Aesthar: Dream of Mad Gods (Part 2 of 2)

‘There’s only one thing for it.’ Aesthar concluded as the cascading bug-bombs she had just unleashed brilliantly desecrated the glowing infrastructure that stood as the last defence of the higher city’s upper echelons. ‘I’m going to have to blow up the Scottish Parliament.’

‘Wait.’ McPuck hesitated in her ear. ‘Has anybody voted on this? Aesthar, this is not in the mission log! Repeat -’

‘This is not in the mission log,’ Aesthar repeated. ‘I know.’ Tearing down through the troposphere, Aesthar set her coordinates for the crazy-pavement citadel far below that called itself Parliament. Like good astral bodyguards, her trusty memshards spun around her, negging and scattering only the most critical of wildlife. ‘If I can get inside I can find the Problem. We know it’s located in the central hub of the building. Radical explosives might be the only option.’

She drop-kicked a caterzilla that had swung too close by. The creature’s head exploded, leaving its many-segmented body to writhe wildly around her. Like a shoal of piranhas, the memshards swirled back into her vicinity and rapidly consumed the unfortunate entity’s remains, filtering its essence safely back into the unrealms. The ‘shards didn’t always have their eye on the ball; too easily distracted by the swirling lights below. Aesthar was going to have to try to keep them on a tighter leash.

‘If you can get inside.’ Now McPuck was exasperated. This would reflect badly on him if the mission went kaput. ‘How exactly do you intend to get in? The memshards dissipate at ground level. You’ll be on your own! How on Earth do you intend to breach the building’s defences? The Problem is heavily guarded!’

‘We’re not on Earth anymore,’ Aesthar countered; regrettably aware that they were, after a fashion. ‘Toto,’ she added, knowing that McPuck would almost certainly not get the reference.

‘Fucking Wizard of Oz, very fucking clever!’ You don’t get one over on me, Mistress Smarty-Pants.’

The line had failed to go over his head. Aesthar was momentarily disappointed by her wit.

An itinerant jellycloud filled her field of vision. After having to make a last-minute, split-second landing calculation, Aesthar was forced to punch the beast in the head - or at least, in what she thought probably had to be the head. Jellyclouds had no fixed form that could be easily defined - generally they were placid and docile but if unexpectedly cornered, they were quick to encircle their opponent in a rubbery grasp that often led to eventual digestion in wherever the creature’s digestive areas were.  If it was necessary to pacify them, by and large it was best to go for the beak. If you could find which area of a jellycloud contained that.

The jellycloud made a foosh of disagreement and liquefied away. Pointing herself in the opposite direction from a nearby kindle of cat-things, Aesthar readjusted her decline and sped on to her destination.

Upside-down buildings hurtled past her as she descended. Sometimes it felt as if it was the whole universe that was moving while she was fixed unmoving to the firmament - immobile. A fleck on a windowpane.

Aesthar remembered the chair: the dark room. The last time she had been fixed. The inquisitor leaning over her with the electrodes in hand. What did she know about the bombings? What did she know about the protest?

She had forgotten most of what followed after. That had been another life; a life tied up, shut down and ordered around. There would be no more of that now. Now, there was only her rules; her mission.

Now she was on street level. cityghosts dashed about, secretive and transitory. None of them appeared to be paying her much attention.

The Memshards were gone. McPuck continued to rant in her earpiece.

In front of her stood the Parliament; a confluence of weird grey edges and strange windows that seemed to stretch all around her for ever. The building made for an impressive sight up close.

‘It’s not like it is in the real world.’ Aesthar announced to McPuck, when he had finally ran out of ranting steam. ‘You can hardly even see the top. You got my visual? This is the front bit, right?

‘I can’t… dammit…’ McPuck tutted and hammered some keys. ‘It’s in defence mode. Constantly rearranging itself and recalibrating. I can’t tell.’

Aesthar watched as several high-up windows of the edifice rotated, jutted out, transformed and became turrets, which gave birth to more of the familiar gunshapes. Other protrusions that looked like further armaments were emerging from the rocky heights of the building and inclining themselves to point down at street-level. Aesthar didn’t think any of the gunshapes were specifically singling her out for attention. She was not paranoid - at least, not so far today.

McPuck was still battering away on the keys: trying to blue-sky a solution to this new smaller problem of access. ‘You’re right, though. About the appearance. That’s security architecture. The version build is like nothing I’ve ever seen before… There’s no way I can break through it on my end. I’m going to assume at this point that you have a strategy? ie, one that doesn’t involve a clusterfuck of conflict, friendly fire, and you getting permanently disincorporated on this level?’

‘Pfft. Of course. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.’ Aesthar set her appearance parameters to Tourist. Immediately she was swathed in a combination of sunglasses, ginger hair, plastic rain-mac and inappropriate tartan. Approaching one of the entrances and joining one of the queues would now be extremely easy.

She breezed past the SecuriTigers. They prowled mechanically but didn’t register her approach and passing. Other approaching entities swirled towards an emergent entrance node. She noted one of the tigers decoding a nosy spiritoid - the results were not glamorous. It reminded Aesthar of the electrodes.

Ahead of her was a vast arch emerging from a node, that resembled a doorway of some import. Above a neon sign confidently strobed the legend, ‘ACCESS TO DREAM OF MAD GODS.’

‘Okay, so I have to admit, that was not something I would have done,’ McPuck growled.

Two govstolen metalloids were monitoring the archway node. Aesthar’s mind crawled with ideas. ‘You remember that sim I was running the other day?’

She heard the sound of McPuck upending a beverage of some sort, possibly all over some important piece of communications equipment. ‘What? NO, Aesthar! You cannot run the sim! It hasn’t been tested!’

‘C’mon. Now’s as good a time as any.’

‘But… It might… it might start a WAR!’ McPuck hissed.

The metalloids of the node were scanning the code of every visiting spiritoid; checking for inflammatory ideas or insurrectionist thinking. Aesthar advanced closer to the entrance.

‘Remember your training, Aesthar, dammit! There are no such things as wars! THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A WAR!’

Aesthar reached the front of the queue. The metalloids rotated to face her. Their protuberances were all a-quiver, ready to scan.

‘WELCOME TO PARLIAMENT.’ the metalloids both droned in unison. ‘PLEASE HAVE YOUR REASONS FOR ATTENDANCE FOREMOST IN YOUR BRAINSPHERE. SCAN WILL BEGIN. THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR YOUR CONTINUED ADHERENCE TO OUR NON-TERRORISM-BASED POLICY OF ATTENDANCE.’

Ignoring McPuck’s frantic screaming in her ear about beta version testing, Aesthar activated the first of her three planned simulations. Almost immediately, the external structure of the parliament building began to shift and break up into confusing shapes that began to float away into the sky.

‘Hello.’ Aesthar politely said to the metalloids: who by now had a look of extreme confusion drifting across their normally-inexpressive grilles. ‘I appear to be lost. Can you direct me to the Problem please?’

‘ALARUM. A POLITICAL FLASHPOINT EVENT HAS BEEN TRACED TO YOU. PLEASE EXPLAIN FLOATING-AWAY OF PARLIAMENT BUILDING BEFORE WE DISINHERIT YOU.’

‘Oh,’ Aesthar said, as surprising numbers of tartan-clad spiritoids began to appear and jostle up alongside her - quickly beginning to overload the metalloids’ motion-detection sensors. ‘That’s just a little program I like to call Reverse Tetriscide? It completely unlocks and reverses access to politically-sensitive astral edifices. Appears to be working perfectly, don’t you think?’

‘EXPLAIN,’ the metalloids stated, sounding faintly distressed. ‘EXPLAIN UNEXPECTED PROFLIGACY OF SPIRITOIDS OR BE DISINHERITED.’ 

‘That would be something else I like to call The August Offensive,’ Aesthar grinned at the baffled robots. ‘I sourced it from this town’s real-world equivalent? It’s designed to simulate the potential overpopulation and overloading of any given built-up astral environment - It’s based on an arts festival, but you wouldn’t know what one of them was. Soon an infinitely-increasing number of foreign spiritoids will overrun the area, destroy your parliament and release the Problem. It was the Problem I came for, if you want to note that on your records? There’s not really anything you can do about it. Sorry.’

‘YOU WILL BE… PREVENTED. FROM DOING THIS,’ one of the metalloids declared, before being knocked down and trampled underfoot by a number of paper-distributing and singing spiritoids.

Aesthar felt the world begin to tremble. She produced some pieces of holocard from her hypothetical pocket and offered them to further newly-arrived and panicking metalloids, who were already getting dragged away by ghostly revellers.

‘Would you like a flyer for my show? She asked: more to irritate McPuck than for any other reason. ‘It’s called, “Blow up the outside world.” It’s just starting now! You’d better prepare yourself. The reviews say it’s an explosive experience.’

School Dinners

Och its offay frightenin. ah cannae believe how big they forks are, aw stabbin doon at us. the forks an the knives an the spoons aw cutting an choppin oor bodies up intae bits. Ah hear it yisee, cos we’ve aw got the throughspeak. It’s whit we are here, in the hall.

Ah wis hearin fae the spicy pakora oan the aer side. cheers whenivir wan ae thum smashes a plate. Chipped broon wooden trays were sayin tae plates, “dinnae leave me” an feelin the scrape, the give, the centre fallin oot. Then air, then smash, then aw ay thum shoutin, an laughin at wan ay oor lot dyin. Bits skiddin an disappearin under the dark places. the lunchboxes bein clicked open, shut. Polite hubbub ay noise.  

Thur voices are offay weird. They dinnae speak like us: jist wan tae wan. Getting allowed in wan at a time by yon “prefects.” hierarchies already in place.

Wan ay them goat stung by a wasp: wis aw screamin an cryin. Noo they ken jist a wee bit ay how it feels. Wasp wis laughin, telt us aw aboot it.

Custard is screamin. solidifying under the lights denied its natural consistency. vomitous melt, sufferin. Spooned intae the bowls which dinnae like it either. Then awaw tae the other place. Wi thum.

Ye sense the the fear ae thum also the nervousness aboot goin intae the hall when the hall is nearly empty and the food is nearly all dead. Nae sounds apart fae bubblin an gurgling. Meat lettin oot juices. Last gasps ay intelligence. Some ae the meats remember their last times as they die. Huvvin the legs, like thum.

Tryin tae avoid each other. the wans they dinnae like, the wans they dinnae trust. Some ay them will kill each other. Chlorine in the baths, that comes tae us.

Teachers the “high-up heid yins” aw cordoned oaf at thur ain tables. Click-clack ay the cutlery. Swallow-slurp. Noise noise.

Aw the trapped smell, smell ay evvrythin. Smell ay us livin an dying. Smell ae plastic and nae air. Wannae ken whit that is: smell ay fear. Oor journey intae afterlife. Food intae trash. Or whitivver comes next.

Steam behind the hot plate, curtain ae oor origin. The milkshakes shakin in thur cups. Squeaky noise ay thur feets oan the floor. Caramel shortbread says thir’s no much left. cracked chocolate an bleeding caramel, stuck tae thur mouths, goin doon intae the belly where we aw begin tae begin again.

Tuna sangwitches in wan ay the “computer rooms.” The report wis not good. The enemy wis playin a game where wee animals chucked themselves oaf a cliff. Death aw the way.

Some ay them go roond the corner shop where they say, dae ye want red sauce or broon sauce. Both ur the same.

If ye were born tae die… then ye dinnae huv tae be afraid ay dyin.

But we ur. we ur.

A Channeling

I started collecting secrets when I was just six years old.

Some said I was a strange child back then. Those were the words the headmaster muttered to my parents while I waited in the next room; spoken with a certain exasperation that even my small brain could comprehend.

I told everyone in the class I wasn’t human. I was often more exasperated with them than they were with me. For not understanding.

I never slept well at night.

In my dreams, I sensed the vast unknowable thing at the edge of space.

I could see inside it. See its never-ending deserted cities: its airless transport routes. Hear its distant rumbling noise in my ears as I slumbered, its engines still operational. Out there inbetween systems where only darkness lived, it moved. Inexorably; terribly. For years I supposed it was just some deep-seated Freudian nightmare. And deep in its icy, labyrinthine heart, the coffins. The infinite dead.

When I was eight, I went guising. Everyone else called it trick-or-treating but Granny called it guising. This word made more sense when I thought about it, cos you were wearing a disguise.

Granny took me round the doors. I wore an oversized long brown coat and the mask of a monster with one eye. That evening I caught my own reflection in a mirror and was momentarily terrified of that one, all-seeing eye.

When I was thirteen, I saw the school bully picking on another girl. A girl who was much less popular than me. I decided it was only right that I redress the balance. A day or so later, I found the bully in the playground.

I’d never meant to hurt her badly. She lost an eye. Years later other kids would call her Cyclops and trip her up in the corridor. I was never blamed. Children can be cruel.

I was probably four when I first saw the moonlit people. It’s hard to remember; the memory is sketchy around that age. They would arrive gaily by night and silently dance around, while showing me the bedroom cinema - pictures of the past and future flickering on my wall at 3am like old projected cinefilm.

They showed me final times. The ends of the earth. I felt the planet’s death throes. Witnessed plains burning - the slaughter of dissidents: their bloodied corpses heaped in market squares. All this, as the moonlit people danced for me. Those twilit hours - years compressed into sleeping decades gone - were my education. My destiny.

The last time came when I was 18. Mum had been in one of her moods and I hadn’t been much better. I don’t blame her for that. You are who you are. You can’t change.

I went up the hillside, away from the village. I did used to love it up there. Especially when it was cold. I used to like it when the wind ripped through your clothes: an elemental force. I’d go up there in silence.

Stumbling over rocks, I saw one. In the flesh. It danced for me. Lithe and beautiful, with its wings, supple thighs and pale, smooth shoulders.

It reminded me of a girlfriend I had known. Her innocence and beauty presented a contradiction to the world. It had been necessary to end her. Her nose red after a few beers. I punched her hard until it was so very red. Her twisted face looked as if it might never smile again; behind all the blood. I never saw her again after that night. Somehow, I took satisfaction from this. I had accomplished something small and awful; but important. Permanent.

Now, years on, I found this thing’s dance upsetting. And I was so full of the anger. My mummy saying through the wall, ‘you’ll never amount to nothing’ so many times. I saw the same in that dirty little beast.

I had to be tough. I reached for the rock.

I can’t apologize. I felt ecstatic relief as I smashed it down. If I saw daddy long legs, I did the same thing. Uglies.

I buried it in the hillside. I made it a cardboard coffin. Then I forgot. Forgetting is the worst thing you can do.

This was the final part of the equation. The hatespell carried out. The trap they had set for me all those years ago.  

I forgot my mother’s screams as daddy hit her. As a little kid I had rationalized it - thought it was because mummy was stressed out and she had to be upset at night to feel better in the morning. The empty bottles, the ashtrays. Always better and smiling. I would open the windows but she wouldn’t like that. Always too drafty. Too cold. Don’t let the chill in, she’d say.

I never minded the draft. Never felt cold.

When daddy died the social workers had said it was the drugs but they never wanted to talk about how he lost the eye on that final night. Nobody seemed to know.

My life is ashes now. My heritage, the void of space I’ll return to when it’s over.

I close my eyes and I see the skeletons. See them dissolving from their tombs: in stellar transit, growing flesh. On this night when the moon’s light lies on the hillside, the secret door opens. The lunar door. And they are free to return.

Now they will be entering the houses. Taking the youngest with their charred talons: burning the houses with their touch. Bringing the tranquility of annihilation. All because I let them. Because I gave them what they needed. A channeling.

I realize it was not my face staring back, on that long-disguised night. That was the face of the truly marked. Chosen, to be erased, by the secrets I collected for them.

Touched by a dark urge; resurrected then buried in time. My endless death and recycling.

Lost; in the obsidian mirror of the machine.

Aesthar: A Head Of The City (Part 1 of 2)

Aesthar closed her eyes and fell headlong. Into the endless, coruscating, circling dream of the city. 

GOSPEL - A short story

And now, some bizarre allegorical (bizarregorical?) science fiction for y'all. Not sure if this piece is entirely scrutable, I shall be revisiting it soon and chances are it'll only get longer and more convoluted. Nevertheless... here is what is so far.

GOSPEL

There are three stories that unmake the world before it begins. These stories concern the individuals Farsten Hand, The Icon of the Lady who Has Fallen To the Sea, and Arclord Redshift. Separately and together, they make decisions that ruin and rebuild their age. Their paths are divergent but not mutually exclusive. Endings are found; burned into existence in the heat of exchange. The first is now.

The humagram stands mute and lost in the plaza. This happens on the first day. Her story, as of yet, is untold; yet in its untelling, understandings shall be gleaned.
A voice was raised in the manner of a telling. ‘The Icon of the Woman Fallen to the Sea,’ the voice announced, ‘is one of many in the central agrigrounds of Commuversity 1 that illustrate the woes and follies of days gone by. To many contemplating passers-by, the slowly active statue looks like a relic of the bygone age she is intended to represent; crudely, if appealingly, delineated by technology that is now almost quaint in its ancientness.’
Prime Disseminator Overhead Fryt - a master elucidator in his spare time, which was mostly spent learning young Deciders - was holding forth on the tale of the lady whose story was not to be told properly this afternoon; or ever. ‘Here she stands,’ he continued, ‘festooned as she is in the likenesses of the unintelligently fetid yet intellect-hungry mutt-weeds that signify loss of control and a resultant death by drowning. These women were the Cylryths: courtesans of the waterbearers who sailed off into the undecided regions back in the maritime period. That era was one of great discovery, yet also one of terror, suppression and the forced shackling and crushing of the youngest of minds. In losing their women to the mutt-weeds, the waterbearers of the maritime age learned a valuable lesson that led directly to great advancements in science. Now, can anyone here tell me what that lesson was?’
Zere’en Best Lucky, the shyest yet brightest of all the new young Deciders, raised a slight gloved hand. ‘Do not screw with that which can screw back at you. Sir.’
‘This is the more common wording,’ Prime Disseminator Fryt said, after Best Lucky had prettily blushed and an indulgent chuckle had sounded among the group. ’We must of course have our rebeller maxims. From the oldtongue, the expression is more readily translatable as, “Do not run directly into the arms of that which possesses the arms to swallow you whole.” ’
Indeed, the small group of potential implantees in the plaza thought the statue had something of an odd way about it. As it indeed did have.
Prime Disseminator Fryt went on to detail the imagined history. We here shall listen to other voices.
Originally crafted from Redyum - a material first forged in the prime days and one receptive at the molecular level to custom nanolight treatement that allowed for full humagramattical capability - The Icon of the Woman Fallen to the Sea now possessed a subtly programmed yet distinctly limited ability to perform for any attendant audience. The artelligence encoded in humagram subroutines allowed for a degree of dramatic representation; whereby The Icon of the Woman Fallen to the Sea would act out the very motions of her own undoing. Her surrender to the lulling cries of the mutt-weeds: and her transformation from lusty siren to cruel, cold suicide as she acted out the throttling of herself after murdering her man. Taken by the slithering brainwash of the ascendant mutt-weeds and with her position as a bringer of passion compromised, the Woman Fallen to the Sea would play out her returning to her man at port - her sexual potency becoming poison; her kisses reshaped by the creeping touch of death.
‘Now she stands with arms outstretched. A look of desperate longing etched into her metallic face which seldom changes. Furious and uncouth; as if challenging the very stars to stand down.’
These stars would concede; but not for her.

It is here we take a different path. This tale does not refer exclusively to the Icon of the Woman Fallen to the Sea, yet her presence within the boundaries of it betrays her importance in the telling. This happens on the second day.

So, then. In the origin days, there was Arclord Redshift. The people of this planet knew of an even older time than that of the waters and the weeds; one not so commonly explored on comfortable field-trips such as the one led on this afternoon by Prime Disseminator Fryt.
This time unremembered was referred to as the Redshift Eternity - since, at some point, it must have been presupposed that the period was not expected to ever end.
But returning to the point. The ruler of this cycle was his holiest typeform incarnate, Prime Arclord Redshift.
It was more often said than written that Prime Arclord Redshift was a being possessed of the means to push his way through the very star curtain itself. Indeed, certain shamans suggested in their orations that the Arclord himself might have come from the other side of that untold-of barrier. This was the dread divide that even the mystics could not reach beyond; for fear of discovering the ultimate truth about the mythical clockworkers, or the supposed holes in the end of eternity - suspecting any knowledge of the curtain’s invisible mechanisms would automatically prevent everything the shamans pretended to know from ever having existed.
In truth, and as a feted architect of these times, Arclord Redshift was merely bigger than the universe itself and capable of shrinking himself down to a sensible size. Which effectively meant, at least in this frame of reference, that he could pretty much do whatever he wanted. Arclord Redshift had of course never seen beyond the world-curtain and certainly did not possess any special ways or means; nor had he held any obtuse extratemporal understandings of the nature of creation.
It was also said that these rumours about his size had been greatly exaggerated. It was said - mainly announced by the perpetually addled Penetrator Crystaltz Touchnail of the Fourth Tribe of the Term Lossless - that the Lord Redshift had been making it up and was in fact really much smaller than the universe itself - and only knew how to make himself big enough to pass as a God; the likes of which had not been spotted by anyone in the wider firmament for a good long while. It had always been said that the Gods were giants; so by dint of this, it transpired to all that Arclord Redshift was and could only be the one and only God. No better options had yet presented themselves; after all.
So the illusion went unchecked for a very long period, as Arclord Redshift set about conquering roughly ninety-three percent of the spiral without anyone ever stopping to challenge him on account of his mostly confusing size. After many aeons spent dominating and eliminating roughly seven thousand extant species in the spiral, the Lord Redshift became convinced of one thing.
This world’s humanoids were the enemy. This world’s humanoids were the weak and the foolish.
This happened on the third day. Despite only being a humanoid himself, Arclord Redshift knew that this world’s humanoids were not to be trusted under any set of circumstances. Henceforth, they were to be eradicated.
Lord Redshift’s wife was only human. The Arclady Zenethyst Jenesister had been born on a small and undistinguished satellite world which the Lord Redshift had detonated in the early stages of the expansion. While it was expressly stated in the low Gospels that not even the long stretch of eternity stood a chance of damaging the near-perfection of the Arclady’s glittering, hologlyphic condition, Arclord Redshift soon made the arguably harsh decision - after tiring of her constant liberalism - to encase her forever in a block of unmelt. It seemed to him to be the proper thing to do; she had, after all, been attempting to save the universe from the shackles of his all-exacting reign for some years. It was long suspected by many that the febrile condition of the Arclady’s mind and the sabotaging thought-blocks that were placed into it by the Arclord’s psychions eventually drove her into the cold finality of cell-disintegration; although this aspect of the story was excised from the prime arc-spool some time after the now-ruling ur-patriarkism had eradicated every female in the spiral and replaced them with mass-produced fleshfeelers. These were, by any stretch, far easier to put up with.

It transpired then that the better civilized parts of a thousand systems were utterly destroyed by the exhortations of the Arclord‘s expansion. This happened on the fourth day.
Monuments even stand to this today; and these are often seen by the students in Commuversity 1’s central agrigrounds.
There is a humagram of the Arclord Redshift. He eventually died of a degenerative condition brought about as a direct consequence of his constantly trying to make himself appear larger than he actually was. It turned out that in all actuality the Arclord really was quite small - and the eventual scope of his actions only served to confirm this to everyone still alive in that age, and contributed to the playing-out of the ignoble nature of his final days.
His humagram shows him as a hero. Such as he was.

It is here we take another path.
On a different but not utterly dissimilar planet in this same spiral, in this same arc-spool of Commuversity 1, Farsten Hand takes a moment out of the daily slednav from his ap to the processing centre to go stand by the fountain near the corresponding humagram that represents that which he desires the most.
Freedom. This is what happens on the fifth day.
This humagram - like its corresponding doppelganger in Commuversity 1’s plaza - is of Arclord Redshift; performing courageous deeds and saving all, in his lost age of reason. Farsten Hand gazes up and it and wonders if the Lord Redshift was truly misguided in his desire to bring order to the spiral. Yet, after a moment’s calm contemplation, Farsten suspects no; the Arclord was truly pure in his intentions.
Farsten is a processor. He is a processor only because this is a condition of the world and the class he was born into. Farsten’s horizons are all in binary; the ones and zeroes that control the flow of his information and understanding. When he closes his eyes at shiftclose, only these runes lull him deeper into his torpor; filling him with the comfort of knowing who is signifier and who is signified. Appearing and disappear to him: the phantoms in digital fog.
After the first eighteen years, Farsten Hand is losing the will to live. He has read of the waterbearers who carried succour to the newer worlds and of the undoing of their womenfolk at the tentacles of the mutt-weeds. This has led to Farsten coming to the conclusion that the womantypes are to blame for everything that went wrong in the world; and everything wrong in his world. All his controllers in the processing centre are womantypes, and none of them understand the way the world is supposed to be.
They are not educated.
They know not of the Redshift Eternity. A glorious time of peace and progress.
A time without womantypes.
He wishes the mutt-weeds had not gone extinct.

Farsten Hand continues to pay homage to the idol of Arclord Redshift. There is a nearby humagram of a Woman who once Fell to a Sea, but this barely registers in Farsten’s eyes.
In his head, Farsten hears a voice. It is not a real voice, but it is a voice that Farsten hears nevertheless.
Arclord Redshift says to Farsten Hand, kill your idols.
Arclord Redshift says, liars tell the best truths.
Arclord Redshift says, everything that is broken cannot be unbroken.
The Lord Redshift is dead and cannot speak yet Farsten hears his voice.
The Icon of a Woman who Once Fell to a Sea speaks also, but Farsten does not listen to her. Farsten Hand now listens only to Arclord Redshift.
Farsten smiles. He feels the hands of history upon his shoulders.

On the sixth day, Farsten Hand goes to the arma centre. There he creds out six full rotats worth to a corrupt viser for a turn’s access to one of their graymat colliders. In the age of the understood, a great Zeer of the Firstking’s call discovered in his labs through careful testing and experimentation with life’s great particles that all of shiftcreation - as the Zeers had come to acknowledge it - was made up of the elusive substance that became known as graymat. Using the imagetwist wetware he stole from a worklab, Farsten convinces the viser he is not only a respected Zeer, but one with the funds to prove it. The viser has no further questions and leaves Farsten alone with the collider.
On the seventh day, Farsten Hand switches on the graymat collider; a device that was only ever expected to be used in times of improbable turmoil; times never forecasted by the throughthinkers to be close any turn soon.
On the eighth day, eighty thousand and two citadels on worlds in the spiral net were stripped of the life that had come to define their positions in the universe.
Every thread of intelligent thought is reduced in an instant to paste. Not just the womantypes. This event was spoken of in latter days as the uncouth moment, or the gray day.
Years later, it is in the memory of Fasten Hand that the statues were erected.
Humagrams had gone out of fashion by this point. Like so many things. In every zodia in this world, a reminder of He Who Is Henceforth Without Name; the last taker of life; the final uncreator who dared to take on creation and was, in his folly, uncreated. In killing reason, He Who Is Henceforth Without Name became a martyr to unreason.
By removing something’s name, you devoid it of its power. And thus reason was returned to creation. This happened on the first day; as it always did.

I put a curse on you, the lost voice of Arclord Redshift said. You are to be kept, to be held; to be loved, to never be let go. This was all a game you fell for. The true losers are those who do as I think and not as I know. You must learn to understand what I did not.

The people of the plaza thought the statue had a odd way about it. Uncouth; as if challenging the very stars to stand down.
Zere’en Best Lucky, the cleverest of the group by far, smiled and laughed; getting it before all the others. Rather than raise her hand to ask to interject, she spoke clearly: interrupting Disseminator Fryt‘s dry treatise in mid-flow.
‘This statue says,’ Best Lucky announced, ‘I was here once, and I got it all wrong. Please do not as I do, instead learn from my example.’
Prime Disseminator Overhead Fryt halted in his oration. For a moment, he looked genuinely surprised - as if no-one had ever challenged the validity of his authority before. Above him, the blackened visage of He Who Is Henceforth Without Name stared down; not animated, or filled with answers.
‘Well,’ Disseminator Fryte said ‘I think, perhaps, young Zere’en may be on to something. She has broken through the stone, if you will.’

In other places, for Farsten Hand there was to be no more breaking-though. Only stillness in perpetuity; an aeon to consider the gravity of his misdeed. In the cold prison of the entropic void that encased his still-living form, Farsten Hand dwelled on only one thought.
This world’s humanoids are not to be trusted. In their haste they created love. Henceforth, they are forever damned.
Days begin anew; the prime arc-spool is often reset.
New stories can be told. This is one of them.
In her model of eternity, the Icon of the Woman who Never Really Fell to the Sea has but one thought.
Do not run directly into the arms of that which possesses the arms to swallow you whole. This is only one lesson. There are more.

TRAINSONG - A short story

Another short story then. This one's not quite as weird as the other ones. But it's still weird. It also won a prize! Ken Macleod (proper actual SF writer) thought it was 'perfectly decent' if I recall his wording. Damning with faint praise and all that... Like some of the events of the tale, this one may still be 'in transit.' It was written to a wordcount and perhaps could benefit from either an extension or a pruning... you decide.

TRAINSONG

Ariadne glanced irritated at her mobile. The time was 11:37 PM.
The night was pushing her down. Fucking hell. Ten minutes. Wasn’t supposed to be. Still time, though.
She hurried down the steps into the drear alcove of the station. The main forecourt was as cold as ever. The only people around were a faintly confused looking couple, weighed down by enormous backpacks. They were squinting up at the time-display screen with looks of mild confusion on their faces. As Ari looked over at them their countenances took on a sheen of crestfallen disappointment. She heard raised voices; probably Polish, but God all those Eastern European accents sounded the same. She wasn’t clever enough to say for sure. She had always been one for picking up on other peoples’ emotions; although this wasn’t something which normally did Ari any favours. She usually tried to avoid it.
Like that girl at work. The unspellable name. Ari hadn’t had any idea what she had been talking about, in English or Polish, so everyone had ignored her. This had made Ari cry one night. It had been so very frustrating.
Said it was about the rent. Gave him the fucking rent. That wasn’t the fucking issue.
They’re lost, she thought with a mild upset that flitted in and out of her heart in a few passing seconds; pushed aside by other concerns. Go and tell them but come on. Ten minutes.
The possibly Polish people turned and started to head for the ticket barriers. Ari strode in the same direction, fumbling in her pocket for a ticket; hoping one was there.

The carriage was empty and all the lights were out. This seemed a little weird to Ari; at this time of night, things were always activated and there was usually at least a handful of people besides herself. Just last week the conductor had had that business with the drunk woman who had been shouting incoherent insults: Ari had been at the other end of the carriage. Thank fuck. You really don’t want to be dealing with lunatics.
He’s at home though
She picked a window seat facing a table and slumped down. This bit always filled Ari with a warm sense of relief that she had made it - even though it had been six years of this bloody commuting and she had never been late or missed her train. Was this why she had that recurring dream about running into the station to realise her train had left hours ago?
Perhaps. Self-psychology was not her strong suit.
His though. Clever clever.
After a few moments the carriage shuddered. The lights flashed on and the route display on the roof began rolling LED messages. There was life after all.
More minutes passed. Nobody else came into the carriage.
Ari looked idly around her, seeing an abandoned coffee cup and sandwich carton on the opposite aisle. People coming and going.
The train finally started up. Ari went to search around for her iPod but sure that it was lost in the cavernous depths of her bag, gave up with a half-arsed pfth of exasperation. Divorced from the usual white noise of commuter chatter, the somnambulant rumbling of the train bordered on soothing.
Might get to sleep.
Outside of the window, distant yellow lights began to careen past her. Flying by so fast.
More moments passed. Ari’s head began to nod.
No sleep tonight. He’ll be on about it. Why don’t you like it when I talk to you?
Would you rather
rant rant. stop listening after the fourth philosophical
do you want me to touch you i mean as if fucking hell
The train shuddered to a stop. Ari’s head jerked back up.
She was aware of a voice speaking quietly behind her. A low mumble.
Someone else’s come through. Doesn’t matter.
Look at the time he keeps saying. Why do you have to stay out all night
Jason’s gorgeous though. He so would
Actually meant it. Five years. Five years just gone snap like that gone
There was no point in trying to hold it off. Ari felt the floodgates pending.
Not here. Someone in the carriage. Ticketman’ll come, I’ll look a fucking mess. Look a mess anyway
A few tears hit her lap. The weight began pushing up.
The throat was always the first to go. Had anyone been sat in front of Ari, they would have seen her composure going; the shoulders already starting to tremble.
why am I so angry all the time
why won’t he just do it I’ve had enough too much
‘Of course,’ the voice in the seat behind her said, louder and clear now, ‘this is a side-effect. We are but side effects of one another.’
Ari swallowed hard and closed her eyes. This’ll go this’ll stop, she thought. Not this time. Not the knife tonight. Know it's wrong
‘An education forged in pain. Such things can be bypassed. But never overlooked.’
Ari opened her eyes. A shock hit her; forcing the blackened feelings clean out of her mind.
The owner of the voice had moved. He now sat in front of her on the other side of the table.
‘We have seven minutes,’ he said to her, as Ari struggled to take in his bizarre appearance, ‘to save the world from who you are. This is nearly the Madonna song, no?’
The man’s accent was almost the same as that girl at work; but surely not. He was tall; slim yet muscular: shaped like a dancer, and inexplicably dressed in what appeared to be an extremely close-fitting one piece outfit, the surface of which was a dull, unreflective silver.
His features were aquiline; angular. His white hair was close-cut. His mouth twitched the tiniest hint of a smile at her: as if he had never smiled before and was trying to figure out how to start. The stranger’s eyes glinted: something that stuck Ari as placing him somewhere between sinister menace and unending compassion.
Stuntman, Ari thought, her brain battling to hold onto something concrete and explanatory: circus
‘Agnieszka,’ the silver man said. ‘There is such a thin line between love and hate. My name is also different, so I will not tell of it.’
Ari felt her stomach sinking and then turning over. She suddenly needed the toilet.
Details. Saskia thought she got raped. Changed her mind. Remember. Face. Databases
‘What’s your name?’ Ari said in a very small voice; poorly-researched defence strategies scattering through her mind.
‘You could call me anything,’ the silver man said. ‘What I am does not come into play here. But the name is key. Yours come from a variety of sources. Very holy: utterly pure. These are expressions you could read. A weaver; Queen of snakes: Mistress of the spider. Through powers of your own you helped him escape from the labyrinth. These things in legends. We are what our names make us. We become them, and they become us. Agents of change.’
The man held out his arm and spread his palm. The ambient lights of the train seemed to dim slightly.
‘All can change but some must first acknowledge. Here.’
In the air above the man’s outstretched hand a blue globe of light about the size of a football formed. Ari found herself gazing into its fluttering texture, wondering why the object’s apparent brightness was not dazzling her; but instead drawing her in.
‘The book of lies,’ the man said. ‘Now look inside.’
And then Ari was flying again. Continents moved beneath her.
She had arrived inside a room. No, not a room - this was too large to be a room.
Before anything else, Ari noticed the thin, rubbery cable that seemed to extend from somewhere around her midriff. Although still fully clothed, Ari got the overwhelming sense that this was her umbilical cord.
A sudden hot flash of panic hit her. She was floating; hanging suspended inside a wide vertical tunnel that extended upwards for a seeming infinitude of miles. It was coolly lit from on high by the distantly bright lights of some far-off surface Ari was sure she would never glimpse in the dim lights of this lifetime. All around her and as far as she could see on the inside surface of the strange edifice were small doors about the size of car doors.
Ari couldn’t see where the ground was. The umbilicus stretched off into nowhere. She felt further panic welling.
Please do not be alarmed, the now-familiar voice echoed in her head: The connective tissue. A thread that binds worlds.
Ari drifted close to the nearest circular door. It appeared to be made out of burnished wood and was pitted and marked in some places; as if worn down over ages.
On the door was a small piece of paper. It appeared to have been affixed with sticky tape. On it was written her name.
She checked the door next to it. This also held her name.
The machine and the mechanism. The nucleus in the cytoplasm.
The door on the other side featured messages in a further indecipherable language. Had she been properly asleep, Ari would have instantly recognized one as Jewish Middle Babylonian Aramaic; the other door marked out in post-flood Pangaean Atlantean would also have been clear. At least; clearer than most things.


We are entering the protoplasmic shift, the shining man said, as Ari hung suspended in time. Certain decisions have been made and others remain. Your future is a cloud. Continents still drift outward; one day they will all meet again. The world is a bubble. Will it be this door or the next?
Ari thought then of Riz. Manners maketh a man. Sweetness and light.
And the other hand; Jase - Companion of the dark. Reliably unreliable. Summed up in one word.
He was something. Without him, the knife. With him, the union of souls.
Ari opened the first door. Inside was a small cupboard area. In its centre was a ring made of paper. Ari reached out and touched it.
She fell back inestimable miles. The gulf between cold stars swallowed her like a friend: while the sullen shiny blacks and incomparable colours of infinite lives lived so far away and yet closer than knowledge said hello, then goodbye again, for ever.

Ari heard the tinny beep of the old watch which always lay for security purposes in the bottom of her bag. Pulled back to relative normalcy and oddly compelled to look for it, Ari reached in and raked around.
Her hand alighted on something unfamiliar. Something round. She pulled it out.
‘This is Agnieszka’s wedding ring. A name so often forgotten.’
Ari realised her mouth was hanging open but did little to rectify the situation other than move her lips and tongue to form words.
‘She told me… she’d lost it. At reception. I… wasn’t really listening…’
‘It is not real gold. But imbued with all that is needed. Return it to her.
this will give you something to talk about. Perhaps for weeks.’
The man stood up; his mouth finally resolving itself into a smile. ‘Look at the time. Morning. Another world beginning without compunction. This is the trainsong; on and on. Getting off but always back on again. Arriving unleashed to begin again.’
A final though drifted into Ari’s head as she roused herself and headed for the door.
All of this is over now.
Never having faltered in its journey, the train came to a halt. Ari pressed the button and the door opened.
For the first time in what felt like a very long while, Ariadne Somerville knew exactly where she was headed. For once, this was quite enough.

DAYS OF CONJURATION - A short story

And now, another properly finished story. Although it's debatable as to whether you can actually call this one a story. Who cares though, it won a short story competition so it must be!

DAYS OF CONJURATION

The club is closing. The club closed hours ago. The club is just opening.

Walking back from the club. Another cold morning. Most of them are cold.
One day is dead now. As it passes, another springs gasping into life.
The crossing point is 12:33. This is sometimes the time but not always.

This is Sunderland, in the last century. You are out of place now. By the river, under the bridge; but you will be alright. The sailors are watching over you.
Here on the campus walkway, abnormally-sized nuts and bolts regard you with an artisan’s dismissal. They were here before you. Who are you to judge them, to even try and comprehend the thoughts and feelings of the people who created them, their uncanny forms hewn out of human struggle, out of hope, out of love?
Next to the nuts and bolts, a twisting abstract sculpture of monuments long since gone bends itself into the sky and remembers all that was.

You have no idea what happened here.

Far from the riverside, the city’s unremarkable lights paint cryptic yet comforting messages; reaching across to embrace. Here we are, they say; here we were and here we will be again.

She’s standing next to you and she’s talking about that boyfriend, the one from Scotland. The one who had to go away.
And it looked like it was going to happen for a very long time. You never know what’s going to happen, she says, brightening against the funereal weather with the lightest of smiles. You really do never know. Everything could change and you could be left standing with nothing.
The statue on the walkway of sailors and ships and industry collapsed and moved away just sits and reaches. This night, it has nothing to say.

Me and me nan, another girl says, somewhere else. My nan died and we were really close. She’s leaning in close since the music is so loud, and you feel time slipping away: a subtle loss of the self, annihilated by the music, folded out of existence by the stains in the carpet. There is writing on the table. The words say; get out now.

Disappearing like temporary internet files. This folder is empty. This file has either been moved or deleted. We’re sorry it didn’t work out.

A Blue screen event. Shut down like a kick in the teeth. The year is 1997.
That man could take over the world. That man could take the world down.
The hungry caterpillar drank all the oil in the soil. We stand now, symbolic in your hyperbolic shadow. We are free at last but we do not know it; having been swept away in tides of false rhetoric and duplicitous doubletalk.

I start wars yet break hearts. Who am I?

York. The pamphlet directs you to the statue of Mars, the Roman God of War. He stands untouched by spectacle next to some plaques and a content museum guard with a laminated badge.
Mars is not in the mood for conversation this morning; he has grown tired of advertising the fashions of lost art and chocolate bars. He remembers a time when destruction was the norm. He’s just mad because someone bashed his nose off aeons ago, and now he’s lost face. No pun intended.
Those were simpler days, of course. March was the colour red. Now it’s just a month like any other; except when people are born, and die.
They still fight in March. Just like any other.

Of all the deities, many of these faces have stared at you across the years. Some of them were loving, some condemning; but when night finally came to protect you, most of them became vast and moon-like and faraway and could not help you anymore.
Some were left alone. When in a room surrounded by others, the food contained more obvious flavours; hints of recipes concocted to forge understandings between those who could not speak. The lady and the tramp.

If we stand at the crossroads and the devil asks us who has the best tunes, what is our answer?

The year is 2002. This morning she wears your name even if she has been sleeping with someone else. Her eyes speak truth but her body lies.
The dishes just keep coming. They have little or no concern for human thought or feeling. They know that one day they will not be here.
Sarah brings you a drink. She is from south Africa and is beautiful, kind and perfect. In two months you will no longer know her. She will be in London and gone.
Dana is from new Zealand. She is broken and suicidal. She is also perfect, but no one notices here.

No one comes here. Here is the end of the world. Things falling apart, then pulled back together again. Bodies shifted into planetary conjunctions by aloof high-born entities who learned so much about themselves that they were forced to admit that they didn’t even exist anyway, and so could not ever possibly be held responsible for these actions. It was someone else wot dun it, guv.


A house on the top of a hill. The ashtrays are filled to overfilling and someone has fallen on the floor again. Inside, the premature burial becomes premature rebirth.

The tale of the reoccurring dream of the school room that can never be found is told here;
The corridors are after hours. Most of the lights are out. You walk, you search; running into unfamiliar turns that stab your heart with remembrances of opportunity leased to the gods of invisible education.
You turn a corner. There is a door left open. Inside, the classroom is just as you remember it. But not.
And still she is there. The only one. Still younger than you, just. Still silent, gazing down at a desk. The hair a little darker than usual; that acne you recall that did clear up. Still there.

A million internet searches and nothing found. Whose jumped-up idea of a good idea was that?

On the path facing the loch two people sit shivering and watching the water as it flirts with motion. Sometimes they see the mountains.
Somewhere out there in the labyrinthine darkness that shrouds their nebulous and arcane presence, there are goblins; the cold-troll-hearted denizens of the places beneath where you once were. The kobolds who scurry about their closeted ways: down in the pixy mines; in the monotonous places no human eyes have ever been opened enough to see.
Across the stillest night they say to you; listen. You can’t hear anything.
The person beside you says, Oh my god, that’s terrible. do you want my coat?

Seagulls gather over playgrounds. Mould-inviting bread is thrown onto garage roofs and the birds redesign their plans, without recourse to human communication or consultation; yet still giving in to co-dependence.
Somehow both still find sustenance. Human civilizations always grow out of water-rich settlements. But bread helps too.

Flashpoints and little eclipses. That drunk Spaniard spends the night on the couch in the worn hotel lounge. The porter waits, mildly anxious and utterly awake.
The time is now 4:18. We need charge him nothing: since, at this time of night, no price is placed on solace.

Cologne. A cathedral haunted by the ghosts of everyone that left their fears and insecurities locked up in the gargoyles for safe keeping. Somewhere someone drunkenly barges their way into the wrong toilet; half-singing, half declaring, we could be heroes; not the German version.

Decisions are things to be made, ignored or sometimes ran away from. But at the end of them, there will always be progress.
The last man on earth. I disappear but can never be found. What am I?

Many centuries have come and said goodbye. When the others come to visit this planet, peeking their multifaceted compound eyes through masses of overgrowing vegetation, startling the animals who had for so long been untroubled by the presence of any intelligence higher than themselves, they might perhaps uncover just the faintest broken remnants of something white and ancient poking its nature-scoured hand out of the Earth. The aliens have no means of discerning the year and so cannot even begin to date the artifact; they have no such words as nature, broken or white. Months and calendars are also foreign to them; yet despite this, they love numbers.

Visiting times are communicated by the orderly. There is noise on the phone; perhaps it is a clipboard being adjusted: or someone passing.
You just need to do something with your life, the man says, searching the cabinet beside his bed for one of the soft drinks everyone has brought him. Be your own man.
Someone dying has died here long ago. The cleaners have been and gone.

This table is tan, smooth and completely unmarked. She holds my hand carefully, running one finger up and down the inside of my palm. A life in miniature.
The swirl and the coffee stirred. If there is coffee then after all the tears are done, everything will always be okay. Raindrops and thunder.

Just drifting off to sleep. A green glow from the nightlight protecting the dark from itself.
I am incomplete yet was finished centuries ago. What am I?

A park morning. The dog runs by the tower blocks that stand watching the horizon like pensive parents; acting as custodians of the light and dark, their dirt-encrusted offspring soon to be loosed again into the day to do whatever they wish with their lives; sometimes die, sometimes live - but always survive.
The dog doesn’t notice. It is chasing an idle woodpigeon. The woodpigeon escapes.

And in some stories, there is walking on the surface of the moon. Except in those stories seen in numinous dreamtime, it never seems all that much like the moon but more like a foreign country. And that is the past; a place we can never visit again. You only need to go there once. A landfill with nothing in it.

Spiderwebs draped from leaf to leaf in the early December chill. Ladybirds later, traversing cautiously, knowing that one day soon they will all be nearly extinct.
A tiny book store emptied of books and ready to be filled with new ones. Another morning wreathed in fog that seeks to hide creation from itself. A werewolf or a phantom.
Lives disappearing, but not yours. Not yours.

Canadian snowdrifts. Kids running on and on forever, knowing that one day, they might be free to cast off those mittens and never need to go back home ever again.
I could be here, yet am there and everywhere. Where am I?

The front cover of the comic book is missing. All stories of revenge becoming the same if you squint at them in the right light; just stories of forgetting, remembering, hitting back, then accepting the Greek myths, the word of the Bible. The sound of someone else’s voice at four minutes past three in the morning in a pitch dark room in a small terraced house in the middle of the wilderness of nowhere that is the UK, in 1985.

Planes go overhead. The moving and the stationary. The wood by the sides of the train-track just begs to be collected. Not far off is the same-so-called wood the branches came from; but there is a darkness at the heart of that wood; the feeling that there is every chance that the wood may become a forest, and that the forest might become a path: just an endless road in the murk of brown-green, leading to nothing, and something: and nowhere. Although sometimes, if not always, there is a something behind a nothing.
The eye of the needle. The way of the warrior.
Who knows what the magician has hidden behind the curtain?

Across the void of possible occurrences I bleed in the National grid. Hydroelectric stations pulse my messages out to workplaces. The ebb and flow of yellow coloured lines moves hither and thither.
Acceleration seen from the stratosphere. Fifty billion points of light become snakes; rushing, slithering, multiplying: subdividing.
Satellite masts and frost on the morning quiet. Spacemen at home in space, looking down.


A tiny kitten is released for the first time from the safe, defined corners of its first home into the tearing noise and borderless nightmare of the savage outside. With this disaster of understanding comes knowledge; of sorts.

A becoming of gold is forecast. The way of all things unfolding. Like shooting fish in a barrel, in the dark. A name unknown.

A gnosis that was here is now everywhere. The lady went into the cabinet yet somehow she is now not there.
I shall now saw myself in half. You never know what’s going to happen.

Days of conjuration will be left behind. The imagining is all that remains. The past; the future. The inbetweens.

THE CRACKS - A short story

Here, then, is a little short story from a couple of years back. I won't ramble on here, I'll just post the thing. As far as I can tell this is actually finished now, if anything's a work in progress I shall let you know.

THE CRACKS

It was on the day before the small people came that Wife decided she had finally had enough of Husband and his philandering ways.

A sort of realisation had been coming to her for quite some time now. In hindsight, and in many ways, it had been the coming of the small people that had helped Wife understand that had she been becoming enormously complacent for quite some time now.

Over the past six months or so, Wife had been experiencing the distinctly troubling sensation of feeling her senses getting subtly worn down; and her emotions becoming dulled to the point where, when He left his clothes scattered on the bedroom floor so that she could not tell what was clean and what was not, Wife wasn’t capable of feeling a whole lot of anything that would result in a gnashed teeth, pulled hair, tantrum or a raising of voices. Or an anything of any kind.

But then; there had been the Small People. Of course.

The Small People had initially been slow in announcing their presence. It was only on that first occasion - when Wife returned home from work early on a Thursday afternoon due to the drama of a health and safety inspection - that she discovered the floors of the bedroom; and their new state of immaculate cleanliness.

What made this state of affairs even more unnerving for Wife were those extra details. There was seeing that exact spot where Husband had kicked her glass of red wine over that last Christmas when he had gone running for the phone - and that other patch, where Siamese terror Pogo had peed because she was in a bad mood with Husband ignoring her all the time. Examining the length of the carpet, wondering if she had perhaps misjudged the stains’ original locations, Wife discovered there was now no trace of either spillage and only the puffy newness of clean white carpet. A surface that, despite being only six months old, had recently started to show evidence of being worn and trampled down, and of having become soiled in certain places; a little like Wife.

Except that now all of these worn places were immaculate; as if some mysteriously charitable carpet-fitting men had surreptitiously been round while Wife had been out, and laid an entirely new pile free of charge: as if to please her with some kind of pre-planned event-style present.

Except in her heart Wife knew it had not been any carpet-fitting men who had initiated the change.

These had been different men; characters more unseen and amorphous. Wife had thought about them that night as she had lain in an otherwise empty bed, eyes fixed on the long crack that ran the near-length of the skirting board that nearly joined the wall to the ground. She tried to see into the split; wondering if there was perhaps something behind it.

But it was a thin line: not even a breeze came through it. Nothing could be there. Except sometimes at night, during the long hours when even Husband slept without snoring, Wife would hear the noises. For many a month Wife had succeeded in convincing herself that these were merely the scrapings of errant mice or vagabond squirrels, playing their arcane games in the loft and in the walls - or even perhaps Owls.

Charity at work had spoken of Owls. She had found a family of Tawnys nesting in the hollows of her garage a few years back and had been too scared to disturb the intimacy of the animals’ lair, lest she frightened them off - fearing that, if she were to disrupt the sanctity of their repose, Charity would effectively soil the creatures’ habitat by the very dint of her presence and drive them away to some cold location where they would struggle, wither and perish.

Some secrets were better left uncovered. Charity was a timid sort, and wasn’t one to generate dispute or enmity of any kind. This was a quality Wife most admired in her workmate, and was secretly jealous of: being so utterly incapable of it herself; or at least, not for any extended periods of time.

And Wife felt such a period was approaching its endtime. As she peacefully seethed in the dark, sensing the angry voices rustling at the back of her head like crunched sweet wrappers, the warmth of the unrevealed night pushed down on her.

Beside her and at this time, Husband was long gone. Wife was inevitably still awake: with all of it to deal.

There were such things as auditory hallucinations, Wife knew - Wife had experienced such a thing once. A terrifying phantasmagoria, she had thought it was, although that was of course an outmoded term; nowadays it was more likely classifiable as something more like hypnagogia, or hypnopompia; Wife had got the two mixed up upon researching but suspected from the thoroughness of her readings that the two definitions were essentially different words for the same thing.

The occurrence had taken place the night of the carpet-cleaning. It had been much later on, in the long hours: the times that Wife both anticipated and sometimes dreaded but not for any specific reason. Husband had been faraway and comatose on the other side and Wife had been lost, in some remote fantasy about a famous actor and an exotic location. The confabulation had been idle and underdeveloped, not seeming to evolve to any significant degree, and it was just as nothing much at all was happening in her dreamitude, Wife’s entire body froze stock still and the sounds began.

Wife had of course found explanations. Her later studying of the reasons for and symptoms of sleep paralysis, or Old Hag syndrome as it was often called, had not yet taken root in her consciousness, so instead of cool acknowledgement of the scenario, Wife was instead gripped by the most visceral and chilling sensation of dread she had ever felt in her entire life - worse even than those delirious few seconds three years back when she had been abroad; where she had gone back home with a charming but anonymous Gentleman she had met by shadow in Mykonos. Under florid moonlight, the Gentleman he had pulled a knife and held it to her throat; demanding improbable remunerations in a tongue Wife could have sworn was Greek but easily could have been any number of languages; or any number of languages spoken at once. The Gentleman had held her in this lovers’ tranquillity for some moments before releasing her, and had laughed before running off into the night; and it had been then that Wife had found herself flooded with the most impossible rush of endorphins and had become giddy with supernatural delight.

The fear had not lasted then. Wife had once again not asked for it, but the sensation had returned all the same.

It had come flooding back. And with it, walking steadily in tiny footfalls Wife could not hear but knew were occurring in a steady, metronomic rhythm, the Small People had returned; as they had always been returning.

The pulling away of the duvet was the first indication that this time, they really did mean business.

There had of course been that other time, Wife reminded herself as the duvet slid ominously away and she remained paralyzed; two months back, when Husband had gone out to a swingers’ bar and not returned until the morning. Wife had not done the dishes in a fit of pique - and it had been the on that morning that Wife discovered every pot and pan gleaming clean and stacked accordingly back in their respective houses, and even the oven thoroughly degreased - as if worked over by attentive yet elusive hands.

Of course, Wife must have imagined the kitchen was in a worse state than it was. Of course These little vacancies of mind were to be expected.

And that other time, one month back, Wife thought; as the barely perceptible stretching of the mattress under her back indicated the little boots marching onto it, having made their way up from their previous location on the floor. The time none of the bins had been taken out, gathering as they were in the hallway, awaiting the vagaries of some unidentified council official managing to sort out some kind of appropriate collection facility for the street. And just at the point where Husband’s inability to keep old food from spilling onto the floor in disgusting puddles expired, and Wife’s patience was similarly on its final warning, Wife had again returned from Anonymous Work to find the hallway clear and stripped of landlord-upsetting fire hazards. Relief had hit her then; albeit a relief tinged with a more watery sense of unease.

Wife had worried at many times during the long hours that, perhaps, one day, she would just turn out to be one of the people who just slipped through the cracks. Maybe she had thought about it for so long, someone had picked up on one of her unanswered desires and finally responded in kind. But, since Wife never let any of her deepest wishes out into the light - knowing that if they did get out they could perhaps damage someone or something - surely this was highly unlikely. So, like gentle Charity and her itinerant but untroubled Owl family, Wife kept these thoughts to herself.

Perhaps they would not trouble her any more.

The mattress creaked. With a faint and muffled shuffling, Wife felt Husband sliding away; carefully pulled by industrious individuals.

Perhaps Husband would not trouble her any more. Feeling the paralysis beginning to lose its hold on her, Wife relaxed and began to drift into a deep and peaceful sleep; untroubled by dreams of relentless Husband, or of unclean residences; but merely of quiet and noble Owls, going about their business in the closeted night; silently preying on animals that were dumber and slower than they.

They flew glassily through the dark, their wings beating to a strong and unknown rhythm: a rhythm Wife did not recognize but felt it resonating with her very being; lulling her into alpha waves of luxurious torpor.

When morning came, Wife awoke to a spotless environs and the honeyed sunlight of another new day.

She also found to her looming relief that she was no longer a Wife.
Her ring had gone. The bed was clear and free of any clutter. It would be so easy now to spread the sheets.

UnWife smiled to herself. Perhaps she would fetch herself some breakfast.
As she roused herself, just by chance she glanced down at the skirting board; and at the place where its scuffed surface met the carpet.

There was no longer any gap there. The shadowy crease had ceased to exist. Letting slip a flighty, birdlike chuckle, UnWife imagined it must never have been any kind of a crack in the first place.

She went downstairs and headed for the bathroom; all set to shower herself clean in preparation for the rigours of a new day.

It was only upon pausing to assess the severe split that ran the length of the floor in front of the shower cubicle that UnWife thought to herself - for a blank, black moment - that she might perhaps not be entirely free of troubles after all.

A clunking noise sounded beneath her feet. UnWife became distressed.
Swiftly departing the bathroom and closing the door after her, UnWife left the bathroom untended.

Someone else would have to go. The people below would only wait so long.

Making a list of Friends in her head, UnWife began to ready herself for work.

Perhaps Charity would be able to help. No one would even notice me if I wasn’t here, she would joke. Charity was, after all, the very model of her name.

Wife who was no longer Wife but in fact was now possibly someone else entirely went to fetch herself something from the kitchen. She thought there were perhaps still pancakes. Finally, there would be peace to eat.