Abraham’s Hill

I wonder if we all have one – a story about when we almost died. I didn’t realise how close I’d come until many years after the incident when I saw an item on the news about a young black boy called Damilola Taylor. He was stabbed in the leg in a dingy stairwell somewhere in South London and bled to death in less than ten minutes after a major artery in his inner thigh was severed. He didn’t stand a chance. No one who gets that wound survives unless expert medical help is immediately available. Even then there are no guarantees. The Hollywood movie Black Hawk Down shows an American soldier with a thigh wound bleeding to death despite the desperate attempts of the medics to staunch the flow of blood.

As I listened to the news about Damilola, I started thinking of my own childhood in Cumbernauld New Town, just outside Glasgow. I lived in an outlying district called Abronhill, the curious name being a corruption of ‘Abraham’s Hill’. A name like that promises miracles and Abronhill was certainly a miracle of scenic hills, dense woods, and long, lush grass. Like all of Cumbernauld, it had been designed according to a principle of separating people from traffic: it was possible to walk for miles without ever encountering any traffic lights thanks to the elaborate network of paths, bridges and tunnels. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast with the grim high-rise, high-density housing estates of South London where Damilola lived. He must have spent a lot of time dodging traffic, coughing from the fumes of thousands of cars. I think he was originally from Nigeria. I can’t recall if he had any brothers or sisters.

Our lives could hardly have been more different, yet I think about him a lot. When I do, I picture myself as a ten-year-old, exactly the same age as he was on his last fateful day.

It’s autumn – October, I think – and I’m in a wood playing ‘commandos’ with my older brother. I’ve been patiently waiting in position for him to appear, ready to spring my ambush. I’ve got a toy M16 semiautomatic assault rifle that makes a great ‘tat tat tat’ gunfire sound when I pull the trigger. When you hear it you know you’re dead.

It has been raining on and off for the last few days and the soil beneath me is sodden. Everything has that strange smell of wet, rotting vegetation. My clothes are filthy with long streaks of mud and my mum’s sure to kill me, but it will be worth it if I win.

There he is, my brother crawling past my hideout, tightly gripping the Luger pistol I bought him for his birthday. Gotcha! I leap up, scattering the covering of leaves, ferns and branches that I’ve expertly used to camouflage myself, and slide down the embankment, grinning manically while I blaze away with my M16.

It’s just as I’m savouring my glorious triumph – my first victory in the last month after a disastrous run – that an incredibly sharp pain tears through my right thigh. This is the worst agony I’ve ever felt in my life, a pain so hot and sharp it robs me of my breath.

As an adult, I’ve often heard people claim that when they were stabbed they didn’t feel a thing. I wonder how that can be because as a ten-year-old I knew all too well how much it hurts when something hard and sharp rips through your flesh.

My brother stares at me, panicked by my shriek, his eyes popping. Unsure what has happened, I’m now gingerly sitting on top of a collection of multi-coloured autumn leaves, soggy peat and slimy mud, gazing down at my right leg. I’m slightly breathless, slightly apprehensive, but not overly so. I can see nothing but a tiny sliver of red on the blue fabric of my trousers. I’ve seen more blood than that whenever I’ve nicked my finger. Whatever has happened it can’t be too bad.

My brother comes over and has a look. The colour is returning to his cheeks so I think he also believes that nothing serious is going on. I tell him that I felt a really bad pain in my leg but it seems OK now. He asks me to stand up but for some reason I don’t want to, or maybe I’m sensing some kind of resistance. When he sees that I’m not responding, he says maybe he should take a look. I’ll need to slide my trousers down, he tells me. It seems like the sensible thing to do.

I’m not expecting much, maybe a little scratch. But why so much pain in that first searing instant? Now, there’s no pain at all, but my reluctance to stand hasn’t disappeared. From my sitting position, I undo my belt and unfasten my trousers then I lift my backside a couple of inches off the ground to manoeuvre the trousers down my legs. My brother keeps his eyes fixed to the spot where the blood is located as I delicately edge my trousers downwards. I’m sort of watching his face and sort of watching the trousers moving closer to the bloodstain.

Then everything happens in either incredible slow motion or unbelievable high speed. It’s odd how, in a crisis, time perception changes so much that you can’t really find any context for it, so speed becomes meaningless.

I’m aware of several things at once. My brother’s face has instantly blanched and it looks as though he’s about to vomit. My trousers have descended beyond the original dots of blood but instead of revealing a slight scratch, something very different has happened. My thigh has split in two, two chunks of flesh separating from each other like the Red Sea Parting. I realise that my trousers had been holding the flesh together and now that the trousers have moved too far there is no longer anything doing the holding. It’s no minor cut I have received but a horrific wound that has virtually sliced my thigh in two.

I have a terrible taste in my mouth, as though I’ve swallowed dead leaves. Waterdrops splash on me from the high branches of a tree. Again, I’m aware of the smell of wet wood and damp soil. But, above all, I’m seeing something unbelievable. I’m looking down at a bizarre wall of red and white dots, with green and brown pulsing through them. Jesus, I’m not sure what I’m looking at. It surely can’t be my leg.

Looking back, I suppose I was seeing muscle, fatty tissue and a matrix of torn blood vessels. I’m not sure where the green and brown came from, perhaps the reflected colours of the autumn woodland. What I know for sure was that I certainly wasn’t seeing things as a normal person should. A huge blast of emergency chemicals had flooded my ten-year-old brain and my visual senses had changed dramatically. Now everything was rapidly becoming green-tinged and formless. I could no longer differentiate colours properly and I was finding it difficult to focus.

My brother’s face had been replaced by a vague greenish-white ball from which incoherent sounds were emerging. The trees had all merged together, surrounding me like some great brown giant with straggly green hair. I don’t remember the grass or the sky. I had a sense of my eyes turning around so that I was staring inwards into my own screaming brain.

My memory of what happens next is almost nil. Shock, I guess. People have told me what happened, what they did, what they saw, what they heard and maybe I can remember bits of that and maybe I can’t. Perhaps I’ve created new memories based on what people said.

What’s for sure was that I was in a bad way. I was located halfway down a steep wooded embankment above a railway line. There was a fence at the bottom of the slope and one at the top. To get out of here I would have to be carried uphill and lifted over a three-feet-high fence. What would happen to my thigh, already flapping in two places? Would it split apart completely and fall off? Can legs do that? Who knows? I’m only ten. What about the blood? On TV, blood spurts in huge gory fountains, but I’m oddly comforted that there is little sense of blood gushing out of me. Maybe my blood is as shocked as I am and refusing to move. Maybe I have no blood. Has it all gone and I didn’t notice?

I’m told that my brother raced up to our house, which was luckily only about a hundred metres away. Equally luckily, my mother and sister were at home. Strangely, I was never aware of being alone, but I must have been when my brother went for help. What did I think about it? Did I imagine I was dying? I was probably worried about getting a lecture from my mum. Didn’t I tell you not to go running around wild near that railway? Now look what you’ve done. What are we going to do with you?

I remember that she once bought me expensive training shoes for my Christmas and by the end of the day I’d managed to stand on some broken glass, piercing the sole of the right shoe, badly gashing my foot and saturating the trainers with blood. I was terrified of confessing that I’d ruined the trainers already – maybe she’d never give me a present again. I spent ages trying to clean them, but they were never the same again. In agony, I poured antiseptic over the wound on my foot. Luckily, I didn’t need stitches. The wound healed and mum never found out a thing. I hid the trainers for weeks until I could claim I’d ‘worn them in’.

My mum and sister somehow lifted me up the hill. My brother had gone into complete shock and was unable to do anything. He feels guilty about it even now. A few years ago he fainted when he had to provide a blood sample to his doctor. I guess he never got used to the sight of blood.

I was probably very light and easy to carry. Even so, it’s still hard to work out how my mum and sister got me over the fence. I can’t remember any of it. I guess they must have found a hole, or perhaps made one. Somehow, they managed to prevent the wound from growing any worse.

Next thing I know I’m lying in the kitchen of my house with my mum looking down at me, carefully assessing the damage. I can’t remember if she was shocked, angry, appalled or anything else. I know I kept saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ over and over. I’d done a bad thing and apologising was the least I could do. It’s a very bad thing indeed to be lying on your kitchen floor with your thigh sliced in two. A considerate person wouldn’t do something like that, causing all this trouble and inconvenience. But my mum was stroking my hair, telling me everything was going to be fine and that I wasn’t to worry. She was trying to make me sip some water. Had she given me an aspirin? I don’t think she believed me when I said I wasn’t in pain. I felt oddly weightless, as though I wasn’t really there. This couldn’t be happening. It all seemed too ridiculous for words.

Again, everything becomes unclear. Did my dad come back from work? But he worked miles away and it was always hard to get in touch with him because, as a Quantity Surveyor, he was frequently on building sites. Maybe it was my mum and sister again, but someone carried me up to the doctor’s surgery. It was about three hundred metres away, up another of Abronhill’s many slopes.

So, I’m lying on my stomach in a treatment room. I’ve been given immediate priority and I’m feeling sorry for all the people in the waiting room because I’ve skipped the queue and I hate it when people do that to me. A female doctor is crouched over me, examining the wound. I think my trousers are around my ankles or maybe they’ve been cut off. It doesn’t occur to me that I’m in a very undignified position. Clean underwear? Don’t know, don’t care. I just want things to be back to the way they were. I want my M16 – where is it? Please don’t stop me playing commandos. I love running around in the woods.

The doctor is speaking to me and I am tremendously reassured. It’s the way she speaks. Very calm, professional, knowledgeable. Even though I’m only ten I know I’m in the care of a highly capable person. She will do an excellent job, I don’t doubt it.

She gives me Dolly Mixtures, which I take as a sure sign that things will go well. After all, why would you waste sweets on someone who was about to die? Then again, adults are very odd. She tells me about a Tetanus injection. Maybe she mentions other injections (there must have been one to deaden the pain; of which there was still surprisingly little). All I know is that injections are coming my way and they terrify me. I have a plan. I line up several Dolly Mixtures between my teeth, my clever idea being to crunch down on them at the moment the needle pierces my skin. Rather than feeling pain I’ll taste the sweetness of the Dolly Mixtures and all will be well.

Of course, life is never so obliging. The injection is very painful and I grunt involuntarily, making the Dolly Mixtures fly out in every direction. I wonder if the doctor was distracted by the small colourful sweets suddenly shooting around her surgery. I guess not because she did an expert job. I received twenty-five stitches, in three layers. The inner two layers were supposed to be of the ‘disappearing’ sort. I’m not really sure what that means. Are they still inside my leg even now? If not, where are they? How did they disappear? As for the removal of the outer stitches several months later… well, that’s another story. Let me just say that having a nurse clean the wound with stinging antiseptic a couple of weeks before the stitches came out remains one of the most strangely and unexpectedly pleasurable experiences of my life.

It was a pleasure denied to poor little Damilola. He got his wound on the inside of his thigh, while mine was on the outside. Only inches apart technically, but in fact an entire human life. He bled to death in minutes while I was carried to a surgery, patched up and I suffered no ill effects apart from the scar on my thigh. I lost scarcely any blood. Within months, I was happily playing commandos again.

My assailant wasn’t a violent teenager with a Stanley knife but a broken milk bottle that had been carelessly tossed over the fence and wedged itself in the railway embankment. My dad found it later that day with drops of my blood still visible on it.

Every time I hear Damilola’s name I think about that incident. Scarily, it was also a broken bottle that was used to inflict his wound. He was on his way home from an after-school computer class. A few seconds earlier or later and he might never have encountered his attackers.

Life and death, it seems, are a question of inches and seconds. Those inches and seconds – I’m sure we’ve all had our close encounters with them. Maybe next time we won’t be so lucky.

‘Twenty years ago,’ the old white man said, a ghost stepping over my dawn shadow, ‘that’s when your life stopped.’

Twenty years. So it was. Twenty years to the day since…since…I last saw her.

‘It was in the kasbah, in Casablanca,’ the old seer went on. ‘You thought you were being daring when you stepped into that opium den for an exotic “eastern experience”. Your wife told you she wanted to stroll through the bazaar, perhaps buy an oriental carpet. You never set eyes on her again.

‘For a whole year you criss-crossed Casablanca like an echo trying to hear its voice one last time. You searched every thoroughfare, every back street, every out-of-the-way alley. They were all question marks, signposts pointing only to a dwindling hope of ever finding what was most precious to you.

‘How do you know all of this?’ I yelled, unable to control myself. ‘Have you heard news? Is she alive?’

‘I can say nothing about that.’ The old man placed a clammy hand on my shoulder. ‘If you want to know more you must go to the king of the archipelago of shrunken heads. He’s another of our kind.’

‘You mean he’s white?’ I found it impossible to believe that three explorers had independently managed to find their way to this godforsaken part of the Congo.

The old man nodded. His voice dropped, as if he were whispering in church.

‘He’s as insane as the midday sun trapped in a single drop of midnight rainwater.’ His tone was oddly reverential. ‘When the Hawangi killed his beautiful wife, he lost all touch with reality. The tribesmen say he killed one hundred of them with his bare hands on that lethal day in the jungle. They threw spears at him, fired a thousand arrows, but a possessed man cannot die. Finally, the tribesmen fell on their knees and worshipped the lunatic. What else could they do? They tried to appease him by telling him how they could give his wife a kind of immortality.

‘Almost out of his mind with grief, he listened to his wife’s killers telling him they could shrink the head of his wife to the size of an orange, keeping all of its features perfectly intact. They described the intricate process, the bizarre details worked out by trial and error over many centuries. He seemed to like what he heard.

‘At any rate, he agreed. He himself beheaded the corpse of his wife, not trusting anyone else to do a good job. He took instructions in head shrinking from the elders of the tribe, so determined was he to do the gruesome task himself. The tribesmen say the greatest gods guided his hands, for there was never such a masterwork as the one he created. Love on an unimaginable scale spoke through every fibre of his craftsmanship.

‘Now he’s one of them. He’s their leader, their priest, their talisman. He goes where others cannot. He sees past people, past the world, to God only knows where.

‘He never allows any of his followers to see him. He always stands behind a curtain when he addresses his people. Only his voice, his truly uncanny voice, is heard. I have been told that his words are not words at all – they are said to be poems poured like dark wine over fields of blue tulips; seas of glittering amethysts suspended in silver waterfalls.

‘It is said that the heads of one hundred thousand men, women and children of conquered tribes lie around his village on the banks of the river. All the islands lying in the centre of that river have been levelled and the shrunken heads placed on them like a bizarre flower plantation. Row after row of the tiny heads now stare lifelessly at a world of which they can never again know anything. All of this at the behest of the white shaman. He’s obsessed with the tiny heads. The only one that is never displayed is his wife’s.

‘A huge killing field has been cleared in the heart of the jungle so that the darkness in his mind can extend across a tropical forest. He claims it’s a tribute to his wife, the blonde woman who abandoned her previous, comfortable life to be with this tempestuous lover.

‘You must go to this man and talk with him. Only he can end your crisis. He might allow you to breathe again.’

I stared at the old man and I knew he was right: I had to find this other white man. We were connected through the deaths of those we loved most. He would understand me. Maybe he could give me the answer I craved.

****

‘King of all I survey.’ The white man’s voice fell and did not land. A man in the ocean with no flotsam to cling to. In the sky, wingless. Surrounded by desert, with sand alone in his flask. In the snow with an empty lighter in his frostbitten hand. The man I had come to see was no man at all. His life had made him something different, a bridge stretching only half way across a river.

‘A wooden hut for a palace, illiterate savages for courtiers, a circlet of bamboo for a crown.’ His voice substituted a vacuum for a soul. ‘Do you see any garden out there?’ he went on in weird soliloquy. ‘I see only rows of tiny human heads. Nothing blooms here except death. I am the gardener of extinction. I am Bible. I am Gospel. I am all the letters returned unanswered from God.’

I longed to pull back the curtain and look at the man, to see hell in the shape of a human face looking back at me. But there were twenty tribesmen, painted from head to toe in blue dye, determine to stop me.’

‘Why did you lover her?’ the disembodied voice asked.

The question shocked me. It was everything required to unsettle me. Above all, it was a question to which I had no answer.

He laughed when I remained silent. ‘How can a woman know you love her when you say nothing?’ There was malice in his voice, contempt.

‘She knew my feelings,’ I replied lamely.

‘Did she?’ He let the comment hang. ‘Was she a Delphic priestess who could read the signs?’ he jeered. ‘When I met the woman I loved I told her she was my life, my death, my blazing Viking longship sailing over the edge of the world. She was the red-painted oxygen in my lifeblood.

‘She told me that no one had ever spoken to her like that, least of all her husband. She gave up everything to run away with me.’

A shiver, so insidious, went through me when he said that. A dreadful voice told me that he was speaking of my very own wife, the wife who had vanished without trace all those years ago. My shock seemed to paralyse me. I listened, dumb, as the madman ranted on.

‘Love is an end, never a beginning,’ he babbled. ‘It’s a tear shaped like a flower falling into a star too bright for mortal eyes. It’s a polished moonstone onto which bright mercury is being poured. The mercury runs over the whole glistening surface but can never find a resting place.

‘Love is an abyss. To somehow find it beautiful while it’s killing you is what it means to be something other than an animated corpse. Love destroyed me. I lost everything when I lost my woman. Life had to be paid back for taking my lover from me. Don’t you understand? That’s why I plant dead heads and not living flowers. I spread the desolation in my mind all over the jungle. I’m in a benighted continent, and my wish is to make it darker still.

‘I was told that you were a kindred spirit, another soul trapped in the escapeless void, another nothing in the silent emptiness, a cipher searching for a non-existent origin. But you’re just an ordinary man, with the ordinary inability to see yourself for what you are. Come back tomorrow and I shall show you everything you want to see. You will have precisely what you seek.’

Without a word, I stood up and walked away. I heard him laughing as I departed his hut. I hated him. I wanted him dead. I knew he was the man who had stolen my wife twenty years ago.

I returned at exactly the same hour the next night. My dagger seemed light in my hand, comfortable. I was surprised to find that there were no guards. Inside the hut, the madman’s curtain had been slightly pulled back…an invitation.

When I snatched back the thin gauze, I felt the abyss the lunatic had spoken of growing exponentially in my mind. I swear, the white god was swinging from the rafters by a noose fashioned by his own hand. In his left hand was clutched the most grotesque object in all the world. Like a lover hanging on to a final kiss, he was grasping the long blonde hair of the head he had worshipped for twenty years. The tiny features of the white woman’s shrunken head were preserved with perfect, uncanny accuracy.

I began to laugh, crazily, like a chimpanzee staring in a mirror. The absent tribesmen reappeared. They crept into the hut and stared at me in that special way I knew they reserved for their next leader.

I used my knife to cut free the woman’s head from the white man’s death grip. I ordered the tribesman to give the head a decent burial.

It wasn’t my wife.

It was his.

A body is lying at my feet. The police will be arriving soon to arrest me. I can already hear their sirens. I am desperately trying to remember how I came to be here. What on earth turned me into an assassin? Something has happened to me…something unbelievable.

I remember receiving an odd package from India for my twenty-first birthday. Was it really only yesterday? I didn’t even know I had a friend in India. The package contained several items, including a few photographs. There were pictures of me standing outside the Taj Mahal…but I’ve never been there. In fact I’ve never been to India. In the pictures, I was standing in the middle of a group of approximately twenty smiling men, all of them extremely athletic. I seemed to be the best of friends with them. But I couldn’t recognise a single one of them. What was happening to me?

There was a letter in the package, the strangest letter I’d ever received. ’Snake charmers aren’t what they seem,’ it said enigmatically. ‘People believe that the snakes are beguiled by the music. But snakes are deaf. It’s the movement of the tip of the fakir’s flute that entrances them. You see, nothing is ever as it seems.

‘The time has come for the sloughing of the old skin. Life must be born anew: stronger, nobler, more vital. The old must perish. Kill the old. Kill the old. Kill the old…’

That last line was repeated one hundred times, like a mantra, a hypnotic injunction going right to the heart of my subconscious. It was a command that bade me return to the box to accept its final gift: a phial of snake venom.

‘Kill the old: drink the new, ‘the attached prescription read.

I didn’t know what to do. I had an extraordinarily powerful urge to drink the poison, but every particle of my instinct for self-preservation told me to destroy it. Bewildered, I took out an ordinary pack of playing cards and began dealing myself a hand. I felt ill. As I looked at the designs on the cards, the room seemed to swim around me. I saw real hearts and diamonds emerging from the playing cards and swirling around my head. Echelons of clubs and spades marched towards me like a Chinese army. Eventually, all of the images formed into the likeness of a man, a very old man. He stared at me as though he were my father.

‘The time has come, ‘he said in a voice as old as the universe. ‘You know your duty. I am the Old Man of the Mountain. You have been to my home and enjoyed my paradise. You drank from my hashish fountains, you took your pleasure with seventy-eight of my beautiful virgins. We trained you, just as we trained twenty others. Remember you task. Kill the old order so that there is room for the new. Transform yourself. Redeem the world, my son.’

I drank.

My mind went blank. I don’t know for how long. Now I am here and I know I am a programmed assassin. I was in India. I was there for ten years with twenty companions while the Old Man of the Mountain moulded our minds. Subliminal triggers were implanted in our minds. It was necessary that we should not have to think about what we did. The perfect killer is the man who is unaware he is going to kill.

Images are flooding back into my mind. I can see myself dressed in black, wearing a mask, like a mask of Greek tragedy. Now I am standing above the body of the man I was born to kill – the Prime Minster of the UK. I am aware that at this moment all the world’s leaders lie dead, slain by me and my fellow bringers of death, the lethal marionettes of the Old Man. I am also aware that I have no idea how to escape.

It is now that the police enter the room. Almost reflexively, I start repeating one word over and over again. It is the word which best describes me. It is what I have been all my life. I say the word slowly. I say it again and again. Each time I say it I realise it sounds slightly different.

Assassin.

Asssasssin.

Asssssasssssin.

Asssssssasssssssin.

Asssssssssasssssssssin.

Asssssssssssassssssssssin.

Finally, only s’s are emerging from my mouth. The police are appalled. I can see the terror in their eyes. It is only now that I realise the horrific truth. I have become something no longer human. I am something ancient, and utterly terrible.

    I have become, God help me, a snake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  

I stared at her, as I had stared at the seven before her. I could see that same odd mixture of curiosity, revulsion, incomprehension. Why did they all react in exactly the same way? It annoyed me, that did. It was bound to count against them. Couldn’t they see that?

I had loved each of them with the same fervour. Or, rather, I had loved that part of their character that pleased me. The rest I had chosen to ignore. It was the only way to allow love to flourish. Love is selective blindness. I thought everyone knew that. Those who want to see everything are not lovers, but pathologists. They want to dissect, to cut everything out until what they are examining is no longer recognisable as what they began with.

Each of them treated my love for them as some kind of exercise in autopsy. They kept carrying out their incisions, their sutures. They drained fluid from this part, dismembered that part, subjected this part to the microscope. Why? How many times must I repeat it: the very process of examination kills what is being examined.

When my wives had destroyed the loving part of me with their infernal curiosity, I felt nothing for them. It was inevitable. Why couldn’t they have worked that out? Why couldn’t they simply enjoy what they had? Why did they have to ruin everything? They became little more than incorporeal vapours. They were all around me, but they no longer communicated with my soul. All possibility of that had gone.

The last one did not scream. I suppose she should be given some credit for that. She simply kept staring at the stuffed bodies of her predecessors as they swung so gently from the chandeliers. Personally, I thought they looked rather fetching in their pristine white wedding dresses. It was more than they deserved. Moreover, the blue light I had carefully set up in the room flattered their rather pallid features, concealed the unfortunate areas where the taxidermy hadn’t worked quite so well. Perhaps I need more practice.

I slammed the door behind her, just as I had done all those times before. She knew precisely what fate was in store for her: it was staring her in the face, so to speak. Maybe the next one will know better. Surely I can’t be asking too much. Everyone needs privacy.

Even Captain Bluebeard needs to be alone some time.  

She was crying, but she wouldn’t take her eyes off me. She kept doing that thing with her hair. I have to confess I found it quite amusing. I suppose you would call this the initial shock – Phase 1. I had seen it on my own world many times, and just as many here on earth. I preferred it when it ended in termination – the self-inflicted ending of the unit’s life – but that was regrettably rarely the case.

Ah, she’s making the cup of hot liquid now, a sure sign that we’ve moved onto Phase 2 of the study. This ceremony will be repeated at least twenty times, having as an inevitable consequence the creation of a well-worn path to the liquid release facility. I understand they call it ‘toilet’ on this planetoid.

I’ll self-deactivate for a while since I do find this phase rather wearisome. Phase 3, due in about two hours, offers greater promise.

Oops, nearly ignored my reactivation signal. Must be getting old. Maybe it’s all the strain of having to maintain this ridiculous shape. I don’t know why I bother. Who on earth wants to study humans? It’s not as if they’re interesting. The entertainment quotient here is on a par with waiting for a proton in the Crab Nebula to decay. Not to be recommended, I can assure you. But a job’s a job, I suppose. Or so they keep telling me. Well, at least it pays for my time-share condo on Jupiter. It’s in a prime location, right in the centre of the Red Spot. Ah, to hang-glide when the hurricanes are at their fiercest, to feel those blistering radiation storms, to smell those delightful free radical gases, all of them reassuringly entirely poisonous to these crass humans. No chance of bumping into one of them as I stroll down to the radioactive cinder beach to soak up a few choice gamma rays.

Now, observe: Phase 3 commences. She’s phoning all of her friends…seeking sympathy, support, endorsement of her sense of utter outrage. She’ll invite them round, luring them with talk of alcoholic beverages and sugar-laden confectionaries. Just you wait and see. Things are definitely livening up.

Oh, here we go: one’s agreed to come round straight away. This should be good for a test of my amusement facilities. It will be the all males of this species are illegitimate offspring of lesser creatures on the phylogenetic scale routine. All the rest of the tedious speech will pour out: oh, we lavish all of our higher emotional states on these backwardly evolving invertebrates and they repay us by substantially raising the level of depressants in our cerebral cortex. Wretched are we. The carriers of the Y chromosome abnormality render life most unpleasant. How we wish they could be subjected to a catastrophic and overwhelming viral infection at the cellular level. How we wish they’d be plunged into a primal soup of virulent bacterial contagion. Ah, yes, the same tired litany is heard on every planet.

Then will come the ancient ceremony of the ripping up of the male’s most expensive body-concealment garments, the throwing of his most cherished auditory possessions, and associated visual paraphernalia, out of the window. Vows of undying hatred will be taken, punctuated by consumptions of glasses of gin displaying a pronounced and alarming pink colouration.

I wonder why I subject myself to this dull chore. It’s not as if I ever learn anything new. The reactions are always the same. I’ve played this part over one hundred times now and the outcome has been the same almost every time.

Maybe I should try a different tack. Perhaps playing the part of an unexpected child-maintenance letter from the CSA to a married man with no children by his loving wife is not a dignified role for a visiting alien to be playing.

Snapshot

A photograph is a time machine. It takes a fraction of a second for light from the subject to reach the film. The past, not the present, has been recorded. That past moment can be carried around in a photo album and used at any time to impose the past upon the present.

The earth is a camera. It takes a picture of how the sun looked over eight minutes ago. There will come a time when the sun has died, but for just over eight minutes we will be unaware of the fact. Our planet’s film will be showing an image of the extinct.

History is a lens. Through it, any past moment can be brought into focus.

There has been a spectacular technological breakthrough. A unique camera with a special patented film has been invented. Now, instead of simply pointing your camera at a subject and taking its picture, you have the option of pressing a timer switch and taking the picture of any event in history which occurred at that same location. Any past instant can be brought to life on film.

A man has been taking pictures with the invention. His dark room is covered with snapshots. Now he knows the identity of Jack the Ripper…he photographed him in the midst of his gruesome murders. He has taken pictures of the Holocaust…no revisionist can now deny the truth of what happened. He has taken pictures of the Mary Celeste, of the Loch Ness Monster, of the Bermuda Triangle. He has solved every mystery.

There is no further need for courts and lawyers…pictures of every crime can be taken. Proof is incontrovertible. Now, the guilty will always be caught. There will be no more miscarriages of justice. Adulterers will be found out on every occasion. Every like can be detected.

The cameraman has recorded the dinosaurs, the Missing Link, every moment in the life of Jesus Christ. Every religion, every belief, every ideology has now been recorded in minute detail. The perfect biography of every historical figure can be produced. Fact and fiction are eternally separated. The camera is unerring. The past can now be subjected to infallible scientific tests.

Back, back, ever backwards. The first moments of life on earth are photographed. The planet being formed out of interstellar gases is revealed. Further back – the moment of creation – the Big Bang itself…captured on film for eternity.

Within a year of the discovery of the Time Camera, every human being had killed himself. Every fantasy had been destroyed, every lie exposed, every horror unearthed. There were no more mysteries, no puzzles, no hiding places from unpalatable truths. Everything that had given life meaning had been stripped away. There was simply nowhere to run. Man needs secrets, and secrets are what the Time Camera had killed forever.

One of the last humans built a huge tombstone at the graveside of mankind so that the future would know the terrible fate that had befallen the earth. He inscribed a simple message on the cold, grey headstone…

‘Here lies mankind, sadly missed. Destroyed for one reason and one reason alone – the damned camera never lies. Go stranger of the future and tell all of the universe: never say, ‘Cheese!’  

Little Red Riding Hood

You’ve never met a female assassin before, have you, detective? They’re calling me hell’s bitch in the newspapers. Have you been reading them? I suppose you’re too busy with the investigation. One of them said I was the worst serial killer in history. It makes you think, doesn’t it? I’m worse than Calamity Jane, so they say. Actually, I don’t think she killed anyone.

You’re not taking all of this in, are you? You’re looking at me and you don’t believe I could really have done these things. You’re intimidated by my accent. You know I’m far more educated than you are. And you know who my father is, how powerful he is. When they talk about ‘pillars of the establishment’, they’re talking about him. All you can see is a posh little daddy’s girl – a silver spoon princess – in her Laura Ashley frock. You think I’m incapable of violence. Men have no idea. They’re so gullible. Always taken in by appearances. Christ, they’re so tedious, so easy to manipulate. Charles was the only one who understood me – and he was a homosexual. Just my luck, eh?

You know, I don’t feel guilty in the least about shooting all those fat old men. Bit Charles and Julian…I didn’t pull the trigger, but I might as well have done. They would have succeeded if it hadn’t been for me. Great men are only ever stopped by treachery. I always hated Judas. I never thought the day would come when the Judas Kiss would be hanging from my lips. Maybe we become what we hate most. What do you think, detective? I don’t suppose you care much for philosophy.

Charles and Julian were the two brightest men in the country. They would have changed the nation. Made it great again. They knew who our real enemies, the Fifth Column that sabotages us from the inside. I remember when Charles firs told me of the plan. I didn’t believe him when he told me that all you had to do was kill one hundred men to take the control of the country. He showed me the list of names. The more I thought about it, the more I realised it was true. These one hundred men were America. For this nation to be something different it was necessary to dispose of those men. The Roman dictators used to publish lists of their political enemies. Charles loved the Romans and Greeks. I don’t think he felt comfortable in this cheap age. He thought it vulgar. He wanted to go back to a more noble time.

We got fifty of them. No one can say we weren’t good. So many fat old men. None of them understood. They couldn’t believe that the game had changed. I suppose the game had been played their way for so long that they couldn’t imagine it being played any other way.

Charles said we were unique. The world had never had to confront intellectual killers before. We assassinated powerful men not for justice, liberty, morality or any of the usual, ludicrous, pseudo-religious reasons. We killed on behalf of intelligence. We killed newspaper proprietors and editors, the producers of soap operas, sit coms, the presenters of game shows, famous chat-show hosts. We executed big business bosses. They all made their money by selling trash to people whom they’d made incapable of appreciating anything but trash. They didn’t care a damn. They’d degraded humanity. Somebody had to do something. We were the ones with the guts to act.

You’re a detective. Tell me, do you think it’s right for you to protect the interests of enemies of the mind? Do you actually think about what you’re doing? Or is it just a job?

You think I’m mad, don’t you? Maybe I am. After all, I caused the deaths of the only two people I ever loved. Isn’t that crazy? But they hurt me so much, especially Charles. They had no right to do that to me…me of all people. You know that Charles actually arranged for me to be raped? Watched the whole thing. Laughed about it. Said I needed to be shown who was the boss. I couldn’t let him live after that. Surely you see that? He taught me how to kill. You shouldn’t mistreat people when you’ve trained them to hold a gun…to be fearless about breaking the law.

When we went on our last mission, I filmed the whole thing. I turned the film over to the police. I knew I’d lose everything, spend the rest of my life in jail. But it was the only thing way to destroy Charles. Eventually there comes a time when every experience is contaminated by memories of one person, by what he did to you. Everything turns to poison. You convince yourself that you can be cured only if you rip that man from your mind. For a moment, I thought I’d freed myself of Charles. But your best plan is always your worst in disguise. I’ll never be happy without Charles. I’ll never forgive myself for what I did. It’s true what Oscar Wilde said, ‘Yet each man kills the things he loves.’

My life is over, detective. Maybe that will give you some pleasure. What does it matter whether it does or not? I sometimes think that people nowadays have their heads filled with nothing but nursery rhymes and fairytales. But nobody lives happily ever after, detective, not even you. They didn’t tell you the real story of Little Red Riding Hood.

Two of a Kind

It was either his mirror or his mind that was deceiving him. For ten years his antique mirror had steadfastly displayed one, all-too-familiar reflection. Now it was insisting on displaying two reflections, neither of which bore the vaguest resemblance to the customary image presented to Mr Smith.

Where once had stood the reflection of a respectable accountant, there now stood the reflections of two complete strangers. One was small, feeble and rather curiously attired inasmuch he was sporting a grey bowler hat, a nondescript grey suit, sensible grey shoes and, most oddly of all, a grey mask bearing an inappropriate grin. The adjacent image was of a tall, ferocious Pictish warrior painted from head to toe in blue woad. He was wearing a garland of mistletoe, but clearly wasn’t hunting for kisses. If all of this wasn’t bad enough, a voice, unmistakably African in origin, was chanting at poor Mr Smith from the mirror.

Mr Smith was the sort of punctilious accountant who could spot a discrepancy in a set of VAT returns at a hundred paces. He didn’t require a second opinion to confirm his immediate assessment that his mirror contained a mystery that required urgent resolution. He didn’t hesitate. He picked up his telephone and dialled the number of an old university friend, now an eminent Freudian psychoanalyst working out of plush offices in Harley Street. It was in fact from this same friend that he had purchased his singular mirror.

‘Hello George…Mr Smith here. Got a bit of a puzzle for you.’

‘Go ahead, old man. I hope it’s something meaty. I’m tired of listening to the dull fantasies of the great unwashed middle classes.’

‘Oh, this one will intrigue you, all right. It’s to do with that antique mirror you sold me ten years ago. Do you remember it?’

‘I certainly do. I discovered it in the middle of the Belgian Congo jungle by some drunken Scottish explorer looking for the mythical source of Scots Porridge. I recall there was some story about the mirror having been stolen from a village shaman.’

‘A shaman? Mr Smith queried.

‘You know, a witchdoctor type – someone who takes drugs, dances more frenetically than my wife doing the lambada and then communes with spirits from the Otherworld. A lot of hocus pocus if you ask me.’

‘Well, I do ask you, George, I do. My mirror is playing up a bit. It’s giving me a bit of gyp, as my old mother used to say about her hip before she went for the replacement operation. Could you toddle over here as soon as possible? I believe your witchdoctor chappie is trying to get in touch with me through the mirror.’

‘Impossible, old boy. The witchdoctor died over thirty years ago. His tribe claimed he was over five hundred years old, you know. What a lot of old rot. But I’ll pop over if it will put your mind at rest. See you soon.’

Within half an hour, George was standing in Mr Smith’s master bedroom and carefully examining the recalcitrant mirror. He asked Mr Smith to position himself in front of the mirror and state precisely what he could see and hear. Mr Smith speedily recounted the disturbing facts of the peculiar case while George nodded his head slowly and surely as if he were practising for a job as a doorknocker.

‘So then, professor, what’s your diagnosis?’ Mr Smith asked at last.

‘Well, it’s exactly as I suspected, Mr Smith,’ said George with psychoanalytical insouciance. ‘You’re barking mad. In fact, you’re quite the maddest person I have seen all year. You’re so mad that tonight you’ll be standing in your garden stark naked howling at the full moon expecting to be turned into a werewolf. You’ll feel an overwhelming desire to sing, dance, and make love to your neighbour’s wife while stamping on the feet of your boss.

‘The plain truth is that you are suffering from a malady known as Multiple Accountant Syndrome. This condition can be best explained with reference to Stevenson’s story The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. As you know, Stevenson asserted that inside every good man is an evil man struggling to get out. This is drivel, of course. What is true is that every man consists of two natures locked in one body. One nature wishes to do whatever it likes, regardless of the wishes of others. The other nature is too timid to do anything other than what society permits, Freud called these two natures the Id and the Superego. Jung called them the Shadow and Persona. Nietzsche described them as Dionysian and Apollonian.

‘In your case, you’ve spent a lifetime denying and repressing the anti-social side of yourself. You’ve been the perfect accountant: a bland, banal, innocuous, tedious little grey man permanently wearing a socially acceptable mask with a silly smile so that you’ll never offend your fellow man. Finally, your inner self, your Mr Hyde, has forced its way out of the prison you devised for it. You’ll never be the same again. You’ll be two-faced from now on.’

‘Is there no cure? Mr Smith asked.

    ‘Of course there is – you can always become a politician.’  

I Spy With My Little Eye

‘No one other than us had details of the mission,’ stated Agent Circle matter-of-factly. ‘One of us is the traitor. There’s no doubt about it.’ A pool of water was forming in the crown of his hat. Raindrops were bouncing off the sodden cloth of his trenchcoat.

Agent Triangle sneezed, causing his finger to tighten on the trigger of his pistol. Immediately, the other two tensed and steadied their grips on their firearms.

‘Maybe there’s another explanation,’ Agent Square murmured in a voice that was both unconvincing and acutely aware of that fact. ‘Spy satellites, perhaps. The other side is making big breakthroughs.’ It sounded desperate. ‘Maybe there was an elaborate surveillance operation, ‘ he went on futilely, before deciding it was wiser to shut up. He could sense he was attracting suspicion. He could actually see the guns of the other two pointing more firmly in his direction now.

‘Circle went to the toilet at the service station,’ remarked Agent Triangle abruptly. ‘That was the only time one of us left the other two.’ His voice now took on a trace of a hiss as he pointed his pistol firmly at Agent Circle.

Circle was sweating. ‘Not true,’ he whined. He looked straight at Triangle. ‘Square went for cigarettes. You yourself spent a lot of time fidgeting with a newspaper.’ His tone became more confident, more accusatory.’ You might have been concealing some sort of transmitter. Maybe you were sending a message.’

Square interrupted forcefully. ‘Yes, that’s right. There was something strange about that newspaper. I saw a man bumping into Triangle. Maybe they were doing a switch. Maybe Triangle had hidden a message inside the newspaper. ‘He sneezed again.

Agent Triangle opened fire. He got Square straight through the forehead, but he didn’t dive for safety quickly enough. Almost simultaneously, Circle opened fire. He was a marksman. Triangle slumped onto the wet concrete, a perfect hole through his heart. Blood mingled with water and streamed into a drain.

Two targets down, Circle muttered to himself as he prodded the bodies of the other two with the toe of his foot. I’ll need to request a Cleaning Service. Can’t afford to leave any trace of what happened here. I can think up some story later on. My cover hasn’t been blown.

God they were such idiots, those two. When I announced that one of us was a traitor, I immediately gained the advantage. I could see in their eyes that they trusted me. But it’s such an obvious tactic. The person who talks about traitors is always a traitor. That fool Square. How I hated him. Always sneezing. He was so weak. I nearly laughed when he came out with all that rubbish about spy satellites, big breakthroughs and elaborate surveillance operations.

Triangle was a lot sharper, I have to give him that. I can’t deny I was very worried when he mentioned my visit to the toilet at the service station. Not that I went near any toilet. I was meeting my contact to hand over details of the mission. But I recovered quickly, didn’t I? That’s why I survived. That’s why I’m special. I remembered Circle’s cigarettes and Square’s newspaper. All that fidgeting with that stupid thing. You would expect better of a seasoned spy. Square really went for him. I couldn’t believe it when he said the thing about the switch taking place with the newspaper. I knew Triangle would shoot. He didn’t have a choice.

I’m surprised one of then didn’t try to take out the other two earlier on. That was the safest way. There’s no room for sentiment in our game. So what if a good guy gets it? It’s far more important to put away the baddies. I would certainly have gone for them, but I only had that one bullet left. I couldn’t afford any mistakes. Still, it doesn’t matter any more. I’m here…and they’re gone. ‘Live and let die, ‘that’s what they say, isn’t it? It’s time I was leaving.   

A Swiss Cheese

The old man and woman shook their heads. The Swiss mountain that had reared up in front of them as unexpectedly as laughter at a funeral brought all the painful memories back. Though much higher, it was the same shape as the one back in Glencoe where they had first encountered the god. It was still hard, all this time later, to believe it actually happened.

When the god had said it was time for the games to begin, they had no idea of the catastrophe that was to descend on their community. They themselves had led him back to their village. They were the most enthusiastic builders of the great hollow Maypole that the god ordered to be erected in the centre of the village square. They had imagined the god was some kind of fertility deity. They chatted happily in the pub about what kind of saucy games he had in mind for them.

He instructed them to assemble in front of the Maypole at ten o’clock at night. They were mildly surprised that the games were to take place in the darkness, but when they saw the many bonfires dotted around the red and white striped pole, they assumed the god was going to treat them to some kind of firework display.

As the tenth hour struck, ten of the female villagers emerged from the village hall in the guises of witches. An expectant murmur greeted them.

‘We always perform the ceremonies of our god in the darkness,’ they chanted rather enigmatically. ‘Only in the dark can we become what we truly are. Our God dispenses Pharmakon, the universal drug. Pharmakon is the night visitor, the first imaginary number, the gateway to the imaginary cosmos where we are what we want to be, what we ought to be.’

The ten witches processed slowly around the towering maypole. Their fellow villagers scratched their heads and wondered what was going on. And where had the god gone? There was no sign of him even though it was his party.

No sooner had that thought occurred than a door opened in the side of the Maypole and out stepped the missing god.

‘I choose nightfall for my brutal epiphanies,’ he cried in a voice so strange it had shed all trace of humanity…like a swan shaking snow from its wings. ‘The tedious daylight with its dreary demands on us to perform unpleasant labours has been dispelled. The time is our own now. We are liberated. Enchantment has opened every door to us. The cares of the day have gone. Now we can play. We may bathe our frustrated souls in the forbidden sins of darkness.’

He raised his hands towards the heaven. Divine Pharmakon cascaded from the night’s darkest portholes. Blackness is a sea and the stars are glittering ships sailing onwards as pointlessly as the Flying Dutchman’s ghostly schooner. The crystals of the universal drug glowed like fireflies. This drug contained release from all constraints. It shattered every taboo, allowed the thinking if the unthinkable, the dreaming of the undreamable. The chains of the day had all been loosed irrevocably.

‘Inhale my freedom,’ bellowed the strange god. ‘It is only now that we can contemplate the ultimate crimes. Death awaits our command. He is our slave. I bid you do your worst with his services. He carries a lantern of secret things. He celebrates the imagination while the stolid angels of the day deal only with the obvious. The divine exists solely in the dark.

‘An execution on a night like this always involves a cruel game. Derision is invariably present. The game of death has simple rules. Each contestant must carry a sack full of rocks and run round the Maypole twenty times. Each contestant who succeeds will be rewarded with his life. Those who fail will be torn limb from limb by their fellow contestants.’

Suddenly the local minister and the leading members of the Church Council were pushed forward from the throng of curious onlookers. Each was heavily drugged. Each carried a heavy black sack over their shoulders. The sack contained the weight of life.

‘Begin!’ cried the cruel god.

Round and round. Round and round. Death rotates. The grave revolves. The execution is spinning, the wheel of destiny turning. The circle of tragedy tightens. Beginnings and endings. This journey has no terminus on this side of life.

After nineteen laps, no one had fallen. All of the contestants were within one lap of deliverance. The god stepped forward. As the village minister was passing him, he stuck out his foot. His face betrayed no expression as he tripped the hapless holy man. The minister dropped his load and sprawled headfirst onto the hard ground.

‘Valhalla has come to earth, the god declared triumphantly. ‘Even the most humble of you may revel in the infinite pleasure of the moment. Pay no heed to the future. It will never come. Only the present exists. I am the king of the now. Say all your prayers to me. Murder those who condemn me. They are worse than death. They have betrayed joy. Joy is morality. If you enjoy it, it is justified and it is good. The truth is whatever you want it to be. Go berserk, my beauties. Let the anger of the universe pulse through your veins. Kill this dog-collared clown. He has played the game and lost. The sentence must be capital. That is the law.’

The execution took place in a blur. There was only one clear moment in that blur, the moment when the truth finally dawned on the minister. Every act is one of either birth or death. There’s nothing else. Every passing moment sees and infinity of creation and an infinity of destruction, the cosmic scales of balance. It’s the dynamic that propels the universe. Death is life’s meaning, its only meaning.

He found this an oddly comforting thought to cling to as he met his own death. But there was enduring comfort for the minister. Just as he was about to close his eyes and give himself up to holy oblivion, one of the witches tore off his toes and stuffed then into her mouth. The pain was so great that the minister’s right hand, the only one he now possessed now that the other one had been pulled off by one of his attackers, reached up involuntarily towards the mask of the his torturer. He pulled the terrifying scarlet mask away from the woman’s face. It was something he immediately regretted for when he looked at her he felt that numbing horror that always accompanies the unthinkable.

As he started at the crone’s hideous face, he realised he was staring at his beloved wife of twenty years. The hag reacted by putting her hand straight through his chest, pulling out his heart and chewing it right in front of his dying eyes. The rest was darkness…

Afterwards, no one spoke about the incident. A church commission declared that the village had been temporarily taken over by Satan. The police brought no charges due to a lack of anyone willing to testify. There was no sign of the weird god who had walked down from the mountaintop on that infinitely strange day.

In the months that followed, the villagers left their cursed community in dribs and drabs, always in the quietest part of the night. At last, the village was completely deserted. It had become just a ghostly shell, a spectral cluster of rainswept stones near a haunted mountain.

No explanation for the extraordinary episode was ever forthcoming. Maybe that’s why the old couple had come to Switzerland in their attempt to forget the nightmare. Every time they ate Swiss cheese, they were confronted by all the holes that had appeared in their lives. They were reminded of something a wise old philosopher once said: Be careful not to gaze too long into a hole or you may find the hole gazing also into you.

My bride awaits. I have chosen well. She is a princess of the House of Orange. Her blood is royal. Soon it will inherit a still more important quality.

She shares the dream. She wants to wrap herself in its silken sheets, to let its velvet moonlight songs caress her weary mortal flesh. The dream is a royal orb of solid gold set in a blue sky that has never seen a troubling cloud. Midnight sea-sirens dance around it, stroking it with weightless mermaid whispers.

Tonight she will come to me. It will be the darkest hour. She will be wearing a white wedding dress. I will be in black, as ever. I look thirty years old, but I have seen thirty thousands winters.

The time has come to return to the primal blood, the blood of my fathers, of my ancient race. In blood, everything is redeemed. Purity flows along its red rivers. The truth circles overhead like an imperial eagle. I have come a long way. I have travelled far and wide, through every country on earth. How many souls have I have liberated in all those years? It has been a pleasure, but even the greatest joys are eroded by repetition.

Someone more vital must take up the torch. The passion must be reborn, restored to its original vigour.

I will kiss the bride. I will kiss her as only I know how. My kiss is like no other. It transcends. It soars into the sky like a prince’s prize falcon. It transforms. Blood is exchanged. My condition is transmitted. My lover inherits the magical blood, the blood that brings immortality. She will come to know the joy of always waking in the dark, never having to pay fealty to the tedious banality of daylight chores.

She will have a thousand ebony coffins to choose from: vampires can tolerate nothing less. She will be able to bite and feed as I have done, to know of sex of a far higher order than mortals understand. Every carnal pleasure shall be hers. She shall never die. She shall never age. Never will she have to genuflect to another human being.

Only as he watched her pulling the hammer and the stake from her honeymoon bag did Dracula remember that the ancestral name of the House of Orange was one he knew all too well.

    That name was, of course, Van Helsing… 

Yours Sincerely

One of us was crazy and I was sure it wasn’t me. Well, what would you think if someone came into your office and asked you to help him contact a man who had departed this mortal world twenty-four hours earlier? I would have thrown him out with a flea in his ear had it not been that he was a good friend of my father.

Sir Giles Carson…that was his rather impressive name, and he had only recently retired from a lucrative and prestigious position in the City. I had never taken an interest in his career because I knew he was a freemason, and freemasons are something of a bête noire with me.

He was an extraordinarily tall man with a taste for old-fashioned tweeds. He resembled an elongated Sherlock Holmes, and he was every bit as pompous. It was difficult to imagine his dabbling with cocaine though, and he didn’t look the sort who stuck a violin under his chin of an evening.

The tale he had to tell me was most inventive, I have to give him that. His closest friend, an individual by the name of Edward Fitzwilliam, had passed away in somewhat supernatural circumstances. A servant claimed he’d seen a demonic apparition hovering over Fitzwilliam’s bed on the night of his death. The bedchamber reeked of sulphur and brimstone.

Fitzwilliam was a well-known clairvoyant. Just before his death, which he claimed to have personally foreseen, he declared on TV that he would take the opportunity soon to be afforded to him to confound all of the sceptics by providing irrefutable proof of life after death. His last will and testament was where he outlined his scheme to convince even the most determined Doubting Thomas of the truth of the beyond.

That, in fact, was where I entered the equation. Fitzwilliam had named me as the person he wished to execute his spooky posthumous instructions. Well, what the hell, I was game for it. I was a scientist with an international reputation. I had exposed a host of scientific frauds, and there was no doubt in my mind that this was just another scam. I admit humiliating a corpse isn’t quite so much fun as disgracing real flesh and blood, but Fitzwilliam has asked for it and I didn’t intend to disappoint him, corpse or no corpse.

So, I went along with Sir Giles to the home of the late Edward Fitzwilliam. Sir Giles took a wax-sealed envelope from an old wall safe and portentously opened it in front of me. The first set of instructions could not have been clearer. I had to select three names, and only three names, from a list of ten thousand reputable scientists from respected universities and institutions all across the world. That was simple enough: I selected three of my best friends – veritable paragons of integrity – one from Brazil, one from Germany and one from China.

The next step was to summon the chosen three to England on an all-expenses-paid trip. Sir Giles took care of all the tedious arrangements. Thank you, Sir Giles. 

A week later, all three were safely ensconced in luxury rooms in the mansion of the dear departed…and having to suffer the tedious company of their irksome host. But the food was good, damned good.

Stage Two was to lead the three men down to the mansion’s gothic dungeons and place each man in a separate secure cell, to be tightly locked as soon as they were inside. There were no windows in the cells and the walls were exceptionally thick. I supervised the incarceration, as per instructions. That stage was easy too.

Then came the supposedly psychic part of the crazy scheme. Each of my friends was given a photograph of the deceased and told to concentrate as strenuously as possible on this item. This procedure would allegedly create a channel to the afterlife, allowing the late Edward Fitzwilliam to transmit, from beyond the grave, a message to each man.

The clever part of the scheme was this: each scientist would be presented with only a third of the overall message, and a random third at that. The message would make sense only when the three meaningless fragments were added together. The idea was that there could be no possibility of fraud if three sceptics, none of whom was known to the deceased, produced, in perfect isolation, messages with no inherent sense, whose meaning only became clear when linked with other seemingly senseless messages. I had to concede it was a devilishly cunning plan. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was now distinctly intrigued.

So, on with the test…

After one hour, all three of my friends were amazed to find themselves suddenly scribbling furiously. As predicted there appeared to be neither rhyme nor reason to the individual messages.

      They read as follows:

Number One: He who night William night For other He in Your sin unably.

Number Two: Tom may cern etern detain ward is un to to any all ity is ed ll. . . sly, an.

Number Three: Or it con avoid Ed Fitz able commun with you Sat icate cere…

I tell you, we were all very bright men, but it took us the whole night to fit the bizarre messages together. In the end, of course, the way to crack the code was a plain as the nose on your face, but there you go. When we eventually succeeded, the message brought the deepest chill to all of us, a chill such as none of us ever imagined possible. You see when we deciphered the cryptic message this is what it said…

To whom it may concern. Edward Fitzwilliam is unable to communicate with you tonight. Or any other night. For all eternity. He is unavoidably detained… in Hell.

Yours sincerely,

Satan

The Journal of a Man who kept a Journal

It seems hard to believe that I’m about to kill myself…on account of my journal of all things. It all seemed so innocent when I first began scribbling in an old exercise jotter. Who could credit where that seemingly innocuous activity has led? It had been my intention simply to dash off my thoughts about anything that grabbed my attention. I started slowly, just a few minutes a day. I didn’t realise how quickly those minutes changed to hours. Soon I was carrying my journal with me everywhere I went. My pen was permanently in my hand. It was a shiny new Papermate, a present from my girlfriend – before she dumped me for writing about her. Even though it brought my hands out in an odd allergic rash, I insisted on using that pen and that pen alone.

I listened intently to other people’s conversations, hoping to discover a little pearl I could add to my precious notebook. I watched my neighbours with the searching eye of a private investigator. I had never realised how many utterly fascinating things they did each day. What a wealth of observations they furnished. But the best of all goldmines came in the shape of my friends. I often stopped them in mid-conversation to make them repeat something I hadn’t quite managed to commit to paper. Strangely, they seemed rather displeased that I was immortalising their thoughts. I put it down to modesty on their part.

It was such fun for a while. I thought I was laying the groundwork for a modern masterpiece, a sort of Jack Kerouac odyssey through small-town England. I fondly imagined I was honing my writing skills, converting myself into a quillster extraordinaire, a veritable writing machine. I would keep going. I would not be diverted. I would never stop until I had fulfilled my mission. My journal would furnish me with a lethal arsenal of drop-dead anecdotes. Ah, how simple it all seemed.

I suppose the moment of crisis came when I was watching a video of Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Stephen King’s spooky novel The Shining. Half way through the film, Jack Nicholson was thumping away on an ancient typewriter in much the same impassioned way as I committed my thoughts to my journal. His wife – Sissy Spacek I think it was (didn’t she star in Carrie?) – looked over his shoulder at what he was typing and was appalled to see that he was typing one, and only one, sentence over and over again. He had covered about two hundred manuscript sheets with that one sentence. The sentence itself could scarcely have been more chilling, signalling nothing but wholesale mental collapse: All work and no play makes Jack as dull boy.

That was the stark sentence, every bit as brilliant as it was terrifying. It might as well have been my life sentence. I looked down at my journal and realised that while I had been watching the dramatic scene, I had been imitating Nicholson in every particular.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, my journal madly proclaimed a thousand times over. The horror that seized me when I realised what I had done was so overwhelming that I immediately had to write about it in my journal.

I suppose it was then that I appreciated the full extent of my predicament. The fact was that I simply couldn’t stop writing. Even as I thought that thought, I wrote it down. I was a hopeless case. Not only had my girlfriend left me, all my friends had deserted me too, and my neighbours had moved as far away as they could manage. Finally, my boss had summarily sacked me for writing at work, and I immediately wrote about my dismissal in the most heart wrenching terms. He had particularly objected when I started writing down my observations about him. I was gloriously uninhibited. My journal demanded nothing but the purest truth. Couldn’t the fool see that? Couldn’t he appreciate an artist at work? Philistine!

I realised that I had effectively stopped living. I was like one of those crazy Japanese tourists addicted to filming everything. Rather than simply enjoying the spectacle they had come to see, they spent all their time filming it so that they could take the captured images back to Japan with them and replay them on a lifeless Japanese TV. They had sterilised the entire episode, drained all the life from it like the worst Nosferatus.

Don’t you see, everything has become a second hand image, a recycled imitation. We live in an inescapable ersatz world. Everything is one step beyond. We have placed a screen between the real world and ourselves. All direct experience has been destroyed.

I have achieved the same result with my journal. It has turned me into a virtual person, a kind of living ghost. I can no longer feel the fresh air against my skin. All I can do now is take one last revenge on the accursed jotter that has left my life as so many commas falling off the edge of a delete key. Burning the object would be crude. No, it must be subtler. My revenge must be…literary.

Luckily, I have the ideal ammunition. Just last week I was drowning my sorrows – hold on a moment while I make a note about how dreadful a cliché that is – in a drab local pub when a group of what I can only guess were creative writers lurched in with a rather wordy bounce to their step. They were engaged in a furious debate about whether or not something that they called ‘death in the first person’ could legitimately be performed in a short story. A spectacularly silly debate it seemed to me. I immediately made a few sneering notes in my journal. Now I can put those notes to their God-ordained purpose.

I am standing on a block of ice. A noose is around my neck. I have turned the central heating up to maximum. The ice beneath my feet is melting rapidly. It shouldn’t be long before the block is unable to support me. Even as my life runs headlong into the growing puddle on the carpet, I am carefully making notes in my journal. I am providing the definite proof that a story written in the first person can indeed conclude with the protagonist’s death.

I need only take one small liberty. Before the event actually transpires, I am going to write the words that they said could never be written. Imbeciles. How wrong they were. Let the words be shouted. Let them be carved on my headstone. Just to give them extra emphasis I am going to write then in a foreign language. Ah, the moment can be delayed no longer…

Je suis mort!

Not quite a fabled city. It shuns Joseph’s Coat of Many Colours. It is a crown at the top of Jacob’s Ladder. A thousand arcs of light leap-frog over one another to touch the hem of its royal robes. It lives in a hall of mirrors, surrounded by an infinity of glinting reflections and inversions. All of its shining faces are reversals. It glitters and sparkles like diamonds in the unique light of the world’s first dawn. It becomes black when it’s tarnished. It jangles into battle like a jaunty knight, and clatters on to the dinner table like a clumsy Sancho Panza. Unopened royal letters lie in a heap on its polished surface. It’s humble in the presence of only one other. It is the Second Age. It is a country. It has to be mined like coal, but it is never thrown on to any domestic fire. Its name is kept in a delicate, miniature domestic snuff box, intricately carved with magic runes. Its number is thirty and it lies at the foot of a Gospel Hanging Tree. Not quite El Dorado, the City of Gold...not quite.

What am I?

Metabolical Diabolical

‘What did you tell them?’

‘The truth – that I was going hunting.’ Jack tried to grin, but he found it impossible. Too many people had died.

‘No one has ever hunted game like this,’ Bobby muttered, finishing the elaborate zipping-up of his ski-jacket. The temperature had fallen to thirty degrees below zero. It was the coldest winter in memory. The last time it was cold as this a meteor had stretched out its fiery hand and brushed a Siberian village off the face of the world.

‘Well, who do you think did it?’ Jack turned to the remaining member of the trio of hunters in the snow.

Russheimer responded by speaking aloud the thought all three were sharing: ‘Whatever did this killing, it wasn’t