The Path Through the Archway

The blue door of the school's open. I'm alone. I'm not moving, but waiting. I don't know why I'm waiting but I know why I'm alone.

I'm outside the crumbling arch of the wide door with the complicated markings and it feels like this is the first time, but it might not be.

It's not a school day. I'm in my uniform. My cap feels too small.

I step in and push the door gently: it moves an inch or two then comes back but it doesn't creak because it's used all the time. It stays there, waiting.

The voice in my head says "You have to wait as well."

Behind me, I can hear the noise from the main road and to my side I can hear a cow swishing its tail in the next-door field behind the houses.

I touch the roughness of the brickwork around the arch: it feels like an old sticking-plaster on a cut made on a thumb a few days ago.

There's a smell like medicine, but it doesn't smell as if it’s there now. It smells as if it's coming in from the future.

Past the door, I can see the corridor with the coat-pegs on the right which are empty now and the two wash-basins at the end, which are not dirty, and the closed door into the room on the left.

I walk in past the open door again and touch the first peg. I feel a slight jolt of electricity and I pull my hand away and move back outside the doorway and wait. My eyes have now got small sparks of blue light in them that dance over everything I look at.

From behind the door to the room, a man's voice starts to make a tune. The voice is muffled and slurred over a bit, so I don’t recognise what the tune is, or even whether it really is a tune. The voice sounds like sandpaper making the air rough, not smooth.

The room door opens, and a man comes out and locks the door behind him and I don't know him and he walks through the open doorway, wearing a teacher’s gown and smelling of the same thing that my dad used to smell of on a Friday night, so that's definitely a past smell. His hair's not properly combed and it's brown but turning to grey so it looks a bit green and his eyes keep opening and closing slowly. He walks past me and he brushes my face with his cloak without seeing me and he turns to the left, and he carries on singing, and he walks up the slope towards the boys' toilet block and walks quickly like he’s very determined, but he walks from side to side quite a bit as well for some reason, with the gown blowing out like a kite, so I can follow him easily.

He goes past the open side of the block with the trough in it and he goes into one of the cubicles. He's still singing. I still don’t know what it is he’s singing.

I walk up to the trough and stand there. I need to pee, but his singing is putting me off. The place still smells of other boys' pee and also distant pooh and disinfectant, but this is a now smell. I touch the black stain on the black wall above the trough. It feels like somebody has roughed it up lots of times and painted over it lots of times to make it smoother but not smooth altogether.The man stops singing and now I can hear him sobbing. The man starts singing again, but now every bit of the music has a sob where the bar line ought to be when the music is written down on the page like we were taught to do by the French lady before the time she didn't come in once and never came back again.

I still don’t recognise any words and I still don’t recognise the tune, but I recognise the sound the sobs make and that’s a past sound and it sounds like the sobs on a Friday night only they're what the French lady said was called "lower in pitch."

Because the cubicle's door is closed, it’s like he's made his own country, where he's allowed to cry, even though he's a man.

The song sounds like it never needs to stop.

I can’t wait any longer. I start to pee into the trough.

The voice in my head says "It won't get better."

I hear the cubicle door opening. He's still singing. He's still sobbing.

***

I was outside the doorway again, and it was the same ornate door in the same crumbling arch, but this time it was closed and this time there was a sign that said "Old School House Doctors’ Surgery" and again there was a smell of medicine, but this time it smelt of the present.

I heard a vehicle door slam behind me. I looked down to the car park that used to be the playground. People were getting out of a car: a man, a young girl and an old lady.

I pushed the door gently: it opened easily and did not creak.And the voice inside me drifting in like smoke, but not talking yet - just making its presence felt, wrapping itself around all my tiny bones.

The spring of the door caused it to close behind me, and I moved half way up the corridor past a right hand wall plastered with posters, offering a variety of medical advice. In front of me, there was now a modern-looking door marked "Private" and to my left there was another door, the old door, through which I could hear a woman's voice humming a tune. I could make out the structure of the tune, even though it was faint through the thickness of the door, but I didn't recognise it. I touched the door handle, and felt a slight spark but left my hand there and let the electricity drift through my body down to my feet. I was used to it by then. Nothing special. Nothing different. Nothing hurt anymore.

I opened the door. On the counter, there was a bell, and a box labelled "Repeat Prescriptions." The woman that I had heard was seated behind the counter. She stopped humming and looked up. I caught my reflection in her glasses, unimpeded by her eyes, which seemed more like round shadows than things you would look out of. My own eyes looked tired and bloodshot. My hair was unkempt, as usual. The green tint of her spectacles didn't help.

The woman said "Good Morning. May I help you?"

"Yes. I have an appointment with Dr. Allison, at ten thirty. The name's Goodrich, Leonard Goodrich."

"Ah yes." Her eyes seemed to spark for a second, and then darken again. "Please take a seat in there to your left, Mr. Goodrich. Dr. Allison is currently on time." She stated this as if it were unusual.

"Thank you." I walked through the open entrance into the empty waiting room and as I did, I choked on a smell of piss and distant shit and disinfectant, but it disappeared into the past as soon as I walked past the door jamb. I took a seat, but started coughing immediately. I pulled out a piece of tissue and hawked into it, and there was a black stain on the white paper background. It looked rough and three dimensional and was wider at the bottom than the top, so it had the shape of a black gown, billowing in the breeze, a black gown without a body.

And the voice breaking in and speaking this time, and saying "You, Leonard - taking me where and when you wanted me. Leaving me. But now things are getting equalised, Leonard. Now I'm with you all the time."

There was only one other door off my waiting room. On it, there was a sign that said "Doctor Frederick Allison." Behind the door, I could hear the faint sound of sobbing. The receptionist started humming her tune again, but stopped almost immediately as the door from the corridor opened and the man, the old lady and the young girl entered. The man mumbled something, and the receptionist made a note and gestured them into the other waiting room. The young girl reached up and touched the bell and seemed to get a slight shock from it. She giggled, and ran ahead of the man, who was supporting the old lady as they moved slowly through the other open doorway.

I suddenly felt the need to piss but decided it was too late. I could still hear the sobbing. The receptionist resumed her rendition of a tune of perfect unrecognisable clarity.

I crossed my legs and hoped.

And the voice twisting in again. "Yours, Leonard, yours and yours only. Of a kind, you and I. Mingling and twining together like twins fighting in the womb."

I yelled "Shut up!" I looked around: nobody appeared to have heard me. The receptionist had paused in mid-beat, but only momentarily, and she had quickly resumed the obscurity of her song. But I could still hear the echo of my own voice and the echo seemed to have its own echo, bouncing off the hard surfaces.

I coughed into the tissue again.

The doctor's door opened.

***

I carry on peeing and I don't turn around, and I hear him shuffling, singing and sobbing behind me. I look over my right shoulder when he's almost past, and I can see he's not looking at me, but he's staggering slightly down the slope, and his back is hunched, and his gown is limp now and it's torn and bedraggled, as if he's caught it in the door or something. I've finished now, and I spit into the trough. My mouth tastes salty even though my spit didn't.

I button myself up. There's nowhere to wash my hands here, so I just stand and wait until I feel sure he's gone away and then I move back down the slope.

When I get to the doorway, I wait there again. I begin to forget why I'm here and why there's nobody else around. I brush my face against the smooth blue paint of the door, and close my eyes."You, boy! What are you doing here?"

It's him. He seems fierce now, tidy, with a new gown on, and he's much taller now he's not slouching. His eyes are wrinkled but dry. It's like he's walked through a wall and become a different person.

"Please, sir, I was told to come here today, when everybody else had gone to the outing, and wait to see somebody about – my problem."

He looks puzzled. I hand him the envelope. I remember I haven't washed my hands. I think about the germs my mum told me about.

***

A red-eyed young woman came out, looked down at the floor, then raised her gaze and stared at me defiantly before she turned and walked back out to the reception.

The doctor's door closed. I scratched at a scab on the back of my hand. I licked it. It tasted of nothing.

The doctor's door opened again. He stood there, impossibly tall, just as before.

"Leonard Goodrich", he declaimed to the four corners of the room, as if it were full of waiting patients. I uncrossed my legs and stood up. My bladder seemed to sort of slurp sideways and the pressure was momentarily relieved.He allowed me through past his elongated thinness and I sat down. There was a sort of plush roughness to the cushion of the chair and a Friday night memory smell seemed to be settling slowly from the ceiling like recently stirred-up dust.

He straightened up from his stoop and settled in his chair. Sat down, he was less obviously taller. He put his glasses on. He looked at his screen. He took his glasses off. He swivelled on his chair and looked directly at me. His hands trembled slightly. "Well, Mr. Goodrich, we have received the results. I am afraid that they do not change anything. The recent blood test results merely confirm the previous ones and, I regret to say, it would appear that, whilst some of the analgesic drugs have clearly had a real palliative effect, as far as treatment is concerned, we are merely arresting incursion."

And the voice wisping through me, seemingly deeper in pitch: "You may have come back here, Leonard, but you can't get back into the past."

"So where does that leave me, doctor? Back on the road to nowhere?"

"Well, I wouldn't say that, Mr. Goodrich, but I am afraid that there is no prospect of a complete recovery. The way forward is to ensure that you are comfortable for..." He paused.

"The rest of my days, doctor?"

"Well, Mr. Goodrich, I wouldn't have put it quite that way; there are advances in this field every day. However, I am afraid that that there is no cure on the horizon. Nevertheless, we have a number of measures that can be used to assist you."

"So do I, doctor; so do I."

"Mr. Goodrich, we discussed this during our other meeting. I do - honestly - realise that this is extremely difficult for you, but I'm afraid that alcohol - or any other narcotic depressants or stimulants - will not only make the symptoms worse, but also make the drugs less effective."

"And singing, doctor? What about that?"

"Singing, Mr. Goodrich?"

"I'm sorry, doctor: a private joke. With myself."

"Oh, I see. Well, singing certainly won't do any harm."

"Unless I perhaps sing the blues rather too vehemently, doctor."

"Possibly. However, if I correctly remember what you said on your other visit, singing the blues is supposed to have a cathartic effect, which may help. Not my specialist area, I'm afraid."

"Well, we shall have to see how this pans out. And whether it's worth it."

"Mr. Goodrich."

"Yes, doctor?"

"There is no doubt - and you, to your credit, have been the first to admit it - that self-infliction - on a number of fronts - has been the root cause of your ailments. Therefore, I feel that I should emphasise again that you have to accept that any continued indulgence will only exacerbate your symptoms."

"Yes, doctor. I do."

"Therefore, perhaps we would be better advised to work on that next time."

"Yes, doctor."

"How are you getting on with the nicotine patches?"

"Very well, thank you, doctor. I haven't had a cigarette since we spoke."

"Good. Well, I'd like to review that with you in about two weeks' time. Please make an appointment when you go out, and I'll see you then."

"Thank you, doctor. Goodbye."

"Goodbye, Mr. Goodrich. We'll see you soon."

And the voice slicing in again: "You know nobody here anymore, Leonard, and you're the next one to go."

***

He takes the envelope and sniffs it for some reason.

"Your problem, eh? What's that?"

I don't reply. I look at my feet.

"Well, I suppose you'd better come in. There's nobody else here, and I certainly haven't been told about anything, but I'm sure I can deal with the matter."

We walk through the classroom towards a smaller room. He holds the door open, and waves his arm for me to go in. Inside, there is a smell, and it is a now smell, so the smell is not quite like medicine, and not quite like Friday night, but smells a bit stale like dirty bodies and a bit sour like a horrible liquid you don't want to drink but you have to.

He walks quickly to his chair like somebody in the army and he sits down. He waves at me to close the door and sit down at the opposite side of his desk, so that's what I do.

I look at the cane hanging on the hook above his head. "Excuse me, sir. This is the headmaster's study, isn't it?"

"Yes. He allows me to borrow it on Saturdays."

"Are you a teacher, here, sir?"

"Yes, but I normally work at the Infant Annexe at the Old Manor House, so you won't have seen me before, probably. Well, let's find out about your problem, shall we?"

He opens the envelope. The other, smaller envelope - the one that's still sealed and that's addressed to the Teacher-in-Charge - falls out onto the desk.

He looks down to the bottom of the page and quickly reads the whole of the first letter and then he looks at the envelope.

"Where did you get this? There's no stamp on it."

"Please, sir, it was pushed through our letter box. Mrs. Fenwick must have dropped it off on her way home."

"I don't think so. I really don't think so. I regret to say that I think that you have been the victim of a rather cruel prank. I suspect that someone received a genuine letter at some time and has copied it and typed out a new one. A bit laborious, but they were obviously determined. There is no letter heading, you see - here: they've merely typed the address of the school."

"Oh."

"You have no idea why they might have done that?"

"No, sir."

He picks up a paper knife from a pot on the desk and slits open the second envelope. I sit there, quietly. I can hear a clock ticking in the classroom outside.

The voice in my head says "everything is leaving you behind - even time."

He looks at me. "Well, we may as well discuss the contents of this second letter, assuming that they're true. It says here that you have problems controlling your "waterworks" as it so quaintly puts it, and that therefore it is not appropriate for you to go on long coach journeys. Is this true?"

"Please, sir. Yes, sir."

"Your father has gone away. Is that true?"

"Yes, sir."

"It says that this problem only arose at that time - when your father went away. Is that true?"

"Yes, sir."

"I see."

He suddenly bursts into a series of coughs and he pulls out a handkerchief and he does what my mum calls "splutters" into it.

"I see. Well now, tell me about your problem. Is there anything anybody at the school can do about it?

"I can't really explain, sir. It just - started happening."

"I see. And who has been informed?"

"Nobody at the school, sir. And - and please, sir - I don't really see what good coming here does either. I can see about not going on the outing but I can't see why I've got to come here."

"Neither can I. Unless…"

He stands there, and it's like he's frozen into a statue, with a puzzled expression on its face.

"Sorry, sir. You said 'Unless'…"

"No matter. Tell me, have you seen a doctor about - your problem?"

"No, sir. My mum doesn't think there's any point. I'm not ill, she says."

"I see. And has anybody at the school seen you? The nurse, for instance?"

"No, sir. In fact…"

This time I feel myself freezing into stone.

"In fact?"

"I didn't think anyone at the school knew about it. I haven't had an accident here or anything."

***

I left the consulting room, walked through the waiting room and rushed to the toilet. Everything burned as I pissed into the pan. I coughed up some phlegm and spat it out. It splashed down through the line of urine and splayed it out into shivering yellowing fingers and then lay there like scum on a tide in the country of the ill, to quote the poet. I washed my hands, went out to the reception desk, made a further appointment and moved away. I looked no better reflected in her spectacles than I had done when I had come in. When I moved through the archway, I started to sing. Singing that I woke up this morning seemed too much like a blues cliché, so I did just that.
***
He reaches for some glue from the desk, seals the envelope again, and hands it back to me.

"Please, sir…"

"Yes, go on."

"Sir, I don't understand."

"What?"

"Sir, so you weren't here waiting for me to report to you."

"No – no, certainly not. I had no idea you were coming. I am here to do some work."

"So, if you hadn't been here, sir…"

"The place would have been locked."

"And I would have gone home."

"Yes. So, I wonder why they sent you here. It seems a pretty pointless prank, unless the people who did it knew that I was going to be here. Which would narrow it down somewhat. However, I have been coming in here on every Saturday for - I suppose that it must be for the last two months now. So word may have got around."

"Please, sir, why are you here on Saturdays?"

"I have some catching up to do: I have – got a little behind in my work. Things happened that delayed me. I have homework to mark, lessons to prepare."

"Please, sir, why do you wear a gown if it's Saturday and there's nobody else here?"

"You're very inquisitive, young man."

"I'm sorry, sir."

"No, don't be: it's all right. I - I wear the gown because it helps me get into the right frame of mind to do the work. There have been - certain problems - but this helps me to concentrate. And I'm getting there." He pauses and then stands up quickly. "Anyway, I am afraid that I have to go to the lavatory again. I have a key to the outside door, the classroom and this study, but nowhere else, so I cannot use the staff facilities. So, I am afraid that, for security reasons, you will have to go back outside and wait for me. Unless you need to go yourself, of course."

I do need to go. All of a sudden I'm desperate.

We walk out of the headmaster's study. He locks the door behind him. We walk across the classroom. The clock is still ticking. We walk through the door and he locks that one too. We walk through the open outside door and up the slope towards the toilets.

The voice in my head says "This is when the future starts."

***

I got as far as the corner of the fence and hedge at the far end of the car park but no further. I knelt over and vomited under the hedge.

The voice twisting in again. Not leaving me alone. "Well, Leonard, going down the tubes together, you and I."

When I looked up, the family had come out again. The little girl jumped up and down. The man looked at me strangely before helping the old lady into the car and shooing the girl onto the back seat. They drove away.

***

We walk into the toilet block and go up to the trough. He unbuttons himself and starts. I wait because I'm not sure what to do and then I unbutton myself and start as well. He finishes. He seems to shake something. He buttons himself up. He is close to me. I can smell stale tobacco and that is a now smell. I haven't finished yet. He starts singing again, and I still don't know what the tune is. I start to cry. He reaches over and hugs me. I still haven't finished. I start singing myself, because I don't know what else to do. I sing my mum's favourite tune. I can feel shadows but I don't turn around.

I hear voices. "Well now, what have we here?"

And now people move in. Adults. I don't know these people.

***

But that was then, and that was then as well. And now here we are. It's all done now. All past tense. The white sheets are like the starched skin of some dead albino animal. I stand up and let them clatter to the floor. It is time to move on. I can see the door in front of me. I touch the roughness of the brickwork around the arch. My mouth is closed and dry. I can hear my own voice singing from the other side. I can hear no other voices. I open the door. I walk through the wide doorway.

Jewellery

It was the fold of the night, the time that things happen. The thoughts jangled across her brain: burning torch notes. She woke up. She had been dreaming of someone sweeping out his empty eye socket with a brush made of his own hair on a handle made of the bone of his index finger.

She knew this was not true, for she had his hair. She had a necklace made of his hair. She had earrings made of his hair that she wore in the holes he had spiked through her ears. She had a brooch made from jet and embellished by his hair. He had been the loved one, so that had been the only thing to do. It had been agreed. It had been in accordance with tradition.

She attempted to sweep herself out of the bed. She caught her foot in a twisted hinge of the sheet and lurched downwards. Her head caressed the wood of the floor. A glancing blow. She extricated herself, stood, lit a candle, and stared at the mirror with its frame of his black hair impregnated into a setting made of more jet, scavenged from the beach as usual.

She stopped looking at the frame of the mirror and looked at her reflection. There was a smear of dirtied blood across her forehead. She swept it off with her index finger and licked it. No salt to its taste. She had sweated it all away again.

Her cramped limbs limped across to the window and she drew aside the curtains. The moon was still there, in its small black oasis between the dominance of the clouds. She stuck her tongue out at it, and could feel the salt returning to her taste buds. She closed the curtains.

She looked down. The dream-sweat had smudged her nightdress with black streaks again.

She looked at his picture, in a frame of the same mixture of his hair and pillaged jet. The lines of the drawing of his face had been rearranged into the lines of his poem once more. She knew what they said, but she read them again.

I went when the season was closing
When autumn tools were put away
I went when the days were tightening,
Mean as miser's purse-strings
I knew it was time for me to leave:
The messenger was knocking
I knew it was time to leave
The messenger was knocking
On the door inside the porch

She closed her eyes, and recited the last few lines aloud:

But now every night has become a season
Every night my time for return
So now every night I come knocking
I come knocking but you do not wake
Your world of sleep has sewn you in
With stitches made of hairs
Your world of sleep has weighed you down
With hard dreams made of black stone
I love you for your distance
I love you in your tight sleep
Please wait for me to come again
As I will always wait for you.

She opened her eyes, and looked up again. The lines of the poem had rearranged themselves back into the lines of his face. The lines of his eyes were smiling. She brushed a few grains of salt from the lines of his mouth, put them on her tongue, extinguished the candle, and went back to her bed. She did not limp. She pulled the blankets over her. She slept.

A Guardian Angel Explains Blood on Pavement (after Francis Bacon)

This is a chav town: long life is a luxury here. Never forget that.

But now, things are calm. The wind is too lazy to get up yet.

Look down there at the footpath: there it is – can you see it? That single painted paving stone is what will give you the clues to allow you to know everything you need to know about this place. Look at it: you can see it hemmed in by the port-town greyness of the blank ones around it. Look at the edge-curls of its ageing paint waving in the rain. Listen carefully, and you can hear them scratching wetly against each other, mingling like blood in a violent friendship.

It just appeared. Nobody saw it happen. Somebody must have chosen to paint it, throughout one night, but nobody knows why.

It must have been created on the night of the blood-moon: look at the way that whoever it was smeared a horizon across the middle of the painting, then hurled a blood-moon onto the horizon, and made the blood-moon instantly tatter into roughness, unravelling beneath the black-painted sky.

But if you look carefully at all those mashed-together pigments, they all seem to be rotting away - they seem deciduous. Red flakes to purple, and purple to brown.

It's not all paint anymore, either. Time has added its own substances to it.

Look there. There are incidents scratched into it, if you look closely. Depictions of short-fuse stand-offs. Short-term cowardice. More minglings of fluids. There are outlines of fists in the wash, invisible unless you look closely. There is evidence of at least two events there. And at least six people. There were none to start with, when it was first painted, but it's stained with the real stuff now. Stained with the things that appear in the curl of the night.

Go on - check it out! Feel it. You can sense the demarcation of feuding fields of energy; you can see the archaeology of conflict smeared horizontal: you can see the strata of booze-fouled ego clashes and nocturnal petty tribal bellowing fights.

Somebody must have chosen to paint it, and what they painted is all pain.

Lie down there and make sure you avoid the dog turds and the glass from the bottles – go on, do it – there's nothing of you, and there's more than enough space! Now you can hear it speak, hear it whisper of the raised voices. Now you can hear time imposing its date of destruction.

I am fading away now, and my guiding hand will soon be withdrawn, and you will soon be on your own. Time for you to stand up and be recognised.

I can feel the wind finally getting itself up. Soon it will be hurling itself up from the port and soon its rickety tongue will be in everything, and then red will flake to purple, and purple to brown, and brown will flake away into its soot-soaked clutches. Wind. Time. Erodes us all in the end.

I am fading away now, and eventually the remains of this painting will also dust itself away into nothing but flecks of pollution in the already pollution-saturated air, but the disagreements that caused its creation will not, and they will still hum across the paving stones, and that is what you will need to watch over, but not interfere with, because this is the jurisdiction that you have accepted, and please never forget: this is a chav town, and long life is a luxury here.

No Other Hope but You (a Prose Sestina)

She stands looking at the crossroads of the paths of stepping-stones that almost meet but then collide away at perfect right angles, leaving a full-stride gap between them in the middle of the pool in the single clearing in the centre of the overgrown forest. Everybody has been told about this, so she knows that this is the place where the perpetrator spirits of suicides-by-drowning have separated from the victim spirits of the same drowned suicides and where the perpetrator spirits are constantly circling in the direction of the clock, trying to choose the correct path home but unable to do so, and the victim spirits are always circling in the opposite direction, trying to flee back into time to escape the continued manipulation of their perpetrators. She knows that each suicide spirit was compressed at the point of creation to the size that would fit inside the bell of a foxglove and she also knows that none has ever escaped so that is why the evaporation from the silty water is saturated with a chorus of minuscule buzzings. She stands alone at the edge of the water in the moonlight. The knife between her teeth gleams sallow.

Moonlight spills down, shears across the surface of the water, and bounces up crookedly from its reflection, forming a crossroads with itself above the tops of the trees, and only at that intersection does she see the spirits - winged, snub-nosed, each encased in a private atmosphere of ghosted sweat - moving against each other with a sort of passionate indifference through the shrunken patch of illuminated air. She reaches down to a foxglove, and puts the little finger of her right hand into its bell. An acidic tingling seems to shear her skin away in little petals of fleshed-away finger-meat. A collective malicious giggling rips in to her then ripples away in a pure-tone diminuendo, like stepping-stones of sound receding into a mist-strangled perspective. She takes the knife from her mouth, rips off the bell from the flower, bites into it and then swallows it, and her ears begin to hiss and her head begins to flounder. Her brain feels as if it is flaking backwards into a drowned forest.

Something flits in and perches on the nape of her neck like an insect from the forbidden part of the forest. It titters as it bites, then flies away into the moonlight. She ignores the bite, and drags her hands over the enlargement of her stomach. It feels as if something has drowned in there and refused to go, as if it is stuck in the same mud that keeps the crossroads of stepping-stones in its implacable position. She holds her breath and listens. The air never goes quiet.

But now, all she can hear is a ringing too low in pitch to allow her to trace its direction, like a bell ringing in submerged church tower. She eats another bell from another foxglove. Something jumps up from the forest floor and nibbles her toes. Something else sniggers and sucks the blood away from the wounds created. Her feet blister up straightaway. With each truncated stride she makes, the pain makes her feel like she is walking over stepping-stones made of the memories of the knives of the soldiers who came that time. She looks towards the moonlight crossroads and sees the spirits hover briefly, turn towards her, bare their tiny teeth like pine-needles, then return to the choreography of their criss-crossed paths. She looks down. Her toes have turned black, like they are drowned in their own discarded blood.

And she too feels drowned, as if she is floating in a soup of forest murmurs, slowly being chomped smaller by the abrasion of all the other victim ingredients. Something stirs within her, like a bee kicking inside the bell of a foxglove. She tries to edge further around the edge of the pond, but her stomach is too big now to allow her to squeeze through the gap in the vegetation, so she cannot escape her proximity to the start of the path to the crossroads and she returns to the water's edge. The forest seems to twist in the moonlight. She feels a stab of pain around her heart, and squats next to the silted inflow to recover. She gazes at the stepping-stones. She calculates how tall they must be to reach the bottom of the pool. Something behind her seems to chuckle.

As she stares, the stepping-stones seem to undulate, as if they were in danger of being drowned in the acrid sediment and are crying for help. She continues to squat. She feels tiny tooth-marks on her ear. She brushes them aside. A sound like rain made of melting metal cackles around her and half of it becomes a visible mist of minute bodies and disappears into a halo around the moonlight and half of it drags itself deep down inside her, dripping through the chambers of her hearing that have been impregnated by the spite from the foxglove and hence infected by a twittering morass of whispered screams that seem to carry the malign essence of the forest. And now is the time. Now her life has reached a crossroads. Now she has to decide.

She stands there drowned in moonlight. She eats a final foxglove bell. Her head feels as heavy with confused patterns as the overgrown forest itself. She steps away from the bank of the pool onto solid rock. She walks along the stepping-stones as far as she can go without turning. She holds her hand down, like a vanquished sword. She draws a deep line across her wrist, at a perfect right angle, then throws the knife into the water. She throws herself after it, down into the hole at the centre of the crossroads. She is not aware of a splash. She begins to feel her spirits separate. Into two, not four.

Angel Kidnap

He was up there with the angels. He was visible, should they choose to look up, hanging around amongst the clouds, handcuffed by ectoplasm to invisible celestial guardians. Captive and floating. Serve him right.

This is what he'd done. Listen up: I shan't say it twice.

He'd had his mindstream perma-ghosted between his naming and his death, the poor sucker, some foreign party-pooper deposited in the crystals of his braingut so he gradually succumbed to its powdery malice. This is what happens all the time, unfortunately. But you know that, of course.

Angel Kidnap was his name, not his modus operandi. If you're bequeathing your kid the surname "Kidnap", you tend to want to compensate by giving him the best start in life, so they named him "Angel." And he was a little angel. At first. But angels can fall. And he fell. First downwards then upwards. He never saw the wagon. Fifteen years old. Too busy sauntering. The vertical movement down the road took out the horizontal one across it no problem. Warp one, weft nil. Head-squash-pulp. Instant release to purgatory. Strings pulled. Instant release from purgatory.

No matter. No sweat. His soul stretched to a point where it qualified for expulsion instantly and then instantly transported to the pain-wire factory, then forced out across the crush-wheel until it became even thinner: so thin it was invisible to all but the real angels. And then his soul not so much escaped as sidled out and fell upwards, like angel feathers in a rising draught.

But his soul was still a soul invaded by another soul, and that's when the trouble started. His soul became web-sticky, and it spidered out and started to snare things drifting up past it: people's prayers, mostly. Caught and annexed. Trapped in the web of a twice-perverted soul who disgraced and twisted their earnest supplications and turned them to vile imprecations that cursed the god and spouted support for evil rebellion before they were allowed on their way, so that the god always received them with their malice attached. And the prayers, always rejected by the god, always fell like screwed-up petitions back to the ground.

That is when the angel-police decided to act. The arrest of a soul. Rare, but occasionally necessary. They were trained for it. And that training was regularly refreshed. Changed circumstances, new knowledge, disinterred dangers.

This is what happened. Seething wing-squadrons of clumped-together angel-hair almost-presences appeared unobserved, and strong-armed his spread-out soul and gaped slashes into it so that the prayers could escape through. Unlike unpossessed souls, his soul couldn't bleed, but it could leak. It leaked wickedness to the planet, and hence became even lighter. It floated closer to the god.

The god had no jurisdiction over the planet: only over the prayers of its inhabitants. The god had no power over errant souls, either. But the god did have resistance, so was unpolluted by the malevolent stickiness of the escaped soul and the god kept the soul at an unharmed length.

However, the planet was polluted by his dropped malice and its prayers were perverted at
source. The god received no further sincerity. If the god had a thirst for honesty, it was not assuaged. The inhabitants of the planet had no more to give. The haunted ghost had haunted their prayers. The proliferation had commenced. The god started to desiccate. The angel-guardians started to weaken and drift away. The planet started to burn.

The Gift from History

The sister who used to be known as 'Injury' is lying on her right side on her bed beneath the tall ceiling of the new-sister dormitory, wearing her cloak with the hood up, stretching her left leg, pressing her head into the pillow that is now nothing-but-white in colour. It is the time for the dancing lessons outside, which the sisters and the under-sisters and the returned-sisters do no matter how cold it is as long as the weather is dry but she doesn't do, because she has to carry on doing her exercises, just as the sister-in-charge-of-healthy-matters has told her.

Every day she has to stretch and stretch and stretch to keep her legs straightening, stretch and stretch to stop her shins curving, stretch and stretch like she thinks she was told to, before she came to the sister-refuge, but she doesn't remember, stretch to chase the cramp down to the ends of her toes, stretch to force the cramp out of her toes and into the air, and stretch to tear apart the knots in the muscles of her thighs and calves and make the muscles tender again, soft like the flesh of the dirt-snake-fish she stroked that time.

She stretches almost to the end of the bed, and she wonders if the beds the sisters-in-charge sleep on are twice as big as hers, or if they have to curl up twice as tight.

She gazes at the trees through the uncurtained windows, down past the curve of her leg that is just like a giant flattened version of the hook the sisters-in-charge use to catch the clean-fish from the clean-stream for the meals and she looks at the skin of her leg and she sees the hairs are still there, and the hairs have grown more in the night. She is sure she can see light glowing away from her big toe, pointing into the forest. She moves her lower leg to hook over the stretching one and force it down, to make things straighter faster. The light seems to dim. The branches of the trees straggle back and seem to be pulling her vision away, seem to be forming two vees pointing back to somewhere in the deepness of the forest too far away to see and too far away as well to really exist until the future arrives. She looks up over her shoulder at the body of the anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgence. Its body is still drying up, cracking, and flaking away, dripping solidly and slowly to the floor from the nail holding the ribbon tied round its neck to the bedhead, just as it has been doing since the ceremony. She looks at the blue-and-white unevenly patterned ribbon, but she knows she isn't allowed to untie it, just as she has always known she isn't allowed to give the kitten a name, because it won't work any longer if she does.

The tiredness seeps. She jolts into her day-sleep. There are two vee-shaped slashes of dark across the white blinding before everything goes into darkness.

...and then what there is is the sound of her own voice again and what it says is "Welcome again, my darling-child. You will soon be with me, my darling-child. Your anti-shaper-spirit drowned-kitten indulgence is running out, as you have seen, and when it does, you will then have finished the waiting period, which is the time that the sisters who are in charge of you secretly call "shaper purgatory" and when you have served your waiting apprenticeship, you will be mine again, and my wait will be over. That is something for you to look forward to, my darling-child: let me promise you that. But there is a thing you must do for yourself, first: you must fetch the knife. You know that you have to fetch the knife and you know why. And when you have fetched the knife, you will be able to help me as well"...

She falls awake. She starts to breathe again. The pillow is pink from the day-sleep blood-tears again. What she now has to call the absent-parent-knife-scar is itching. She looks at it. She dips her finger in its deep crescent cut bumping up like a second navel on her stomach. She looks at the small pool of liquid inside it that is clear, not red. She smells her finger. Sniffs at the memory of the knife she has never seen. Knows it belongs to her. Knows it will need to be used, but not what for. But now she knows she can smell it out and reclaim it.

She looks up, and out into the forest again. The vee-shapes vibrate slightly, as if they – or some other things - are listening.

She lets her legs fall to the side of the bed, and she drops down to the floor. She puts her hand into the bread-pocket inside her cloak, and checks there are some black-bread crumbs inside. She picks up her skin-parcel from where it is hanging on the bedhead and hangs it round her neck from its ribbon.

A Change of Diet

Report on Inmate #6805:

He has been observed for three weeks now. His table manners have been impeccable. He is vegetarian. He eats nothing but berries on open sandwiches made of rye bread. His favourites are mistletoe and mountain ash berries. He clearly has an iron constitution and a predisposition not only to be able to ingest this apparently poisonous fare, but also somehow to be almost addicted to it. We think that he may have been hypnotised to accept this food, but have so far been unable to break the cerebral code to discover this. He has been passed as suitable to be allowed to use a knife and fork. He eats in a very particular way. He examines each berry, each scrap of bread, from at least three angles before consuming it. If there is the merest speck of what appears to a blemish on any of the berries, he will incise it with the tip of his knife and move it to the side of the plate before consuming the remainder. He eats on his own, but eats far more slowly than any of the other inmates. For dessert, he will eat a few wrinkled blue petals, by hand, again examining each one minutely to ensure that there is no rot, and no insect-pollution. He drinks nothing but consecrated water. His bowel movements are regular.

To illustrate the background to his incarceration, and the turnaround in his fortunes, his attitude and, most certainly, his eating habits, our researchers have managed to unearth this poem that he wrote a few months before his admission. It is called "The Song of the Albino Brain-Wolf" and it goes like this:

"I am drying
strapped for plasma
reaching for transparent succour
reaching for the dripping from the pregnant leaking blood-fruit
that blooms
straggly and innocent
in the soil of the hollow
that sags behind your eyes
Soon I shall lick
in and through your nostrils
soon my tongue will penetrate
your thwarted blighted plans
soon my tongue will stagnate
in the pool of your discomfort
then gulp things into me
and spit red cells
discarded to the earth
(Wherever I go, the ground is blood-litter)
All I want from you is colourless
I crave the sallow lack of real distinction of your brain
I need to catch the silent anti-howl that crawls within you
and reach your hiding soul where it is convented by silence
where soon it will be tooth-licked by the prying of my malice
and neutralised
and swallowed
and digested
and converted
to me
and to mine
I need to hide in you
your blandness is the thicket that conceals my lusted greed
I need your emptiness
and soon I shall have it
vacuous victim
prepare to meet your soul-mate."

Truly a change of diet. His rehabilitation continues.

Paradise Remixed

Everything is stopped.

Twilight is settling through the trees as he gazes down to where the street-light flares curve and evaporate and the unsmelt vapours of the River Tiber unsettle upwards and block the air above it.

Time to wait.

Time to lean on his oil-streaked, silent, white box-for-hire, time to hunch for shelter against the feeble drizzle, waiting for the sake of waiting in this part of the wildfire-viral city that is noisy-quiet tonight, noisy-quiet as a snoring snake, where the fares are thinly sown in the streets that always seem as dry as parched fields in the run-off rain. He is first and last in the queue at the taxi-rank, nobody else willing at this particular time to stake out this particular spot that lies out on a discarded limb of a neighbourhood away from the main pickup points, this place where the thick air is resonated by the intermittent comfort of bells and the drizzle is spiced by droplets of sap from the pine-needles.

The light is dusking over.

He inhales, and exhales. (There is always something to do.) No need to smoke: too much smoke trapped in the air. The beer from last night sitting heavy. (His liver invaded.)

He can see someone's phantom, but it is shapeless and unrecognisable, and it is swilling over him like wafts of damp smoke, imposing the crossing of its rhythms on the breeze, fraying and consolidating, but always just about remaining in one piece. Whose it is he may never know.

No matter. Another night; another place; another phantom: the same old story. The lattice of its splitting and rejoining imposes a remembered map onto the air, and that map is of the interlinked complexity of the tousled rush of the inland delta of the Niger River. But there is something different about this phantom somehow: an unusual insistence; a solid underpinning that is both an antidote and an anchor to its bendy ethereality. There is something about it that suggests it may never go away.

Especially now. Even though the sound system in the cab is switched off, he can still hear the remembered notes, as if the phantom has not only summoned the notes into his head, but has also chosen to portray them visually on the air in front of him, which means that he can now see the pulse of the bass notes as regular splashes of mud and the flurried notes of the tune as raindrops breaking the river-surface-meniscus and the organised unpredictability of the improvised notes as a salvo of iridescent fish, and all these things intermingle in front of him as the sounds coalesce in his head, and together they drag him kicking and breathing back to an image of the past washed by the deceitful currents of the rising waters of the Niger River, and he can see his small child self as others would have seen him then, squatting cross-legged in the well of the boat because there's nowhere else for him to go, building miniature mosques to an ancient design from the sand provided by the endeavours of his father who is constantly disappearing into the depths from the boat with an empty bucket and re-surfacing with one full of sand to fill the boat and feed the burgeoning concrete building programme, then disappearing again into the world of by now hopefully fled hippos, a one-man bucket-chain throughout the long hot day. Down. Up. In. Out. Slop plop drop.

And he can feel two thumbs and two fingers fading away as the music decomposes, and he sees a fare approaching, puffing up the steps, business-greyed, tall, slim, hat pulled down, buttoned-up into his raincoat, laced-up into his uniform of commerce.

The fare nods, but doesn't speak, and holds out a card with a destination.

He takes the card, makes a brief scrutiny, sweeps his arm as if throwing aside a cigarette, and then opens the door for the fare, who gets in without speaking. He goes round the back of the cab, pulling his driving gloves back on.

He climbs in through the driver's door and puts the card in the slot on the dashboard.

He glances into the three segments of the mirror, which show his own eyes, a perfectly formed picture of the fare, and the street behind, at this moment rarely and mercifully empty of the scrawled chaos of traffic. He smells stale smoke from his stubbled hand even through the glove as he brushes it across the sweat of his nose. Urban sweat. Soured.

He turns the key to induce the familiar contralto diva snarl from the engine and floors the pedal, wincing at the clenched cramp in his foot - another fallen arch in a city full of them - and in spite of the gunning noise, they merely trickle away, in a clutch-fighting crawl down the slip road, the tail juddering behind, reluctant to leave, even though the fare is not heavy, choosing their merge-point into the flow of traffic, edging in slowly before finding their level and then they go crashing through the crush of the hook-punch melee blur of the city-at-night that uncurls before them, and a carbon monoxide furl of blaring noise envelops them and to damp it down he flick-punches a key on the dashboard, and the actual, not the remembered, music curls out and flays the taxi's air with the selected rhythms and it's like he has used them to impose his own private independent state in his cab.

Fragments from the Ghost Apocrypha #1

I knocked on the door. I was slightly out of breath. As the door opened, shifting trickles of woodworm dust speckled down to the floor.

He appeared in the doorway. He invited me in. More woodworm dust fell into my hood as I walked through and the door closed behind me.

I glanced around the room. Collapsed cobwebs were clinging to the picture rail in a sort of wave-form. There was a vase of dead flowers on the side-table. There were bookshelves and a sideboard, but no seating other than a brocaded settle that looked scarcely able to accommodate as many as two people. I could hear the fire crackling, but it appeared to be exuding nothing but smoke.

He sat down on the settle and gestured for me to sit next to him. As I sat down, the abrasion of my robe against the brocade expelled an amount of dust that was not only more extensive than the smoke, but also of a type that was almost red in colour: the red of the sand of a desert that I used to know. There was a faint perfume to it, as if rose petals had been ground down to a powder that contaminated not just the settle, but apparently every item of furniture in the room.

He gazed at me.
— I am afraid that I have nothing to offer you in the way of refreshment, he said.
I noticed that the utterance of every syllable caused a draft of steam to issue from his lips.

— That is all right, I replied. I do not eat or drink during the hours of daylight on any day of the year. It is a rule of my order and one that I am happy to follow.

— And I keep no food or drink on the premises at all. For reasons that will perhaps emerge during the course of our conversation. Or perhaps not.

He looked away.

— Then my dietary requirements are compatible with your dietary provisions, I said. Let us hope that we achieve a similar compatibility in my need for information and your ability to supply it.

He looked at me again. His eyes looked as if a spider resided in each of them and that each one had woven its web from his blood. I could feel two slight patches of heat on my cheeks. His voice quavered slightly, and the cobwebs vibrated. There was no smell to his breath.

— Forgive my pedantry, he said. I trust that we shall not fall out over this matter, but to my mind you have no need for information, merely a desire. And there is no obligation on my part to supply it.

He shivered slightly, abruptly rose from the settle, walked to the fireplace, and busied himself with attempting to coax more life from the fire. I addressed my remarks to his bent back.

— I trust that I have not offended you. I freely concede that you have no obligation to supply me with any information, but I have an interest in these matters – a very practical one – and a third party – that party we have both agreed not to name, as I understand it – indicated that this conversation would be to our mutual advantage.
He appeared satisfied with the state of the fire – although I could discern no improvement in the miserliness of its effusions – and returned to the settle. The dust that he displaced this time most certainly smelt – I am sure – of roses: roses cut (and hence dying) but smelling of exposure to the open air, as if recently placed in a graveyard vase.

— Well, let us begin, he said, and attempt to discover if it is indeed to our mutual advantage. What do you wish to know?

His clothes exuded a sort of weary discarded smell, as if he had sweated out his words already, and was now merely about to repeat them.

— I understand that you have had an encounter with a ghost, or rather, several encounters with several ghosts.

— That is correct.

— When and where was this?

He sighed. His breath seemed to hang heavily.

— It occurred whilst I was residing in a city where, as has been poetically described rather too many times, one continent slides into another. I was plagued (and I do not consider this too strong a word to use) by sand and dust blowing into my eyes, and owing to a temporary but prolonged inability to produce liquid from my tear ducts, the material remained in the corners of my eyes, abrading them. Let me explain one item of fact: I have three previous wives and seven estranged children. As soon as this phenomenon had manifested itself, images of all of them appeared doubled in my peripheral vision at regular intervals, intervals so regular, indeed, that one could set one’s timepiece by them, because they were of slightly fewer than fifteen minutes, as if the day had been divided into a hundred hours.

A circular wind seemed to reverberate around the room, dragging smoke from the fire with it. I momentarily felt cold, but I also noticed that for the duration of the wind’s visit, steam was escaping through his clothing. I felt needle-points on my skin as he continued.

— However, not only did I see them, but they also spoke to me, warmly, as if we were all still in the family home. They were diurnal presences, so as soon as I lay down to sleep they made their exit, which I understand is the reverse of ‘normal’ manifestations. Perhaps you are in a position to advise me on that.

— Certainly. On the balance of probability, that is indeed the case. However, what you describe is by no means a universally nocturnal phenomenon.

— I am interested to hear that. Perhaps we may discuss this at greater length later.

I felt my skin tighten.

— Certainly. But in the meantime, please continue.

— I had lost contact with all of them, owing to circumstances that it would be pointless and tasteless to elaborate here, but suffice it to say that, when I investigated the matter, I discovered that all of them had died before I saw them.

— What, all of them?

— Yes. This merely reflects the state of the country that I left, my alleged standing in it, and their perilous position within it.

— You are sure of this?

— Yes. At that time, I was still in contact with people who were aware of what was going on in the country that I used to inhabit. They kept me apprised of all . . . details. Including the fate of my wives and children.

— You had more than one wife at a time?

— Yes, although that is of no significance, in my opinion.

— Perhaps. Perhaps not. Please continue.

— Not long ago, shortly after coming to this country, I received medical treatment to alleviate the damage to my tear ducts, and my . . . companions left me, but ever since then, either as a direct consequence of their desertion or as a side-effect of the medication that I am obliged to continue to take, I have been beleaguered by headaches, which keep me awake and make me long for the return of my ghosts.
I felt my skin loosen slightly.

— If they are still out there, I said.

— I know that they are still out there.

— How do you know?

— The bedhangers told me.

— The bedhangers? And what are they?

My eyes felt as if they were drying up.

— My constant need for repose as a result of my symptoms brought me into contact with them. They communicated with me whenever my eyes were closed. I understood the phenomenon no more than I understood the presence of the ghosts until I received a communication a little over two weeks ago. It was pushed beneath my door. It provides an explanation of sorts. This is the reason I agreed to your presence here. Please read this.

He reached into his jacket pocket, and handed me a piece of paper. It was scorched with radial stripes that echoed the arachnid confusion of his eyes. I read:

This is a warning. You have little time left. The bedhangers will acquire you. They are already with you, standing on your bedhead, looking down on you, looking into you, scooting on the cushions of air from your nightly snorings, light as noise, synchronised with your breathings, the breathings that they pull out with the noddings of their flimsy muscled necks. They have absorbed what you expel, but they are hungrier for more, and can dig far more deeply. They will supply an explanation, but not one that will provide you with any succour.

I looked up. The cobwebs appeared to have writhed around and attained a flatter shape and now looked more like a series of smears of human hair. I handed back the piece of paper. I held out my hand and looked at it. The skin had dropped slightly.
— So what do you make of that? he asked. Are you familiar with these bedhangers?

— With the concept, I said, not the word.

— So this is a recognised phenomenon?

— The existence of nocturnal malevolent dislocated wisps of spirit? Certainly. And they often afflict people in your circumstances: people who have offended larger, more mature ghosts in some way. They can be a form of emissary of the future coming of that more mature ghost, or conversely, a type of residue: the fractured remnants of a departed spirit. They inhabit a space that the more significant ghost cannot occupy or does not choose to.

— And the warning letter?

— That is highly unusual. These phenomena do not normally have the power of verbal communication, whether written or oral, so I would tend to regard it as genuine warning from a third party rather than a threat from the presences themselves. I notice that the language is slightly arcane, slightly unusual – possibly of a foreign nature originally. Please tell me: how did they – and indeed how do they – communicate with you?

— They set up a rhythmical tapping. Deep within my head. Throughout the night. There is a succession of changing but yet regular beats but there are also improvised percussive sections of a sometimes excessively violent nature. Whilst there is nothing as crude as some universal coding method, there is nevertheless some sort of message embedded within the tapping, and I have come to recognise it.
— So what is the nature of the message from these – bedhangers?

— Let me attempt to explain a little further. In the country where I used to reside, each rhythm – used most specifically for dances of various natures – has a complex and quite sophisticated meaning. Any named rhythm can indicate a rural or urban environment, a religious or a bawdy tone, an indication of happiness or sadness, a feeling of solidarity or estrangement, and many more things. In this way, a subtle vocabulary can be built up within the non-conscious mind, and a message – often quite a complicated one – can be imparted by assembling these rhythmic elements in a variety of sequences. I trust that I am making sense?

— Indeed you are, and this is a phenomenon that has been described to me before, although I can feel no affinity with it personally. However, does this mean that your sleeping hours were plagued – to use that word again – by constant drumming?
He made a sort of half-smile, half-grimace. His teeth looked cleaner.

— Not so much plagued, as anointed. They did not help me sleep better, nor did they ease my headaches, but they provided stimulation for the long, lonely nights and they gave hints of a possible journey that would relieve me from my accursed state of permanent ennui.

— But presumably the veracity of the message is entirely at the whim of the subjective interpretation of your non-conscious mind?

— Most certainly. But none the worse for that. In my opinion, of course.
My mouth felt grubbier. I stretched my tongue over my teeth and it seemed to become serrated.

— So what did they – do they – tell you?

— They communicated what appeared to be many conflicting things initially, but over a period of time, matters were slowly resolved, and following one night when I was more tightly asleep than ever before, the only possible interpretation was made clear to me.

He rose from the settle; his hand brushed mine: unnecessarily, I thought. He busied himself with the vase of flowers, which appeared knobblier, as if, by some perversion of the natural process, buds were forming. He sat down again, grabbing at the sleeve of my robe for support. His suit was more frayed than when he had stood up.

— You were talking about the interpretation, I said.

— Yes.

— And that interpretation was?

— That I had to suffer for my desertion. That my ghosts were pursuing me as relentlessly as agents of an enemy power. That I was guilty until and unless I established, not only my innocence, but the identity of the guilty party, because there was no doubt in the minds of the ghosts that the bedhangers represented that a crime had been committed.

His suit continued to fray as he sat there. Filaments of it were turning to vapour in the smoky wind, rising and forming shapes and then twitching apart and descending.

— So, I said, you have to find the true guilty party?

— Yes.

— The true guilty party, or a scapegoat?

— I recognise no distinction.

— Do they?

— No.

— So you just require someone onto whom to pass your perceived guilt?

— Indeed.

— And how do you propose to do that?

— Like this.

And suddenly, he reached into his suit pocket, screwed up the piece of paper, and threw it into the fire. Flames rushed up to devour it, causing sufficient heat to blister the wood of the bookcases. The flames seem to evaporate around the room, then condense to more red dust. The wind roared out of the fire. His suit decomposed further to its component threads that were sucked towards the mutant flowers in the vase and powdered into a hanging twitch of pollen that was absorbed by the burgeoning buds, causing an instant blooming. And then he was naked, and not only naked but also transparent, and looking out from his abdomen were three women and seven children, bent over, handcuffed to his transparent ribs as if they were prison bars and by some trick of perspective they appeared to be of full size even though they were constrained by the cavity of his abdomen. He had no internal organs.

And again the wind filled the room with billowing smoke from the fire. And everything turned red and dusty. And it hid him from view, and when it had dispersed, he had disappeared.

And that is where we have reached. I am here, and he is not. It feels as if there is a pause, rather than a gap between us. All that I can hear is the sound of fragmented drumming.

He has not returned physically. I suspect that he will not. I look down at the document, which has been violently expelled by the fire. It is now comprised almost entirely of ash, with only the words picked out in paper. I kneel down and read it again:

You have no time left. The bedhangers have acquired you. You are an easier subject. They can operate on you whether you are asleep or not, because you are too weak and too badly trained to resist. But they have now done their job. The next stage is upon you. But they may well be back, for remember: people grow old, gods grow old, even ghosts grow old, but the bedhangers are tireless and the bedhangers are ageless and the bedhangers will always be here if there is a job to be done.

The document disintegrates and blows away. I reach down, and pick up a pile of red dust. It smells of roses. I throw handfuls of it to every crevice of the room. At every angle of wall and floor, it does not quite settle, but folds over itself, a kind of constant visual ululation. I feel something scratching at my brain, like a cat trying to get in or get out. I blow on the remainder of the dust on my fingers and it buffets up and lodges in the corner of my eyes. I hear three voices in unison, underpinned by an indecipherable, higher-pitched wailing.

You will not remember us, but we are the ones you deserted. But we shall not desert you. We promise you that. And we can promise you that because we are not about to join you: you are about to join us.

I am unable to speak. I feel an overwhelming desire to lie down. I must make my way to the bed. I am getting lighter. I seem to be spreading thinly across all the sharp surfaces of the room. I am fraying like an old suit. My thoughts cry out to my gods, but they do not hear. My head is clamped by whispering pain. I can float above everything. I can see everything. I will . . .

Sheepish Man in Changed Clothing (A Prose Sestina)

They'll never know it's me inside the skin of this wolf. If I hang around long enough in here, they won't even notice me after a while. They're used to wolves – they're always everywhere: that's their problem. And then I shall stake out my route and track everything down. And I shall find what I'm looking for. And steal it. And store it. And sell it back to them later, when they do realise the danger that has been dormant for so long. And if my assumption is right, they won't even have changed the combination of the safe. They have no concept of how precious that substance is, so they have no concept of how to protect what is valuable. I shall find my way. I shall lay my track to their lair. But this way is no good. But I shall detect a new path. I shall persist. And I shall succeed, because they are too naive. They are not wily enough to deal with me. And even if by some fluke they catch me, they'll never fit hands of this size inside their handcuffs. And now I shall find a means of access suitable for this new gigantism that has been inflicted upon my feet.

I can pass by only feet away from them, so inured are they to the presence of the wolf, which is what they perceive me to be. Even the warden, with his gun and his handcuffs dangling from his belt, stoops to fling me some scraps from the table. (There is, of course, a notice on the board about not feeding wolves, but nobody pays it any attention.) I pad past him, making sure not to take up too much of his valuable time, in case he gets suspicious of my lingering, and I sidle up the disabled ramp that my memory has rediscovered at the rear of the building and I make my way to the floor with the room that contains the safe.

I hide around a corner. The security man is doing his rounds. He is long-standing, reliable. He is considered to be a safe pair of hands. He knows where his bread is buttered. He is locked into the irregular but constant rhythm of his misplaced legs, like a slow-frozen gallop expressed in the metrical feet of a poem – a staggering iambic pentameter: de-dum; de-dum; de-dum; de-dum; de-dum. He knows that the work he does is valuable, even if others don't. He is aware of the latent danger in the wolf, even if others fail to notice. He is not swayed from his duties. His experience has told him what is important. He has not had a life of trivia. He can surely still remember when he was locked into an iron lung that must have felt just like a giant pair of handcuffs around his whole body, squeezing the breath out of him, squeezing the breath into him.

And breathing is getting difficult in here as well. It feels as if every atom of oxygen in my lungs is in handcuffs. But now he is gone, and now I can push open the door of the room and check the safe. Now I must be careful, because a four-legged creature on its hind legs is something they would notice. I move the wheel, clumsily but successfully. As I suspected, the combination is the same, and I snap the door open with a swipe of my artificial paw-wrapping. And now I have it. So much value, so much power, so carelessly guarded. But listen! I can hear the sound of feet. Should I lock it away again, or can I wolf it down and regurgitate it later? It's a high risk strategy for something so valuable. It's a high risk strategy for the state of my health as well.

But my health is not so valuable that it's not worth taking a chance with. I know my lack of importance in the order of things. But now what is happening? Now I feel hot. Now I feel on edge. I must be getting feverish. My suit is getting tight. Too tight. It squeezes me. It handcuffs me in. My suit is starting to burn me. Filaments and elements and particles and shreds and molecules of the essence of the wolf are blistering into me and bubble-drowning my skin, spearing their scorch marks in, echoing the sharp-toothed malice down. The lupine spirit has now leaked into me, leaked into its permanent residence, safe and secure inside me. I attempt to limp away, so as not to be under their feet, but it is too late. They have discovered the theft. I hear loud voices. It was stupid of me to think that they wouldn't notice.

So now they have me. I could pretend to take no notice, but I would convince nobody. What I have is more valuable to them than it is to me. My head is starting to clear, and I can now remember the struggle, and I can now remember managing to bite – and infect – each one of them on the soft flesh just above their feet, as they laboured to hold me down, kicking me, hitting me with sticks. So now they might have captured me, but they'll never fit these paws inside their handcuffs. I am captive, but I am also safe, secure in the identity of the wolf.

I await my fate, and their means of securing me, which will be something far worse than handcuffs. They will not kill me – not yet – because I am too valuable to them. They know that if they kill me without neutralising me, they will still not be safe. But they will tether me by my feet somehow, and they will stretch me and they will cause me great pain – I know that. But what they don't realise is they will never retrieve their booty, for I have now ingested it, so now they have no antidote and so even though it will almost certainly kill me, they will soon come to their state of plague-cursed lamentation. The order has now changed. They are no longer in charge. They will soon face the long-planned revenge. They are about to taste the malediction. They will soon have to take long and bloody notice of the leakage of the wolf.

A Short Time in the Skin of a Head

"Time is so short in the skin of a head." (Inaccurate internet translation of a line from "Dans La Peau D'un Chef" by the Congolese rap group, Bisso na Bisso.)

Observation Report 13209

Report Introduction

1. Date of the report: 29^th. January, 2012.

2. Facilitator of the study:

Name: Pierre l'Argent

Sex: male

Occupation: photographer, although he has not worked since the events documented in this report and the two subsequent reports with which it is associated.

Age at the time of this report: 47 years.

Psychological preparedness: the "cerebral hotspot" examination clearly established that he had already been previously stripped clean psychically and his potential ghost appropriated so that his head was therefore safe to be entered.

3. Subject of the study:

Name: unknown at the time; subsequently ascertained but currently suppressed

Sex: female

Occupation: unknown at the time; subsequently ascertained but currently suppressed

Age at the time of this report: approximately 36 years

Psychological preparedness: not applicable

4. Telepathy-medium utilised for the purpose of the report:

Name: details currently suppressed, for reasons explained in the conclusion of this sequence of reports

Sex: female, in accordance with the organisation's policy of attempting to match the sex of the subject

Occupation: full-time telepathy-medium, employed by the organisation on a contract basis

Age at the time of this report: currently suppressed

Psychological preparedness: not applicable

5. Zonal range of telepathic intrusion from the physical subject:

Not considered to be relevant.

6. Follow-up:

The next "episodes" are continued in reports 13210 and 13211, which at the time of the publication of this report have not been cleared for publication.

Report Overview

Following his assignment to her, it became apparent that the facilitator of this study was convinced that the subject of this study belonged to a sub-species known as the "luddite-vampire" (Basic Dictionary of Human and Related Hominoid Types refers) because, although he had attempted to photograph her digitally on a number of occasions, she had never materialised. Therefore, he reverted to conventional film and took his vintage kit with him, with out-dated, but still active, black and white film stock that had been archive-refrigerated for some time.

He stopped before her in the street once, and took her photograph, just a head-and-shoulders portrait, but at the crucial/significant] moment, she stuck her tongue out and raised her hands, whether in protest, salute or surrender, we do not know. She stared at him briefly. Then she ran away.

The facilitator of this study then proceeded to utilise his previously learned skills and develop the film.

At this stage, it was apparent that the image of her face and hands had indeed materialised, in, of course, negative form. Because he had only managed to take a single photograph of her before she moved away, hers was the only image on the film.

The next section of this narrative is assigned to the real-time report of the telepathy-medium assigned to this case from the point immediately after the film was developed.

Telepathy-Medium Narrative

I am swinging in. I am aware of a room. I can see nothing directly yet. I am aware of a reddened light, in a darkened room. Equipment has been set up.

Things are clearing slightly. Darkness is no obstacle. I require clarity of thought-interaction. I now have it. I can now see the film, hanging from a peg. I can see that there is only one image.

I can sense her now; I can sense that she is in there, locked into the celluloid; I can sense her depraved affinity for film-emulsion; I can detect her essence, nestled inside her satisfaction nestled inside the complexities of its chemical structure.

He takes the negative film, and places it beneath the lamp in the enlarger. She is in place. She is screaming through the lens of the enlarger.

He adjusts focus and adjusts ratios and adjusts distances and projects what bits of her he has onto the paper in optimum size and clarity.

He has removed a box of sensitised paper from the cupboard.

He has put the sensitised paper in place and secured it, so he has now held what she will be down flat with metal strips.

What bits of her he has are now being projected from the negative through the adjustable eye of the lens down onto the flat surface that bears what she will be.

He says out loud:

"One luddite vampire, two luddite vampires, three luddite vampires, four luddite vampires…" then tails off to silence, his lips still moving.

He takes the paper and puts it in the tray. I can see all this. I can see it through the nothingness that separates us. (All three of us.)

She is materialising through the chemicals in the tray, and I can feel that which are appearing first are the mouth and the eyes, and together, in their disjointed fashion, they fasten into a scowl that appears to me so wicked that it could surely blister eyeballs across a curved horizon. At this stage I can see her from a distance but also feel her. But I can't communicate with her: I can't inhabit her.

Her presence has become absence, and her absence presence. She is black and she is white: dots of black and daubs of nothing. Nothing else. She is mostly greyed out, but her grey bits are bits of black spread thinly. All of her is either there or not there. And what is there is either diffuse or intense.

The ears appear. The lips stretch. The tongue protrudes. There is a single fang embedded within the tip of it, which makes her tongue look like a single-toothed snake. I am now inside the negative. Observing. There is no fang on the negative. I can confirm this. I am now out of the negative. The hands appear, next to the ears. Nothing else appears. Pure white space between. She is a study in dislocation. She is an abbreviated avatar of malevolence.

I am now ready. I am now sending my thoughts out to the image in the tray and allowing them to merge with it. I can immediately still feel her malign negative presence inhabiting the film, hanging to dry. I feel that there is a danger that she will invert everything I possess.

He holds the paper up with tongs. He hangs the paper up to dry.

She slides from the paper onto his skin. She is stuck to his skin and ready to burrow. The paper is now blank.

I feel the time. Our times are colliding. My mind is sliding into hers. I am now connecting to her. I am now within her.

In her
she is my carrier
now we are a joint-brain
now we are we
self-licensed
no zone of exclusion
all areas forbidden
(so all areas accessible)

We find an aperture
we streak in
into the bacon of his body
into the black lean and empty fat
in like a tick mining a seam

We are in
but slowed down in the man-lard
I nurse-wet her
lubricate us for travel
for the clawing non-crawl
of our disembodied hands
joined to our no-body head
by nothing-but-willpower connections
(unknotting strings of air)

We slither onwards
edging through the tight-waist of his viscera
unseen viscosity streaming past
(conduited)
our cheeks squelched
by a private wind
thickened into grease
by an unknown-hand-work

But now there is heat
now we are beltaned within him
fire sprinkling through us
(his vesselled blood glowing)
and our journey turns aside
shuffles at the arched entrance
shuffles at the sign that welcomes
to the skin of the head

But we are primed and readied
and we are well-prepared
to go round the fetid inside circle clinging to the skull
to curve oozing through the skin around the turmoiled cheesehead mush
to be burn-splashed in the light that comes transpiring through his flesh
and falling in patches
falling in patches
(snowed sunshine)
giving us sight
but dimming it
dimming it dumb

...but at the threshold she goes stark-panic-rebellion-crazy tries to snap her presence within me away from the heat and she starts dragging flashburns of skin-scrape through me scowl-scarring my mind but I hold firm and retain control and grapplehook the control into my path alone and we are now on course and she will argue no more and we will do this thing...

And our tongue will not retract
as it levels with our hands
pursuing the way ahead
(tasting the destinations)

We taste the sweet
we taste the sour
we taste the salt
we taste the bitter
we taste the pungent
taste the astringent
six times intoxicated
(full of airhead eureka)

And every taste we take
is absorbing bone-dust from the skull
so every part that we possess
is heavying
heavying
heavying into strength and guilt
fearing the grumpy destiny
of imminent retribution

...and it comes in straight away and it comes hailing down comes hailing in a toxin drip-down onto our dusty conjoined pupa and what is happening what is happening what is happening teeth come slashing down from his skin to scrape the living debris from us and there is no escape no respite no crawl-away to wound-licking mental penury no stowaway coward-creep as the sharpened gristle hustles down and drops of bone-blood flick from the pieces of our abbreviated body and we will be blood-drenched if our nerve goes into failure so we sink into our unity which is all that can make us survive the soldier-malice speckling in as a hailstorm of lance-trap-sharpened teeth...

But we foetal-roll away
to temporary safety
and feel we have survived
and know we have won this battle
so now his thoughts are stolen
and now his thoughts will nourish us
so our future is secured
pygmatised in this flesh-forest
of his underhanging tripe-tentacles

We push a finger
up to the skin-folds
feel its bulbous scrape go across us
feel the threat
diluted but still there

So now our displaced mole continues
the scrape through of amputated hands
through the scratchings of his imagination
through to the lie-ahead place

We hear notes
tiny micro-tonalled music-scraps
scrape-tickling our ears

Four specks of snow fall - (big as chestnuts) - disappear - unmelting - no more come - (wind dropped to nothing)

...into the garden of him where the squeeze is reduced and the space is opened wide where specks of something like apple blossom are wavered down as the skin flakes away inwards and where the smell is speckled into separated crumbs of perfume shit and food...

A hang-down piece of skin - a passing cloud - a temporary piece of opacity

We are head-hooking our way through
hacking away with our single tongue-fang
ripping off his body's redness
ingesting him
bits of him becoming us
(becoming our blood corpuscles)
we are fed
we are secure

The skin raining blossom-petals - occluding the sight - (acre after acre of blizzarding white-scraps)

Now we have him penetrated
so what we now hear is distorted to mush
(we are his tinnitus-succubus)

...and I put my finger in the vicinity of it because it is too small to see and the taste is almost imperceptible but is redolent of the components of the chemical make-up of sweat that have somehow been twisted so that they don't taste salty but still taste of salt...

Surroundings streaming
past our contorted head
daggered pin-stabs of pain enter

...and the muscles exude a faint smell of primroses and we place our nose against the spongy thrust of it and breathe shallowly and it is so faint that it is like only one particle in a million carries the scent...

An inward breakdown of ice-sweat
cracking the underskin
the creak and flop of a broken dance
but the walls break
and we are vulnerable

...and we are feeling his thoughts impregnating every square of every part of what little of us there is impregnating several times embarking upon a crusade invasion of impregnation brain cell into brain cell claw-collision...

We are stretched
those empty bits of us are entered

...blood entering blood blood clotting into blood blood merging with blood scab-blood scratching scab-blood as things congeal and start to form...

Brain-baby
brain-to-brain-baby
brain-baby-collision
brain-baby-breaking-in

...brain-baby-breaking-her-in to the brain-baby-pumping-of-rhythms that pour in the liquids-of-baby-make...

I am swelling
as we two separate
I am slowly getting there
the body is now forming
the body is now growing
parts joining
parts filling in
limbs emerging
slowly getting there
(the tightness of pain as things accrete)

Little time left
every movement taken
forced to be tiny

The fog of sound still there:
he has encircled us
he is our tinnitus-incubus

We taste salt
minuscule particles
scrape across our face
salt-licks like dried sperm
cheesing down our throat

A faint hum
a slight thrumming of an artery
and it RAINS

...rains skin-bone wreckage-fragments on our solid parts and on our scraps of non-existence and rains an acid wear-away on us but spares the bits we need to have to bring it to the air...

And we must go
and we must be out of him and dry again

And we are out
out with a squeal
like an axe-murderer simper
and I am out of her
out like a scraped ghost

She drifts across the room
sticks to the hung-up paper
clings there like brain-dead magnetism

The plop of blood in cold pursuit
falls into the tray
and the splash settles into ripples
thickens
clears

And now I am back in the skin of my own head, and watching.

A curdled feeling seems to have sprayed the room.

And in the fixing fluid in the tray, there is an unravelling sniff of blood, curving like a kidney.

And it merges to form a shape. It is a baby's body. And now she slithers out and plops back into the fixing tray. Like a limp almost-foetus. A pecked-out gobbet of blood in the tray. Spreading. Growing. Turning. Forming the shape of a foetus.

He is still holding the blanked piece of paper.

I am fading, but she will not negate me. No. Me negate not will she but fading am I. Away go must I. Sleepy feeling am I. Me surrounding is blackness. Me has she now. Negative am I now. Nothingness to goes solidity my. Solid now is empty was what. Reversed am I. Negative.

Report Conclusion

At this point, the telepathy-medium's report/narrative ended.

No further approach was made to the subject of the report.

Retrospective psychological assessment tests on the telepathy-medium are still ongoing, mainly because she has not managed to communicate coherently since the events documented in this report and its successors.

This conclusion will be revisited when the two subsequent related reports are made available.

However, it can be stated here, even though the information is out of sequence, that the brain-to-brain baby is currently fostered and doing well. It is observed on a regular basis. It is healthy. Its sex can not be revealed at this stage.

Report ends.