Damo says...

Nothing to see here...but look over there!

2011-08-28T13:01:00.000+01:00

Yes, it's been quiet here of late, but not because the writing had stopped.

It'll stay quiet here for a while more as I try to work on meatier things.

In the meantime, though, I put a book out. It's called The Christmas Gifts and you can support it at http://www.christmasmacabre.com and I really hope you will.

Come by and sign up for the feed, preview a few of the chapters for free and give me a wave.

And give something macabre this Christmas.

See you there.

Damo

Devils

2011-07-05T01:12:00.002+01:00

Heaven's empty now; so's Hell, it's said.
The devils walking where angels fear to tread.
Our angels bide while devils hide in well lit places.
But then, devils still bear angels' faces.

Insert Holiday Here

2010-12-23T21:26:00.003Z

Because you're great, it bears relatin'
Happy What-You're-Celebratin'
From me to you, it's worth restatin'
Happy What-You're-Celebratin'
Raise a glass, invite your mate in
Whether or not the date's worth ratin'
Take a break from What-You're-Hatin'
Happy What-You're-Celebratin'

Love and Hate 4

2010-06-22T13:46:00.001+01:00

Love and Hate 3

2010-06-22T12:38:00.000+01:00

Love and Hate 2

2010-06-22T12:37:00.001+01:00

Love and Hate 1

2010-06-22T12:26:00.002+01:00

Postcard V

2009-07-31T01:45:00.002+01:00

Postcard IV

2009-07-21T01:42:00.001+01:00

Postcard III

2009-07-20T00:44:00.001+01:00

Postcard II

2009-07-17T16:42:00.003+01:00

There's a monster in my room

2009-06-30T13:09:00.006+01:00

Spam

2009-06-30T11:59:00.004+01:00

Classified

2009-06-26T14:36:00.007+01:00

2009-06-26T13:04:00.004+01:00

Origin story

2009-06-26T09:13:00.011+01:00

Marian stepped out of a pine-scented mist, slung the spray bleach and floor cloths back on her jury rigged cleaning belt and closed the bathroom door behind her. She wasn’t up for it, but the sounds of Saul at his workshop below – drill screams and metal music – meant an open invitation for her to tackle his room. So she unhooked the laundry net and followed the trail of energy drink cans along the sideboard to his poster covered bedroom door, crushing them one-handed as she went.

‘No job, no school, no interest in leaving the house – energy for what?’ she asked the figure with the eye-patch that faced her.

FURY!

The poster-hero blew his speech bubble around a mouthful of cigar.

‘Never a truer word,’ Marian replied.

And the poster nodded. Without an air to lift it the corner still peeled away from the door and reached towards her like a paper shred to a static charged comb. Marian instinctively pulled her loose hair back over her shoulder, away from the encroaching paper.

Stupid.

She slapped the corner back with her palm and the door opened onto the sliding mess of Saul’s room.

Comic books. They slithered over every surface, they climbed the walls and nestled in his discarded clothes. She tramped them underfoot as she crossed to open the curtains, and felt them rise and brush at her heels. She was always worried that something lurking underneath them would bite her, some trash burrowing insect. Comic books were a symbol of filth to Marian after years of cleaning Saul’s room. They stewed in the fug he left behind, while they waited for him to return. Heroes poised to spring from every direction, to leap onto and into his head. Like cockroaches.

He’s eighteen, she roared inside.

He’s clever, he’s gifted – all those machines and computers. He should be his own hero.

She started tearing clothes from the floor and bed for the laundry, not caring whether she tore the comics in the process or not.

His father said he wasn’t worth it, that they should kick him out and let him sink or swim. But she couldn’t turn her back on him. She wanted more for him, just as she’d wanted more for herself. She had been less-than-special all her life; her older sister Vivien the glittering success who’d done it all first. Bigger, better, faster, more. And when Vivien had her own child, Kevin, she’d passed on that legacy for overachievement to the next generation, and it was Saul who was made to feel second best. Saul, the child who loved stories and heroes, was made to look foolish next to worldly-wise, perfect cousin Kevin. Well, she’d be damned, Marian had decided, before the little peacock would get the better of her Saul.

She got him the best tuition, the best computers and equipment. The best of everything he ever showed the least bit of interest in. But what had he done with them? Made them the playthings from his comic books. Junked it all, and himself, into the cellar and never came out.

She’d tried to motivate him, but when positivity hadn’t broken him of his comic book fantasies she’d gotten tougher. She’d berated him, then grounded him. Impressed upon him the need to make his mark on the world. Not to wait.

Resentful, he’d just disappeared further into other worlds, more violent comics, more useless gadgets. She took his money away, but still he accumulated them somehow. So Marian invited perfect cousin Kevin to the house every Sunday for dinner, to hold up as an example, though she hated herself for it. She’d called Kevin a hero; she hated herself most of all for sinking that low. And yet she hoped it would goad Saul into hating the boy as much as she did, to want to succeed because of Kevin, if not because of her. She could play the bad guy for that.

Something buzzed in her ear. She swatted at it, but connected with nothing. Then the hairs on her neck started rising. More static. She shuddered and dropped a handful of comics she’d lifted in order to get under the bed. She rubbed the creeping sensation from her neck and looked round to catch sight of the fly she imagined must have caused the buzzing. Gone.

‘Flies, Saul!’

She shouted towards the door, knowing full well the noise of his tools and stereo could drown out a bomb going off upstairs. Still, she ranted on.

‘Your comics breed flies. I shouldn’t be expected to have to work around things that breed flies. And yet, here I am, lifting these stupid comic books aside to do your laundry. You know who’s a hero, Saul? Your mother’s a hero!’

Something moved on the bed.

Marian screamed and expected a rat or a fistful of cockroaches to appear from under the shifting jacket that was sliding from the bed to the floor. But there were none. Instead the jacket fell away, scattering a patchwork of plastic cards from inside. Marian looked at them. Credit cards. She stepped closer and read the name. They were Kevin’s. A dozen credit cards in Kevin’s name. In amongst them was his driver’s licence, except that the photo wasn’t Kevin. It was Saul.

She became aware of silence from the cellar. She unhooked the belt of cleaning utilities, dropped the net of laundry, grabbed the jacket and cards and stormed from the room.

Staring down the length of the corridor to the cellar entrance she tried to compose what she’d say to him. She was so angry she felt like sparks were dancing on her skin. She felt a tickle at her throat of something crawling on her skin. A flash of metallic blue crossed into her peripheral vision, skimming the ceiling, but though she looked up immediately, it was gone. More flies, she though. Time to clean house.

She was halfway down the staircase that led into the cellar when she realised that he was waiting for her, facing her. She’d intended to forego the usual ranting and move straight to the slap in the face, but his appearance stopped her on the steps. He was wearing a suit. Crisp, tailored. It made him look taller. He looked incredible.

‘Like it?’ he asked her. ‘Do I look the part?’

She found her anger again.

‘The part, Saul? What part is that? Kevin’s?’

She threw the cards at him. He didn’t dodge them. He smiled broadly.

‘You stupid little shit!’ she barked at him. ‘Steal what he has? Is that the best you can manage?’

Saul just smiled on. Marian suddenly hadn't the energy to press on; disarmed by this smug disregard it all seemed to drain from her. She retreated to her usual weary assault.

‘You could have all he has and more, you know? You could do so much more than he ever could.’

‘I agree.’ Saul replied, evenly. ‘And I promise you, even if he still had any use for the money I took from him, Kevin could never have done what I’ve done down here. What I've done for you.’

‘For me? Wha-’

And then all the sense went out of the world.

The air around Marian became sticky shimmered, and then things began to appear. Just melted into view from the half-light, as if they'd been crowded all about her all along and she'd somehow failed to notice them. Or feel them, as she felt them now, fuzzy with heat and static charge. Things.

Resolving out of thin air to either side of her were – what? – robots? They were metallic figures, man-shaped bodies with steel masks for faces, what else could she call them? Four of them flanked her, two left and two right. A fifth was appearing on the ceiling above her head, a metal arm reaching down, one finger extended to touch her neck. Her reflex was to fall back, to cry out, to flail at it. But her reflexes didn’t kick in. She stared at the thing, quite suddenly and painfully catatonic.

‘W–’ she half uttered. She couldn’t manage any more.

‘W–What?’ stuttered Saul, finishing her utterance for her.

‘What is it? It’s a robot, mother, obviously. An automaton, a mechanical man.’

Saul stepped closer, lifting a foot to rest on the bottom step of the stairs. He crouched to look up at her from beneath her chin, as if he were still a small child.

‘I couldn't make a man of myself, but I did make a man. Eh? Heh! A veritable Frankenstein's monster, right out of a story. Right out of a comic book, I should say.’ He turned away again and back into the middle of the cellar room. ‘It's the monster that's applying that uncomfortable current you’re feeling through the fingertip on your neck, which is what has you paralysed. You'll have been wondering. And it's increasing the strength, up and up until you finally suffocate, you fucking–’

He stopped. Looked at his shoes and then up at her again. He beckoned at her to speak as he sucked at his own pursed lips. The energy flowing through her shook Marian like a rag doll as the muscles all went taut, but even if she’d had the freedom to move independently she’d have shook anyway. Tears came as she strained her lips to wail.

‘W–! w–’ was all that came, again.

‘Why?’ he continued, her least utterance giving him his own voice back. ‘I'm succeeding, mother. Succeeding beyond your wildest nightmares. Making a life for myself. I'm making lots of lives, mechanically speaking, if you'll pardon the pun. But then I'll probably be taking lives, so I'm just addressing the balance ahead of schedule.’

One of the things beside her took the jacket from her frozen grip and passed it to its creator.

‘Yeah, I couldn’t be Kevin, mother. I couldn’t be the hero. And that really only left one other avenue open to me. But I have learned from him. Indeed, his reasoned, ordered and pragmatic mind has greatly informed their thinking.’ He gestured at the things. ‘There’s a little bit of him in all of them.’

He held up a finger and thumb, about an inch apart.

‘A cube about that big, in fact.’

He dropped his hand, and the overstretched smile.

‘I’m going to make the mark you hammered into me for so long it’s like a bow in my back. I’m going to make as many other people as I can bend in exactly the same way. I’m going to be the villain, mother. And this is my origin story. So – stand very still. Show the artist your best side.’

Marian’s eyes rolled back in her head as the current alternately froze and burned within her. She couldn’t die like this. She focussed on the current, tried to feel its pulse, to move with it. To speak –

‘W–wait–’ she gasped.

Saul’s brow furrowed. He nodded at the thing hanging over the stair and Marian’s muscles began to tear with the redoubled force of paralysing fire.

‘Can’t wait, mother’ he told her. ‘Story has to start.’

But she was already feeling her way into the pulse again, surrendering to it and finding it willing to work with her.

‘Wait–’ she cried, gagging on the word, but louder this time.

‘Die! Die now!’ Saul roared at her.

The other things moved in to hold her, their hands cradling her in a parody of comfort.

Marian’s body ran with fire, and her connection to the pain flared and was consumed in a moment.

Body must be gone, she reasoned numbly, imagining her nerves turning to flame and smoke.

Alright then, she told the fire. Burn me up.

But she stayed awake, was left staring at Saul as he was forced back by the blaze of white fire that surrounded her. She couldn’t bear the sight of him, so she concentrated again to quicken the fire. She surrendered to the pulse, the rush of it; let it into her mind. She perceived the shape and shift of it, and relaxed what was left of her so as to accommodate it fully.

Finally, she was every bit lightning.

But–

‘–wait.’

Lightning had a tongue and Marian spoke.

‘Wait –’ Marian spoke to the thing hanging above her, spoke lightning to it, and it answered with explosion and the snapping of wire and metal.

‘Wait...Wait-WaitWait!’

The creatures buckled and flew from around her, burning and sparking. Then frozen, inert.

Motionless, picture book evils. Saul, too, stood motionless, back to the cellar wall.

She sagged, but didn’t fall – the lightning in her muscles had them enervated and animated again. She looked at her son and opened her mouth to speak. Saul covered his face in panic, turned into the wall and, howling once, rolled down its surface and onto his front on the floor. He made no further sound and he didn’t look up.

Marian held her sharp tongue. She turned to make her way gingerly up the wooden steps and out of the cellar. She opened the door to the corridor above and stopped. If he had moved from the floor she hadn’t heard him, but then the electric roar in her ears was deafening. Still, she wasn’t afraid of turning her back on him now. And she told him so.

‘Wait,’ she said, ‘‘til your father gets home.’

Her diary

2009-06-25T20:09:00.005+01:00

I found her diary on the tube, heading home from Victoria.

She’d left it on a seat, open at the first of the only two pages she’d not ripped out. I say ‘she.’ Could be ‘he.’ No, I’m sure she’s a she, the handwriting is a she. It’s the kind of thing only a girl would set up. It is a set up, a total set up. It’s really pretentious of her, actually. Still, I really think I’m going to call her.

She’s scrubbed, scribbled out her name on the inside cover but left her mobile number intact. She’s done a proper job of it; I’ve been teasing out the deepest impressions with a coarse grain eraser and I reckon it’s Marian, maybe Marianne even, but it could be anything, really. Still, it’d be worth the risk to ask for Marian when I call, on the thinking that right or wrong she knows she’s got me fascinated enough to try and find out her name. And it gives me something else to talk about instead of what she wrote.

Or does that come off as too cautious? That I needed more security before I called, that I wasn’t captivated enough by what she wrote to make the call on that alone? Why did her name matter? God! Stop analysing – she hates that. I cannot start dribbling on like some pop-psychology nerd with a childhood trauma and a star sign.

Practice run. Okay – Hello, can I speak...no.

Is this Marian? Yeah, better –

Hello, is this – Crap!

Hello? Hi. Say hi.

Hi, is this…no. No!

Hi, I found your diary on the tube. You’d left your number inside. I think you meant it as an invitation and I’d like to accept. Which, I think you’ll agree, is not just a slimy line but a creepy one too. Aaagghh!

Speak like a normal person, damn you! Like an interesting, interested person. Speak like a lonely person.

She wrote,

“I think I’ll stop being lonely today. I don’t think I’ll be alone tomorrow if I stop being lonely today. If I stop thinking alone all the thoughts that other people split between them. If I put down this book, this handbook to being alone, I can leave loneliness on the train, circling the underground forever. And go meet someone instead. Give him my number, maybe.”

Isn’t that sexy? And bullshit, I mean…it’s such bullshit. It’s even cringe-worthy if you think about it-

But that’s what we do, isn’t it – she and I? We think things out of all their worth and possibility. We think them to their conclusions, think them to death and discard them before we’ve even met.

I want to call her and tell her how I totally understand her.

Only she doesn’t want someone who understands her. She doesn’t want to meet someone who has the same thoughts as her. She wants someone different, mysterious. Who isn’t tired. Who isn’t terrified.

She doesn’t want to meet another lonely person.

Hi. Or hello. No, hi.

Hi, I found your diary on the tube today and your number was inside.

…

No, I didn’t read it.

Personal injury

2009-06-25T20:00:00.003+01:00

She recognised herself in him; he’d been hurt before, as she had. In all the same ways and in all the same places. Watching him leave court she’d discovered they even used the same personal injury firm. They'd shared a brief.

She’d noticed him first. His spectacular electrocution at B&Q had inspired her to have a very similar accident in Dixon’s not six months later. Their eyes actually met for the first time beneath some poorly stabilised scaffolding overhanging a bus shelter on High Street. One of her spotters had phoned her before they’d even finished erecting it. She’d raced down on her bike. He was already there. Accidents of fate.

It took the fire brigade almost an hour to dig them out. He never spoke, just wheezed and blew blood-slick spit bubbles. But he’d smiled encouragingly and she’d never known a friendlier face. Weather-warmed and scar free; obviously he was lucky. She believed in luck. In fate. They’d shared a brief and got fifteen grand apiece.

They didn’t meet again until Christmas. A nightclub had opened in the precinct near the university. With festive goodwill it could be relied upon to be dangerously overcrowded by midnight on Saturday night. There’d already been eight successful claims against the owners, who’d become fairly comfortable with settling.

He was lounging against the bar that first night. On the job, sticking to his lemonade, surveying the crowd for likely lads. He’d spotted her early on and smiled, but when his gaze moved on she was crestfallen. She couldn’t concentrate on work as a result. He’d had no luck either, as it went, which should have somewhat compensated her injured pride. But it didn’t.

She’d noticed the reflective nylon jacket as he left. A little research revealed that he was working construction on the precinct itself, next to the nightclub. Attacked in his local; what loving attention to detail. She loved him. She got a job that afternoon answering the phones in the port-a-cabin that served as a site office.

He took his lunch from a box on one of the benches surrounding the island of grass in the main square. She took to doing the same on a bench that backed up to his and they ate together that way every day, still without speaking, each listening to the other working the newly laid terracotta paving stones loose with steel-capped boot and stiletto heel. Saturday nights they always went back to the nightclub, sometimes sharing silent signals if they spotted someone who might spell trouble for the other.

But he never crossed the floor. A floor perpetually slick with beer that he could have easily broken his neck on.

He obviously wasn’t interested.

Then it happened. She’d been spilling drinks all night and money was running short when the champagne appeared, ice bucket and everything. He’d sent it over. She held his gaze as the bubbles fizzed down the cleavage of the girl beside her. He stared back, clearly deliberating; chewing his lip and his opening lines. Finally, decisively, he downed a double Dutch courage and made to come over. But didn’t. Halted instead and then left. Head turned down but unruly eyes lingering, he snatched up his coat and he left.

Afraid? He's never afraid, is he?

She’d never considered that he could even be afraid. Their kind never were. Of what? That she might hurt him?

She ran outside, but he was already in the car. She stepped up to the kerb, shook her hair out and waited. When he turned that corner he’d see her waiting and realise there’d been no need for that double after all.

The double.

What hateful fate. He was right, after all; she would hurt him.

She stepped off the kerb without looking.

Balloon

2009-06-25T19:58:00.002+01:00

one, two, three, four, five…

I got the best balloon, the best the man had. Princess Fiona, from Shrek 2. Daddy took me to see it today at the cinema across from Toys ‘R Us.

…six, seven, eight…

Everybody on the street looked at me and smiled huge smiles. A black taxi man stuck his thumb up at me.

“Well done, darlin’.”

I got the best balloon in the whole bunch.

…nine, ten…

Daddy takes me out every Saturday because he left us. But he didn’t leave me. He said he had to leave Mummy because they weren’t friends anymore, but he didn’t leave me because I’m too special.

…eleven…

The people in their cars slowed them down right in front of us and rolled down their windows and looked up at my balloon. And they all looked at me. Everybody grinned huge grins and one woman waved at me. I waved back and she laughed. I felt really special, just like Daddy said.

…twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…

Daddy promised me in the cinema that even though he has to go away, he’ll still be my Daddy. And he bought me nachos even though I had my church dress on.

…sixteen, seventeen…

I could see the shop people in Toys ‘R Us all standing at the window and looking up the street at me. We were meant to go there after the cinema, but we couldn’t. Daddy buys me everything on Saturdays. I love Saturdays.

…eighteen, nineteen…

Then a man on a bike nearly ran into the door of a car when another man opened it, because the man on the bike wasn’t looking where he was going. He was looking at me. When he looked back he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Bastard!”

I put my arm around Daddy’s leg but he didn’t ask me what the matter was. He was too busy counting.

…twenty…

I counted too and I didn’t look at the man with the bike.

…twenty one, twenty two…

Daddy said he can’t come and see me next Saturday because Auntie Jean’s got a conference and he’s got to go too –

“But it’s only for one Saturday.”

– and she’s still not as special as me, anyway. He told me our special secret – that he loves me more than Auntie Jean. I felt really special then. Then I saw the balloon man outside the cinema and Daddy said I could have a big one to last for two Saturdays. I got to reach in and pick it out myself.

…twenty three, twenty four, twenty five…

I picked out the biggest one. Princess Fiona. For two Saturdays, while Daddy’s away with Auntie Jean. Because even when he goes away he’s still my Daddy.

…twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine,

“Thirty quid. And I hope it chokes you, mate.”

For thirty balloons.

And then they were all mine. My balloons.

And nearly everybody on the street today stopped and smiled at me and watched them fly away.

A Fable

2009-06-25T17:17:00.001+01:00

The Gilded Cup: A Cautionary Fable on the Dangers of Compacts with the Devil

An ugly man, and portly, lived in the mountains who had never known a wife. And this concerned him greatly. Having not the mien to rectify the problem, he decided he should tackle his woes by other means, and so he sold his father's farm and all his livestock for all the ready cash his neighbours would offer, and for a short while became a man of ample means.

He immediately sought out a good deal on some fine clothes, got himself a free ride as far south as he dared without blowing the scheme before it had a chance to play out and then hired a carriage to take him, in the assumed guise of a wealthy northern estate holder, about the towns of the lowlands. There he found women aplenty; compassionate souls willing, despite his hideousness, to let the mountain man spend himself with them, in his feather beds of silken throws, all broidered and tasselled with gold. And of course they loved him. But in short order the man was best beguiled with one particular creature, fresh and lusty, whom he married in a rush.

But not long after rushing her again on their wedding night, he was forced to tell his new bride that he was not, in fact, a wealthy landowner. That, indeed, his wealth was very much a finite affair and that soon, as it happened, they would be destitute, with nothing between them but their love for one another. The bride was heart scalded by her husband's duplicity in the manner of dethroning her maidenhood, and told him to go fuck himself. But the marriage vows are sacred and she was forced to stick with the cretin until - she hoped - the effort of transporting his fat arse would make his heart explode, whereupon she might look about again. She decided that it would be necessary to keep the bastard well fed, therefore, and returned pragmatically to whoring around the inns and pleasure houses of the surrounding countryside. Her husband, without the means to return to the mountains and with nothing to return to anyway should he somehow make the journey, was forced to take on the role of a sullen drunk; first squandering the rest of his meagre fortune, then drinking what cut of his wife's coin he could wrangle by making a pathetic nuisance of himself at the tables she was dancing on. He was laid very low of spirit, lamenting his misfortune so utterly he had not even the wherewithal to recognise his own culpability in the whole affair.

Presently the devil came to him to offer the usual necessities to be free of his temporal woes, coupled with the usual spiritual caveats about eternity – though these came as no surprise to our portly hero and were, as is usual in these stories, ignored. Soul proffered and accepted, Ol' Nick asked the chap what he sought in return. In a very singular moment, wherein he forsook a lifetime of cupidity, the Northman replied that all he wanted was his wife to himself; alone, forever. Ol' Nick, more acquainted to the highest forms of greed in such situations, was rather taken aback by the simplicity of this request and pressed the man to consider his offer more deeply.

‘Don't you want anything else?’ he asked.

‘Not as I can think of,’ answered the mountain man. ‘I just want to have my wife at home and for us to be together again, forever. I love her you see. Every cheap and tawdry bit of her. She's my shining buttercup, my whiskers on kittens, my stew and dumplings. I could eat her all up and then eat her all up again.’

‘I see,’ said Satan. ‘How very sweet. Your simple honesty is to be commended. But might I also commend it to you that you are an ugly fat porker whose wife actually hates him, despite his obvious devotion to her, and you'd be a moron, on top of all your other inherent disadvantages, to miss out on this golden opportunity to do something about that. If you like, for example, I could throw in a slimmer body, the means to immortality - always a popular feature - and the sympathetic attendance of your wife every day 'til the day you die, which, since you would very soon be immortal, would call for the dawning of a very rare morning indeed by my measurements. Anyway, think about it for a minute why don't you?’

The mountain man gave this some careful thought, bargains with the Prince of Lies being notoriously trap laden by all accounts, but in the end could see no downside to this arrangement and signed up for the deluxe package.

‘Excellent choice,’ crowed the Prince of This World and explained how the man might affect his change of fortune. He gave him a gilded cup, which he instructed the man to half fill it with his own blood each morning before dawn, then half fill again with beer, and give it to his wife for her breakfast before she went for her morning tumble. The mountain man took the cup, bid the devil farewell and made for his humble apartments to look him out a good sharp knife.

His wife eventually returned well into the dark between days and after teetering over to the cot where her husband lay to spit on him, she retired alone, hiccupping, to her boudoir. Upon hearing her snores growling through the thin walls, her husband slipped into the kitchen with his gilded cup and the sharpest knife he could find and, finding a smidgeon of hereto unforeseen courage, opened a small wound in his upper thigh by his own hand; needing a spot on his body where his wife would never knowingly look for evidence of his truck with the dark forces, the mountain man figured that anywhere near his groin to be a very safe bet in this regard. This was a painful affair and, unfortunately, somewhat protracted – the mountain man’s cut and courage both being altogether less than sufficient to the job. In the end, with dawn fast approaching, our rotund would-be magus grew desperate and in a moment of panic plunged the knife blade whole into his fleshy limb. This brought forth a baleful cry from the self-mutilating mountain man, but also served to bring forth a more than adequate flow of blood, more than enough to finally half fill the gilded cup. Still squealing like a stuck pig, and looking much the same, he stumbled to the larder where he had earlier secreted a bottle of beer and where, shaking enough as he was to spill more than a fair measure of the booze, the man from the mountain still managed to fill the goblet to the brim.

There promptly came a second bellow in reply to his, no less of pain but addressed more in anger, as the rudely awakened wife barged into the little kitchen, swearing like the sailor under whose tutelage she had undoubtedly spent the previous evening and ready to strangle our already bedevilled protagonist.

‘Kill…you…useless…fat…’she told him plainly, before adding that ‘Ugh! Pain! Cut it offo’ya! Bastard!’ should he disturb her slumber again.

Dizzy with pain and the loss of a great deal of blood, her husband could only sway, mumbling and sobbing, waving the gilded goblet under the nose of his distressed shining buttercup. His wife was eventually distracted, as the fumes of the strangely congealing alcohol reached her bleary head and – being but a delicate female, near o’erwhelmed by the vapours and in dire need of fortifying her shattered nerves – she snatched the liquor from him and promptly pinned it. His task completed as the devil had set it, the husband could only roll back his eyes and submit to the whims of oblivion.

Later that evening, the husband awoke drained and wan, but comfortable in his wife’s bed. Casting about him he discovered his love by his bedside, a look of tearful concern on her flushed face and a cool towel in her hand, dripping into a basin in her lap.

‘Oh husband,’ she cooed, ‘how fine it is to see you wake, for I did so terribly fear that you were lost to me and I should be heart cracked and driven to throw myself from the chapel in despair.’

‘Pardon?’ croaked her husband.

‘Oh husband, how fine it is to see you wake, for I did -’

‘Yes, yes I got that,’ interrupted her husband. ‘I just though maybe I’d dreamt it.’

‘Oh no, my love,’ she mewed, ‘though ‘tis true you have been so plagued by nightmares since you did swoon in the kitchen this morning, I had feared you possessed and suffering at the hands of the devil himself.’

‘Has someone been talking to you about –’ began the husband, but his dumpling was on a roll and not to be interrupted again.

‘Such a fit of thrashing shakes has wracked your poor frail form all day,’ she continued, ‘that look – you are half wasted away!’

And it was true. The mountain man’s body was but the half of what it had previously been in bulk; his gut - the only remaining part of him previously capable of standing proud - full sunken into his body again, leaving but a honey pot paunch where once a mead barrel had hung. This must be devil’s doing, mused the man to himself, and he smiled, but his wife was none so pleased.

‘It is plain to me,’ she said gravely, ‘that you are sick. Very probably with shame at the wicked ways of your wanton wife and worry for my sinful soul. I am sorry, my darling - I have been a bitch. But I swear I shall make it up to you and I shall begin by devoting my every waking moment to making you well again.’

And so she did. She quit her whoring the very next day in favour of sewing lingerie, which she could do at home, and spent the day beside her sickly spouse, tending to his every need, bringing him his meals and his piss pot. But by the evening his condition was no better; indeed it was worse. He had lost even more weight; the last of his belly had melted and his ribs were beginning to show. He had eaten a horse’s measure and yet still looked like he’d never eaten a horse in his life. A doctor was called for, who poked and picked and told the wife to ‘feed the poor bastard, he’s starving.’ But the larder was empty and the wife at a loss as she turned to her husband as night drew near to morning.

‘How did you get so fat to begin with, my beloved?’ she asked bewildered.

‘Beer,’ said her husband, flatly, in more ways than one.

‘Right,’ said the wife, ‘then we shall have to see that you get all the beer you can drink from now on in,’ and she went directly to the inn to wake the innkeeper.

The husband, wide eyed at this unexpected bonus to the devil’s services, took the opportunity to crawl from his bed and get the goblet and knife from the kitchen, where they had lain forgotten, and scuttle back to bed. There he took to his leg again; unbinding the dressings his wife had put on it from his previous endeavour with the kitchen knife and prizing open the wound once more to milk himself for another half measure of blood. He was woozy and weak by the time his wife had returned, but he still had the sense to hide the goblet beneath the bed. Seeing him sunken further into illness, his body even thinner than it was before she left, the wife almost dropped the bottles of beer she had in her arms, but managed to lay them intact by the bed while she wept into her husband’s bony chest.

‘There there,’ he chided softly. ‘Be not without hope. Let us have a beer together and see if that doesn’t perk me up a bit. Here, let me pour for us and we shall have a toast to my good health.’

Reaching down he fished out the goblet of blood and, shuddering, topped it up with beer and handed it to his wife, bringing the bottle itself to his own lips.

‘To my good health,’ he toasted. And so they drank.

Thus began the routine of their days; she ever-present and attentive to his every caprice, except when she had to nip out for more beer, while he got weaker and thinner day by day from filling her drink with his blood. But, though all but drained of life, the man from the mountain was deliriously happy; his dumpling was his constant, faithful companion now and would be forever, since the devil had promised her attendance ‘til the day he died, but had also promised to make him immortal as well. And besides all that he had an ass so skinny he had to blow a raspberry when he farted for want of some butt cheeks to flap. Everything was as Ol’ Nick had promised and the man from the mountain was finally content.

A week after first filling the golden goblet, the man from the mountain was so happy with his lot in life that he had sent his wife out early to get the beers in and they had been drinking for many hours by the time it came to fill it again. The wife was very merry by this time and the man felt it safe enough to bring out the goblet in front of her without her having the sober sense to suspect his actions of any malignancy. He kept her laughing and distracted with jokes and mimicry as he unbound the wound and set the goblet lip beneath it to catch the spill of blood. But no blood came. He worried at the now quite dead skin around the gash, to get the flow restarted, but to no avail. He slid the knife all the way in again, even jiggled it about a bit, but the leg it seemed was dry. So he stabbed the other. Also dry. He stabbed his chest, his arms, even his skinny ass; from nowhere could he coax even one drop of blood. His alarm quickly spread to his drunkard wife who, booze confused as to what was happening, asked that he explain his strange behaviour.

‘I need blood for my cup,’ he told her frankly, not thinking her sensible enough to remember the comment later.

‘Oh, my sweet,’ she said smiling, ‘take mine. I would give it you gladly if it made you happy and well.’

He was about to agitatedly tell her that it had to be his blood, when he was suddenly struck by a thought. To make him well, she had said. Indeed, there was the answer. He could take some of her blood for himself, to refill his spent stock, and then bleed it out again as his own blood for the sake of the spell. Excellent.

And so, smiling, he took his wife’s arm and made a healthy incision, which she being so sodden felt not at all, and fastening his lips there, began to suck out her blood. He had told the devil he could eat her and eat her again and she was as sweet as nectar. Really, really, very sweet. Quite delicious, in fact. Very, very bloody good.

The husband was intoxicated, so overwhelmingly good was the taste of his wife’s blood. He drank and drank, feeling his skeletal form growing strong from the life that flowed into it, his slack muscles becoming swollen again, his skin flushing with health and his eyes regaining their shine with a primal urgency. With a roar he freed himself from the powerful draw of the draught and leapt from his sickbed with a vigour he had never known before. He caught sight of himself, naked, in the mirror and marvelled at the sculpted form that it displayed; Adonis-like in its splendour. Then he gasped to see the wounds on his body, where his impotent stabbing had failed to yield blood, seal themselves like flower buds closing with the passing of the day, leaving his youthful skin smooth and incorrupt. He felt the surge of immortality rise within him and he spun to share of his joy with his darling wife.

She lay, a crumpled husk, upon the bed; dead eyes rolled back in her head, drained lips but a pair of thin wrinkles in the parchment of her face. The man from the mountain cried out in horror and despair. How could this be? She was to be with him forever, unless there should dawn that rare day that would bring him the release of death. This had been the devil’s promise, now belied. Unless…

Unless this was such…but surely not. Not at the very moment he’d…

And then there dawned a rare morning, whereupon the vampire was consumed entirely in flames from the sunlight that poured through his bedroom window. The fire spread and razed the whole building to the ground, reducing everything within to ash.

Everything, that is, but a gilded cup, its inside stained with beer and blood.

In memory

2009-06-25T17:11:00.004+01:00

Jack raised his head and arched his back and let sunlight fall directly onto his damp chest. The cuts weren't deep, but they were long and brimming over. There was going to be a lot of blood to dry. Still…

‘I should have cut deeper. What if it won't scar?’

‘It will,’ said the young man sitting on the ground behind him. ‘If you don't put pressure on it, dry blood will keep the skin apart. Does it hurt?’

‘Not at all,’ said Jack, turning to squint at his companion, ‘but I'm excited. Adrenaline stops you feeling pain, doesn't it?’

‘It's not like that anymore, Jack,’ the other replied.

Jack stared into the sun, not bothering to shield his watery eyes from the white glare.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he continued, ‘but if there’s a chance I might remember pain, I might just as easily remember the rush of adrenaline.’

He grinned at the young man, wrinkling the sheets of dust on his cheeks, channelling tears aside.

‘“It’s all memory” you said. Well, God knows I want to remember everything. Especially things like adrenaline.’

Jack turned back to the sun. His companion got to his feet, dusted off the seat of his jeans and made his way to the edge of the highway where Jack was stood, as if waiting for a gap in traffic. Nothing, as far as the young man knew, lived anywhere in the infinite nearby. Even so, he tucked both hands into his back pockets and duly surveyed the empty stretch of road in both directions. Then he let his eyes sweep empty skies. The naked light was blinding. For maybe the thousandth time he reminded himself about suggesting some birds. It seemed wrong that this sky, of all skies, should bear no winged thing. He mustn’t forget.

The silence was punctuated by a creak of the mammoth pair of gates that faced them across the blistering asphalt.

The young man wondered why they did that, there being no breeze to move them, no air at all in fact. He presumed it was for effect. Or to mark the passage of time. The gate creaked again: a short sharp scraping note. The sun seemed to jerk an inch across the sky. Time was passing. The young man noted the sun’s position and waited until he heard the gate creak again. Another inch. Content that the universe was in check, he returned his attention to Jack.

Jack's chest was stained a dark mahogany from the drying blood; the waistband of his trousers was soaked and lower down fat drops blossomed on his thighs and knees. He was picking idly at the wet scabs with the point of his knife, encouraging the slits to open further and bleed more, for wider scars.

‘You might be forgetting the pain,’ the young man ventured, pulling red hair from his eyes and following Jack's gaze up into the blazing light. ‘Forgetting, rather than remembering.’

‘No.’ Jack was emphatic. ‘I'm here to remember.’

He looked sideways, brow crinkled.

‘Aren't you supposed to know that? You're my angel. Isn’t that why you're here?’

‘I'm just being where He asked me to be.’

Jack smiled at his angel, patted him on the shoulder and sat down next to his discarded shirt. Picking it up, he wondered for a moment at a host of previously unnoticed little rips at the shoulders, before using it to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He continued to observe the tops of the gates of Heaven, glinting in the light.

‘I have to tell you Jack,’ said the angel, ‘I don’t think carving a cross on your chest will make your turn come any faster. That said, you’re the first to try it, so I could be wrong.’

Jack dabbed his wounds with his shirt, watching what he felt was hard evidence of a heartbeat in the liquor blobbing steadily through the crusts on his breast.

‘Just felt like the right thing to do at the time,’ he said. ‘My mother would never let me have a tattoo and I always wanted one. And when I go through those gates I get the body incorruptible, so what other chance will I get?’

He looked down again at the cruciform wound, slick with congealing blood, marking where the angel said his heart used to beat. A thought struck him.

‘Do you think if I wanted I could make it heal faster? Given that I’m only remembering how long it would take to leave a scar?’

‘I could help you if you want.’

‘I'd like that,’ said Jack.

The angel stepped back from the edge of the road and came to kneel in front of Jack, head half-bowed. His bronze face was mostly hidden beneath autumn gold hair, but Jack could see he was smiling as he pressed his soft hand to Jack's chest. A cold glow bloomed. It swam the length and breadth of his torso before fading, leaving him clean of the muck of his own body fluids and with a neat, smooth scar in the shape of the cross on his left breast. He smiled broadly at the angel, and took the retreating hand in his own as it lifted from his skin.

‘Tell me –’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

He let go, lay back on the sand and closed his eyes. By now he was getting used to the heat, was letting it sink into his remembered bones and muscles, easing his remembered aches and strains. When he'd first arrived here with the angel, the young man had explained to him that his body was no longer real; that it wasn't really feeling anything and that he shouldn’t be afraid if it seemed to change or lose its shape while they waited: this was part of the natural process of forgetting his mortal life. But Jack had worked hard to keep his image of himself clear and faithful to his final days. He wasn't like the other souls who came to heaven's gates; he wasn't here to forget the life before, he was here to remember it. To regain the years his misery had cost him, to reclaim the memories of joy he had lost as he'd grown older.

He thumbed the scar. It hurt. Scar. Tattoo. His –

‘I remember my mother.’

‘Oh? What do you remember?’

‘An angel,’ he said. ‘I remember an angel, warm and homely. She had auburn hair. A long plait. No. Maybe a bun – it doesn’t matter. We lived alone. She worried about me, scolded me all the time. But she loved me. I can almost hear her telling me so.’

Jack looked up at the angel, now seated beside him. ‘You remind me of her.’

‘That, or you’re using me to imagine her. You don’t really remember her.’

Jack sat up. He examined the angel's profile, unmoving and unchanging, while his own jaw worked silently for the right response.

‘Of course it's her,’ he grumbled at length, pulling his tattered shirt back on and buttoning it.

The angel made no response. Time passed. The sun shifted an inch.

‘Remember anything else?’ the angel asked.

‘A little of the street outside the house,’ Jack replied, his gaze following the line of the highway stretching westward into the distance. ‘Children's faces, trying to see in through dirty windows. And a park beyond that, I think. I couldn’t go into it, I seem to recall. I don't remember what my problem with it was. But I was depressed then, and bound to be confused.’

The gates creaked again, chiming the eternal hour. The note it scratched held for longer than before. The angel leaned forward.

‘I think the gate's open,’ he said at length.

Jack continued to face west.

‘Jack?’ The angel pressed the point. ‘The gate.’

‘Shush!’ hissed Jack. ‘I'm trying to remember.’

‘I see.’

The angel reached up and ran his hand through Jack's thinning hair.

‘How long has it been open, Jack?’ he asked.

Jack turned, his face flushed, the sun-drowned eyes streaming.

‘Since we arrived. But it’s your own hard luck that you didn’t think to check,’ he said. ‘You’re the local. Not that it matters, anyway. I can't go in. I have to remember first.’

‘I told you, Jack,’ said the angel, softly, ‘what you need to do is forget.’

‘No!’ Jacked roared back, slapping away the hand and clambering to his feet. He dithered for a second, and then stumbled into a lolloping gait down the left hand side of the road on legs that didn’t remember being very fit. By the time he had steadied his progress and lifted his head to check his path, the angel was ahead of him and the gates, which were gaping noticeably now, loomed exactly where they'd previously been. Jack stopped. He sank to his knees with suddenly remembered fatigue.

‘I have to have my memories, angel’ he moaned. ‘I have to have some joy to bring in there with me.’

By the last he was weeping and the angel slid towards him, discarding any pretence of human locomotion to be able to hold his charge and comfort him. He cried for a long time, until the final heavy sob fell from him, a moan that became –

‘Karen.’

‘Who?’

Jack's sobbing became breathier in the angel's lap, his tears and spit seeping through the denim of the imaginary jeans, turning the dust caked on them a rusty brown. An autumn brown. He had a vision of oak leaves dried a burnt orange, and saw them turn green in his head.

Who?

‘Who, what?’ he replied, drawn out of his mewling daze by the unexpected question.

‘You said a name,’ said the angel. ‘Karen.’

Jack hunted his tattered scraps of memory. Karen wasn't his mother's name. He couldn't remember what it was but it definitely wasn't Karen. But the name did make him think of his mother all the same.

Could she be someone waiting for him inside the gates?

‘The gates are opening wider, Jack, this could be your chance.’

‘No,’ Jack said for the third time, firmly. ‘I have a name, I'm getting close. I can feel it coming back. We'll wait a few more minutes.’

He disentangled himself from lying curled up over the angel's thighs and steadied himself to sit upright. The flat expanse of desert that fell away in all directions from the thin black highway had lost some of its reflected glare; it seemed at last that the sun was losing its grip on the day. The angel didn't move from his hunkered position, regarding Jack silently as he scoured the remains of his memory for someone named Karen. At length he began to speak to the angel again, though his eyes continued to flick through faces and places visible only to him, running like degraded home movie reels in his head.

‘I can't remember ever being happy. But I must have been. I couldn't have been as sad as I was if I hadn’t known what it meant to be happy.’

His eyes focussed on the angel for a second –

‘Stands to reason.’

– then swam away again.

‘I must have had people who loved me and times where I loved them back. But I forgot them. Somehow, something made me so miserable that my memories were taken away from me. And all I could do was sit there, in that filthy house. Children took dares to look through slimy windows at me, dying at my kitchen table. The trees from the park casting their terrifying shadows into my room. More and more shadow, the room always seeming to get that bit darker, just when I thought it was as black as it could be. This name is going to bring the light back into that room.’

Back came Jack from his faraway stare. He took his angel’s hand.

‘I want to remember my mother telling me she loved me, to remember her actually saying the words. Because I can’t remember anyone saying it. If I’m to know that the love in there’ – he gestured to the gates – ‘is the real thing and not some silver lining, some degrading compensation, then I have to remember Karen telling me she loved me.’

‘Karen?’

‘What?’

The angel’s quiet voice was stark, coming hard on the back of the passion in Jack’s.

‘You said Karen again. You said Karen had to tell you she loved you. Was Karen your mother?’

Jack shook his head; it felt fuzzy. The dying light and waning heat made the landscape oppressive, less infinite and all too quickly chill. It was distracting and disconcerting.

‘No,’ he managed. ‘She just reminds me of my mother, because I loved them both so much.’

Where had that come from? He’d loved Karen?

His heart leapt with the revelation, so hard his scar stung and his hand, knife in fist, rose involuntarily to massage it. He reached again for the memory of her face and this time she came; small, slim, auburn hair. In a plait.

There: the confusion was easily resolved. His mother’s hair in a bun and Karen’s in a plait. His heart was racing with his love for this woman remembered, so strong, so sure. Jack was dimly aware that the last of the sunlight in this limbo place was fading but in his head a different sun; an evening sun, ruddy and yellow instead of white. In the park. It played about her auburn hair and filled the leaves of the oak trees behind her with a glow that made him think of paper lanterns and all things exotic. He could see reds and greens billowing and mixing as he pulled the plait loose and she leaned back against the aged bark, and the colours were beautiful together.

Together. Him and Karen. How could he have forgotten this? The feeling of running his hands through that soft shimmering hair.

‘The gate is completely open, Jack.’

He ignored the angel’s intrusion. He was so close. Tell me you love me, he urged the vision, and he felt his body press against hers, his left hand on the scarred skin of the tree, steadying himself, his right playing about the buttons of her blouse.

Tell me you love me, please. Tell me what she never would.

His right hand in his coat, searching.

Tell me you love me the way I love you.

Tell me you love me. Tell me.

Tell me before I cut your filthy heart out.

…

Jack’s heart forgot to keep beating. It was too distracted by the knife wedged in it. He sensed the angel’s approach, felt him settle down beside him.

He didn't turn, his gaze fixed on the dark gates. Park gates. Children's faces between the bars, indistinct in the shadows of the oak trees. Witnesses.

‘I remember,’ he said.

‘I know.’ The devil sighed, one hand in Jack's hair, the other mechanically unbuttoning Jack’s shirt.

‘But you’ll forget.’

Memoriam

2009-06-25T16:40:00.003+01:00

The challenge was 100 words, with no word to be used more than once therein.

Memoriam
By Damien Kelly

Sitting by the weather-worn, ivy-draped headstone of a grave I like to visit
is your flower, flushed with dew and white as new fallen snow.
Moonlit. Vibrant. Still alive.
Some gilded marble cherub, his gold paint flaking away
– alas poor desiccating beauty, only skin deep –
silently threatens he'll tread on it.
Our bright wedding rings, wedged in tight beneath those chubby little toes,
assuring him perfect balance, say otherwise.
Placed here, just so, this blossom, these bands, will tell people
– dead ones mind, but hey, they were someone too –
that you, faithless madam,
can kiss my ass.
Goodbye.

Postcard I

2009-06-25T15:34:00.002+01:00