Dangers of a Bear Market

Here is a thing I wrote when I should have been doing something else. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but it does feature someone being eaten by bears.

It is reasonably long, so for a more eyeball-friendly black-text-on-white format, click the envelope icon at the bottom of the post and just scroll down past the form (there's no need to actually send the email unless the urge particularly grabs you).

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Dangers of a Bear Market
by Elizabeth O'Hara

“The Non-Damiated Macassarman, I presume?” The voice was dark and unctuous on the line; tar masquerading as molasses. Malcolm Baylock, newly-made attaché to the Shadow Board of Directors and still not fully feeling it, tried to answer, but even the one word snagged on the dry ridges in his throat. The voice on the line ignored his scrobiculated dry-hiss of non-sound and continued: “The silent pig roams softly over the verdant pasture of Mars.”

Baylock’s mind and stomach both participated in a small lurch, convinced that the pressure of the situation upon his native disposition had finally pushed him into the shrieking tumult of madness. A future bristling with sharp needles to dull thoughts. He considered asking the voice to repeat itself, but feared that this time his words would come out as a bright shriek of bafflement, a chill mountain blast through the desert dust. He stared dumbly at the mouthpiece until it eventually repeated the statement and then made new ones along similar lines, including “Emasculated Master?” and “Masticated Antimacassar?” Baylock’s mind grasped at meaning, thrashing like the death throes of protoplasm.

The phone emitted a pixellated sigh. “Please refer to the book, Mr Baylock.”

With a mental click and a body-long sigh of relief, it fell into place. Code! Of course! What sort of nefarious, secretive, semi-underground investment cabal would they be if they just came out and said things like regular folk? He was so relieved that he almost forgot to look it up in the calfskin codebook he had been issued at his recruitment to the shadowy organisation. But with the pulse pounding through his neck threatening to dislodge the receiver wedged between ear and shoulder, he eventually managed to find out what information the voice had been attempting to convey. And, true to form, answered before the information had been given due process by his faculties.

“But the Binckley stock is falling floorward! Any fool knows that!” Baylock was a mediocre man in most respects, but one aspect of him that had yet to be faulted was his ability to pass off the opinions of others as his own. The finance pages had been screeching for days, their columns doomladen with predictions of Binckley’s imminent failure, including one employing a particularly deft piece of dog-based wordplay that Baylock couldn‘t quite recall. “We should Battersea those puppies immediately,” he attempted. His rhetorical skills were certainly mediocre.

The voice responded in smooth rage like the glassy face of a tsunami. “Speak like the lords of Siam,” it insisted, “and you too would be made the diamond hunchback.”

Baylock blanched as he decoded the message; not only was it a round dismissal of his idea, but of all his ideas, past and present. It also made clear what would be done with his fleshly body should he ever neglect to use the code again.

“Camshaft,” said Baylock hurriedly, indicating both that he understood and that he was fully capable of bricking up the fact that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it behind the disused fireplace of genuine terror.

The voice on the phone did not reply. It clicked off instead, leaving only a brief squeal of interference and Baylock to worry.
_______

Maddie Mitzenberger was engaged in a tiny war. She had launched a staplegun sortie against the seemingly-bottomless forces of the wastepaper bin void, sending wave after wave of fragile metal goalposts into the frey. The battle-scarred landscape of the greybeige office carpet was littered with the silver corpses of the fallen and still she continued her mad god’s barrage. It was only when her boss, Mr Baylock, came in that she granted them armistice, put the stapler down, and went back to pretending to type. Life as a secretary was far less glamorous than she had been led to believe by TV; there were far too few opportunities to control the fate of millions with one wave of her empress-hand for her liking.

Mr Baylock was less than exciting too. At first she had seen his brooding as a sign of his sensitive soul tormented by the yoke of responsibility, but after a few months with the company she had realised that his soul and the yoke were essentially interchangeable..

He was brooding again at his desk later that day when she brought him his messages. He had told her to hold all calls last March and hadn’t retracted the order, so she had yanked the landline out of the wall to save his being accidentally disturbed. Now everyday at 3pm she would bring in the same pile of messages for him to tut and peer over. It hadn’t caused any issues so far. Anyway, he had his new mobile phone for anything urgent, now he had been promoted. Maddie didn’t know exactly what his promotion entailed and had never mustered the enthusiasm to care; attaché to some subcommittee or other was more than enough information to satisfy her oxidised curiosity.

Mr Baylock shooed her in and pulled to the door behind her, handing her a paperclipped document with an intensity that underlined its importance.

“I want you to get me six copies of this,” he said. “But don’t use the copy room. Is there still that place down the road?”

“Think so,” replied Maddie. In fact, she knew so, because it was where her boyfriend Brandon worked.

“Great, take it down there.”

Maddie nodded and started to leave. She glanced down at the top sheet and skimmed through phrases like “the rejection of most massmade nutbalm” and “opalescent nightshrikes on the sodden cusp of veracity.“ She wrinkled her pretty forehead and turned back to her boss. “What is it? It looks like gibberish. Anything important?”

Mr Baylock swallowed loudly. “No, no,” he said. “No, no, no. Just some documents, just some documents to be copied. But not in the copy room, OK?” He attempted a casual grin.

Maddie shrugged and left. Her stunted curiosity on the subject was soon overcome with the joyous prospect of being able to leave early.
_______

Baylock slid across the translucent plastic door that separated his office from the Reception area. He contemplated that his office was technically an annex, a subsection of Maddie’s larger one; her office engulfed his entirely. He contemplated this state of affairs several times during the workday and occasionally in the middle of the night, sweat-drenched and suddenly awakened by a wailing noise apparently emanating from his own face. It was the cumulative effect of this which set his ambition so enthusiastically in the Shadow Board‘s murky direction. And it had been just such an earlier contemplation that had led him to the course of action he had chosen. He wanted an office that stood alone. Or even better, engulfed the offices of others, of everyone that had ever passed him up or done him wrong. He wanted the uber-office, an office which subsumes all other offices within itself, its own body. He aimed to make organs of his enemies.

But that was getting ahead of himself. The first step would be to make his mark on the Board, to make sure that his name was one they would remember. And he knew just the way to make it happen. What’s more, he had utilised his individual skillset and implemented his core strengths, so it couldn’t possibly have been a bad idea. Initiative must be prized by such people, surely. And most importantly, he knew which market analysts and commentators were worth reading and they all insisted that any Binckley stocks should be jettisoned post haste. Saracen-Gorilla, the energy drink company, were a much better prospect. They all said so. And that was what he had said in his letter to the Shadow Board. He intended to send a copy of the letter to each Board member, to arrive at the same time as the round up of the morning markets to show them how well his decision - made entirely off his own bat - had paid off. By secretly selling the stock before it plummets and strategically revealing that fact at the ideal moment, he would appear to be saving the day. And he’d be lauded like the pure-gold baby. Getting that girl to make the copies elsewhere was perhaps overly cautious, but why risk the plan by revealing his success ahead of time? He sat back in his chair and imagined an Akira-like expansion of his office and its absorption of all those around it.
_______

Out of range of even the imaginary danger of incorporation into one man’s swollen officespace, Brandon Weimar doodled lyrics on a sheet of 90gsm laid goldenrod whilst ignoring the numerous error lights twinkling from the blocky machines surrounding him. He saw his employment at QuikCopy as very much a temporary measure and so the work itself became of minor concern. But it wasn’t too bad and when the manager was out he could work on some songs. This Rickety Artifice, his band, was as ever his main focus.

Maddie bustled in and he instinctively straightened behind his counter. She had a certain knack of instilling guilt and shiftiness with her mere presence. They exchanged an obligatory kiss and she handed over the document for him to copy. While he searched for a machine both stocked with paper and free of its jams, Maddie assessed him and the shop via a sour pursing of her face. Despite Brandon’s attempts to distract her with chatter, it wasn’t long before her attention was drawn to a small poster on the noticeboard advertising the QuikCopy Management Training Scheme. And it was even less time from that before she vocalised her interest.

“You should give that a go, Brandon,” she said. “Salvage something good out of this dead-end job.”

Brandon had finished feeding the documents into the bottom slot of a copier, but he maintained his crouched position behind the bulk of the machine. He had to think. She had been making several such suggestions lately and it didn’t bode well.

“Seriously, Brandon, I know it’s only a copy shop but at this stage you’ve got to settle for what you can get. I mean, what else are you going to do?”

It was at this point that Brandon decided that they would have an argument.

“Music!” She shook her head in a cartoon of disbelief. “That stupid band? That’s not a job; it’s barely a hobby. A waste of time is what it is.”

It was at this point that Brandon decided that they would split up.

“There are hundreds, thousands of people with more talent than you and even they don‘t make it. What the hell chance do you have?” She snatched her bundle of documents from his hand and stuffed them into her bag. “It isn’t as if Rickety Rockety are even anything special.”

It was at this point that Brandon decided he was quitting this job immediately in order to concentrate his attention on that which was very special indeed.

“This Rickety Artifice,” he said quietly, and glared at Maddie until she left.

The rage soon subsided, giving way to the zen state of supreme confidence in the decisions he had made. He penned a quick resignation/apology note for Mr Ibrahim, then remembered several examples of dickery on his boss’s part and so crumpled it into the wrong recycling bin with relish. He stopped only to cram the sheaves of notes he had scattered around the room into his rucksack, inadvertently scooping up rogue papers along with them, including the copies of Maddie’s document which had trundled slowly out of the machine as they argued. He ripped off his lime green apron and felt its great weight lifted from him as he strode off into his newer, freer life.
_______

The weight Baylock carried on his shoulders increased greatly as he scrolled through the afternoon’s latest figures. Binckley’s latest model of stainless steel shinplates had been sported by a celebrity in a tabloid photo spread and Saracen-Gorilla had been discovered to cause hirsutism; the stock prices reflected these facts with horrifying clarity. Baylock’s entire digestive tract was crammed with butterflies; he felt them flutter unpleasantly from mouth to anus. His mind fluttered similarly, flitting from one idea to the next in an effort to find one he could use to save himself. The deals had been done and the stock had been sold; clearly there was nothing he could do about that. And it wasn’t as if he could stop the Board from finding out that they had been sold; they kept a close collective rheumy eye on things and he was already expecting a phone call at any moment. No, the only variable at his disposable was plausible deniability; so long as the Board didn’t find out that he authorised the sale, he could ride this one out high up on a velveteen steed. And because he had been so secretive so far, it left only one loose end. As soon as he got his bragging letter back from that little wall-eyed secretary and made sure it was destroyed, there would be nothing to link him to the sale. It would just be an error - nothing to do with me, squire - and his career would survive. There would be a little dent, sure, what with the mistake having happened on his watch, but nothing insurmountable. If she hadn’t slunk away early, it could already have been done. As it was, it wouldn’t hurt to wait until Monday morning. He relaxed slightly, remembering to breathe, and used his codebook to draft a shocked and disappointed reply to the Board‘s inevitable communication.

His phone chirruped the message’s arrival. Their anger seeped in between the code. But it broadly went according to Baylock’s plan, other than the Board’s insistence on knowing who did authorise it. “Indicate our tacky bear,” they repeated, until he finally panicked and gave them the name Maddie Mitzenberger, a secretary who had absconded from work that very afternoon and hadn‘t been seen since. There was a pause before the Board replied - there was obviously some discussion amongst them - and then the decision came. They would deal with this person who had cost them money; a job lot of “garrulous starpigs” would be dispatched post haste. And Baylock was ordered to wait for further instructions.

He was perspiring heavily when he got off the phone, the touchscreen misted by his nervous secretions. He had the feeling that he had been extremely lucky. All that was required now was to speed up the plan, to get the letter back from Maddie before their people caught up with her and he became implicated. The codebook translated ’starpig’ as ’security personnel’, but ‘garrulous’ was not listed so he could only assume it was meant in the conventional sense. If heavies or even hitmen were going to be involved, he had to move fast. He had to retrieve that letter by any means at his disposal; including bribery, if necessary. Baylock flicked through the human resources files in search of the secretary’s home number.
_______

Maddie Mitzenberger was jerked out her chablis-nods by the unpleasantly organic and rhythmic spasms of her handbag on the coffee table. It took her a moment to realise that it was her phone on vibrate ringing inside, rather than some nightmarish blurring of the divide between living and inanimate matter. She was in no hurry to answer it, in any case; it would only be Brandon calling to apologise. Apologising for what, she wondered? She looked around her flat, at the TV still on and blaring Psycho, at yesterday’s knickers twisted up in her tights in the hallway and empty wine bottles scattered everywhere else. She remembered stopping off to pick up some wine at the corner shop and taking advantage of their generous 3 for 2 offer. Then she remembered why the wine had been required - the argument with Brandon and their final split - and buried her steel-wool-stuffed head in her hands. She thought of what people would say. It was at this point that Maddie decided that she very much wanted to leave town and start again somewhere else.

The handbag shuddered again and this time she reached in to answer it. It was a voice she did not at first recognise, angrily saying something about a letter. She eventually worked out it was her boss and that she was fired. It was at this point that Maddie decided that she had nothing to keep her here.

Mr Baylock continued to shout and she stopped listening. Psycho was far more interesting anyway. When she tuned back in, his voice had become somewhat desperate and was saying something about a pay off. She looked at Marion Crane on the TV and realised that her plan of getting away with the money was sound; she couldn’t have been expected to factor in a psychopath, after all. And her own plan was even better, considering that her boss was essentially giving his consent to her absconding with the loot. It was at this point that Maddie decided where she was going to get the money to start her new life.

So Maddie met Mr Baylock (in a neutral, public place, of course) to exchange the letter for a small holdall stuffed with £10 notes. And after assuring him that she hadn’t had a chance to make any copies of the letter “for personal reasons”, she was on her way.

She drove until nightfall, until hungover fatigue compelled her to stop at a motel. The place had a very ill-favoured look and the sole member of staff even more so. It was even called the Bates Motel. But it turned out to be a Psycho-themed novelty hotel, negating the creepiness; the intentionally sinister usually turns out to be anything but. She knew that she had nothing to worry about when the offer of coffee and sandwiches up at the house turned out to be just that, and with no pseudo-necro-maternal intrusion to boot. As the proprietor explained as they ate in the artificially-creepified kitchen, Mother’s interjections came via speakers on a timer system. And as Maddie got to know Norman (he was nothing if not committed), she began to fall in love with him. He soon reciprocated and before she had even properly unpacked, they were married.

She took her husband’s surname and at first worked in his business as the Mother, despite the inaccuracy. Norman explained that it didn’t matter much because anyone that would voluntarily become a customer was unlikely to be the sort to remember plot points; all they cared about was a shrill scary voice and some sort of Mother Theresa/Cryptkeeper-style desiccated skeleto-zomboid Mummy/mummy. But as she soon learned, this didn’t take up much of her day and so she used the bag of money to start a small advertising agency; it was, conveniently, a job she could do from home, between oedipal shrieks of criticism directed at her husband/son and whilst still wearing her long-time-dead-old-lady costume. Of course, her clients didn’t know that; she was very professional. She even took to using her full first name - Madeleine - in order to be taken a little more seriously. And both businesses thrived.
________

Back in town, another Madeleine Bates and one with a far more original claim to the title, was preparing for the gig of her life. She stood in her specially staked-out position, sipping her plastic pint and fiddling with the digital recorder in her pocket. This Rickety Artifice were, in her opinion, the finest unsigned band on the circuit and until they put out a record, she felt it was her duty as webmaster of the band’s foremost fansite to record a bootleg. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t had offers of a record deal, but they had so far resisted. The band’s lead singer and songwriter used to work in a copy shop and so had developed a deep suspicion of the technology of facsimile (imagining such a beautiful thought being expressed through such a beautiful mouth sent a deep quiver along her fillet). She had read in interviews that this traumatic time had provided inspiration for many of his best songs, such as Lost Cat Answers to No One, Generic Resume and We Buy Gold for £££!!!

A throb of the amps signalled the start of the gig. Madeleine adjusted the miniature microphones attached to her lapel and clicked start on the recorder.

Brandon Weimar stood glistening and shirtless in a sickly green spotlight. His eyes were dripping with earnestness and prescription opioids, and were cast upwards above the heads of the expectant crowd. His band surrounded him in shadow; functional session-players who knew they had found their feet with this particular frontman. He sighed deeply, as was expected of a man of his station, and nodded the song into being. A sonic stalactite of guitar drone emerged in jagged stop-motion from the speakers only to be sliced charcuterie-thin by the piston-powered blades of drumbeat. Brandon Weimar took the mic and launched into a new version of At the Schwarzkopf Gentlemen, Spoken Like the Lords of Siam.

“The silent pig revelations have been assimilated,” he began. “And you are no doubt wracked by the opalescent nightshrikes on the sodden cusp of veracity. But the rejection of most massmade nutbalm need not be your crossbeam. My strong fine will has developed a rock-rough carapace.” Then the crowd exploded as he wailed into the chorus. “With ever-viscous and vicious verisimilitude in the hivebox’s favour. The non-damiated macassarman! Emasculated master! Masticated antimacassar!” The song then descended into wounded whelps and pretty, heartbreaking noises; the audience were carried further aloft.
_______

Madeleine Bates’ nervous system was still regulated to the beat of the music as she walked home through the darkened streets. She walked on autopilot, her attention focussed on her phone through which she was uploading the audio of the gig to her website. And so she didn’t notice the van-full of burly men tracking her steps and checking her face against a photograph they held between them. The progress bar filled with a beep before the phone shattered on the oily pavement; she dropped it as they bundled her into the Transit‘s yawning back. (I will point out now that this is the last we will hear of this particular Madeleine Bates, but never fear; she was an enthusiastically resourceful young lady and soon had the “garrulous starpigs” planning to use their former snatch-van to follow This Rickety Artifice on their upcoming East Anglian tour.)
_______

The other Madeleine Bates gave a more protracted shriek out of the kitchen window at her husband-son, one eye still on the laptop on the kitchen table. She was working on the ad campaign for an energy drink and had been scanning local unsigned band websites for something that ticked the boxes of ’authentically rock and roll’ and ’naively cheap’. One band particularly grabbed her attention; a guy appeared to be yelping barnacled nonsense over a boxy guitar riff. She hadn’t a clue what it was about, but the target demographic - the kids in the crowd - seemed to love it. She copied the link and drafted a few emails.
_______

Malcolm Baylock was sweating profusely, the shirt-wrinkles across his back forming visible contour lines in the wet raw silk of his suit. He was in the front row of several in the small AV suite and could feel a dozen cyclopean eyes boring into him; the chairs were occupied by small black boxes, tinny speakers from each of which sprouted the gunmetal stalk of a webcam. The Shadow Board had gathered to watch the new advert for Saracen-Gorilla energy drink in which the hirsutism was portrayed as its unique selling point; the drink for those that yearn to release the animal within. It was a project which Baylock, in a cruel twist of fate, had been chosen to spearhead. He turned nervously to the sea of lenses and clicked the data projector into life.

The advert’s style was a bog-standard appeal to bland rebellion, but that wasn’t what was causing the speakers to crackle with grumbles. Nor were the lingering slow-motion shots of taut young bodies shaking droplets of water from their glossy pelts. Baylock’s eyes darted around the room, but the unblinking lenses were giving nothing away. Something about the lyrics? A bit risqué, perhaps? He strained to listen; he hadn’t until this moment considered them as anything other than noises, like those made by the guitars and drums. “My strong fine will has developed a rock-rough carapace and the silent pig encapsulated within,” he sang.

Baylock blanched and shrank as recognition hit him. His shaking hand flapped at the codebook in his pocket. He recognised his own crowing words, distorted as they were by code.

The song continued: “The ejaculating barnacle will assert itself anew on the jeering face of the jamboree man, skipping across the verdant pastures of Mars. It was all the labour of my strong fine will.”

It was at this point that Baylock realised that the Board members, far more proficient at code than himself, were simultaneously translating.

“With ever-viscous and vicious verisimilitude in the hivebox’s favour,” he sang. And then Baylock heard his own salutation and stopped scrabbling for the codebook in his pocket, knowing what was coming next. “The Non-Damiated Macassarman! Emasculated Master! Masticated Antimacassar!”

It was at this point that Baylock recognised the murderous rage rising from various boxes holding the Shadow Board’s wills. “Camshaft,” said one of the boxes. “Bear market?”

They crackled in unison, confirming the decision: “Bear market.”

Almost hyperventilating, Baylock finally managed to gain purchase on the codebook and pulled it out of his pocket, flicking desperately to the Bs. There was a sudden drop in pressure, a crackle shift of electricity that agitated the air. It was at this point that Baylock understood that his office would expand no further, as he suddenly and reasonably inexplicably found himself being eaten by bears.
_______

Retirement

An English village on an army pension.

The Colonel found himself on the village green, at the far end by the duck pond. He had let his feet drag him where they would, but they had instinctively avoided the playground by the road - his body had an intrinsic memory of jeering he didn’t understand from tiny people with a hatred far bigger than themselves.

He sat down on Jean’s bench. He had no idea who Jean was beyond the dates of her existence and the assertion that she loved this place, as the brass plaque on the crossbeam proclaimed. In slightly younger days, he had wondered about Jean and imagined that had their lives overlapped, they might have been happy. He didn’t love this place, but he liked it and for happiness like that was willing to pretend. But Jean had made her exit in 1986. He wasn’t sure when he had come to the village (although he couldn’t remember being elsewhere) and had long since abandoned the notion of trying to remember 1986. There was far too much to do.

He was eventually flanked by his companions. The Alderman wore a tweed jacket over his robes of office, his head seeming so small as it emerged, a prematurely bald pate fronted by his youthful face. The Vicar too was bald but was shorter and ruddier, his dog collar tight around his fat neck.

“Nothing yet,” reported the Colonel. They had known each other too long to bother with greetings.

“Are you doing all you can?” asked the Alderman, his face remaining smooth yet belying his age with his seriousness.

“I think so. It‘s difficult sometimes.”

“Aye,” nodded the Vicar, thread veins burnishing. “Aye, there’s the rub all right. But what if it were easier? What then?”

The Colonel allowed his gaze to be filled with ducks, and affected catatonia. What indeed? It was an old catechismic game, one often played between them these last few years. But he had yet to find an answer to satisfy either them or himself. If he were honest, he wasn’t entirely sure what it was they wanted of him.

The Alderman offered him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “You’ll get there, you know. You’re closer than ever. Closer than you know.”

“But…”

“Trust us. Go to the Post Office - collect your pension. Go to the chemist - collect your prescription. This can all be discussed later.”

“Later?” But it was just him and the ducks. And their inscrutable, miniature minds were engaged with other matters.

-------

“Think of it like this,” remarked the Vicar. It was one of the rare times that he came alone - a situation that always made the Colonel a little suspicious. The Alderman was clearly the brains of the operation. “I don’t have any sort of skull to speak of. That’s why I have this dog collar.” He gestured at the band of white cutting into his fat throat. “It sustains my facio-cranial erection and allows me to get on in the world. Without it…” He fiddled with a clasp and removed the collar. His skulless scalp sagged like an octopus removed from water. Thick folds of skin enveloped his eyes, mouth and eventually his bulbous red-webbed nose. He continued to talk as his head deflated, but the words were lost in the muffling skinfolds.

“I see,” said the Colonel, a little confused. Then, with the abruptness of all such revelations, he really did see and let out an amorphous honk of a laugh. He was still laughing several hours after the Vicar had left and the night had reduced the surrounding Green to monochrome. Later still, some people had found him exhausted from laughing, and called others who had taken him to the hospital. He tried to explain that it was funny, so funny and so true, but no one had listened. They thought him ill. Is laughter a symptom then? Maybe only for people like him, people considered to be bereft of anything at which to laugh.

So he stayed at the hospital for a few weeks. They gave him bright pills in a small paper cone and he received no visitors. Eventually he was allowed to leave, prescriptions, leaflets and outpatients appointment cards clutched in his unsteady hands. The Post Office, the chemist, home and then back to the Green.

The Colonel shook on the bench, his body wracked with dyskinesia. The ducks were not so vivid now, just little physical shapes, hollow like Easter chocolates. He let his eyes rest on them anyway. How had they changed in absence, he wondered, what had they lost? He let it go. He could focus now, but not think. There was a name there - Jean, perhaps - and something frightfully important, something he had to do. But there were no details. Just the intensely silver glint of mirrors in the darkness. There had to be light somewhere, but where was it coming from? He couldn’t say. But he could stare with his mind’s eye. Stare and shake. What was it he was supposed to be doing?

“We’ve lost him.” said the Vicar, shaking his head sadly.

“I’m afraid you’re right.” replied the Alderman. “Time to move on, I think.”

“But what about…?”

“Our chances of success were always slim. We’ll have better luck elsewhere.”

“But look at him. We can’t leave him like this.”

The Alderman fixed his companion with a stern gaze. “The task is not an easy one and nor is the calling. We’ve all tried, him especially, but we must cut our losses and move on.”

The Vicar sighed, the vibration causing his scalp to ripple slightly. “You’re right, of course. It doesn’t make it any easier though. Shall we?” And they were gone.

The Colonel shook on the bench for a long time. Then he stopped shaking and was found the next morning, more still than he had ever been.


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Addendum 12 Dec 2011: Duran Gökemre has written a rather awesome and beautiful piece about this story over on Duran Reviews...
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Existence Status: Ongoing

If anyone is still reading this thing after my gaping chasm of a hiatus, I salute you; it was a heady combination of busyness, illness, laziness and working on other stuff. Yes, I've pulled that old chestnut out of the fire.

I'll try to be a little less negligent in future. In the meantime, here's a cut-up poem I made from last Saturday's Guardian Review.

(click for a readable degree of bigness)

Extended Moorcock Interview

If you dug Hari Kunzru's piece in the Guardian Review a few weeks ago about Michael Moorcock and interesting science fiction in general, you might want to have a look at the transcript of the full interview that he has rather nicely put up on his website.

The Constellation Homaridus

An alternative interpretation of Ursa Minor, for those that are sick of bears (and sound sleep).

Night Flights of the Coir Scarabs

As evening falls, the coconuts begin to wake up. Cracks form along their hairy carapaces. Elytra snap open and forward, revealing gossamer wings. They take flight, unfurling milk-white mouthparts which drip opaque gata and ichor over the world below. They bombinate about the night city with their unfeasible bulk hanging in the air until dawn troubles the sky. Then they return once again to their daytime roosts, to sleep suspended amid the feathery crowns of palms.

A Sketch by Raphael on Late-Night TV

Christ, Our Lady and their Pet Cat, all in crystalline-abstract form. Jesus clings on to the struggling cat and Mary clings to Jesus, and all three categories of Renaissance flesh - holy, human and animal - merge into pure geometry smoked with obscure folds, representations of cloth.

We feel as though we could step through the linear plane; to stroke the baby and the cat, and shake the woman by the hand. But they are not real people (or cats), any more than the impossible columns of the stylised marmoreal temple surrounding them are real structures. Symbolic qualities overshadow the mundane meanings of depicted objects. And if some naturally-occurring things can be interpreted as having symbolic importance then all of them can, with sufficient prodding and conviction.

Swan Song

Most bands would benefit from the addition of an angry swan to their line-up; they can produce riffs capable of breaking a man's arm.

Memories of a Youthful Impalement

A curious sensation. Not pain as such. More shock, certainly at seeing an arc of serrated metal emerging from the front of one's own torso. Then a kind of giddy warmth. I think I might have laughed out loud, bringing my hands to the wound then spreading them before my eyes, watching ropes of thick blood festoon between my outstretched fingers, crimson-black and beginning to coagulate.

I looked up over my shoulder, still giggling, to see the man who had impaled me. He was still gripping the hilt tightly, still connected to his weapon and my wound. I remember the whiteness of his knuckles and the whiteness of the skin stretched taut over high cheekbones. His eyes were wider than any I have seen, before or since. Wider even than her's the first time I penetrated her. Wide with absolute surprise and the complete defiance of expectation. This, of course, made me laugh even harder.

I suppose I must have lost consciousness then, because my next memories are of a high, white ceiling, a clipped doctor's voice telling me how I was stupid and lucky in equal measure, and a dull ache in my trunk that was never to truly dissipate throughout the remainder of my life.

Soundproof Booths

How were the working conditions in these booths?
Awful; they were full of earwigs and half of them used to break wind for fun. And they'd be laughing and you'd be dead.

Bettering the Circuit

No more exaggerated protozoa clotting the pit lanes. No more sea of umbrellas drowning out the crowds. No more errant paper globes floating over whole affair and blocking the aerial view. Just a bevvy of young Asian women in hot-pants and crop-tops, and the Pacific Ocean glinting on the distant horizon under an impossibly blue sky.

Darkness: A Hallowe'en Trifle

The night was thick with owlspeak. Darkness the texture of molasses dripped from bare branches. Black winds hissed through tortured thorn and toads draped themselves voluptuously over the black mudbanks like crone-scrawny concubines swaddled in greasy brown paper. The oily obsidian of the lake's surface stretched on to the rougher vertical monolith of the sheer cliff face, a straggle of coarse fringing its silhouette; a more solid slab of darkness against the darkness of the sky. A flock of egrets flashed white as lightning, migrating away and not looking back, not one. Oppressive images and archetypes of Philomel dominated her thinking. Nothing much happened and yet her barely-contained panic was total.

She was awoken by a strangulated yelp, and lay stock-still and listening but there was just the sloppy-drunk slur of a Levantine conversation below and the distant traffic growling like a lonely animal in anguish. A thrust of courage and she opened her eyes to her bedroom, it's contents bathed in sickly orange by the streetlight outside. The familiar London knot of people and the objects they made, and no such thing as darkness. Realisation dawned, abating and concentrating her terror, that the yelp must have come from the front of her own face. A nightmare then, albeit a particularly vivid one. And a stupid one too, based upon nothing more than a threatening atmosphere.

She sighed and decided she needed a glass of water. She swung her legs off the bed and planted her bare feet in the peaty mud. Unknown things - segmented, bloated and bristling with legs - crawled between her toes. The snuffling of nightanimals came from under the furniture. There was darkness here, a sodium darkness selective in what it revealed.

This time she was unable to stifle her scream for long. This time it did not wake her up.