Fiction Friction
Tales From My Mind
(Published in Bare Bone 7)
Beneath You
There are cracks between the floorboards of the café, wide enough to lose a large coin down, sideways on. They are a constant wonder to me, and I always spend a few minutes each day, sipping hot sweet tea and mopping up egg yolk with a chunk of bread, watching the lights flash through the gaps...
...and hearing the screams of joy as the ghost trains rattle beneath.
Only if you get down on hands and knees will you catch a glimpse of a terrified face, a grasping hand. But that would be rude, to steal terror and enthrallment from someone else's ticket, so to speak. I was brought up to respect things like that, as no doubt you were. Another man's fear is his own business. If you are lucky, as my fellow café friends and I are, you may find a place such as this, where the floorboards don't meet or the walls are too thin.
Then, and only then, is it correct to share another person's yells of terror, as they plummet from some skeleton infested precipice, into God knows what kind of blackness.
Not that my envy is a dark one. They deserve their particular mode of transport, according to the sum of their worldly goods. I myself, as you know, am merely a retired librarian with a pittance of a pension to get by on. I can just about afford a meal at the cafe every day, and a few hours of TV before I go to bed. Nope, no subterranean ghost rides for me, I'm sorry to say. No dangling, heavy cobwebs, no coffins expelling their inhabitants. Oh well, eh?
At least I have my bus pass.
It's a fair old distance away is my home by the industrial lake. I used to walk it in half an hour, when I was a young man, free of school and my family. Savouring the empty stinking shells of houses and the dark trickling ditches breaking through scraggy gardens. Walking the streets gave you a taste for better things. I was aware even as a tiny child, wandering alone through litter clad alleyways and crossing rusting walkways that something bigger was going on, somewhere else. Unseen.
Aye, that was when I was young and fit. Can't expect to stay young and fit for ever, can you? And besides, the buses, although not in the same league as the ghost trains, do at least attempt to stir up a bit of fun for us. A sudden detour past the asylum on dark winter's nights. The occasional lump of rotting meat left inside a flat cap or stuck to a seat. One day the driver let on a gang of youths dressed as ghosts and they performed all manner of strange deeds under their sheets. It's not much, but it helps.
It's very much appreciated.
For some of us, though, it's just not enough. Not all the time. Some just can't take not knowing, you see? They have to know, even if it means breaking into the train tunnels and...well, the rest is hearsay. There's always someone with a story to tell. People cut down by the speeding trains, trains full of screaming faces. Others captured by the ones who run the trains...and provide the entertainment. All rumors, you have to understand. No real evidence.
Those that listen to rumor tend to fair better, and go to live in the old factories, swimming about in brown pools, running naked through dark corridors, in the hope that enthrallment shall fill their hearts and then they shall have their own eternal ghost train. I can see them during the day, dressed as God knows what, standing about waiting for night. And at night I can only hear them, their echoing screams as they search through darkness for something that will always elude them.
I know, because I've searched too.
Sometimes, when I'm at peace, sat in the café, mopping up egg yolk with a chunk of bread, I'm almost convinced that my search has come to an end.
And then the trains come rushing beneath.
(Published in Bare Bone 8. This one was spotted by the editor of THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR and was given a honourable mention in the back of one of their anthologies. My name appears a few lines down from the name of Clive Barker.)
Name This Film
I think it was a seventies film. English. I saw it when I was a kid, snuck down in the middle of the night. I was just shaking off a dose of the flu, or something. The doctor didn't know what I had. Just kept sticking her thermometer in me until I eventually passed out.
Anyway, I saw this weird film. Missed the beginning, so I don't know the name of it. Maybe you'll recognize it. First off, there's this mad guy in a rubber suit, like something off Sesame Street, except weirder. He was all yellow with this big round head. His face was just like a man's, but his eyes and his mouth were fused to the shiny rubber of his head. A great effect. Looked like he was really made out of rubber. They had stained his mouth blue, on the inside. Horrible he was, riding around in a little kid's car.
He seemed to be lost in an underground shopping centre, with endless grey corridors like a maze. He would drive around, quite fast, beeping his horn and stopping to look in the shop windows, which were full of odd stuff. Not like shop windows, more like mini theatres. I remember this one display was of a gigantic heart, bristling with thick black hairs like antennas. It filled most of this little room beyond the glass -beating, beating. He watched the heart for a while, this horrible look on his face, and these things began to appear behind the mass of the heart. I think they were little men, but all grey and featureless, covered in webs.
Another thing I recall is a window with this room painted entirely black. Walls, floor, table, chair, and a man who was sat in the chair. The rubber man watched for ages before the scene came to life, the seated figure's mouth gaping open, full of all these weird colours, glittery and alive like snakes or fingers, spilling out and waving about. How they did that effect I don't know. Maybe it wasn't made in the seventies, but just made to look like it was. There were all these other windows with dolls running around being chased by giant spiders and spooky cemeteries spinning around upside down. Weird shit.
Another thing was this weird house, nothing to do with the yellow guy. It was in the middle of a misty wasteland of pebbles. Pebbles as far as the eye could see. There were these strange women walking about in the mist, holding big bunches of flowers. The flower heads were like flames, fizzling and smoking. The women looked burnt. Burnt rags and mangled up skin. The camera got a good look of these burnt women and then flipped to the interior of the house. A horrible kitchen. There was another woman, not burnt, wearing this bizarre dress made from maps. She was sniffing something in the sink. The camera came close but turned away at the last second. The thing she was smelling must have been like a drug, because she came away looking really off her head, falling about the place and making a weird noise. A creaky wood noise. Only it wasn't her, it was this blue door, slowly opening inwards. This black thing, like a towel, came dangling down over the top of the door. It just hung there, jerking slightly. The woman watched it, fear in her eyes. Then she grabbed the door handle and slammed the door shut on the black towel.
It made an awful racket, screeching and writhing about in agony. I had to turn the volume down so my parents wouldn't wake. Horrible it was. Stuck in my head for years. I must have gone to bed after that, or fallen asleep on the couch, because I don't remember seeing any more of the film. If you know what it is let me know, because it's been bugging me for years.
(Published in Bare Bone 9)
Three Hammers
I wake up around nine o'clock and beat my wife up. Her blonde head exploding this way and that like something I'm hallucinating. Like a memory, trickling down a child's eye. Or a dog tussling with a bone. I can feel the bone becoming a stew as I hit it about. Later I open the front door and stab an old lady in the neck. It makes me feel like I've just successfully worked out how to use my new high class VCR, and yes the picture IS so very clear. All this love in my life makes me want my breakfast, which is being served up by my wife right now.
I close the front door, and hear the gargling of the old lady vanish like stolen handbags. So much love in my life.
My wife dies half way through the baked beans, so I cut her up and make her skin into an umbrella, which I will use for a few days before chucking it through a charity shop window. I will no doubt see some fat bastard using it some time or another, and feel that special feeling, like when you sharpen a pencil in front of the teacher, and he or she shivers and tosses his or her head back repeatedly.
And begins to smell of rubies.
Later I drive my car into town and knock a few prams down. They smash like glass, and each tiny fragment is an entry in my diary. Breaking down white light into primary colours. It makes me feel like chlorine in the water at the swimming baths. I am the King of Dover. They will not see me naked again, mother. And we will not pick brambles by the road side, crying and seeing trains on the clotted horizon.
No.
Later I go to the football match, stretching my Freddy Krueger bicep tattoos. My bald head fucking with everyone's view. I cheer and stab. Cheer and slice, It makes me feel like I broke wind in a waiting room at the station, and there's an empty suitcase flapping open on the floor. I charge onto the pitch and sodomise a fat bastard as the game goes on. Making me feel like I just sold a jacket to a man and the jacket wasn't half worth it. Or that I'm hidden in a dumpster and some drunk guy has come along to puke in it and I've slit his throat and all the puke comes sliding out through the slit.
Something like that.
So much love in my life.
I walk home through rainy death streets. All the underpasses are sparkling like a song you wrote and someone liked it enough to buy it. I grab a woman underneath the rectangular scream of a tower block and break her arms. The snap sounds like...like...like...
...no we won't buy clothes together, will we mummy...we won't get an orange drink on the long walk to the beach...can I have a bucket and spade...can I?
Later I climb up someone's drain pipe and masturbate while some fat ginger cunt shaves his beard off in a window. It makes me feel like I got my best friend's joke and I'm laughing as hard as he is, and he's wearing red trousers and has no dad. And his big sister shares a room with him, and he has nightmares about...bees. I toss a few coins at the window and go home thinking about how mathematical the streets are. Like a graph of unacceptable tallies.
I head home and stab a man so hard he lets go of his kids and sinks down dead. The kids run off screaming like apes. Their faces looking just like mine now. If I had my car, or a gun...
The police are on TV when I get home, and I wank myself with a piece of liver as they pull bodies out of ditches, take photos of gaping mouths and dream of those days when as a child their mother would take them along to dance classes for older girls. And they would have to sit and watch the legs and the arms moving from a cracked chair that was neither wood nor plastic but some kind of hybrid. I watch this all night and then go to bed. I dream about tractors pulling up the earth as it snows. The white covering up all the work. It makes me feel like I'm checking out pamphlets advertising some kind of historical display. Wax Tudors pointing at baskets of eggs...so much love in my life.
(This one wasn't published but WAS posted on the Ramsey Campbell Message board and Ramsey read it and it gave him a fright. The word he used to express this fright was "GUM!")
The Move
Mr Marks heard the shrill sound of children laughing as the estate agent pulled the car up to the kerb. The houses were large, old enough to have seen the last hundred years pass by, without touching them too much. Front gardens too, boiling over railings with a froth of greenery and selective dots and dashes of colour. Mr Marks gripped his wife's cool hand and smiled with a look in his eye that could only be appreciated by her. She gripped his hand back and copied his smile.
“The area looks lovely,” she said.
The estate agent turned the car off and cast a look over his shoulder, his tanned square of a face resting on his bright white short sleeved shirt.
“It's probably one of the best areas we have property in, great for a new family just starting out.” He unlocked his door and slid out, a large bunch of keys jangling out the side of his fist.” Great if your kids have left home, too,” he added, leaning his face in through the door.
Mr and Mrs Marks climbed out of the car and straightened their clothes as the agent locked the doors with his remote.
“There's very little crime in the area, this gives peace of mind.”
“Yes,” Mr Marks agreed. “That's what we want, above all.”
He looked along the length of the avenue, noting how either ends seemed to be beyond reach; a trick caused by thick gardens and a subtle bending of the road.
“It's very quiet. Is this normal for this time of day?”
“Good question. You've done this before. Well, this is around early noon and it is a week day, but it doesn't get much busier than this. The avenue doesn't really lead anywhere so you won't get too much traffic cutting through. As you can see most of the houses have no garages so the roadside is used for parking, but, well, there's no hourly parade.”
The agent laughed and busied himself with the bunch of keys. Each had a paper tag.
“Ah, here it is, number 179. We'll have a look around, shall we?”
Mr Marks inspected the neighbours' gardens as they waited for the agent to unlock the porch doors. They were mostly as tidy as he expected, and saw few signs of life; A boy's blue bicycle peeking from behind the side of number 183, and a large pink cardboard box with a picture of a doll's house printed on the side waiting by a swollen black bin bag at number 177.
The agent tugged the porch doors open and began to fiddle around for the key to the front door.
“The gardens are locally quite well known, Mr Marks. I believe they have small competitions and such. For the better ones. I have a cousin who lives in the next avenue.”
“The gardens are lovely, “Mrs Marks admitted, her high heeled shoes squeaking on the paving as she spun around to look.
The rooms were white and empty, Mr Marks saw. There was a smell of paint. Although none of the walls looked freshly decorated.
“The banister has been painted right up to the attic room,” the agent said, scratching his nose with the front door key, and jangling the bunch. His white shirt made the walls look grubby.
“This is of course the front room, never been knocked through into the back room. So far. Always an option.”
Mrs Marks' high heels echoed in another part of the house. As slow and thought-out as if attending a display at an art gallery.
“Double glazed, but you can have it removed without damaging the original frames...”
Mr Marks nodded and walked around the spacious room, allowing the agent's voice to blur at the back of his thoughts.
They found Mrs Marks in the kitchen, peering out of the window onto the green rectangle of the back garden. A small tool shed crouched in one corner like a guard's hut, left unattended.
“Ah, Mrs Marks, you'll be wanting to know about the plumbing for your appliances.”
She looked at him and smiled without opening her mouth.
“Can we go outside?”
“The fencing is not too high, but you can extend as far as ten feet if you choose. We can do that for you.”
“We do like our privacy,” Mr Marks said, walking to the end of the garden where the sound of children's laughter was loudest.
“Your neighbours are a great bunch. We have a few houses for let on the avenues. So any problems with noise or things like that it's best to contact us first, in case it's one of our tenants. But I don't think you'll have any complaints. The price bracket is pretty exclusive. You were lucky to have first offer on this place.”
Mrs Marks followed her husband, as he walked the entire perimeter of the garden.
“We love it.” He said.
* * *
Mr Marks pulled the car up outside the house and switched off the engine. He looked at his wife until she turned and gave him a broad smile.
“This won't take long,” he told her.” But let's both go.”
She nodded and they climbed out of the car and slammed the doors. Mr Marks went around the back of the car and unlocked the trunk. A large brown suitcase filled most of the space. He took it by the handle and pulled it upright.
“Can you unlock the doors for me?” he asked his wife, handing her the bunch of keys. She took them and walked ahead of him as he hoisted the suitcase out of the car and slammed the trunk shut.
By the time he had carried it to the house his wife had both the porch and the front door unlocked.
“Come in with me, won't you,” he said, when she stepped out of his way.
She nodded and followed him into the house.
Mr Marks laid the suitcase down on its side in the front room and stood up. He walked quickly to the bay windows and peered out, checking all the gardens and what he could see of the road. Things were quiet, being early noon.
“We can do it now,” he said.
His wife gave him a smile that said little, but he understood. He walked to her and put his hand on her arm.
“You go back to the car. I'll do it all.”
He listened to her high heels find their way outside and down the path. When he heard the slam of the car door he knelt down by the suitcase. He stroked the slightly raised flank of it, feeling the coolness.
Then he found the zip and worked it open, slowly parting the teeth. Once he had it completely undone, and could easily lift the flap with his finger, he let it flop back onto the contents of the suitcase and stood up.
“You'll soon find your way around,” he said, as a thin leg that ended at a small dirty red shoe slipped out of the opening in the suitcase.
The leg was dressed in tight fitting trousers, striped, and grimy like the footwear. A second leg slipped out, identical to the first. A sound like a high pitched whine escaped the case as the legs began to slowly stretch out to their full length.
“You'll soon remember what to do,” Mr Marks said, turning to leave. He undid the bolt on the back door and opened it a little.
“It won't take long to work it out,” he said, more to himself, than anyone. Then he left the house and climbed into the car and drove away, hearing the sound of children's laughter in a garden further up the avenue
Madman
He feels dead, yet passionate. Able to crave for more, yet avoid any changes that come about. This state is a way of constantly being in control of his own misery, his own pain. He uses and inflicts his own mental and emotional torture. This trick does not allow him pleasure, only a sense of power. The emptiest of all compensations.
Later he pushes a duck off a table, and possibly begins to chuckle behind his mauve and lime green mask. This in no way demonstrates a sense of humour, as we know it. The amusement is not derived from the look of confusion on the duck’s face as it tumbles through the air, or the knowledge that the duck will no doubt end up in a pile of dirty pants, situated beneath. No, his amusement is more than likely derived from the fact that he has another duck, upstairs in the attic that is glued to the floor.
It’s a complex and unknowable perversity, wrought from the fundamental laws of physics, itself. We can only imagine what u-bends his imagination has to make to fashion this scenario.
Perhaps we may study further his logic, by the way he implements a sudden and almost preternatural alteration in the emotion of the room. Maybe it is the spontaneous use of leg motions, or the ardent display of his scarred nipples. Or is it the things that now grow forth from his hands: an outburst of blue flames and yellow knives. He means no harm. It is merely a way of demonstrating some authority over his own delirium, much in the same way he commands his own mental anguish.
And indeed the two are integral to one another.
You Weren’t There
How warm it all is, or wants to be. How sweet my tea is, and how pretty the day is. It’s a snapshot from bliss, a mere moment that forgot it wasn’t a place. The air is a snug blanket threaded with a cool breeze here or there. It cannot decide. Now I notice the prehistoric scent of the ocean, making its way up the sloping streets and bringing a ghost of sugar from the ice cream parlours.
It cannot decide.
A middle aged couple, hand in hand, stroll by. Maybe they will sit at my table, and feel the sun rest with them. Maybe they shall order coffee.
They cannot decide. They head for the ocean. Dwindling into specks, yet still present.
The churchyard across the street is carved from local stone. Yet it hopes for more, and promises more. It takes in the peoples’ wishes and in turn sloughs off its own blackened skin to make their headstones. It cannot decide if it cares more for the dead or the living. Maybe it makes no distinction, and treats them the same.
How warm I feel now, how effortless. A beetle journeys across the white plateau of my table. A bird flicks a branch in the oak and races its own undulating shadow across the gravestones, almost too quick to register.
A sparkle of twittering greets the bird, beyond the elms. I let the calls sink back into the swaying depths of the graveyard as I sip from my cup.
How sweet my tea is. Maybe I shall order another pot. The young lady who runs the café is surely one of the prettiest I’ve seen in a long time. Hair the colour of buttercups. In my imagination, at least. Where she belongs.
A strange force has settled on this town, preserving my time here. I shall not leave the confines of the force; I shall not suffer its loss. I am its willing eyes. I am held up to witness a flowing of meanings.
This is the meeting of uncertain worlds. A clashing point, barbed and razored for this very moment. How long is a moment? We shall see. When the moment is over, the conflict shall release me, and I shall be no more. Yet still present, forever.
Ah, and here we have it…
Saved For Last
‘There’s a horrible flickering going on somewhere. You can sort of feel it in your skin like pressed flowers beginning to stir, but in a different form, of light and sound. Can you feel it too? It’s not a new age or a rebirth. Nothing nascent about it. Something deathly about it. Something not welcoming about it.’
Doug stepped out of the park. The road was cluttered with acorns and conkers and husks. The drain was full of them he noticed. Spilling out of the slots. When the rain came it would have a job to shift them. They would probably have to send a man.
Doug hated the men they sent. Wrapped up in their machines like men on fire. Like men who had lost something. You cannot regain a lost thing. The pain tarnishes it. Changes it forever. God knows why. People were never meant to have anything to lose, maybe. Maybe that was it.
‘Yep, the thing you have returned to you is not the thing you lost. Get used to it. Accept the open wound and don’t try to slam it shut.’
So why the flickering? Why the towers on the thickening horizon? Why are they digging up the park for Roman ruins? Like men with holes in their hands. Like men eating other men. Are they digging for flickering?
Digging for flickering?
Doug had seen trees on fire. He had seen men crawling through the grass by the clinic. Nobody was willing to say otherwise. A new way of thinking. Flicker thinking. Women clothed in the sea, spilling out of the slots. Mouths open and the tower blocks…the tower blocks switching on their lights, or reflecting the setting sun. A howling mountain of sky.
‘I’m scared. Am I allowed to be scared of my thoughts?’
They would send a tarnished man. To slam it shut. Cluttered with husks and ruins. Send him to the tower to see the sky turn into a hole. In the fields of the alone.
Storben
A small red ball rolled towards Franks, taking advantage of the sloping street. It hopped from the smooth curb and bounced onto the worn cobbles, passing Drupes’ clock emporium and the alleyway to the park.
Soon it leapt past Franks and carried on to its destiny, perhaps to end up in the hands of a dirty urchin, or more than likely to find its way into one of the large drain holes on the main road below.
Or would its owner come charging around the corner above, to retrieve it? They would have a job in doing so, for already it was gone, lost in the dark spiky blur of pedestrians.
He was alone again. No matter. There would be company sooner or later. In Johansson’s café, perhaps. Or amongst the lost and unwanted books in McClarity’s shop. Indeed, what could be more delightful than a chat with Grady, or Mrs Moole? Not much.
He stood just within the alleyway to the park, fancying he could smell the leather from Brook’s shoe shop. Or perhaps could hear the ticking of many, many golden clocks. What a joy to behold. Not unlike the time he was invited into the world beneath the waterworks, to dine with the operators. What a time he had.
What a grand time.
Franks stared along the featureless curve of the park alleyway, feeling his pockets for his knife. He could never recall which pocket he had placed it in. A silly thing to do, he thought to himself.
‘Where have you put it this time…ah, very clever. Nothing safer than having it close to your heart.’
He slipped it out and opened the silver blade with a soft click. How, it caught the sun, like a mirror. He could see his dark pupils in it. His white skin. His red hair. The blue of his shirt collar, and the blackness of his coat. He could hear the clocks ticking for sure.
Franks held the knife in his right hand and began to stroll towards the park.
(sizzle)
Later, as darkness recalled itself, he flicked through a paperback, as McClarity told him about his youth. The war that never seemed to end. The music that still lingered in his imagination. Franks had heard it all before, but it always seemed to captivate him.
‘How much is this book, McClarity? I’ll give you a pound for it. It’s not worth much more. You probably…’
‘Get out. Get Out of my shop!’
McClarity was a tiny man. No hair and no neck.
‘…found it in a bin. Ok, one pound fifty. It…’
‘I said get out!’
‘…has a lithograph I like. Two naked dogs, see? Naked, naked, naked.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
They rutted for hours. Stopping only now and again to say their prayers and wipe the shit from their shirt collars. Franks dominated the sex, and that was how he liked it. Once they were exhausted, or slightly paralysed, they donned their trousers and lit a candle. Black things shrunk back under the tables and chairs. Franks knew all about them. He had heard a discussion about them in the town hall.
Franks shoved McClarity down to the floor and began to dance quickly around the fallen man. It was all he could think to do.
Owen
Owen is a spanner in the works of the local police terror wasteland. He smells of three borrowed weapons and tastes like the froth that builds up around the comic book shops. He is a wedding too far and yet still manages to find time to fight through chubby Wednesday evenings as the rain stops play, and the teams wander off into the woods, lost for a reason not to.
Owen has a sparkling wasp velocity when it comes to spending a single day…
He owns the rights to his own disease. Yes, this disease: Bronzefist, is held in oak trees scattered around the world, ready for use. The license to release Bronzefist was granted last year in Brussels, by the European Council of Diseases and Disasters, after stringent testing in underground silos. The disease, which causes your thoughts to ooze like a cheese through your fingers, was considered as deadly as Sars, and given top priority for dispersal around the globe.
It is thought this will aid the fight against woolly thinking in the middle classes, and sort the socks from the shoes.
Owen Kilfeather, owner of the only copy of Bruce Lee’s ’Secrets of Working Leather In High Altitudes’, has been known to frequent the seedier churches in the worlds of his own choosing, you all must touch my hoop. Now and then he is thought to throb from the rich to jive to the poor. But see him run, see him run like a fox across thistly Scottish moors. Owen Kilfeather is a swooper. The weather is his ghost.
I repeat, the weather is his ghost.
Untouched by the ravines of out-Easter, Owen grew up in solitude, armed only with wit, with wet wipes and a ruined hope so black it had to be eaten out of life’s cruel apple turnover. Lest it should re-kill Sinatra and Kennedy. Owen did not despair, he put on his man pants, wept a skinful and did some world walking. Taking in the air of five war zones and a salt marsh on the East Anglia coastline. Never had a man laughed so like a fire eating a man’s supply of sweetbones.
Get a bit of titty, he decided, one slam pappy day in Summer, 89. Neglecting his trousers like a turn up for the mucky books. Like the sixties, possessed by the melodies of Ted Bundy’s youth, we wired up a shattered mansion to him, dear Owen Kilfeather. We watched Fort Apache The Bronx, and sicked up our reasons for liking sniffy snaffy things. Jet packs, drain pipes, Bond films and Greedo, with his wank hand and a smooth castrato groin. We owe all these things to Owen. To Owen.
Except the snappy globules that pins and needles are formed from.
Owen eats fruity and sleeps as a duty. He thinks so doing and knows you are pooing. He clothes his manskin in fashioned voodoo wax plans. He directs the traffic away from you and your suddenly haunted picnic on the sands. He is the duelist still counting. He would never wear anything made from flannel or toweling. He takes a skateboard to McDonalds for a cup of Mc Tea…but froze in the lighthouse, tucked up in the drapes until his watch batteries run free.
All those photos in the college year book, do you know what they were looking at when they took those snaps? Something distracted all those little eyes…something.