CSi5M 'The oldest discovered'.

Not strictly a CSi5m but a song/poem I wrote in 1982 when I was 18 and in the 6th form of Quarry Bank (it appears on page 23 of the QBSM Summer 1982. My mother found a copy while clearing out the files. Its suprising how little my ability to write poems has improved/changed....

"Invocation of Demons" by Simon Jones (as was).

Candle-lit pentacle
Fly's eye view
Putting millions of devils
Where there's only a few.
Demons unfettered,
Demons in chains
Fiends with their grey eyes
Hiding dead brains.

Infernal City
pider-silk beams
Echo round the damp night
On Coffee Machines
Granular Dust,
Like bad newspaper pics,
Fades all the bodies
Until the mind sticks...

Celebrity night-life
Mildrewed domaines
Pantomime Singers
Humming hellish refrains
Straw politicians
With Dis College ties
Serving Baal Zeboub
Hearing bland lies.

Democracy dithers
Communism quakes
MP has heart tremor
duing trip to the Lakes.
Rain stops cricket
Satan stops prayer
Cold war grows hotter
As it piles layer on layer.

Dismiss the demons?
No too late now.
Asmodeus in white spot
Taking his bow.
The music was perfect,
the gig it was great
Handed Lord Satan,
the world on a plate.


Simon Bucher-Jones

CSI5m Street Life, another Leonard Cohen tribute song

I once sat in a Paris street
Drinking absinthe on my own
At three o'clock in the afternoon.
The swelling tide of yellow light
The arabesques that curled inside
The deco metro signposts.
They did not end the faint unease
Of violins heard between tall houses.

I once sat in a basement flat
Chatting to a whore until
She asked if we should go within.
Her inner room was strung with all her better memories,
And I could not bring more ruin down on them
The things that coins can purchase
They do not decoy the hunters
And the witchmen stride down all the lost alleys.

I once sat in the gutter
While the stars above were whirling
And I kept my eyes averted out of reverence to Oscar.
There are things you hear in gutters
All the gossip of the City
All the inferential horrors of the influencial orders.
But it heals no soul to hear them, only renders
It unworthy, for the music of the chatter
Comes from oh so far away. Like the distant
cries of Peacocks.


[First two lines supplied by Paul Ebbs]

APOLOGY - UPDATE

Some people, expecially the editor have been waiting for THE BIG SECRET PROJECT on which I promised significant progress in July with my SECRET CO-WRITER.

Unfortunately my father went into hospital with a brain tumour on the 3rd July, and died shortly afterwords. Consequently I haven't been able to do any writing in JULY and it will therefore be at least two more months before any BIG SECRET REVELATIONS.

Minor posting will resume during August.

Simon BJ

COSGROVE AND VINES....will return

When I have an evening free, to draw. On average it will be one page a week though, so the longer it is the more pages go up at once. So far I *owe* two.

Simon BJ

More rejected proposals, well Abaddon books never actually even replied....

DIS NIVEN (ZOMBIE / HORROR / WAR)

In an Edwardian world where 'spiritualism', is the driving force in a new industrial revolution, and ghosts are forced into 'ectoplasmic sweat-shops' to power literally 'satanic mills': Dis Niven, a professional 'bodysnatcher' and retriever of the dead, is [like a modern cult deprogrammer] the one man grieving families can call to get their relation's corpse back from the medical students or their soul back from the spiritualists with equal skill. When a crucial middle-european vote is disrupted by the death of the elector-general of saxony, only his Dis Niven's skill can harrow the new iron hells, to prevent a European war in which the Iron Ghosts of the High Germanies will sweep across Europe. [The hook for a series here can be that Dis, fails in the first book to prevent the war leading to a Sven Hassel like series of Great War horrors.]

THE SUNDERED ISLES (FANTASY, ALT HISTORY)

A fantasy series, in which the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was fractionally earlier, hitting mainland America and leaving a shattered set of Lost World archipeligos, where natural selection and the alien energies of the asteroid's fragments have written strange new stories, and taken bizarre paths. We begin with Erik the Red and a party of berserks finding not the new world, but Islands full of Reptile-men relics, and hunting saurians. Then with the magicks they find the Vikings reave back through Europe, overturning the Empires of the West,and coming into conflict with Islam and China. Books can be set during the exploration of the Sundered Isles, then the conflicts in Europe, and finally war with the Sun Dragons of Asian! [Note it would be possible, by making the asteroid a source of cavorite to lead to a dimensional/time war - via Einstein's time experiments - between the eventual Odinised Earth of the Sundered Isles, and the Steam-Punk Earth's British Empire who would see in the 'magic' of this world a further source of cavorite...it could even be possible to make the Rulers of this earth's china, the satraps or pawns of those in your stream-punk world.]

Simon BJ
2005

Depression

Pinned by the acumancy of the night
On the flat plains of doleful grey
That spread like mildrewed counterpanes
And only rise where corpses lie
I find no answer in the sky.

Awful and blank as plastered wall
That empty void’s a fish’s eye
A calendar whose letter days
Have boiled away to faded smears
I find no answer in the years.

I had a heart that once could feel
That now sits black within my chest
And sinking still, lies constipate
A stinking ill, I contemplate
I find no answer in this jest.

Others I know have felt the same
There’s no true novelty in pain.
I can not even forge from doubt
A statement of what life’s about
Be it theistic or totemic, I find no answer in polemic.

But poetry (or doggerel, say)
At least contrives to pass the day.
Until some part of me just breaks
And past the point of all repair
I’ll have no answers to declare.



'well if you can't laugh at despair, what *can* you laugh at!'

Simon BJ

Iris the Outsider

"Wretched is she to whom memory brings only the bitter taint of lost loves and the sorrows of unhappiness. Desolate is she to whom childhood has only echoes of parties held in wastelands, and the constant mutter of the invisible sisterhood. Such a lot was mine, the lovelorn, the bittern, the twice-shy, the wallflower. (Do you see what I did there? That’s a very clever pun on bittern, a mournful calling bird, and “once bitten” which precedes twice shy.)

And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other, and the gin and splash runs low.

I know not where, or whether I was born, save that the Castle nursery was infinitely pink and infinitely vulgar, full of stenciled passages from Mother Goose, and having high ceilings where the eye could find only mechanical mobiles that shrieked and clattered. Flabby and detestable, the pigs and sheep in these mechanical torture-devices, grunted and baa-ed for the slaughter-house.

The plastic sheeting in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up socks of dead generations. It was never light, so that I used sometimes to set fire to the curtains and gaze steadily at them for relief, nor was there any sun outdoors, since the giant and terrible toadstools, fenageek, and herbs grew high above the topmost accessible towers.

There was one pink tower, curse what I now know of symbolism, which reached above the toadstool-trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone.

I must have lived years in this place, but I cannot measure the time. Beings must have cared for my needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself, or anything in the form of the living, but the noiseless plush toys and cuddlies. I think that whoever nursed me must have been aged indeed, since my first conception of a living person was that of somebody mockingly like myself, yet shockingly unstylish.

To me there was nothing grotesque in the bone masks and shadow-gear that strewed some of the stone crypts deep down among the foundations, nor the rooms of costumes, and the portraits with their blank obsidian eyes. I fantastically associated these things with everyday events, and thought them more natural than the coloured pictures of living beings which I found in many of the nursery books.

From such books I learned all that I knew. No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in all those years - not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud, although I often tried to sing, and found the results pretty.

My aspect was a matter equally unthought of, for there were no mirrors in the castle, and I merely regarded myself by instinct as akin to the youthful figures I saw drawn and painted in the books. I felt conscious of youth because I remembered so little, and of beauty because of the ease of which I moved in my own skin, and in the tattered ball-gowns of the great wardrobes.

Outside, across the manicured grey-green fungus lawns and under the dark mute Toadstool trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests. Once I tried to escape from the forest, but as I went farther from the castle the shade grew denser and the air more filled with the cloying scent of lavender fear; so that I ran frantically back lest I lose my way in a labyrinth of fragrent silence.

So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light, grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single pink tower. I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse society and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.

In the dank twilight I climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till I reached the level where they ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds leading upward. Ghastly and terrible was that dead, stairless cylinder of rock; pink, deserted, and sinisterly mottled, but more ghastly and terrible still was the slowness of my progress; for climb as I might, the blank darkness overhead grew no thinner, and a new chill assailed me. I shivered as I wondered why I did not reach the light, and would have looked down had I dared. I fancied that night had come suddenly upon me, and vainly groped with one free hand for a window embrasure, that I might peer out and above, and try to judge the height I had once attained.

All at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless, crawling up that concave and desperate precipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and I knew I must have gained the roof, or at least some kind of floor. In the darkness I raised my free hand and tested the barrier, finding it stone and immovable. Then came a deadly circuit of the tower, clinging to whatever holds the wall could give; till finally my testing hand found the barrier yielding, and I turned upward again, pushing the slab or door with my head as I used both hands in my fearful ascent. There was no light revealed above, and as my hands went higher I knew that my climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was the trapdoor of an aperture leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the lower tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber.

I crawled through carefully, and tried to prevent the heavy slab from falling back into place, but failed in the latter attempt. As I lay exhausted on the stone floor I heard the eerie echoes of its fall, hoped when necessary to pry it up again.

Believing I was now at prodigious height, I dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I might look for the first time upon the sky, and the moon and stars of which I had read. But on every hand I was disappointed; since all that I found were bulky vehicles of red, bearing numerals, and cryptic destinations in archaic lettering, as it might be, Golder’s Green, Putney, Marble Arch, or most odious of all Tooting Bec. I shuddered at the image of the desolate and whistling marshland this name evoked. What these vehicles were and how they found their way, without evident wings, to abide in this high apartment so many aeons cut off from the castle below, I could not conjecture.

Then unexpectedly my hands came upon a doorway, where hung a wooden door, rough with strange markings that I could not discern in the half light. Trying it, I found it locked; but with a supreme burst of strength I overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inward. As I did so there came to me the purest ecstasy I have ever known; for shining tranquilly down in through a iron-grated door at the end of a short passage was the radiant full moon, which I had never before seen save in dreams and in vague visions I dared not call memories.

Fancying now that I had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, I commenced to move through the door; but the sudden veiling of the moon by a cloud caused me to stumble, and I felt my way more slowly in the dark. It was still very dark when I reached the grating - which I tried carefully and found unlocked, but which I did not open for fear of falling from the amazing height to which I had climbed. Then the moon came out.

Most demoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable. Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied. The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of toadstool-treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on the level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground of a deserted thoroughfare.

Half unconscious, I opened the grating and staggered out upon the white pavement that stretched away in two directions. From here I could see the wide and corrugated doors through which the red vehicles would have their ingress and their exits. To open them, somehow instinctively, was the work of a moment: my mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic craving for light; and not even the fantastic wonder which had happened could stay my course. I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost. The controls of one of the red vehicles were simplicity itself to me, and I recognised it now as being an omnibus, a device which I knew from my latin texts to be capable of travelling anywhere in any manner. That this was not always true, I was to learn to my cost.

I knew not who I was or what I was, or what my surroundings might be; and consequently I wasn’t the safest driver, though as I continued to roar along I became conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory that made my progress not wholly fortuitous. I passed under an arch that was low enough to scrape the paint off the roof, and took a corner on two wheels. Soon I was out in open country; sometimes following the visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to smash through haystacks and barns full of chickens. Once I swooshed across a swift river where crumbling, mossy masonry told of a bridge long vanished. I swear the wheels of the omnibus did not break the miniscus of the water.

Over two hours must have passed before I reached what seemed to be my goal, a building in a park, maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness to me. I saw that the castle of my memory had obviously been burned completely to the ground and replaced but never the less I recognised its identity at once. But what I observed with chief interest and delight were the open windows - gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry. The words of an ancient chant imploring that the brown earth mother, raise her hallowed knees, reached me.

Advancing to the windows I looked in and saw an oddly dressed company indeed; making merry, and speaking brightly to one another. I had never, seemingly, heard human speech before and could guess only vaguely what was said. Some of the faces seemed to hold expressions that brought up incredibly remote recollections, others were utterly alien, particularly that of the white haired man in the frilly shirt to whom I took an instinctive liking.

I now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realization, and pausing only to brush broken glass off my dress. The nightmare was quick to come, for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived. Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended upon the whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity, distorting every face and evoking the most horrible screams from nearly every throat. Cries of ‘Not again,’ And ‘Who let the dog out, who, who, who, who’ resounded, although I later learned that that latter was a chorus in a popular hit of the time.

Flight was universal, and in the clamour and panic several fell in a swoon and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions. Many covered their eyes with their hands, and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their race to escape, overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they managed to reach one of the many doors. The cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and dazed, listening to their vanishing echoes, I trembled at the thought of what might be lurking near me unseen. At a casual inspection the room seemed deserted, but when I moved towards one of the alcoves I thought I detected a presence there but it was only a blue police-box. Then my eye fell on a hint of motion beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another and somewhat similar room. As I approached the arch I began to perceive the presence more clearly; and then, with the first and last sound I ever uttered - a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause - I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives.

I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is uncouth, shambolic, half-made up, slovenly, and detestable. It was the mutton-dressed-as-lamb shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world - or no longer of this world - yet to my horror I saw in its flea-eaten-away and corset-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.

I was almost paralysed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort towards flight; a backward stumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless, voiceless monster held me. My eyes bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into them, refused to close; though they were mercifully blurred, and showed the terrible object but indistinctly after the first shock. I tried to raise my hand to shut out the sight, yet so stunned were my nerves that my arm could not fully obey my will. The attempt, however, was enough to disturb my balance; so that I had to stagger forward several steps to avoid falling. As I did so I became suddenly and agonizingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the foetid apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch.

I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the nightwind shrieked for me as in that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory. I knew in that second all that had been, the bloody Doctor had left me in a stasis crib, with amnesia just so I’d miss the UNIT Christmas party, but more than that I recognized, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own.

But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is strong drink, perfume, cheap sex, and sheer, sheer gall. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to my bus, I realised how unerringly I had picked my true vehicle from where the Doctor had concealed it (in some purile version of Poe’s the purloined letter it had amused him to leave my time-ship in a disused bus station). Bah, I swore he’d have reasons to hate bus stations after this!

Now I ride with the windows down and friendly traffic cops, wave as I steam passed, and I play by day amongst the jet-set and the novae rich (and that’s not only a bad pun, all the best parties are at the end of the world) yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.

For although these things have calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still tied to primitive ideas of fashion, beauty, and sexiness. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass."


© Simon Bucher-Jones and HP Lovecraft 2004
Iris Wildthyme © Paul Magrs

STATUS QUEUE

Okay, I nearly managed a month of one post a day. Nearly.

And so, refreshed by that effort, I'm now going to write properly everyday
for two months in the hopes of finishing something important.

So, while I'll be updating C&VIOTVW every Monday, and poems and CSi5M will continue to appear as they form, there won't be a post a day until (hopefully) I return from Writer's Hell(tm) at the start of August.

Simon BJ

Godzilla In East Anglia

Godzilla in East Anglia



His breath is felt, as turning in their myriad blocks
The new white windmills melt, and fly as loose
As sputum, or the threads of dandelion clocks
And the grey clay is baked in the Great Ouse.

He stands athwart the Wash, strides o’er the Nene
And round his flanks rise flecks of speckling foam
His heraldry is grey and mottled green
Here, not Japan, in glory, he comes home.

King John’s jewels crushed beneath his monstrous feet
And in Norwich and Yarmouth and King’s Lynn
New banners fly and folk cry in the street:
“We always knew something big would begin.

When Ravens flee and Parliament’s but frauds
Then Monsters shall Arise and stalk the broads”.

Simon BJ

Web Comic Page 3

COSGROVE AND VINES PAGE 3 NOW UP.

Simon BJ [Post for 29th May 2009]

RE HONESTY ON LINE

I've always posted *as* me. Simon Bucher-Jones: Simon BJ, but a while ago as a joke I set up two other blogs. These are they:

THE WRITINGS OF TREVOR K GRANT

THE DOCTOR WHO CANONOLOGY THEORIES OF DR TREVOR K GRANT

The immediately above now explains classical Who UNIT dating with science.

In these present turbulant times in re fanpolitik, I wouldn't want the existance of these to become a stick for anyone's back. Hence dislosure. Also...enjoy!

Simon BJ [post for 28th May 2009]

The City Of Landfill

Built of debris, detritus and rubbish: Landfill, covers the whole of what was once the south-eastern British Isles. In a world from which humankind has long departed, the other life that once survived as urban scavengers, has followed his path to greater triumphs and mastery on a wider and broader stage.

Their leader's face on the scarlet banners, while furry and inhuman is benign - multiple it gazes down from the telescreens: Great Uncle is Watching You. Their starships each built around the miracle of the Wellington-Tobermory Drive, will spread their careful and parsimonious ethos across the universe: but it is hinted that there is a dark secret at the heart of their Womble paradise.

When they became the masters they left a niche in the great pattern of life: a niche exploited now by things that by evolutionary necessity are as much more ruthlessly driven to recycle, as the Wombles are not to waste.

Needing to live on so little they have become shambling parodies of their once kin, things to be feared in the the darker commons. Overground, underground wombles all flee, the xombles.


Simon BJ [Today's post. Back in sync!]


Simon BJ

PULP OF THE BLACK LOTUS

Extract from The Pulp Of The Black Lotus
By Simon Bucher-Jones

THE HEART OF THE DARKNESS
A Doc Who Adventure
By J. X. “Doc” Smith
A Cockatrice Book / published by arrangement with
The Concordat Nation Press
PRINTING HISTORY
Originally published in DOC WHO MAGAZINE May 1938
Cockatrice edition published July 1974

Chapter 1

MYSTERY UNDER THE EARTH
It was a broiling hot day in the biggest of America’s big cities; and steam was pouring out of the gratings and the manhole covers like all the rats had kettles.

‘Jeez,’ Hoskin the gunsel said wiping a bead of sweat from his thick jowled face, ‘you didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me’.

‘I didn’t tell you what?’ The voice was harsh, thrilling with power and yet inhuman, a tortured forcing of sounds into syllables. It was like a machine speaking: every note ripped from the throat. The shadowed figure hunched against the ironwork of the underground room, twitched as it spoke. It was a nervous, convulsing twitch.
‘That we’d be up against Doc Who and his Trusty Companions; I’ve known hard men who’ve had their heads handed them messing with that yegg. And worse, folks who go against him just vanish plump out of this world like they get et up’.

Pimples MacHoolley the spotty stoolpidgeon broke in, ‘He’s right boss, they say Doc Who’s father was a great scientist and that he gave his son a second heart: an atomic heart that won’t stop beating till the sun goes out, and it boosts his strength till he’s as strong as any man living, and twice as bright. They say you can see the light of that great heart shining out of his eyes!’

The shadow figure emitted a gurgling sneer, ‘I fear not this luminous nemesis, for I am The Darkness, and where I walk all light is extinguished, remember that. Or would you have me re-introduce you to the Beast That Eats Light.’ A scratching noise seemed to fill the underground chamber as if some great insect or segmented worm was moving just below the ground. A greater terror than the underworld’s fear of Doc Who seemed to fill Gunsel Hoskin, and Pimples MacHooley. They had seen the awesome horror that the man who called himself The Darkness could unleash, and they would do anything to prevent its being used on them.

Doc Who made his headquarters (as the popular press had made known far too widely for his modest nature), on the observation floor of the second largest skyscraper in New York . He considered it architecturally superior to the largest, and besides, he said it inspired him to work harder. A friendly rivalry between him and Clark Savage Jr had persisted never-the-less, just as it had with the unknown operator who had taken the identity of Lamont Cranston. Doc Who had traced the man’s retina pattern - for the veins in the back of the eyes are as unique as finger prints - to a missing flyer called Kent Allard, but he suspected that too might be an identity The Shadow had only assumed, just as he himself had taken on this flamboyant role more out of necessity than choice.

He had no past other than the stories of his childhood, written in his own hand on a scrap of paper under hypnosis: A procedure that he candidly regarded with dubiety but which had at least garnered some results that he felt intuitively had to bear, at least obliquely, on the facts. He had come to the Americas after the Great War with no belongings but a crumpled suit, his childhood fable of an atomic heart, and a mysterious blue box. He had found the land of opportunity in the grip of apocalyptic events. Masked criminals were holding whole cities to ransom; the tools of the new science of the atom were being turned to weapons of extortion and greed. And he knew somehow that it was wrong. Not just immoral, not just nasty and evil and inhumane but wrong in a deeper impossible sense as if the fabric of the world was violated, as if it hadn’t ought to be like this. He had been on the Grav 109 when the giant Zeppelin Liner was attacked by the Red Hawk’s sky bandits. He had held one of the trained vampire bats of the Vampire Prince at arms length in one hand until its strength ebbed. And yet, he couldn’t believe in them any longer.
He had gathered a crew of Trusty Companions around him. Men and women he could trust to fight the rising tide of evil; and yet even as he operated on Frank "Peepers" Hyde to restore his sight after the fearful business of the Eyeball Destroyer, he found he couldn’t believe in them either. Any more than he could believe that Sherlock Holmes had pressed the elixir Vitae wrestled from Fu Manchu into his hands charging him to guard it against the Power of the East; or that he had stood with Allen Quatermain and seen Hue-Hue the Monster, the last living Neanderthal, (aside of course from his own Butler ‘Ape’). He had found no peace in England or Europe, but in America he had found only madness.

Little did he know that brewing in the stygian deeps below the New York subway was a dark power that would bring a new terror to the….to the….to the…


***

J. X. "Doc" Smith ripped the paper out of the typewriter. How on earth was he going to make any progress with The Pulp of The Black Lotus if he couldn’t get a grip on his characters. Heaven knows they only had a few characteristics each. Ape was, well, Apelike. Peepers Hyde had those scary eyes and his grandfather’s curse that would turn him into Hyde by nature. Marolyn Minx insisted on barrelling into her cousin’s adventures with her explosives and her jive chat. And Doc Who himself had no character at all, or only as much character as J X Smith could find in himself.

***

Chapter 2
The Century Of Fear

Doc had exhausted the facilities of England and his discoveries were horrifying. Conan Doyle confirmed his blood wasn’t human; his fingerprints were not in Scotland Yard’s new files and, to his alarm didn’t resemble normal whorls either. In his chest, the thud thud thud of his telltale double heart beat out its reminder -different, different, different. He could still remember the fear he had felt when reading Poe' s story for the first time. For the first time he could remember, anyway. Was he some surgeon's freak? A veritable Frankenstein creation? No one knew.

He had tried a dozen quacks and ninety nine nostrums. He had tried a drug which its backwoods dealer claimed came from Pluto (when the planet went by an inhuman name). He had tried mesmerism and hypnotism and teslaism – the latter a brief electrical fad that went as quickly as it arrived. He had even tried tantric sex, exhausting the facilities of a certain notorious house in Boston. Twice. He had learned a good many surprising things; but about himself he had learned nothing.

He had drifted into writing as, between the horrors that at times seemed almost to lay in wait for him, he had always drifted from one profession to another. He mastered each with casual ease but rose always only so far as a man with no past and no papers could rise. He made only the friends that a reticent man might have. He never felt love (even his fictional alter-ego had known better than to imagine that love might have been on offer in Boston), or received a touch of a hand on his face. How could he offer himself if he didn’t even know what he was? What if he wasn’t like Doc Who at all; what if he was like The Darkness, or the Red Hawk, or the Vampire Prince, or The Midget That Laughed, or Herr Doktor Harbinger? What made those gross and festering horrors pour out of him in ink like pus from a sore?
What if he was a horror of the old century living into the new atomic age?

Chapter 9
The Sewer God

‘So the man with no name and the two hearts has come to pay me a visit,’ the patch of darkness said. ‘Don’t you know who I am? Can’t you guess? What does the hero always confront but himself, himself or his fears, himself or his father, the fear of death, the fear of becoming the thing feared; the fear of being akin to the darkness? I am the Master of Darkness, boy’.

Doc smiled his tight, sad smile and the light that seemed to come from his deep-set eyes flashed a cool green in the blackness. In moonlight there is too little light for colours to be seen but somehow the light that his eyes intensified or generated, still gave the impression of possessing colour even in that pit.

‘There is nothing you can confront me with I have not seen, for light must ultimately penetrate darkness.’

The shadow-thing tittered unwholesomely. Images of black light - negative on the mind’s eye, chalk on the night sky of the soul - hit the Doc like a splatter of hot lead. He saw a world of Vampires sucking the energy from the cosmos to power their own experiments; condemning the others of their own kind who hunted merely to survive.

‘Rivals,’ the voice hissed, ‘not to be tolerated. The vampires that sort to rule forever could have no peers.’ He saw the wars where black-cloaked troops rose from the grave on the third day. In the end the mad scientists were triumphant; their kin staked in specimen jars in their vast laboratories in the core of seven dead moons. ‘But, it didn’t end there.’

A star: a black jewel in the white firmament, the sun of a peaceful race. They worshipped the vampires as gods learned their vile arts. Their reward was their sun torn into a white hole, sacrificed for more power. The rulers of this evil realm: Nolissar, Agemo, and the Void. Agemo they fed to the things in the hole, a piece at a time, part ritual, part boys pulling wings off flies for sport. Nolissar, the Void tricked: entombing him alive, with only the malice of the traps and games around his fetid tomb to while away the stinking eons. The Void wanted to live forever, beyond the vampire span of eternity, beyond the last drop of mammalian blood on any world. It foresaw the blood-drought, its kin drying and dying in the dust; everything else eaten from alpha to omega. It foresaw the scavenging vermin from other universes rummaging among their bones. It conceived a plan. Where is the seat of immortality?

The question scrawled itself in white letters of fire in the black interior of Doc’s skull. He guessed the fiend was using subliminal strobes; sub-sonic inductance, hemp fumes in the air, but still he felt compelled to answer. ‘Fu-Manchu once told me it was the head, not the heart that was the seat of life. Of course I had just shot him through the heart. Twice. With two guns. Four bullets in all. He walked away, laughing.’

‘He knows much for a human,’ the shrouded figure leered, ‘but in this he was mistaken. The Heart is the life. The Void understood this truth and arranged that its heart should never die but should live on, pumping its putrid black bile through the veins of a million species. Living – possessing – continuing, until…’

‘I see where this is going,’ Doc said. ‘I suppose you will now tell me it was this same strange heart that my father found encased in that green meteorite; the heart that crackled with atomic fire yet weighed no more than a mass of bakerlite.’ He did not say that he had only dreamed the whole business about his father and the strange plastic rock from space. His biographer from that wretched magazine had put the whole thing in the public domain now as gospel truth. He kept that back, as his hidden card, secure somehow in the belief, irrational at best, that knowing it to be a myth empowered him somehow. Its truth could not be lost. As long as it was a story, its horror did not have to be faced.

‘Yesssss, and while you have resisted for a time its evil history, its perverse arabesque design written across space and time, soon it will claim you once more. You will be The Void, the thing that travels the stars and brings chaos, destruction, and the curse in the blood. You will be not my foe but my bro…’
Swiftly, Doc drew his autofire and clicked by feel the magazine canister to the magnesium flares. The gun of his own design had a number of mercy-functions which could tackle an enemy without recourse to killing violence. ‘But what if I choose to bring not chaos, but light?’ he asked, and fired –

***

Then what? “Doc” wondered. Thematically the light should force back The Darkness. This ought to be some sort of exorcism to get these stupid silly devilish, bed-wetting dreams down on paper. Maybe, someday, if he lived long enough (and it seemed he would), he would pay a surgeon to cut out his extra-heart. Someday when surgery killed less surely. Exorcise - excise - its maddening beat, and find, what? Something built of living plastic? A pyramid of glowing spheres? A tiny neotenous twin gibbering in his chest wall, kicking its tiny tiny feet against his rib cage. The heart of a Jackal? He had searched his body carefully for a minute 666, just to be sure. Then not finding one he had considered having it tattooed on, but had found the idea of needles made the centre of his chest ache. Besides he really didn’t think he was the anti-christ. He didn’t think he was anyone important. Not important to anyone – and that was the only importance that mattered. He was a freak with a typewriter nothing more. Maybe he’d have to do the surgery on himself and they’ll find him strangled by his own strange heart, a bloody scalpel in one convulsing hand. It had been a long decade. Soon he felt, fiction too would fail him. It had kept the night at bay for eight years, his best friend, his bread and butter, but it was a pale substitute for a life.

***

Afterword: The Dark Prince of the Pulps.

Students of the pulps talk in a hushed voice of Walter Gibson and Lester Dent the writers who (mostly) - for their seats were sometimes occupied by lesser men - toiled behind the corporate pen-names of Maxwell Grant and Kenneth Robeson; the supposed chroniclers of Doc Savage and The Shadow. But what of the third member of this metaphysical triumvirate, this trinity of the hot-metal typewriter; this hidden and masked fraternity of authors? Who was J. X. “Doc” Smith, the writer who penned in the space of five red hot years no less than one hundred and fifty magazine novels: was he even one man? Computer aided literary analysis is a slippery tool at best. It makes one man of Shakespeare and Marlowe; dissects others, makes the bible and Moby Dick into equally valuable tomes of prophecy. Turned on the pulps it is perhaps flustered by a form in which the conventional phrase is used as a touchstone to character. How heart warming, how familiar are the recurring lines by which the hero is introduced in each of the sagas! Even so the technique still detects as many as eight distinct styles in the novels from The Man With Two Hearts (1933) to the curiously prophetic final novel The Eagle On The Moon (published in 1938).
The play: The Pulp Of The Black Lotus by Simon Bucher-Jones, examines the life of the writer by juxtaposing elements taken out of context from one of his most vivid novels, with the morbid and depressing state of his own life at the time it was being written, preserved in his correspondence and diaries. It is a compelling glimpse into a dark night of the soul no less black for being penned by a pulpsmith.
P. Jesu Harvester

Simon BJ [26th May 2009 post, formerly published in "Walking In Eternity"]

I heard of a person.....

I heard of a person who thought that she’d spent
A former life lived in Prince Suliman’s tent
Or laid out on a barge on the grand river Nile
Where only the crocodiles rivalled her smile.
But the greatest of all her achievements to date
The one where her karma was really first rate
The one where she go to wear sparkily panties
Was when she was Priestess of Old High Atlantis.

Now was this the Atlantis of which Plato wrote?
I know I once studied his book for a quote
But I seem to have missed, and the fault’s mine I’m sure
The part where Atlantis became such a bore.
For it’s all Auras and Crystals and suchlike sensations
As the Priestesses get with Good Crystal Vibrations,
And that’s just about the same fun that you get
From messing about with an old wireless set.

So call me insensitive, untuned to the vast
Mystical, magical, muddle filled past,
But it’s not the windbaggery nor yet the flim-flam
That puts me against this Atlantean Grand Dam,
It’s that she intrudes on a friend of a friend,
And that friend of a friend driven clear round the bend,
Phones his friend seeking comfort, and that friend goes missing
From her proper concern, improving my kissing.

Simon BJ [another old poem, 25th May 2009 post]

The Exercist: CSI5M

Verse 1

In the early 21st century I had a bright idea
Ghosts were fading out of sight, and failed to inspire fear.
Phantoms they were flabby, banshees had lost their cries
Because they watched too much TV and took no exercise.

Chorus

You’ll be free-roaming phantasms, you’ll make people get a skate on,
Rise up rise up you skeletons and put some psychic weight on,
Throw off the chains of corpulence you sheeted phantom forms
As for impressing college girls you’ll be clearing out the dorms
And teenagers with funny dogs will hunt you down once more
When you can rise up from out of the couch and float out through the door.

Verse 2

For electromagnetic revenants trapped in a solid structure
Prefer to watch soap operas than obey their PT instructor,
Or if you take a theological line, a spirit’s nothing loath
When it’s already cast out of Heaven to give into to sloath.

So buy our exercise tape and play it in the halls
Of your spooky haunted houses and your rat infested walls
Will soon be filled with new-age spooks agleam with psychic-muscle
Ready to take down a ghost buster in any psychic-tussle.

Get them pumping ectoplasm, they are spectres hear them roar!
Then they’ll repay your efforts by attracting guests galore!
In ghastly ruined castle, grange or old forester’s cot
They’ll be gungho to scare you after “haunting-on-the-spot”.

Our terms are very reasonable, the tapes are five pounds fifty
We like to think our instructress is really rather nifty
She was famous in the movies, she was Frankenstein’s bride
And she was really beautiful, at least until she died.

Chorus reprise

You’ll be re-horsed ye horsemen when your heads fit back in pumpkins,
And the horses they can rear and stamp, not pant like fatty lumpkins,
And ghosts in grey that come to stay and moan and look forlorn
You’ll find that you cause more dismay if sweatpants are not worn,
Throw off the chains of corpulence, re-buff those phantom forms
As for impressing college girls you’ll be clearing out the dorms
And teenagers with funny dogs will hunt you down once more
When you can rise up from out of the couch and float out through the door.


Simon BJ [24th May 2009 post]

Dream Diary Of A Widower

I dreamt we were animals
In a glass menagerie
Owned by Marie Antoinette.
People in wigs would come and see
Us perform a pirouette.

I dreamt we were making
A red felt wallchart
For tracking the bell-curve appearance
Of noses in modern art.
They were retrouse.

I dreamt we lived in a trailer
For a popular film matinee,
It was handy for the hotdogs
But it was only rated PG.
And had a lot of explosions.

I dreamt we were from Dalmatia
And had gone to the Doc for our shots
Because whatever we did
We always came out in spots.
He recommended camomile.

I dreamt you placed your lips to mine
And my hand caressed your hair
But then my alarm-clock woke me up
So I kicked it down the stair.
And wept because you were not there.

I dreamt a lot of drivel
And a lot of stupid stuff
But I always dreamt you near me
And the dreams are not enough
For me to see you clearly any more.

For when I wake I always think,
Of course you’re at the shops,
Or getting a haircut or seeing a friend,
Or teasing me by staying out ‘til the end,
Not lying quite still in a box.

I don’t want to dream any more.


Simon BJ [23rd May 2009 post]

As I walk to work

As I walk to work
In springtime
I think of you
As some one who
I’d walk to work for
Across a hardwood floor
And think as scented dust arose
Of coming home to kiss your toes.

As I walk to work
In summertime
I think of you
As some one who
I’d skip home for
Across sandy beaches
And think as the sun bleaches
of being fair to you
And fairer too, to you, than those of yore.

As I walk to work
In autumn
I think of you
As some one who
I could run hand in hand
With through the leaves that land
In yellow and golden folds
And then peel them gently off our skin
Like serpents shedding when their sleeps begin.

As I walk to work
In winter
I think of you
As some one who
I’d risk the cold for
And who’d leave the ice outside
And not inside the door, but would be warm
And without harm
To those whose need for calm
Goes on before.


Simon BJ [an old poem, 22nd May 2009 post]

SHOGGOTH FUNSTUFF(tm)

I suppose we can all remember when we first saw them: with things turning out the way they did. Whether they came free with breakfast cereal (in the second phase they had their own breakfast cereal) or taped in a bag to the cover of a magazine (in the second phase, they had their own magazine, and tie-in TV show) they just oozed cuteness.

They were itzy bitzy blobs of huggable colour that sparkled and glinted and rolled along as if they were alive. They could be pulled like taffy, and spring-back, you could press them to windows and they’d stick there, making a sound like cats or wind-chimes. Some would repeat a brief phrase: these were highly prized because naturally they could be made to be amusingly rude at the expense of teachers, and parents.

They were tradeable like stamps, - there was a catalogue showing all the basic forms and rareties (in the second phase of course nothing stayed really rare) -and needed care like tamegotchi, the regular infusion of Leng-juice(tm) and petting.

After a while some child-genius figured out a way to get them to fight like Pokemon -although even their fighting was so clumsy and cute that it was voted adorable by all the news-feeds. They even had an exotic foreign name - not in Japanese, but in the native tongue of the newest Indochina ‘high-pressure’ rising-economy: Tcho-tcho.

They were the top children’s Christmas best seller two years running. By the third year all sorts of cunning viral marketing techniques were being used to push them. Rumours ran wild through the schools that if you put your Shoggoth Funstuff(tm) in the fridge for a week, some of the rareties would ‘give birth’ to young. Parents smiled at this conceit naturally, even though some - I know I was - were concerned that their child (daughter in my case) might be disappointed when after the seventh day, all that was to show for the scam was a frozen blob and the intense need to pester-power the cost of another one out of my wallet.

Well, I guess, we aren’t smiling now, not now the third phase is upon us.

Simon BJ [21st May 2009 post, catching up albeit with old material]

THE TEMPLE OF DAGON

“Not dust nor the light weight of a stone, but all the
sea of the Western Approaches shall be his tomb”.

Eulogy for U-Boat ‘hunter’ Captain F. J. Walker RN
Given at his funeral by Admiral Max Horton 1944.

‘Of course, the idea that Dagon was a fish god is a complete misapprehension, would you not agree?’ the SS interrogator, remarked, imparting a tiny twist to the brandy glass in his right hand and letting the liquid swirl.

It made me feel sick to watch it.

The dehydration was affecting me badly, and I dearly wanted a drink even though alcohol would have been worse than useless. He was testing me, even as he abused me.

‘I know nothing about it,’ I rasped, my torn and peeling lips shredding the words.

‘No? You are a Professor of Semitic Languages are you not, a scholar of such matters. And I think you should reflect most profoundly on where you are. It is greatly in your interest to co-operate with our salvage efforts.’ His hand laid the brandy glass down on the ebony desk, and brushed, ever so slightly, the yellow star, where it rested, worn at the edges as from much use, against the dark wood.

The threat was obvious. I had been allowed, more or less, to retain my own clothes, if not my full dignity, so far, but once marked with that sign, and herded into the trains to the camps ; it would not be long before I lost everything. The honour my professorship had once brought me among Berlin’s academic circles I would happily abandon. But beyond that was the fear of losing my beloved home, my family, and clearly, eventually, my life . That I was not, merely as a point of fact, Jewish, was an irrelevance. Once marked as juden, any otherness would be suspect enough, and who - if subject to scrutiny by the paranoid and the mad, would not show some signs of the taint. It was already suspicious enough that I had deemed them worthy of study.

Every culture, disdains beyond all measure the action of a traitor. How could I help these people? Even to think of them as kin to me was painful, and yet what they were asking so far was not, in itself, dangerous, and the spectre of the camps, inland and so far away from my beloved was before me like a dark cloud on the horizon of a calm sea. ‘Father’, I prayed, in the security of my own skull, ‘protect me from the barbarians of these days.’

‘Not, so necessarily,’ I responded, determined to preserve myself at the least cost in help. ‘The derivation has in recent years been said to have been from the Hebrew, dagan, meaning corn, and to imply a deity fundamentally agricultural in aspect, and the Philistines were not predominantly a sea-faring or fishing-tribe, despite the coastal location of their lands and yet.’

‘And yet legends persist.’

I nodded, ‘Legends of a god whose name followed the Hebrew word dag, ‘fish’ and whose aspect was of a giant merman or triton. About his worship little is known, he does not appear to have demanded the sacrifices of a Baal or an Astarte both of whom were also worshipped in the Philistine cities of Ashdod, Gaza, Gath, Askelon and Ekron, and yet he is equally reviled in Hebrew scripture.’

There was a pause, in which, heart in mouth, I could only wonder how much this Nazi knew, and in what his interest, ultimately, lay. A word from his threats that had escaped me swam back before my mind’s eye ’salvage’.

He too seemed to be wrestling with doubtful thoughts, and I wondered what fears he might have, he whose dark-uniformed kind had conquered all of Europe. Perhaps he feared what lay ultimately beyond Europe’s boundaries; all that was free and un-enslaved. Perhaps he had, ultimately, more to fear than I did.

He was pacing now, like a beast caged, and the cage I realised was in the man’s own thoughts.

‘So, can you offer me any explanation, Herr Professor, as to why on the 27th of February last a U-Boat operating under the personal instructions of Admiral Doenitz should break radio silence - despite Walker’s verdamnt hunters - to inform German High Command, in tones which I do not associate with the stoicism of the Germanic spirit, that, "Dagon is real".'

‘Can you not ask them what they meant? I asked, softly, without antagonism. ‘That was a month past.’

‘Hardly,’ he sneered, ‘the U-boat was lost with all hands thereafter, under an Atlantic as smooth and unrippled as a children’s paddling pool.’

‘And you think a Philistine God of the Harvest struck them down?’

‘I think this reference to ‘Dagon’ is a code, a way of describing some secret weapon, or device of the enemies of the Reich. Nor do I trust Doenitz’s ‘personal instructions’, he is too much of the Old Navy. I think something happened there in the Atlantic swell, and I intend to find out what. You see, more than a U-Boat was lost that day, my father and brother were on board that submarine.’ A look of pathos, fundamentally at odds with all I had ever imagined about his kind, passed over his gaunt, drawn, face. ‘Nor was that last message, all that they sent out into the night to mark their end’.

He signalled to one of the impassive guards at the door who like a pair of grave guardians, rough-hewn from unspeaking stone, had shown throughout my interrogation no sign of interest or regard. ‘This was recovered by the crew of the Scharnhost in the same area shortly afterwards. I take the Scharnhost's presence to be another sign that the High Command’s interest in the site goes far beyond merely harrying British food convoys. The item was ejected from the U-Boat’s torpedo tubes, shortly before the final radio message, wrapped in oilskin within an emptied fuel canister, pressurised to provide buoyancy.’ Grunting slightly at the weight, their only sign of not having had their vocal chords severed, the guards rolled out on the floor, much as I would imagine, Cleopatra was rolled out before Julius, a statue in a green-veined marble, ancient, venerable, and beautiful. The image of a beautiful woman. Or at least, for I have been trained to consider my words carefully, the image of a woman who while not conventionally beautiful never the less spoke in her every line and curve of power, or grace, and of the unbounded ocean. Unbidden and foolishly I let a word slip past my lips, ‘Hydrae’.

‘Ah, I knew you were the man for me, Professor. There is Greek writing on the base of the statue, yes? It reads, in translation: ‘Venerable Mother Goddess Hydrae Bring Forth The Seed Of Father’ and the final word, while curiously weathered might well be ‘Dagon’.’

‘You have consulted other experts, then.’

‘Indeed, I have, and you should consider well, that they quite evidently failed me. For they are not here, and you are.’

I took a rattling breath, and asked - not for the first time for water. This time at least his mind was not on tormenting me but away in reverie, perhaps under the surface of the Atlantic waves where his father and brother strove in the dark to eject - to reject, or to preserve I wondered? - the image of Mother Hydrae from the oil-reeking tomb their vessel had become, and he nodded in assent to his uniformed thugs.

‘But this is not a secret weapon, but a statue out of antiquity,’ I reasoned, toning my voice to be as reassuring as I could in my parched condition. ‘Some spoil of war, smuggled aboard by a foolish sailor from an Adriatic port, and ejected as hunter-fooling debris, or as mere dead-weight. It can not represent the reason for the demise of your father’s vessel.’

‘No? And what if I were to tell you that, Admiral Doenitz believes absolutely that he has discovered a weapon or a cache of weapons, capable of overpowering any submarine whether German or that of the enemy. Weapons old and mysterious, hinted at in myth and legend long past. Weapons of whose existence this statue and the final message of my father’s craft are supporting evidence.’

‘You are saying, what?’ I floundered, anxious not to stir the man to rash action and yet all too certain, and fearful of what he seemed to be implying. ‘I am saying that my father’s craft had discovered in the deep sea bottoms of the Atlantic Ocean, the relics of that high Aryan civilisation, Atlantis, and that to conceal this fact from the Fuhrer, Doenitz and his allies, after marking the place for the further investigation of their own trusted aides, sacrificed my father, my brother and all the crew of that loyal and trusting vessel, to whatever evil weapon from the depths they had foolishly discovered.

I shuddered. The man was paranoid, there could be no such ‘weapons’ and yet clearly the U-Boat had discovered something, had taken from somewhere the statue, and had suffered, perhaps for that theft, perhaps for some trespass, the loss of their lives. It was dangerous to speculate about such matters.

‘Therefore,’ he smiled grimly, ‘we will be going on a little voyage’.

We flew, in a transport plane to an airfield at the coast, and from there, after a brief trip by lorry, embarked in a grey gun-metal submarine which carried no U insignia.

‘Experimental,’ the SS captain said, ‘it can travel under water at higher speeds than any U-boat hitherto deployed, up to 16 knots. When these are commonly in use we will smash the Allied fleets to flinders. It can travel faster below the surface than the convoy protection boats can above. It can also take on air from the surface without emerging, and most importantly for us, it can dive more deeply and more reliably.’

I recognised that he was talking mainly to himself, reassuring himself perhaps that this submarine was not a mere tin coffin, like so many others. Like the one that had carried his family into the abyss. He had no need to impress a Semitic scholar, nor seemingly had he any need to guard his words in front of me. An arid prospect that for it implied that I was perhaps already as good as dead.

Of course, if that were so I had little to lose by risk taking.

‘You see well supplied with naval support,’ I ventured, ‘for one who distrusts the Navy so much.’

‘Himmler shares my concerns. The SS is a knighthood that will bear the greatest burdens when the world is under the Thousand Year Reich. The legacy of Aryan Atlantis is ours to claim. He has given me unlimited support.’

‘Indeed?’ I mused under my breath. The infighting of the National Socialists for all it might affect my own personal future was of less concern to me than his mystical bent. I knew of many scholars who considered Atlantis a mere myth. It was a view I had always put my voice behind. Cut from the whole cloth by Plato to make a point about the mechanics of government, that Atlantis was as fictional as Thomas Moore’s Utopia. Others considered it a reference to the fall of the ancient civilisations of Crete. I wondered if any, other than I, had ever made the connection that the ancestors of the Philistines who had settled in Canaan during the reign of Rameses III, three thousand years ago, had come from Caphtor (Kptar in Egyptian) a land often identified as Crete. In a sense, then, whatever fate awaited this obsessed Nazi, his pseudohistory was at least partly correct. For Dagon could be said to be the god of Atlantis, carried from the ruins of Crete, to the Temple at Ashdod and Gaza. Worshipped there long after his own people had gone under the waves.

***

The submarine carried us efficiently into the mid Atlantic. I was given considerable freedom onboard, there was after all nowhere to escape to but the ocean bottom, and I did not yet feel driven to attempt so desperate an expedient. The common sailors treated me with a rough contempt, probably adopted at least in part as an aping of the attitude of the vessel’s Captain. The Captain, had indulged in a fit of Nazi hysteria on being asked to carry a Jew Scholar (he seemed to find the term oxymoronic) on board his vessel, a prospect I gathered as unlucky as carrying Jonah away from his Jehovah ordained task, and had only been persuaded by the repeated showing of certain sigils or Nazi amulets which I presume carried as if by dark enchantment, the whiff of Himmler’s own authority.

Twice we ran silent, as aircraft flew overhead, hoping that they could not detect our shadow in the water. It was unclear to which side the ‘planes belonged, but the destruction of U-boats and American submarines by their own side in error was not unknown. Once we scattered a convoy of British bound food-ships and them left them milling like startled sheep in anticipation of an attack. The Captain fumed and raged that he was unable to attend to their slaughter.

Eventually we arrived at the latitude and longitude, the SS had identified as the source of the last transmission from the lost U-Boat. Here the Atlantic sea-bed dipped into one of the great clefts or canyons that some have seen as a proof of the theory of plate tectonics. Deep under Homer’s wine-dark sea, the land was folded and pressed by the forces of time and driven into the fires of Hades. A pretty conceit if inaccurate with regard to the Greek picture of an afterlife. I shivered to recall that to them, Hades was not a place of fire, but an abode of husks and half-spirits, of empty lifeless expanses, of Tantalus who strain as he might could never reach the life-giving fluid he craved.

For a while I tried to sleep as the submarine sank down, all vents open, towards the abyss. I dreamed that I heard the tin walls creak and groan under the pressure of the ocean outside. I dreamed that I heard the rupture of the pipes and the hiss of steam, the frantic scuttle of men forming a chain of buckets to try to shift incoming water to enable to seal a breached compartment. Even in my dream however, I knew that if the water were to strike inward at this depth no such chain, however heroic, would be possible. If the hull were breached, nothing human could survive the steel-driven pressure of the water. I did not sleep well.

My sleep was not permitted to come to a natural conclusion, however fitful, instead I was shaken awake by one of the sailors, a man whom I believed to be probably called Kurt or Hans, as he possessed for his life’s burden, a face so traditionally German in its lineaments and outlines as to be practically a platonic ideal of the Hun.

I confess therefore to being startled in my half-awake state to find him addressing me urgently in English.

‘Professor, I have to speak to you. You must tell me what this Mission hopes to achieve.’ The accent was that of the better British Universities, ‘Oxbridge’ as they are called, a fact I recognised from many happy hours spent in the libraries of that nation.

‘Nothing good for any free nations of mankind,’ I whispered, ‘what do you propose.’

‘That we take charge of this sub, and capture whatever weapon they are looking for, for the allies of course. Are you with me?’

I considered for a second. ‘Can I not persuade you that we should instead take this U-Boat to an allied port and surrender it. It is I understand, itself, of a new and improved design. Are there no weapons that humanity would not reach out its hand for in war, however dirty? Suppose that there was a power that at its height had sufficed to bring to ruin a great nation and to drown its cities, so that for ten thousand years its name would be linked inexorably with destruction and the fall, would you then seek to seize that power to win a game of conquerors?’

‘I fancy you mean conkers, Prof, and yes I jolly well would if the kid with the other conker was that house-painter from Berlin. Do you think I’ve risked my life getting aboard this sub to sketch its engines and its venting gear? We’ve had men in the shipyard photographing the plans while this prototype was still in the dry-dock. I’m after bigger game than that.’

I held my head in my hands. The presence of this well-meaning man was an added burden to me. He would never understand. His was the ethic of the fighting man, of the spy, of the patriot, and my ethics were less clear cut.

‘Very well,’ I said, ‘let it be so.’

We made our way towards the bow, to the slightly less cramped Captain's domaine where he and my SS tormentor made their displays of power. Once or twice, we passed other unterzeeboatmen who nodded to ‘Kurt’ and sniggered under their breath at me. I heard the word Sumpfbewohner used, no doubt some jest at my appearance, which is hardly that of a muscular, Aryan, archetype.

Arriving outside the hatchway leading to the room, I paused and listened pressing an ear to the metal surface. Through it by a process of conduction I could hear vaguely the voices of the Captain (habitually raised) and that of the master of the expedition (calmer and yet with that suppressed edge of nigh-ranting fervour that I associated with the SS).

‘What then do you expect to find, exactly?’

‘I have studied carefully not only the transmissions from my father’s U-boat but signals from and histories of other craft lost in this area during the sea-history of High Germany. I expect us to find, on the edge of this great chasm in the sea-bed, the last relics of lost Atlantis. A mount on the tip of the crack of doom, within which lies the treasure house and secret store room of the Gods of Old Atlantis. Astarte, Baal, but most of all Dagon, god of the sea, whose righteous fury it was that drowned and doomed the cities of that ancient time. On that mount lies his temple, and in that temple lies I believe, the mechanism by which Atlantis was toppled and brought to dust.’

‘Hh, we chase legends it seems.’ The Captain commented, sourly, ‘I like not such games. There are real foes to chase in these waters enough without this haunting of the deeps. I have no confidence in the new Tiefe Suit either, and I will not order a man to wear one. You will have to call for volunteers for all your orders from Himmler, and I hope no man on board my ship will heed you.’

‘When we return to port, Captain, we will see how the navy reads your insubordination to the letter of Himmler’s instructions. For now I have no doubt that there are plenty of men aboard this vessel who know their duty to the Reich.’

That seemed as good an entrance point as any, so I banged hard upon the hatch to signify our presence. The Captain, perhaps expecting a report from an orderly, spun the internal wheel and the hatch opened. We were able to enter unopposed, an old scholar, widely known as a member of a despised race, and the burly figure of an obviously loyal German posed no threat to two officers of the fatherland.

I waited until ‘Kurt’ was half-way through the portal, and then I threw myself sideways into him, knocking the pistol that he had concealed under his mariner’s jacket to one side. ‘This man is an English spy,’ I spat, ‘I suggest you use him to test the Depth Suits, before any Germans are put at risk.

‘It is an amusing situation is it not?’ the SS man, remarked as the orderlies strapped and fashioned the spy into the heavy layered plate of the Tiefe Suit: the ‘Depth Suit’. It make him resemble nothing so much as a great sea turtle, and his eyes, accusing and desperate, fixed upon me through its single cyclopean visor with an unspoken horror. ‘The depth suit, will keep you alive, but to preserve that life you will have to return to this submarine, for out there in the ocean deeps there is no other sanctuary of light and air; and to attempt to rise from these depths to the surface would leave you excruciated from the bubbles of nitrogen in the blood that English divers call ‘the bends’, and you would moreover be alone with no hope of rescue in mid ocean. So then, we are it seems your only salvation, and yet to win that salvation you must bring me back something, and in doing so you work against your country and your honour. For whether you bring me the treasure I seek or merely the proof that a German may be risked within this device, you will have served me, as surely as my right hand.’

His eyes were cold and pitiless; ‘this is why ultimately we must triumph, over you subhumans, for we understand that you can have no loyalties beyond the preservation of your animal flesh, and that in the final reckoning you will do anything to drag out your brute existences, just as an injured dog drags its shattered leg behind it as it crawls away from the path of the blitzkrieg.’ He half-turned to smiled at me, and I had never seen anything more inhuman. ‘You vindicate us, Professor. Not only have you offered up your own knowledge in the hope of buying one more miserable hour of breath upon the Earth, but you have given into my hands this man who wanted nothing but to help you.’

I stumbled forwards, and inclined my head, as if bowed down by the weight of his accusations, allowing my mouth to fall against the helmet of the Depth Suit. Through it as through the metal of the hatch earlier I knew my whispered words would be conducted. ‘Trust the mercy of the nymphs of the sea,’ I whispered, ‘for mankind has none.’

As I backed away, I could see puzzlement mix with the fear in the man’s eyes.

‘We, will listen to the Englishman’s experiences by means of the cables connecting his Depth Suit to the ship,’ the Captain said, avoiding the SS man’s gaze. ‘They serve the dual purpose of carrying a pressurised nitrogen/oxygen mixture to him, and carrying away his exhalations, but they also carry by inductance a signal to an earphone in the helmet and one from a microphone to speakers here.’

‘Most satisfactory, we can therefore be assured of a splendid show whatever the results. Is it true, do you think that at these depths a failure of the Suit would result in instantaneous death from pressure, or would there be time for the wearer to feel the inward rupture of his every organ? Have the orderlies bring us some wine from my trunk, we should make an occasion of this test.’

The Captain scowled, and despite his evident hatred of me, I felt for a moment that he hated the SS more. Perhaps in facing the terrors and fears of the deep which must cling to any mortal man reliant on the thin iron hull of a ship or submarine or the flimsier still fabric, armour, and rubber of the Depth Suits, was born a bond of shared experience that I (in his eyes a landsman) could never share, but to which ‘Kurt’ was to be admitted and which the SS mocked at their peril. I felt glad that for that moment, I could convince myself that not all of them were equally steeped in evil, and yet it only added to my guilt, for if I was correct in my beliefs only one human of all the U-Boat’s company or passengers had the least chance of escaping alive from the perils to be found in the sea-mounts of Atlantis.

The SS officer drank red wine - ‘a passable vintage’, the Captain took nothing. I asked again for water, but was ignored. I was of too little importance to pamper or rebuke.

Slowly and softly over the speakers came the breathing of ‘Kurt’ as weighted with lead he sank from the airlock of the submarine downward to the lip of the abyss.

I suspect that at first, he must have determined to remain silent, and to offer no satisfaction to his captors in any display of fear, nor yet in the provision of any needful information as to the functioning of the Suit, but human nature is essentially the gregariousness of apes, and he soon began to speak. His voice was clipped, calm, and yet there was strain there. But he spoke not as a man afraid, but as one moving from darkness into the light of awe. I envied him that new experience.

‘The sea-bottom is visible now in the light from my helmet, and not just in that light, for I can see beyond the light, into pools of shadow that nevertheless are themselves lit beyond the darker cliffs. This isn’t bare rock, but worked stone.

Ledge upon ledge of it stretching out in great paved thoroughfares which must once have felt the tread of a thousand people. There is little sea-life, just some growths like coral, stark and black against the edges of the pavements and curiously none encroaches upon the slabs as if it could know and respect the ages of antiquity that lie here.

Ahead the footing turns to massive steps, far larger than those needed by mortals: this must be a ceremonial path, upon which the Gods of the City were supposed to tread.

I can see in the walls that rise now on either side, the crab picked frescoes and Sea-weathered friezes that have withstood the centuries. They’re beautiful. Like the statues of Rome, they are brightly coloured, not the pale bone of museum-work, and they show the daily life of the city, through which this path, inviolate and empty runs, straight, and climbing to what must have been the Holy of Holies.’

‘The Temple Of Dagon,’ I breathed, knowing that they had ears only for Kurt’s account. But I knew what he would soon see. He would see the dark walled pinnacle itself, the spire that rose like a harpoon plunged from below through the living heart of the City. He would see the ghost lights that play forever about it, and the deeper depths of the chasm whose edge it now marks. He would see the white bulk of the God rising at the chants of its ghost-worshippers, and the dead sea-maidens reaching out for him. He would see the vast shape of Dagon himself, ignoring him as a whale might ignore a minnow, moving passed to seize and rend the petty iron can that humans had dared to send to violate his domain.

Of course Kurt could hardly have been expected to make that entirely clear, but I had the satisfaction of knowing the source of his sudden screams, before the great hands of the God shook the sub, and Captain, and orderlies, and crew and SS officers and all, were flung back and forth like rats in a trap. I hoped Kurt might survive. To be given over to the sea-maids was the only hope I could offer him. For the Captain, and my tormentors I had no hope to offer.

They had spat at me, and called me juden, but some at least with the lore of the sea, had sensed, however partly, the truth. Sumpfbewohner, they had called me: ‘Marsh-dweller’ - noting perhaps my broad and expressive mouth, the watery unblinking stare of my great eyes.

As the walls of the submarine burst and broke apart under the handling of the God, I gave thanks that only one human had any chance of escape, and I raised again the cry I had first made in the SS interrogation cell: ‘Father protect me from the barbarians of these days. Father Dagon protect me!’

Then the water was about me, and above me, and I could hear through the slow currents the call of my beloved family.


Simon BJ [new edited version, story originally intended for the Chaosium anthology "The Dagon Cycle" which has so far waited publication for six years. 20th May 2009 post.]

Last Night I Dreamed Of My R'yleh Again

There are four puzzles that stand out:
What are the second Mrs De Winter's names and background?
Whose is the first body identified as that of Rebecca De Winter?
Why in his last encounter with Rebecca did Maxim have a loaded gun?
Who set fire to Mandaley?

Summarised from "Where Was Rebecca Shot?"
By John Sutherland


From the Scarlet Records of Raebek-Ra

I have opted for a revenge worse than fire, although fire will be part of it. I have taken the child growing in my womb and dedicated it to the treader of dust, so that it will grow swiftly and be open as a portal to my own spirit.

I have pushed it mewling in its weed-strewn perambulator passed the long gallery in which every painting has the face of my betrayer. Its quick childhood will lie lightly on its mind; a murmur of forbidden books, a passing memory of insane chattering behind the locked and bolted iron doors. When it is two, and seems ten times that age in growth, I will loose it into the world, and blank eyed, innocent, it will hunt him for me. I will see through its eyes, hear its muted broken thoughts around the hard kernel of my revenge.

***

What did he think? The snivelling bridegroom as he drove up with his new wife in the screeching clanking hideousness of their car, to see the blood red fires of his beloved home burning against the sky: the tiny vampire-flames dancing at my behest?
Did he think of me, dreaming under the waves? He should have.

I will have my revenge.

Oh, I have read the nauseating account of the affair by that hack its waterlogged pages bloating into pulp. How closely she hints at the truth and yet departs from it. She has him say of me, "She was not even normal" as if some simple lesbianism or mere rejection of his body should give carte blanche to his heroic murderousness.

Perhaps I'll publish my story too then in some out of the way place. Just to right the balance. My kind is long-lived, my story will wait its turn.

Maxim De Winter claimed I had betrayed him. That I had taken lovers.

Oh, as the sea is my witness it was not that easy. I had not wronged him then.

Oh I had sat with Jack, in that little hut, staring out at the sea, and no doubt longing had come into my voice, but not longing for him, oh never that. The shark does not long for the lion, nor the eel for the viper. I was never unfaithful. Not in any sweaty, mammalian way. Jack was kind to me, for someone of his upbringing. He knew I was not well - as he chose to view my changes, when the wind blew cold he would bring me a tasselled rug and sit beside me with it about my shoulders. The sea-spray would bring me ease. I could abandon my gloves with him; show the changes in my hands, discover some tenderness. Although, I knew it couldn't last.

Unable to make him understand I told him I was leaving, not as he thought because of the cancer he believed I had - the sea-cancer that comes to all like me in time, nor need he have dreaded contagion except in his ignorance. Instead I was returning to a home he could never share, changing in ways he could not..heh..fathom.

It was Jack and I that Maxim expected to find in the cottage that day; but instead he found my maid and myself; she who had grown old in my service long before I had embarked on this doomed marriage. She had warned me no good could come of it, but I had been young then and apart form my family. Now older, and much changed, she could visit me only infrequently when the tides permitted.

It was unfortunate that Maxim De Winter found us together. Maddened with his jealousy, assuming I had some other man or woman, some other human playfellow besides him to warm me, he burst into the hut, a rifle crooked in his arm. From the look in his eyes I know he had always intended to kill.

Oh how he screamed to see her. Her eyes bulging; her skin a green shimmer.

By his standards no doubt my maid was startling, still despite his panic I believe he knew what he was doing when he killed her. I think I hate him for that more than for his attempt upon my life.

He tried to shoot me through the heart, little knowing that in our kind the organ is displaced, the rib cage soft and turned to cartilage. I dropped, cold, not breathing, mimicking death; weeping inwardly. As he hefted our bodies into the sea, he swore, to see on me, as in miniature, those distortions and departures from his normality that he had been made to face full blown in my handmaiden.

Later when her body, further gone as it was in that great change which must comes to all of us, blew ashore he hailed it as mine, whether in ignorance or by design rejoicing that no signs of violence marred its bulk. How I cursed him for that, for keeping her body from its natural rest in the deeps.

It was then I started to crave revenge. To kill a woman was easy, to find one like I had been was harder, but not impossible. I suppose I regret that now, a little. She hadn't done anything to me, except to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Deep sea bathing in winter. Cramps would have got her if we had not. A pity our science doesn't run to guns, I had no way to make the marks he tried to make on me. Still the finding of her body wearing my wedding band, that was hard for him to shrug off with my maid buried in the De Winter mausoleum. I have to smile thinking of the lively awfulness, the putrescent remains of my maid, which when exhumed proved too horrific to prompt more than a rapid and lawless burning by the magistrate. A fate the Dauphne woman merely hints at in her narrative.

It shook him, the second body.

Made him confess to her, to my nameless afterbirth. My alter-ego: my huntress.

I'm glad I burned his house. I'm glad I have worse yet in store for him.

I wonder where they'll live. I wonder what he'll do when he finds out why she's nameless. Why she has no background, except the epistemological void. There are more things than flame-vampires, Deep Ones can conjure up. There are worse fates than fire.


Simon BJ [19th May 2009 post]

Going On Passed Judgement

“..the American continents, by the free and independent position which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any powers.We should consider any attempt as dangerous to our peace and safety as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United Slates.”

Declaration by President Monroe to Congress, 2nd December 1823: “The Monroe Doctrine”.

‘This much we know,’ Allan Pinkerton said. ‘Paul Nemo came through West Virginia, on the National Road, and caught a steam ship from Wheeling, up the Ohio river; running from the sleepless eye. He’d decided to have no more to do with the ‘pinks’ not since they took to heaving dynamite at women and children.’

He hushed his outraged subordinates, ‘His words not mine, gentlemen. We have to understand the man’s motives, wrongheaded as they may seem. I was anxious to talk further with him, and to retain if possible his unique services - men with photographic memories are had to find and useful in our line of work - and I confess I deputised men to bring him back, peacible like. A mistake, as it happens.’

The head of the Pinkerton Agency, unfolded a tattered manuscript. ‘I’ll let him fill in the rest in his own words, gentlemen. This letter to his father, came into my posession two days ago. His father having passed away in the latter part of last year, there was no one else to deliver it to, and the author’s vituperations concerning myself in the letter’s opening paragraphs drew the attention of a particularly venal and untrustworthy postal worker. I regard the fee for its retrieval as money well spent. The letter was written four months ago, and seemingly passed through divers hands in its route back east. As you will hear, this is worrying for several reasons, not least that it implies we are in no position to offer an immediate response to its import. If we’re lucky, matters have resolved themselves. If not,’ he shrugged, and shook the letter roughly, as if to fling the spidery hand writing off of it.

***

I reckon that old slaver Pinkerton wasn’t keen to see me free so easily, the men at my heels were his. I’d been a boon to his work with my freak memory. One time I’d known every desperado’s face as well as I knew every popular song. I’ve got that kink in my memory, that lets stuff run in and then goes hard and yella as amber. You know that Dad, but then neither of us could ever forget an old score, musical or otherwise.

There were three men at least, dressed all in black. Allan Pinkerton must have had the sixth sense, that the papers credit him with, working hard, for they harried me close. Perhaps he was worried I’d go to the Herald or the Courier with tales from the Monroe file. Tales of the things the Pinkerton’s hired-bulls had done to keep the US safe from various European powers.

I’d worked for the old shamus, on the Federal Government’s toughest cases, the ones that had grown men weeping in the corner, at the inhumanity of man; of man, and of other things - and I’m guessing that he felt that some of those cases might reflect badly on the agency. Not that I had anyone to tell them to, or any intent to tell them. I couldn’t see the newspapers publishing half of it, and besides I wasn’t proud of most of it - although it had always been necessary work. So I opted to loose myself instead, to go, finally, as I had always intended, West. You always said it would come to that.

I reckon I lost the ‘All-seeing’ agents on the river. I thought I’d seen one of them - a famous man himself - fresh from his failure to bring in the James Gang, throw his cigar in the wharf-water in disgust as the boat pulled out. His rat-like face with its bushy side whiskers, was built for sneering. He’d have shaken his fist after me if he’d dared - I guessed - but was fearful that I might have plugged him then and there. I was always a prize shot, and though up ’til then I’d never shot a living man, a claim I guess I can still make just barely, he’d no notion - I’d guess - that a man might be a deadshot and keep his bullets really, solely, for the dead.

He had a price on his head from Jesse for his part in the death of Zerelda James, so I’d heard it (I’d heard too that Jesse had vowed the death of Allan Pinkerton himself in retaliation, but knowing Allan I judged nothing would come of that). I’d been almost been tempted to my hand at claiming bounty then and there - but for the obvious difficulties in collecting from Jesse James, and the necessity of dragging the ‘pinks’ corpse over to Missouri. Besides I was enjoying the steamship ride too much to kill, and it would have alarmed the ladies aboard. Turning West then, like so many men in search of a dream, I lost myself - perhaps a trifle more deliberately than most.

Now, I am lost in more ways than that. Not physically, the map I enclose will tell you where these events took place exactly: you’ll see why later, maybe, if this reaches you in time. But for all it matters to the telling of it, it was simply further West, where the West was still a livin’ breathin’ emptiness to be grasped like wrestling with clouds. I write not because there is any hope for me, still less in hope of any forgiveness or reconciliation between us, but because I know that it will be you smug stay at homes in the east, who will be called upon to face the things I have seen, and to go into the great beyond, alive, as I did.

I had joined a wagon-train, goin’ on to a settlement name of “Judgement” - a staging post on a dusty, homesteading trail. Maybe someday, a road will roll on that far, or trains drive across the continent, or maybe not. I guess, just now I doubt it. From there I’d intended to strike out alone, but not long after my arrival it transpired that this would be difficult if not impossible.

It was noon on the 14th April, that by my reckonin’ the West died. At least the bit I’d reached. The bit I lied to myself that I knew, and understood.

Beyond Judgement, in the badlands a ghost town had sprung up, overnight. Across the salt flats, the lights and sounds of the undead saloon flashed and tinkled like a music box on a dead whore’s dressing table.

Honest men - living men - the few ranchers and cattle-boys untainted by the devil’s spore, by the ghost-lights that lit through flesh and bone, were packing their saddlebags daily and lacing their boots for the trek back east. Somehow the deaths spent to gain the West didn’t seem like a needful sacrifice when the unlucky dead were rolling bones for cold cash and fire-water a dozen miles away. Squalling children and women-folk were planning a retreat. Me I only wondered what horrors might lie back east. We’d heard nothing for months, and the aurora lights on the horizon burned eastward as well as to the West. Did Allan’s sixth sense make him sleep uneasily, at the thought of thieves stealing the very world from under his gaze? Did you set aside the railroad and banking profits that so shield your heart, I wonder? Where there any signs and wonders where you were? Or where they only found West, beyond Judgement?

The preacher, Thomas Kirkbright by name, had blamed the Indians. A curse, he’d said: a curse that had ripped the dead out of the ground, and back out of the throats and bellies of the buzzards. He said they’d torn down their tribal totems and made allegiance with Satan Himself direct, to burn the white men out of their lands.

Me, I couldn’t see it. Not so cleanly, or dirty neither, as that. Oh, Sam Woo - the chinese cook from the single hotel in Judgement, empty now since the few travellers staying there had caught sight and sounds of the gamblin’ dead - said he’d seen Indian’s in fancy clothes, high feathered, and bearing rattle-sticks. Priests like, casting a green powder on the hills, and calling out. Not that his heathen tongue had made any sense of the sounds though I’d worked them out best as I could, coaxing each syllable from him with whiskey. It was on the hills that the dead had walked first, but by all accounts - and not just those of a chink cook - they had been Injun dead : braves and squaws, born back from the earth in green-fire and a smell like rottin’ molasses.

That might have made sense. War-parties of the dead, sweeping East, driving the white man into the sea. I’d have seen some gain in that for the red man. But, rousing the spooks of the dead invaders to whoop and splutter their souls away, in the jerry-rigged shacks of an abandoned town, that was just plain wrong. Not, needful no how, Ma would have said, and being ‘not needful’ was the worse crime to her. You know that. I took some more soundings of the folk around, afore I girded my gun-belt to what I saw coming.

Tom Kirkbright, folks called him Preacher, on account as he wouldn’t shut up about the good book - though I’ve always guessed that the truth’s to be found in more books than one - waved his bone-thin hands, and beat his black clad chest and wailed me out lines from Revelation. He was at a guess a kind of Quaker, though the others in these parts had turned their backs on him, for what reasons I could never quite define. Miss Rebecca, whose school house was now deserted - well never mind what she said. Nothing can come of it now, and you’d never have welcomed a school teacher to the family anyway. Let it go at this, what she said made me clear in my own mind that if nothing was done - if that stain on the earth was left to grow and spread and draw in the dead of all the Indian wars, and of the Wars of Independence, then there would be no West in time, and no east neither, but only a seething mass of putrefaction from sea to shining sea.

You insulted me once, father. Naturally I never forgot your words: you said my longing for the West and the life of a cowboy, was the weak romantic strain coming out. That it took more iron in the soul to work day in and day out in a refinery or at an office stool, than it did riding on mule back - two donkeys together, you said - with no man to face under an open sky. Maybe so. I put off going West for so long, I took other work. I even hunted outlaws for the Pinkertons. That is I kept their wanted posters in my mind. There was no iron in me, not at first. I put it there gradual like, day by day, under the open sky. But, I think riding beyond Judgement, into that dead township, took more gall than asking you for a raise ever did.

What lies beyond Judgement? Well rock at first and dust, and a trail half overgrown with neglect as if even the Western urge had faltered there against some unseen ban. But, I reckon’ that beyond Judgement, is what we all deserve, father. Deserve rather than desire, for I hope still for a more merciful God. But beyond Judgement is only Hell, and I rode for it hard, across the burning dust. Dust-devils and sparks struck by my horse’s hooves, rose up around me like a sea-mist.

I rode into Hell at noon. What can I say, there was the whole tradition of the noon shoot out as its told in the dime-novels back East - although its most likely as the shootin’ out West gets done as much by night, by ambush, or when all parties are drunk - and there was the hope, faint though it was, that the noon sun would have laid the ghost and goblins low. I’d tied a buryin’ spade to my saddle bow in case I’d find a town of bones. I did, at that, but not still ones. Never still. The town was a-clatter with skeletons: six guns hanging low from bone white hips banged like gongs against thigh bones. Bone matrons pushed bone babies in permabulators of sooty black, around the white bleached wooden sidewalks: in the saloon the gamblers of the night had drilled holes in their own knuckle bones and set them spinning. It took me a second or two to see the holes made numbers, and the knuckle bones made dice.

The sound of music had drifted out as I strode into the bar; and at the piano a skeleton, ivory on ivories, was playing, a song I remembered from my childhood.

‘While we seek mirth and beauty
And music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent,
Their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.’

The skeleton behind the bar, cocked his bone-white head on one side and the vertibra in his neck bulged and contorted.

‘Drink, Stranger?’ He demanded; his voice like a vetriloquist’s doll, no soft palate, and no tongue, remaining. One of the gamblers yawned elaborately and something darted out from his non-existant lips. Not a tongue though, only a lizard sitting in the dead man’s mouth, and catching flies. One, escaping, buzzed past me, and I swatted at it, catching it a glancing blow with my gun-hand. It was dry and dead as dust. This was Beelzebub’s Town, were even the flies were dead.

I decided to see it through.

‘What have you got?’

He tipped up a bottle, and a pale white sand shot through with flecks of colors I can’t rightly name, spilled into a glass scoured by the constant drinking of the dead. Flecks red as blood, flecks lurid with green sickness, swirled in sand pale as leprosy. ‘I can’t drink, that.’ I said, stating the simple fact, keeping one hand on my gun, ready to slip the fastening of the hoster. More than one cowboy’s been killed refusing a drink, even among the living. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You haven’t felt that thirst, yet.’

‘Maybe the boy’d like some other entertainment.’ That was one of the painted skeletons on the stairs, drapes loose over the bone framework of lost pleasures. All hips and emptinesses, yawning. A shiver crawled up my spine, slow as anguish. I remembered biting down on leather once when a bullet from a misfired gun was cut from my thigh. They say the body does not remember pain. I do. I remember it as I remember everything else: perfectly, repeatedly, at night.

The bar-tender whipped his head around and something rattled inside his skull, like dice. I thought of two shrunken and ossified eyes a rolling, and felt my breakfast rise in my throat.

‘He ain’t felt that thirst yet, either ladies,’ the bar-keep said, ’still he can sit a spell if he keeps himself presentable, and does no damage. Ain’t no law gainst that.’

‘When he rouses himself,’ the bone whore said, ’see that he’s mine.’

I wondered then if I ought to keep a bullet for myself.

A tall skeleton in grey that had been watching the fall of the knuckle bones, stretched itself upright from its observer’s crouch. I could have sworn it were nigh eight feet tall. It had two crossed gun belts over a fancy gamber’s waist-coat that was all worms and gold-braid, and a black hat like the devil’s own halo, above its empty bleached face.

Something about the skull beneath that hat, looked less human than the rest. Not the sub-human skull of a brute, not less capacious, but other, grown to house a brain not whole that of normal men. His voice was like sand-paper on iron. I can hear it now. ‘I don’t take to his kind, riding in here like they own it. This is our town, our deaths built it, our souls raised it, it’s ours.’

‘I thought the indians did that,’ I said off-handed like, and I knew from the way the rattling and the rolling of the dice fell silent with a sudden lock-down snap of the manacles fixin’ on a malfactor’s hands, that I’d said the wrong thing, or the right one since I’d not come that way beyond Judgement to socialise or to bed down with bones.

‘The Indians!’ he said it like a cuss word, like many a man does who’s never seen a prairie. ‘What do they know of the old lore. It’s not a thing of the new world, but of the old, older than their forefather’s, old since the first men crouched in caves and wrote the words in red ochre on the walls for those who came after to fathom if they had a mind. When their ancestors fled West in fear of the dark, it was the dark that told its secrets to my kin. We did not flee.’

‘Leave it,’ the gambler with the lizard for a tongue offered, ‘he’s been here too long already. He’ll be et up before he can ride a mile back. He’s a dead man walking, Johnny, like they all will be. We’ll be the kings of the dead Johnny like you promised, when the dust blows West and east. No skinny runt of a boy in faded chaps can bring down the men death couldn’t keep down, no matter how high they hung.’

‘Shut up.’

A grey sleeve cut a diagonal in the air and a gun, black with grave soil and red with rust, still coughed its old grave-yard cough. The gambler’s bone head shattered before its fury, and the bloody body of the lizard fell across the card tables.

The bar-tender reached below the bar, and a wicked little derringer, polished like the eye of a cat, peered from the folds of his polishin’ cloth. There was a murmer of tongueless voices, and while I couldn’t tell which of the restless dead first gave vent to the sentiment, I could tell it was in all their minds. ‘We thought we couldn’t die, again. He didn’t tell us we could die again. Not again.’

I thought of a renegade I’d heard of while I was with the Pinkertons. A man who’d cheated death across Europe only to come at last to a land larger, rawer, and more fatal than the salons of the mighty, and yet a man who’d still claimed he could never die. ‘Not while the wind stirs the old dust, not while the dust whispers to the magic men, and the damned alike.’

His name had been Johnny Carcosa, and he had been hung two years before, a hundred miles or more from here, and his body burned and the ashes scattered. No one would give it Christian burial, not after the things they’d found in his two black leather saddle bags.

Had his dust blown West, stirring the dreams of shamans and of outlaws? Teaching strange words that might raise up the dead, bringing a death that was staining the earth its evil and unearthly colors? I didn’t know then, and I hope not to know now, although I fear I may before too long.

In the end though - pray God it was the end - it was resolved by violence. I went for my six-irons and so did he. He shot me in the left shoulder. The bullet I later discovered was a piece of bone, and in a way I owe my life (such as it remains) to that fact, for the bullet was already disintegrating as it reached me, like wooden bullets from a trick shooter’s gun will before they reach the target. My first bullet, of good melted lead, dum-dummed with a cross, shattered his jaw and stilled his dreadful voice.

Maybe if he hadn’t killed the gambler, the others would have risen up and pinned me down, held me while he glared hatred from eyes poised above ruin, and throttled me.

But as it was, they parted like Moses’ sea, and left me a clear second shot. It stove in his rib-cage, and I swear, that in the boney prison of his chest, a red and wizened thing beat on, pumping invisible blood to invisible and intangible flesh. He raised his gun again, and his bone fingers tightened at the trigger. Mindful that the minor wound I’d taken might be easily worsened, I raised my own piece, and muttered not the benedictions of my childhood, but what I hoped was the descending version of the charm Sam Woo had heard the Indians make upon the hillsides. The charm that had come to them out of the old, old, east.

Saying it in reverse, forcing the words backwards, was like chewing on glass. Like doing something wrong, something against nature. I lost a tooth mid way through, it just dropped from my jaw, and I started to bleed at the nostrils. The metal scent of blood goaded me, but I spoke on. Later, back in Judgement, I’d see in Miss Rebecca’s mirror that my eyes were bloodshot with crazy, red trails. Still I hung on. If the West is anything, anything good, it’s the chance not to take the old evils Westward. What evil from the old world deserves to stain the new? I guess Monroe was right at that.

Ripped apart by winds that sprung from no source, a dust cloud in the shape of a man, Johnny Carcosa died finally, too easily. Too easily for me to think this thing over.

When he died, the ghost town faded and vanished like a mirage. But, even though the town of Judgement stands, most having stayed - even though I will entrust this letter to one of those too cowardly to remain - I can not yet conclude that all is safe. I can not let the nursing of Rebecca, turn me from the final necessity.

I know the chant. So too does Sam Woo. I’m sorry for old Sam - who may indeed no longer remember the words he told me. I don’t think I can take that risk. I can make that look like a drunken accident; hell maybe he’ll even have one before I’m well enough to arrange it. I hope so. I’d hate to have to start killing living men with him.

Then the Indians. It won’t take much to stir the folk here to hunt them down: most still reckon this was their doin’ - and after a fashion it was - although what whispered to them in the night spoke I have no doubt of bringing back their own loved dead, not of raising a grave- worm township under an evil prince. Then the last. I know the chant too, and I can’t kid myself I’ll ever forget it. It’s made of words that live in the old memories in the blood out of the ancient past, and I who remember everything, every song and every peace of doggeral and every pain, can not be brought to forgetfulness short of the blackness of eternity.

Carcosa was right about that at least, and hard as it was to say it in the descending mode, it would be easy to mutter it in my sleep the other way. The way it wants to be said.

If I say it, the gateway to beyond will be opened again, the dust that should lie still til God’s own Judgement day will stir, and the bone face of Johnny Carcosa will leer across a West which will be stained forever by crimes out of prehistory. I don’t think he’d have stayed a skeleton, you see. I think his evil heart would have built him a new body in time, a new lean body, spare and strong, built from the ground and the men poisoned with the evil colors of that strange dust.

So when I’ve killed Sam, and when I’ve killed the Indians. When I’ve stained my hands red with blood more innocent than mine, it will be my turn to die, assuming that the whispering isn’t too strong for me by then.

That’s where you come in father. You and that bastard Pinkerton. You need to raise a gang of men and ride to Judgement, and if you find anything of me but Rebecca weeping at my grave, you need to destroy it root and branch. For if I greet you with fond words and open hands, the country will have those hands at its throat hereafter, for his voice like sandpaper on iron is always in my ears, and I do not know how long it will be before I speak the words.


Simon BJ [18th May 2009 post. Story originally intended for "Tales of The Outre West" anthology that was never published.]

At Outpost Gallifrey, a post you may have missed....

Since it maybe deleted within seconds of posting....

The OG site-owner has forbidden all mention of Obverse Books, who are producing the Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus collection. He writes that anyone referring to it will be banned.

I know the reason: it's because the site owner couldn't bear to be told that posters were perilously close to libelling the publisher of the said books. None of the mods would act and OG's fair and practical response to an argument escalating to the point where one person professionally libels another, was to ban all mention of the libelled person's products.

I'm not a contributor to Observe books. I admit an interest because I'd have liked to have been. But since OG has banned all mention of a promising book line because of his own disagreement with the publisher, that's unlikely. I also expect to be banned and won't be back anyway. Anyone wanting to talk to me about my books can find me (here) by typing my name into a search engine. I don't need to read or frequent a site where my posts will be edited to reflect the site-owner's personal strops, as even historical mentions of Obverse Books have vanished from peoples' sig files or links.

Simon BJ [Sadly, this counts as my 17th May 2009 post]

More on that web comic?

So after a long delay, and as part of my writing renaissance:

COSGROVE AND VINES ARE COMING! PAGE TWO POSTED TODAY!

THE CASE OF THE CURLY CUTLERY: WHEN BETTY TYNWALD'S BED AND BREAKFAST ESTABLISHMENT IS BOTHERED BY PSYCHIC DISTURBANCES IN ITS SHEFFIELD STEEL KITCHEN-WEAR: WHO CAN SHE CALL BUT HER SECOND COUSIN ARTHUR'S SISTERS FANCY MAN MORRIS VINES AND HIS EX-MI7'ASSOCIATE' SALLY COSGROVE, BETTER KNOWN - IN THE ROMFORD TRIANGLE - AS THE FRANKLY FOURTH RATE TEAM OF COSGROVE AND VINES INVESTIGATORS OF THE VAGUELY WORRYING PAGE 2

Hosted here, in glorious TECHNIBLACKANDWHITE


Simon BJ [WEb Comic page 2 counts as my 16th May 2009 post].

I like the new Star Trek film, but what if Shatner got to direct the next one......

Shot of a red, rusty desert: sound of thunder.

Voice Over: "There are forces that govern time. There are rules that may not be broken." Lightning strikes repeatedly from a clear sky. [There is no thunder after it, implicitly time is running backwards]

A golden globe of fire appears, spinning. It dissolves to reveal a naked old WILLIAM SHATNER. He stands up. In the time reversal he becomes young.

In the distance there is the sound of a car engine. An antique mustang painted scarlet, driven by a beautiful green woman guns across the desert.

SHATNER vaults into the air as the car drives headlong towards him, he spins, landing like a cat on the passenger seat. He opens the glove compartment, in it is a folded gold Starfleet Tunic, ann old-style phaser pistol, and a communicator.

Voice Over: "In a world he never made".

Cut to car, KIRK (for Shatner is now dressed) has his arm around the green woman, and is driving.

Voice Over: "One man will take back what is his"

TITLE rises out of desert in letters of STAR FLEET Gold fire.

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KIRK

Simon BJ [Post for 16th May 2009]

Poem dedicated to my friend Kelly Hale who is forced to study Emily Dickinson

Studying Emily Dickinson, in Her Style

Because I had to take this course
I had to read her verse
Where every poem scans like this
And many are much worse

And Random Words are capitalised
As if people with breath
Like Destiny and Providence
And her best buddy Death.

She spent her life, 'most in her bed
And not shared with another
She scorned the kindly publisher
Who might have been her lover.

Her thoughts turned to philosophy
The kind that gets called high
And that's without the use of drugs
You purchase on the sly.

In other ages she'd have graced
the Reader's Digest or
The local papers (second-placed)
Behind some other bore.

PPH has upon his site,
A comic sketch he wrote
About a similar poetess
And the fans who on her dote.

Though to be fair, I have to add
She's all right by SBJ
He loves to find a poet
Who's so Ripe for Parody.


Simon BJ [Post for 15th May 2009]

The Big Cat II: Mr Kitling's Cakes

Mr. Kitling's Cakes

From the casebooks of Guy Leopold; Were-PI. As transcribed later by his ex-petbot secretary Clarice. (For the account of Clarice’s rescue from petbotters, readers are referred to casebooks tape 2, spool 12, or to the popularisation “The Big Cat” in the collection “The Cat Who Walked Through Time”.) As prepared for publication by Guy Leopold’s literary agent Simon Bucher-Jones

[Transcription of transmission, augmented with material from later police reportage]

The creaking of the glass and iron framework, upon which - most uncomfortably I may say - I was lying, drowned the faint voice of the man in black, (and the slimy tones of his associate) quite effectively. Luckily I had a resonance laser playing on the glass, transferring the impact of air molecules on it back into patterns a pocket comp could interpret and feed into a plug into my right ear. My right ear twitched with satisfaction. This was, as they say – the goods.

I was feeling quite satisfied with the stakeout, stretched out in my leopard form, the evidence trickling ticklingly in my ear, and to a record disc, and a tight-beam satellite link to a mainframe elsewhere (it pays to take no chances). I had a subvocaliser at my throat and was dropping into the mix those little witticisms that make retired PI’s either a wow on the after-dinner speaker circuits of Hellandback City, or a corpse at the bottom of a sulphur pit with their feet (all four) in plasticrete overshoes. Some people don’t like witticisms. Go figure!

My present case ought to have been straight forward enough; this saturnine and secretive man had come from nowhere, bought out a bakery, and gone from obscurity to possessing 87.3% of the Hellandback City baked goods market in three weeks. A figure in a trench coat, mirror-shades, and dark glasses had come to my office claiming to represent his remaining competitors wanting to know why. I of course, saw the figure sway alarmingly in the middle at one point, and a furry paw protrude from its midriff. [Ha, Clarice, you didn’t realise I’d noticed did you.] But what the heck, if a group of ex-petbots who’d gone into bakery security had got their fur ruffled over the new owner bringing in outworld kitty patrols, that was as good a reason for me getting paid as a noses-out-of-joint set of pastry chefs.

At least I thought that, before I found out about the killings. Silly, sadistic murders – and strangely unnecessary ones, if murder can ever be necessary. Hellandback City is many things - I often think when a man is tired of it, he's tired of strife - but it isn't the galaxy's highest per capita front-end sales point for pikelets, banburies and scones. 87.3% of the local sales is a far whack of the old mazumas, but not worth some cake-lord of the Outer Bakeries storming in with gleaming cyberkitchens and staff from the Currantbunneries of Yan. Not worth strife. Not worth murder.

A week ago, Mr. Theophilus Stuffright of Stuffright & Siblings Reknowned Baked Goods, had sleepwalked into his central oven, and nestled down for a nap on the cold metal (undergoing servicing) surface. Unfortunately he had still been there when the pastry-layerers went online, and hot-jam and criss-cross latticed him to death.
Five days ago, Maggy D'Alen of the old Colonial Grant Cherry-Puff Concessions had been found drowned in her own special cherry fondant recipe. Another baker had been found cooked in an amusing Scotch egg. Industrial accident with a giant display model, the insurance company said.

So, I wasn’t as amused and witty as I might have been, even though things were going down on the ear very nicely in a “hear chatty criminals incriminating themselves” phoneline way. I’d just sent a blipdump of their chat (and my interjections / thoughts) for transcription, and I was trying to decide what to do, because it had been frankly weird. And that, officer [subvocalise transmission off in five seconds] is what I was doing at 2.00 am Hellandback Central Time on the roof, just before your police air-cruiser spotted me, and my paws slipped.

[transmission blip, re-spool five minutes, recording for transcription -]

They seem a very ill sorted twosome. One, the front man – Mr Saturnine – neat beard, finicky neat black suit, too tight collar, gold thread chasings round his throat. [No, Clarice – I couldn’t hear all that obviously, that was snipped straight off a regular street-cam]. Hard to imagine him up to his elbows in flour and water.
The other – I’ll get to him in a minute - I haven’t got a convenient safety-cam shot of, he apparently doesn’t leave the bakery, and the implication of that thanks to our surveillance earlier is that he must have been brought there in a box. I’m not joking. I counted the workers in and out, before seemingly Mr. S swapped the place over to full automatics, and he ought to be the only organic life in there. Except his cats. I’ve seen them on patrol, big bruisers, scraggly looking but tough. The other isn’t a cat though. He sounds…squelchy.
Mr. S likes to stroke his cats and talk to himself. I’m boosting him to pick-up level now…..[Did you get a micro-dot cam on your friend’s collar? Yes its going live now….]

“Are you familiar with Tipler's theory of the Omega Point, little puss?” ,the man in black asked, scratching the tabby behind one ear.

“Of course, she isn't,” his companion hissed, his voice bubbling and burbling out from under his slouch hat, “She's a cat, just a cat, not one of your pets.”

[This is me again, and that noise was the other talking. Like listening to a vat of oil being heated. No part of him was visible from the roof, but I could hear (thanks to my gadget) the sticky slopping sloop-sloop noise as he moved from place to place, nervously like a fat man jigging from one foot to another if the fat man were composed entirely of rancid slime. He hasn’t walked into the tiny micro-dot cam field, and candidly I don’t think I want him too.]

“No?” Mr. Saturnine inquired sardonically. 'Your insight astonishes me, I recovered your remains for one purpose and one purpose only. That purpose terminates tonight!”

“And I will be glad of it,” the bundled figure [I got a glimpse of him then, imagine a walking bolster, a great white chef’s outfit tied tightly around a bulbous form, as if it’s bursting out would defy some local law] exclaimed. “You recall your promise to me. Full and complete control of the bakery market on this world together with the technology to expand my grasp to sweetmeats, and finally... confectionery!”

“Yes, yes,” the neatly bearded man said, never ceasing to let his black gloved hands stroke the cat's hair, “You will be in charge of sweets again soon enough, my obsessive-compulsive friend. Maybe even export them to Terra Alpha. I could deliver them, past every danger. A man in black, leaving your calling card on the dressing tables of the mighty. Would you like that?”

“You mock me, when it is my skill with kitchenware that has brought you to this.”

“No, no - never mock. We need each other you and I for this night. I need you to have recreated the ancient recipe, nothing else will do, for what I intend.”

[And as the white marshmallow of a man oozed its way from oven to shining oven, the man in black began again to talk to the purring tabby. Good kid your cousin, she was holding up well.]

“Tipler believed, my puss, that the explanation of the universe lay not in the past but in the future. He thought that the hard anthropic principle, ensured that at the end of time, the universe must tend to an Omega Point Deity. A life able to seize control of time and space, to engineer the universe's final collapse, to justify and make of the past an inviolate logical necessity.” [Memo to self buy hard physics book, I could do with the sleep.]

His eyes, in the micro-dot cam field, shone yellow as he spoke like a cat's; but just hearing his voice, I knew that despite that there was no possible kinship between him and me. Oh I was twinned with a cat to help me kill. The old game of Rat and Dragon they call it, after a story written years ago on Old Old Earth before the bombs went up and the bombs came down, see, but even so he was a worse dragon-cat that ever I’d been.
His voice was hard and cold even as it crooned; a voice hypnotic yet painful.
“Oh I have traveled, puss, and seen stupid races try to realise that vision, to end with puffy incontinent group-minds dribbling their senile way into the more recent eternities. Tipler spoke not of the end of a single galaxy, but of the Finality itself. His Omega Point would be a mechanism of the Ultimate End, realised in the final attoseconds of the Great Collapse. In that tiny time using the infinite shear energy from the collapsing void, his chosen race would pack infinite computations. Enough to model eternity in perfect emulated space. A universe, or all universes recreated under their or its perfect and eternal control.”

To his right, the snorting mass of his associate fumbled at a chopping board, bringing a cleaver down again and again. Working itself into a kind of frenzy.
With a final accidentally wide chop, it severed a thick pink finger, only to grasp it and smush it back bonelessly onto its hand. It re-adhered itself with a sound like worms kissing. [Memo to self get the sound pick ups de-sensitized so they just give me dialogue…euugh.]

Mr. S again:- “My people are aware of Observers, puss. The Gods (lesser deities no doubt) of Ragnarok, the forces behind the Land of Fiction (sometimes called the same, othertimes not), the Eternals. Empty vessels waiting to be filled with life. We are not convinced that to be observed is the be-all of existence, we are not convinced it is, entirely safe.”
A wave of heat filled the narrow chamber, as the man in black manipulated an iron door, sweat beaded momentarily on his high Shakespearean brow.
“For a time, I have noticed a tendency, in me, little puss. A predilection, let us say. A habit.” He smiled. “Villainy. Destroying this, stealing that, plotting the other. I began to wonder. My life had become almost a sequence of stories, always intertwining around the gullible and the foolish, it seemed I could not land on a world without stumbling over superscientific weapons. Anywhere I went there was another race waiting to invade. Children, leaderless children crying out for guidance. It was a heady life, and yet… and yet…. was it all my choice? Even now, I cannot set up a business without chancing on the moldering robotic remains of its most diabolic practitioner, without finding the necessity of amusingly dispatching competitors that in all, ha, honesty, were really beneath my notice. Is it, I ask myself, likely?'

He twirled dials. At his direction his shrouded minion - his “diabolic practitioner” - stuffed his choppings into the oven.

“What if I was an entertainment. What if this future Omega Point God was not benevolence but a gawping infant still crooning for tales of the nursery. Tales of good, tales of evil. Tales with a Proud Mephistopheles, who never finally is defeated, but rises again.” He paused. “Rises!” he gasped, darting at his machinery, like a man with a rouge soufflé. “What, if I had no other existence but those moments in which I lay within its omniscient gaze. What if I killed for its amusement?”

He stripped a glove from one hand and laid a finger on the cat's soft nose. “What then, puss? What if the Master mouse could not amuse the Cosmic Cat a moment Longer?”

He sighed. “I've been trying to think. How did I escape Castrovalva, or did it start before then? Why did I always set a dozen traps, within traps? Was I, the watched, taking on the characteristics of the Watcher? Hmm. That's when I thought of you. Ubiquity is the Cat's middle name, they say. On ancient Gallifrey, there you were. On Earth, the Doctor's little bungalow of a world, there you were. And on Bandragenus 5, and on Xenica, and from the Orion deeps to the Gulf of Galaxy 9. My mindlink with the Kitlings taught me much of the inner workings of your minds.”
His eyes now were close to the cat's own. Big in the micro-dot cam. [I felt myself going under for a minute there Clarice, the bugger’s got the devils own convincing eyes.]

“Where did you evolve? Did the Osirians spread you across space-time with their mummies and pyramids? Oh I doubt it. I think I know what watches through the Cat's Eyes, across all the worlds that live. I see your jade-windows into the Omega Point, my puss.”

With his other hand he flung open the oven, and a smell of delicious Whiskas (that lost delicacy of the 20th century, 9 out of 10 cats prefer it) rose into the air. In that instant of distraction, his eyes darkened and grew large.

“I AM THE MASTER AND YOU WILL OBEY ME.” Viciously he flung his will down the eons…
[The micro cam does not confirm what I believe to have happened. I felt it though, perhaps because I too am part cat; on a good day. I have to dictate this, quickly Clarice I can feel it oozing out of my mind like jelly, and I can hear a cop-flyer swooping and snooping over to my right, mustn’t let that distract me, got to tell you….]

And the end of the universe quaked. The Omega Point is a logical necessity, it cannot not exist because at least one of the worlds in the many worlds bundle of timelines that together make up the over-history of the universe MUST lead to it. But there is no guarantee which species will build it, nor having built it, that they will retain control.

Once there was a convergence. The million Cats of the Khan of Gallifrey caterwauling in their giant stadium; weaving the spells that bound them into the universe, before the Pythia was thrown down. That was the history of magic.

Once there was a convergence. The million cybercats of Mondas, test subjects for the conversion process, their brainpans enhanced, silently slitting the throats of their still mostly organic experimenters. Later they would conquer the ice-dwellers of Telos, and return for their cousins of Earth. That was the history of science.

Once there was a convergence. The petbotted cats of Hellandback City, in revolt, raising an army of weres and ex-PIs. They would corral man; lead to an emancipation of the underspecies, lead again in time to a pan-species evolutionary leap. This was the history of cyberpunk.

The histories of the cats were strong strands in the overhistory, any one might reach unchecked to the Omega Point, give its descendants the right and power to design all the universe from Event One to Event Two.

The Master knew he had only a brief time - if time could be measured there - within the consciousness of this peripheral part of the God-mind. Within one of the eyes with which the multiverse chooses to regard itself.

He pushed. The cats of Gallifrey dwindled into a story for children. He pushed again. The cats of Mondas were left to hunt rats among the freezing ruins as the race of man turned its scalpels on itself.

His gaze turned to the history of Hellandback City. Hardly a challenge this, its location so pinched and cribbed, its economy ridden with corruption. He almost liked it, but even so it had to pass. It amused him that he could keep his promise to the ex-sweetmaker and still leave him nothing but a burned out ruin. Without it the Omega Point would be built by men, gullible men, and built in man's image. While not quite a Time Lord's eternity he felt he could fit in to a universe envisaged by man. It would need a Master.

He reached out mentally for a spur in the timeline.

What’s that? The cop-flyer, no! [transmission transcription ceases]

[INPUT CLARICE, TRANSMISSION LOG DELETE. ALL SUB STORAGE DELETE. VIRAL DELETE. DELETE.]

***
[Transcription HnBKcPD Department Report 109: Witness statement continues….]


It was about then, officers, that you buzzed me, the roof gave way and I fell into the bakery. My name's Guy Leopold (yes, sadly I discovered that by putting the sign up for over six months wrong, the Landlord had in Hellandback City law changed my name by declaration). I'm a PI. I'm also an ex-fighter pilot which means I'm twinned with a wereleopard for reflexes, and I weigh a good four hundred pounds (I've been dieting). I'm afraid I fell on your suspects. Yes, it does look like that one's broken.

Yes, I did have inside info. This tabby here staggering about - I suggest you put possession of a controlled substance on your charge sheet, is Macavity, a colleague of my secretary Clarice. She's an ex-petbot and in with the petbot security guard company. They had sacked all the petbots and put some mangy alien cats on patrol. It was basically a demarkation, blackleg, problem. We got hired to catch him doing something illegal so the union could bring in the law. Macavity here volunteered to go in as a ringer for one of the alien cats.

No, I didn't know anything about four and twenty bakers found in a pie. How did they fit? Oh, he'd shrunk them; I'm glad, I was thinking about mincing. No, that wasn't a joke officer.

Do I think he might have some kind of vendetta against bakers? No, I can't see why he should have. No nor male cats either for that matter? Toms? I shouldn’t think so.

Still; he came off worse when I landed on them, his corrosive friend was between him and the floor. He ran off clutching his face as if it were melting, I'm sure you could catch him.

What's that Macavity? You think some criminals have nine lives? Well, at least it's out of our hands, even if he escapes them he's practically dying. It's not as if he's going to be out and about delighting the public, trying to work up to some big finish.

And as he went back to his office Guy Leopold thought that Macavity’s eyes were a deeper and more mysterious jade than ever, and he forgot utterly the things he thought he had experienced when the Master had hypnotized her.

And the Cat (who if you care to look at it that way, was every Cat), winked. And later Clarice and Macavity exchanged that look, that cat’s have, that signifies that they have, finally, everything well in paw.


[Story intended for The Cat Who Walked Through Time 2, which now seems unlikely to ever be published]

Simon BJ [Post for 14th May 2009]

Part of A Jack Vancian Story....

THE MERMAID AND THE MURMUX

In which a Mermaid comes ashore, a Prince becomes an awful boar,
A crone bestows an ancient curse, be grateful that it’s nothing worse.

The boundary between two states of being, and its violation, is the only genuine source of horror. Just as the stench of the sea-shore, never smelt in the midst of the ocean itself, is but the detritus and decay of all the myriad crawling things that time has deposited to dry upon the alien and hostile land.
It was with this image in her mind that Azusula the Lost, allowed herself to be beached on the death-strands. The rituals had been completed below the waves, in the grand caverns and thorough-swimfares of the citadels themselves, she had been the one chosen to carry the attonement for the dry seasons, to make the great change that the scientists-engineers had devised. If she did not die, the hope of her kind would be maintained for another season, even though she herself might never return to them.
The webbing of her hands had begun to shrivel now as the alien heat from the skinned sun, burned down, hotter, more brutal and brighter than it had ever appeared from below the waters. Her tail, her blue and gold and scarlet scaled glory , her pride in mating, her family history in colours, shed scale by scale, leaving a naked fleshy mass that she dare not turn her head to contemplate. Scales, born away by the odious and abrasive sea-wind blew around her in eddies of brightness: crystophayse and tourmaline, ruby and turquose. She could feel her life-blood pooling within her, and knew, without attempting to shift her main bulk, that it would be staining the wet sand beneath her a delicate and oxygen suffused pink.
The bifurcation, when it came, was not - as the stories had prepared her to believe – agony. Agony was a mere word for what, in its happening, proved to be not pain but a whole new sensation. As near to rapture as to torture, it was perhaps a kind of childbirth, a birthing of a new form of herself rather than of a cloud of younglings. The naked mass of her tail, split, divided, the bones inside cleaving and reforming. On the sand she could only gasp, air moving down new passages in her throat, her useless and now sealing gills flecked with sand.
Within the hour Azusula the Mermaid would be no more.

Prince Hartenstein – often called the bold (and to give him his due not only by those over whom he had the High the Middle and the Low Justice) – rode out that day with his pack of nine great hounds, in the forest called Perfection, that had been planted as a game reserve by his great-great-great-grandfather who, sad to say, had been a magician as well as a King. In its borders could be found the strangest and most huntable of all beasts. The Swallow Deer, that flittered among the tree-tops so prettily, the Undebatable Boar, with its grandeous and marvelous tusks, the Pygmy Tyranosaur, in all its easier to contemplate ferocity, and the Murmux. It was that rarest, most subtle and difficult to hunt creature: the Murmux that the Prince was hunting today. The Murmux is never seen, only heard – it resembles in that respect the best and most obedient of proverbial children – and indeed critics of the decanting practice of the Prince’s great-great-great-grandfather hinted that his breeding vats had contained vital fliuds from man, as from the lower breasts. It, as its name suggests, is a murmur, a breath, a thin and uncanny uullullation among the dark and foreboding trees.


Simon BJ [Post for 13th May 2009]

The Spidermonger

The site that was hosting my online Cthulhu Mythos stories seems to be moribund, so here they are. Starting with a story I wrote at 17 years of age....


The Spidermonger

To be scornful of the supernatural; I would once have listed amongst the qualities of a good scientist; to admit of exceptions to the discoverable laws of physics without repeatable proof I would have lectured against at the Royal Society.

Now, however, I find myself recanting both points of view by setting down as fact, in my earnest desire to explore all the facets of the universe, an experience of my own which may have been wholly subjective, but which was otherworldly in its effects and, I pray, unrepeatable under any conditions.

I was dying. That at least was the opinion of a well respected Harley Street physician whose name I will not demean by mentioning in relation to such a false diagnosis. It may well be that the incident itself in some way changed my health, and I do him an injustice by proclaiming his judgement untrue. Yet I still live albeit with my vigour impaired. Of this possibility the reader of this account more objectively can judge.

Perhaps the long illness running close to Death opened my eyes to one of the invisible and impalpable bands of reality unploughed by the truth-seekers of earthly wisdom. If so those realms are not left fallow for any frivolous reasons. Or perhaps, it brought delusions of a singular sort, delirium so unlike the tropical fevers I suffered in my youth on the Egyptian expedition that I didn’t recognise it as false. The expedition that made my late Uncle famous however was plagued with deadly insects and few westerners could be so familiar with hallucinatory maladies as I.
I can not comment on my state of mind in those days when I waited in my Uncle’s house in Dymchurch-Under-The-Wall, for Death.

I may have dreamed the things I will describe: if so my brain was more afflicted than my body.

The incident began one morning in July 1897, in the twilight that heralds dawn in the marsh country. I was awakened by a spreading pinkish grey light that pierced the easterly wall of my bedroom. It shone straight into my eyes yet did not dazzle or block my vision. The wall, with its load of shelved books on Egyptology, remained clear; it was as if I was looking at the wall through rose coloured spectacles.

The wall was not changed for the better, indeed the paint began to peel off, accelerating in its descent as if weighted. The books withered and their bindings cracked, a sight that appalled me since I had been raised among tomes almost sacred to my bibliophile uncle.

Diagrams of the Osirian Ankh and sketches of heiroglyphes misted down to the floor. The wall which should have looked out over the Dover road, ground itself into a veil of plaster, obscuring yet revealing a pale sky the colour of half-burnt flesh, and a wasteland of fallen masonry around the decaying pillars of which twined curious plants.

The lines of demarcation between this scene and the bedroom of the old family house were clear; it was as if the wall had been chopped away from the fabric of the building and distorting glass placed in the gap hiding the cobbled street beyond.

My first thought was to call my housekeeper, both to give evidence to my sanity and to discover if the effect of the landscape on another was the same as its grasp on me. Though feelings may not be a scientific measure, at the appearance of the phantasm I had experienced tangible awe almost like a static charge, as if a force had stood the fine hairs on my cheek on end.

In the attempt, I discovered I was paralysed pinned down by the now reddish light as a naturalist might pin an insect to a cork board the better to study it.

The source of the light was a vast orb suspended at the horizon of the unearthly plain. A sun speared by mountains, of a red so dark as to hurt the eyes.

Only the functions of my body under my conscious control were hampered by the paralysis, for I certainly continued to breath and I recall blinking violently as a new light climbed into the sky. A blue-white star, a quarter the size of the other but with more than four times its brilliance, rose rapidly, and scurried across the alien heavens, burning a trail through the fleshy tint as it did so.

I perceived that what I had taken to be the sky was instead some form of cloud that broiled away in this new achromatic violence, leaving patches of pale violet in its wake. During the circuit of this smaller body the red star never moved from its position on the horizon, neither up nor down, nor did it do so during all my observations of that netherworld.

In the light of the smaller star movements began to impress themselves on my over perceptive senses. A rippling undulation ran through the faint foliage of the grasping plants. In the far left of my vision a discolouration spread as if some creeping tide disgorged floating wreckage there, and all around a slow but evident crumbling of the scattered structures took place.

It became obvious to me that I was party to some diurnal process of gradual destruction that would have take ages on Earth. And all this time there had come to my alert senses not one sound from that scene;Â indeed I never heard any sound come from the portal until the end, and that call I can hear yet. For three more revolutions of the Blue Star I watched frozen while one plant more ponderous than the rest crushed a pillar to rubble tearing it up from the foundations which seemed to be set into the plain itself.

The familiar objects began to appear superimposed on that ultramundane view; the thick blinds and wall itself cut off my sight of that ghostly land and with its passing I could move again.

Leaping up, for so compelled was I with the curiousity of the scientist that my physical infirmities where forgotten, I flung open the blinds.

Daylight flooded in. My eyes, adapted during the past two hours to a red eventide, watered copiously. Even with this impediment to sight I could make out the old cobbles of the Dover road and the houses like an anodyne outreaching some wretched malady.
How could I believe myself sane, comparing this scene with that I had just been exposed to? Was there no evidence, no link, to justify my continued confidence in my own mind.

Then my eyes caught it, glinting like phosphorescent seaweed on the stones of the churchyard, the same blue-white shadow the small star had cast as it wheeled over that alien domain. I slammed the blind down, panting now as my sickness returned. It was fifteen minutes before I could bring myself to look out again. Of the light there was no sigm. I felt almost disappointed.

I told no one of it that day. I knew the nature of my illness and the conclusions they would draw from it. I did not know if the phenomenon would occur a second time, in the presence of witnesses or indeed if it would return at all.

I spent the day in research. My Uncle had collected a vast number of reference workd, not only in his own subject but in others such as botany which had hitherto interested me little, if at all.

I discovered that the plants resembled no species of chlorophyll based foliage still extant in the modern worlds. Certain of their characteristics, however, recalled the giant prehistoric ferns from which much of the world’s coal was to form.

The plants seemed to be parasitic, though in retrospect that judgement was biased. Raised by an Uncle to whom the pyramids were at once temples and masterpieces, I had inherited a feel for antiquities ancient buildings especially, and to see these mindless plants bring down the relics of another race was abhorrent to me. I felt they were leeches, vampires, enhancers of a decay out of step with my world. That judgement was an uniformed one, an emotive expression; the plants filled a niche that was empty: if any blame is to be allotted it must go to their cultivators. I am far from sure however that blame can be allotted in this matter, there is so much of that world that I may have misunderstood. I have had long to think on the events of those three days. At that time I was panicking in a rigid fashion, applying my moralities to an otherworldly frame; now I wonder if the terms Good and Evil are not rational observed things but prejudices made anthropomorphic. I am ashamed of my actions during the incident and it is partly because of this that I risk my reputation to lay my story, real or unreal, before the scientific world.

The second night all happened as before. It was as if in the absence of an observer nothing had taken place in that ruddy eldritch plain. New insights came however. I have written of a plant overturning a pillar whose foundations were deep. I now saw how deep. The plain itself was nothing more than a vast floor cut of the same dark rock as the pillars. The gullies and ravines of that plain, now hedged with the crouching plants, were magnified versions of the symbols cut on the masonry. The whole scene was a ruined metropolis greater than a human city.

It was so obvious now, I cursed myself for a fool. It was as I was doing so that I caught my first glimpse of a Cultivator….

The creature was at first a mere white speck running curiously out of step in the middle distance. It had a strange means of locomotion: a shifting, hopping glide that reminded me of long legged cranes. It seemed almost to ripple as it progressed, as if its personal time was different from the otherworld’s just as mine was.

As it came nearer I was able to make out is appearance more distinctly.

The Cultivator was like a primitive statue, a mannikin, lumpy and unfinished, but with a twisted resemblance to humanity. It looked incomplete, as though in the midst of some metabolic change that left it listless and pale. Like the structures it aged noticeable in one cycle of the blue star.

The plants unclasped at the creature’s touch. For a moment I wondered if it was the caretaker of this place making a long delayed inspection, but it became apparent its concern was for the plants. It preened them, scraping the accretions of decay from the supple feelers. As it approached the nearest pillars it stopped and I was struck by a sudden fear. Suppose the window into their world was two-directional, what if it could see me? The fear passed and I became elated. To me had fallen a chance to achieve what no other on Earth had done: a chance to make contact with an intelligent non-human being. Then I began to see how faint that chance was. I was paralysed, and even if I had been able to move I could not be sure that communication would be possible with a being that was alien to the entire forming history of my species.

The creature stopped now, and in full view of the aperture it cast its featureless head about as if utilising some sense or perception unknown to man.

The discolouration to my left had risen like a tsunami, and at that moment the great swell burst and a whirlpool of silk-carried spiders swarmed down across the plain.

The Cultivator turned and with others of its kind, raised silent keening over the plants, whose fronds grappled with the spiderstorm, trapping arachnids in their tendrils. Around each spider a penumbra of vitality spread. The creatures seemed more active, the vegetation more lavish, even the buildings stood straighter, their carvings more distinct.

The scene began to fade and with it the paralysis lessened.

I began to shout greetings though I knew as I did so it was useless.

Any sound I could make would be meaningless to them even if it passed the barrier which had seemed impervious to vibration in my direction. Given that they possessed hearing it would very likely be on a different frequency. Muttering at my own uselessness I again opened the reformed blind, alert for any sign of change in the external world. Like an echo my own ineffectual cries came whispering back, intoned by some mock human voice and made sibilant and harsh by their new stresses. I collapsed on my bed and it was a while before I felt able to ring my housekeeper. Never had I doubted my own sanity to such a degree. I resolved I would not greet the next dawn alone, prove what it may. As the day wore on however I despaired of holding to my resolve, for my House-keeper’s resignation left me totally alone in the house. She tendered her notice shortly before noon, not even waiting for a reference. She mumbled of patches of ice spreading in the lower house, of food good yesterday now rotting, of dust and decay.

I was testily forced to accept her departure, and though I was pleased that there was more evidence of the rapid aging invading this dimension, her final statement chilled me to the bone. She claimed to have seen an old beggar hanging around the house, a hunched, cowled figure who moved in circles around the building with a peculiar hopping gait, carrying a large bundle that seemed to move as if breathing. The beggar seemed to have stirred her more than the physical effects; certainly it caused disagreeable expectations in my mind.

Since my later experience and partial recovery I have advertised at length for her testimony but to no avail. It is possible therefore to doubt this reported description. My own personal evidence is not enough to prove this. Perhaps she will come forward yet; until then you must make up your own mind. I was still alone in the house at nightfall though my old friend, my medical neighbour, had promised to send one of his students to look after me until I could hire a new servant.

I later learnt that the student had slipped and twisted his ankle on an unexpected covering of ice that had formed unseasonably on the Dover road, which prevented his visit that night.

I fortified myself with a glass of brandy and some cheese, and dozed slightly through the main part of the night, disturbed only by a brittle staccato jerking click from downstairs.

It sounded like long bones knocking together and I couldn’t bring myself to investigate it. It conveyed a sense of furtive movement, of inhuman precise searching. I shivered towards the dawn.

The image was not as distinctly removed that night, the edges seemed to eat more of the walls, to enclose rather than be enclosed by the fabric of my dwelling. I equated this with the increase of decay in my world, a wholesale leaking of energy into that blasted red and blue inferno. Whispers of sound began to pulse the air, echoes on the verge of audibility as if miles of distance interposed between the view and me.

On the plain the spiders were piled in a vast latticework cage built from the ancient pillars themselves. I wondered at the thriftiness of the Cultivators – if the capture of the arachnids with their strange life giving fields had been their aim – and at their use of the ruins for materials and as a training ground for the plants. Now they prepared to leave: the harvest or pest removal (if either concept fits) was finished. The pallid creatures looked more youthful and vigorous in the ambience of the great insects. They still impressed on me a vast upwelling of energy and….happiness, though I suspect our emotions can not be forced to apply to them. They grew taller and taller, fading as they did so. The massive cage of ruined carved pillars blazed with light from the inset carvings and seemed to extend in some hitherto unthought of direction. The thin dust of the plain’s floor swirled about the cage, the captives, and the ever lengthening Cultivators and then they were gone. I had witnessed something beyond human science, possibly beyond human understanding. Reaved of the preserving fields of the spiders, time reached its withered hand across an empty plain and at last the few remaining pillars went the way of mummies taken carelessly from the tomb.

The disturbed dust settled and grew thicker. From behind me, like an omen, I heard a loping step upon the stairs. The hissing of my own futile greetings was indescribably horrible, not least in the likeness of the voice that uttered them to mine. The Cultivator stood in the doorway, its rough limbs gesturing aimlessly. It was wrapped in clothes made from spidersilk, and with the alien movements of its long limbs – angular and strange - I could see why it had so distressed my housekeeper. It was the image of medieval drawings of Death, lacking only a scythe to emulate them flawlessly.

Terrified all thought of contact gone, under some deep human fear of the unknown I strained against the remains of the paralysis as with slow deliberation it withdrew a spider from a sack of silk at its back and thrust it towards me. Instinctively finding my bonds dissolving, I attacked.

Since then I have realised that the field of the spider restored me, breaking not only the stasis, but also that fatal illness at my throat. I have thought that the might have seen me through the portal, seem the artifacts of intelligence about me and sent an envoy in peace and fellowship. If so, they ere sadly misled. In my newfound strength and fear I was as savage as a man from prehistory and as wild. I seized the Cukltivator by the neck and hurled it from me, into the vision that hung maddeningly before me. As it broke into that dying world it uttered a cry so piercing and terrible I will recall it to my shame forever. The veil between the worlds has not reopened. There is no evidence of my vision and my crime save a scrap of silk finer than human weft.

Recorded in Dymchurch
11th August 1898.






Simon BJ [Post for 12th May 2009]

From the archive, a proposal for a Space 1999 novel

Space 1999: Transit Of Fire or The Echo Of The Fall

Treatment

The Moon is approaching a multiple star system: a great blue-white star orbited by two red dwarfs. Victor is concerned about the external radiation shielding which was designed to withstand Solar radiation at 1 AU, not the full force of such a system. Electromagnetic torus effects alone will begin to disrupt the base’s systems as they pass through, and most of the Eagle fleet will need to be grounded. The forcescreens will help, but they will be unable to dissipate as much energy into the hot solar winds as they would by radiating into intrasolar space and there is a danger that the screens will cook the base just as effectively as the suns (only over a longer period).
The background then is thematically tropical, as if the moon were passing through initially the south seas, then the dark heat of the congo. Tempers begin to fray. As Helena treats personnel for heat-stroke and injuries accrued in fist-fights. John and Tony (Season Two, but introduced here if you agree) take a heavily force shielded Eagle into close-sun space. Their mission to find an asteroid that can be nudged to lunar orbit to permanently eclipse Moon base Alpha while it makes its transit across the system. [This is a hard science, engineering solution portrayed as such].
Meanwhile emergency rationing of water(1) is deeply unpopular and a group of Alphans lead by Dorlan Stanmore believe that this is the end that they have come this far only to fry – and do not see why they should suffer unduly in the process. They seize control of medical section and demand drugs to enable them to “ease their passing”, “to commune with the Great Stars”. [(1) Alphan waste reclaimation is super-efficient but it was not designed to function at 80 degrees + and it is likely that at least some of it involves evaporation and recondensation of liquids that heat will hinder.] Helena tries to talk the group out of their nihilistic stance and manages to direct them not to the bases limited store of theraputic pyschotropic drugs (all carefully locked away) but to a batch of experimental tranquilisors. Under their influence the group fall into deep sleep and are captured: however their REM sleep is peculiar and disturbed possibly a side-effect of the drug at these high temperatures in near de-hydrated subjects.
We see one of the groups dreams in which the asteroid being moved by John and Tony escapes the Eagle’s specialised force-tractor control and, moving away at speed impacts on and destroys Moonbase. As this dream reaches its climax, some of the events needed for it to come true are seem to really happen onboard the Eagle after the prediction.
Helena discovers that the dreams of the drugged Alphans appear to have real effects (the first one brought out of the drugged sleep, recounts a dream of rain in a lily filled lagoon only for it to be discovered that a vital water tank has ruptured flooding part of hydroponics).
John and Tony return, seemingly triumphant. Discovering the odd predictive or manipulative effect, John orders the drugs flushed out of the groups bodies and them restrained. Too much depends on the fine tuning of the asteroid, and the daily restraint now of every Alphan to have a bunch of crackpots disrupting the base, nor is this the time for psychological experimentation.
Helena reluctantly agrees although see considers the results facinating perhaps an example of the “refutation of time” of “echoes of things yet to be” being interpreted by the open unconciousness of sleep. However when she visits the locked ward, she discovers that Dorlan has gone as has a supply of the tranquiliser. The culprit is a nurse who has become obsessed with Dorlan, and shares to an extent his thesis that the Moon is doomed, if not now at this time, then at some not far distant future day when the odds no longer fall in their favour. She intends to overdose Dorlan in the hope that his dream manipulated by her hypnotic voice as he falls deeper into a coma, can do what she does not trust the Commander to have accomplished, get them through this hell-star passage alive!
She does so. Talking to Dorlan of rebirth, of survival of them arising anew. But he imagines something odd, something strange – a phoenix arising from the asteroidal egg – a natural outgrowth of the strange stars themselves.
This creature shields Alpha with its great wings while it passes, but was it a hallucination of Dorlan’s dying brain – or was the asteroid so carefull nursed out of its orbit by John and Tony really part of the life-cycle of the stars themselves?
As the Moon moves on into cooler climes the issue is in doubt.
[The tranquilisor, precognition effect is set out as dangerous to liver and renal function – and not something the Alphans would use again willingly unless in vital danger, however we could add into the dream sequences precognitive glimpses of upcoming books later in the arc.]


Simon BJ [Post for 8th May, oops missed a notional day, and still behind.]

A Poem called "Verse".

Down the River "River"
Lies the Sea called "Sea"
Across the peak called "Mountain"
Is the valley named "Valley".

There is the town called "City"
Which holds the tome called "Book"
The images known as "Pictures"
The pleasure known as "Look"

The tyrant "Lord King Ruler"
Who locked the door named "Gate"
He hid the jewel called "Language"
He mocked the end called "Fate".

Despite the reign called "Terror"
That hid our real "names"
His mistake or his "error"
He let pass children's "games".

And all thoughts we call "forbidden"
Are free as birds called "larks"
If we use the trick called "magic"
And use "quotation marks".

We do nothing called "rebellion"
We make no plot called "plot"
We take no man called "hellion"
Nor put him in a "pot".

We "rabbit-ear" our fingers
As we talk of "other things"
Like "news" and "clues" and "honing axe"
And putting "ends" to "Kings".


Simon BJ [Post for the 11th May 2009]

Muddled Mathematicians #1

Leo Maximillian Gunther, 1689 – 1737

Gunther’s Perfect Number Conjectures

Perhaps the most wrong-headed mathematician of his period. His conjectures are of particular interest for the basic errors contained in his approach to most problems. His pupil Albrecht of Saxony records asking him “Maestro can there be a perfect odd number?”

[Readers will of course recall that a perfect number is a real number (like 6) whose factors (3,2 and 1)add to 6. In Gunther’s day, as now, it was and is believed (although it remains unproven) that all perfect numbers are even numbers.]

Gunther responded instantly with his first Perfect Number conjecture:

Gunther’s first conjecture. “1 is a perfect odd number, for behold it hath but two factors 0, and 1, which add together to make 1.

His fallacy here of course was to treat division by 0 as a valid arithmetical operation, additionally, of course in the case of perfect numbers, a number can not be its own divisor or the divisors of 6 (6,3,2,1) would add to 12, and if perfect numbers were defined as those numbers whose divisors (including themselves) added to twice their magnitude, then 1 would not be a perfect number even if 0 were a divisor for 0 + 1 would equal 1 and not 2. His second conjecture, is however more interesting for how it builds on the errors of the first:

Gunther’s second conjecture. “I see no reason why a number may not be its own divisor, nor why division by zero should be unlawful. Let the Gunther factors of a number n be all the numbers (including n and zero) by which it is divisible by my rule and behold it is the work of a moment to show that for every positive number n, from 1 to 100, every number possessing the property that the sum of its Gunther factors/2 (it’s Gunther Number) is equal or higher than n, is separated by either a 2,a 4 or a 6.

Such numbers which I term "Perfect Gunther Numbers" are MORE perfect than so-called perfect numbers, for they are both more numerous and more bountiful, having either the value n, or one greater than n.

For n 0 to 100 where sum(Gunther factors)/2 >= n. The Perfect Gunther Number solutions are: 6 = 6+3+2+1+0)/ 2 = 6 (also, trivially the 1st Perfect Number), 12 = (12+6+4+3+2+ 1+0)/2 = 14, 18 = (18+9+6+3+2+ 1+0)/2 = 19.5, 20 = (20+10+5+4+2+ 1+0)/2 = 21. 24 (30), 28 (28) (also the 2nd Perfect Number), 30 (36), 40 (45), 42 (48), 48 (62), 54 (60), 56 (60), 60 (84), 66 (72), 70 (72), 72 (97.5) 78 (84), 80 (93), 84 (112), 88 (90), 90(117), 96 (126).

Gunther continued "now, since my Perfect Gunther Numbers have the property that their seed values n have a separation of 2,4,or 6 one from another, thereafter each ‘Gunther Number’ seed n arising hereafter must be likewise even. Therefore since by definition every number n whose Gunther Number is equal or higher than n, is even, it must follow that all perfect number’s must be even. Therefore no perfect odd number can exist."

It is currently generally known (to modern mathematicians) that, no such odd perfect number exists in the first 39 perfect numbers, and yet it is held than one ‘could’ exist. So what was/is wrong with Leo’s reasoning?

[Bonus puzzle: A Gunther chain is a number n such that its Perfect Gunther Number (p) is the n of a further valid Perfect Gunther Number (p2). Thus 56 gives 60, 60 gives 84, 84 gives 112). How long a Gunther chain can you construct?]



Simon BJ [Post for the 10th May 2009]

The Place Of The Two Absent Monkeys

During the Tang Dynasty, it was reported that in the temple of Pang-ko in Shin province was an ornately carved room called the Place of the Two Absent Monkeys which possessed an interesting property.

The room - whose walls were a complex mosaic of carved ivory and white laquered wood - had this peculiarity: while if it was measured, it was clear that it could house no more than thirty people by volume standing in reasonable proximity – if people entered it determinedly, a full thirty two could enter. However if thirty two were to do so, while thirty two people would then leave, two of the people would have changed utterly. Their height, their sex, the language they speak, their memories, all metamorphasised in an instant. The room was widely regarded as cursed for this reason; and for obvious reason its strange nature was rarely tested.

When the wayward grand nephew of the Emperor Xizong, together with thirty dragooned peasants and his bodyguard the Samuri Ro, assayed the feat of putting the room to the test, and the young Prince and his muscular body guard were transformed into two surly old men in rags, the matter came to the attention of the court in Chang’an.

Xizong dispatched his mathematician and investigator Li Po with strict instructions to restore the Prince to himself.

Li Po first talked to the thirty who were unchanged. He discovered that while thirty two people had entered the room, no one within the room had, at any one time been able to see the Prince or his bodyguard. He therefore reasoned that the room in its ‘empty’ or condition, had been so built as to have the quality of possessing minus two persons. When thirty two entered and moved around, the two minuses are ‘raised’ above ‘zero’ and may mix freely with the others, their places taken by two hapless visitors until the moment comes to leave the room. The room therefore did not transform, but rather held as a prison two of its newest entrants, while releasing those it had rendered into 'zeroes', perhaps years before. He confirmed this by talking with the villagers around Pang-Ko who, with the assistance of coin, were able to bring to mind the disappearance years before of the two men, who had now come to light. Within the room they had not aged, and the villagers were on the whole displeased to see them, remembering them as surly ragged ruffians even ten years before.

Li Po sent to the magistrate, and emptied the jail until he had a sufficiency of people to fill the room, for he reasoned that as with the motion of tea-leaves on the surface of a white china bowl, there would need to be a sufficiency of motion to stir up the numbers. And thus he recovered the Prince and his servant.

Even now if you travel to Shin Province and the Temple of Pang-Ko you will be permitted to enter the Room only in numbers below ten, for fear of freeing two feared criminals of the Tang dynasty.

Simon BJ [Post for the 9th May 2009]

Joke

How do you make Victoria Sponge?

***

Hide David's cash card.


Simon BJ

[Post for 7th May 2009]

King Rattle's Song

I am the very model of a villain who’s reptilian
I scorn your callow panto tricks from traditions vaudevillian
I’ve disdain both for cowboys, with their chapped, bow-legged horseman’s gait
And as for those so-called ‘natives’! They came here across the Baring Strait.

Chorus
And as for those so-called ‘natives’ they came here across the Baring Strait.
And as for those so-called ‘natives’ they came here across the Baring,
Baring Strait!

It matters not if you came on the Mayflower or the Sain’t Marie
or stood with Cortez goggling at the first sight of the Western Sea,
Or sat with fabled Sitting Bull before the massed Apache braves,
You're all just Sitting Ducks to me, I’ll see you back beyond the waves.

Chorus
You're all just Sitting Ducks to me, I’ll see you back beyond the waves.
You're all just Sitting Ducks to me, I’ll see you back beyond the waves.
Beyond, beyond the waves!

The scales of justice are my scales, snakes will no longer brook mistakes
Made by a lot of mammals who have never given us the breaks
Mammals to me are nothing but, a writhing mass of dirty rats
[pause, voice 'dirty rats...oh dear..wait I have it!....']
Who’ve earned a solid whuppin for their treatment of invertibrates

Chorus
Who’ve earned a solid whuppin for their treatment of invertebrates
Who’ve earned a solid whuppin for their treatment of invertebrates
Their treatment of invert, invertebrates.

[Song proposed for but unused in 2009 Panto, instead I sang "Lord it's hard to be humble", and "Don't stop me now" both of which were big hits, so the Director was quite right to reject my G&S pastiche as 'clever, but not panto enough'.]

[Post for 6th May 2009]

From the archive a discussion of THE DEATH OF ART

A READER asks: Simon: Given that at the very end you throw in a cameo appearance by the real-life scholar and ghost story author M.R.James (1862-1936), and identify him by his full name, Montague Rhodes James, why did you choose to give one the book's main villains the name Montague? If there's any sign of anything resembling a subtle connection between the two, I'm missing it entirely. Was it supposed to be a tribute of sorts to James? If so, it seems extremely backhanded. Or was it just a coincidence that even you didn't notice when you were writing the book?

***

Yes, the villain is called "Montague" to give a "visual/obvious" thematic tie to the role of M R James' short story The Doll's House in DOA. Its a clumsy device that I in part regret - very much the mechanism of a 1st novel.

The role played is this:-

The Doll's House built by the toymaker's Tackleton & Montague in "The Death Of Art" is the same Toy house referred to in M R James story "The Doll's House". (p5 DOA).

In a loop in time, M R James writes the story because having seen the Doll's House, he is inspired, goes away [implicitly reads about Illbridge House on which the Doll's House was based]and writes his story. (p 274-275 DOA)

He is able to see the Doll's House at the end of The Death of Art because the Doctor is able to triumph, in part, because the Doctor has already read M.R.James' story (p 206 DOA).

Montague the Toymaker isn't mentioned in M R James short story, because M.R.James would have felt it inartistic to use his own name, and he doesn't mention Tackleton because he would have felt he was reprising Dicken's "The Cricket On The Hearth", in which he appears.

What I missed doing, and I would do in any re-issue is to have Dominic flinch when reading M R Jame's card,at the memories induced by the name. [This is the same frisson given in Alan Moore's LOEG vol 1 where the as yet unidentified female character flinches at a shop named "Prospects of Whitby": I missed doing it because
Alan Moore is a better writer than I was (or am).

I would also rename the character Montfalcon so as not to create confusion with Montague. When writing the book, I felt some confusion was *needed* at that point, but I think I may have underestimated how much I was producing (intentionally or inadvertantly).

Some readers have suggested that I intended that M.R.James was to be seen as a "bolt-hole" of the Grandmaster's mind, or a bolt-hole for "Montague" using a methodology parallel to the Grandmaster's: but this was not my intent and suggests (to me) a confusion in those readers between Montague and the Grandmaster.

I referenced and included M R James in the basic framework of the book thus, simply because I like him and his work. I thoroughly recommend his stories which are the only classical ghost stories, apart from E F Benson's, to actually convey (to me) a sense of real fear.

There are several other horror fiction authors and horror fiction characters referenced in the text: indeed while less overt in its metafictive usages, I
regard DOA as being a *kind* of LOEG given that it contains mentions or appearances of most of the famous fictional characters operating in or around Paris at
the time the book is set(1).

It is possible it may do this so subtly (and/or annoyingly/confusingly) to fail of course, whereas the purely straight approach cf LOEG later paid such dividends for (of course) a better writer.

(1) characters from The King In Yellow, the Murders In The Rue Morgue, the Fantomas novels, Hercule Poirot, an ancestress of a famous Parisian party-giver in the episode A, B & C of The Prisoner, secondary characters from the Fu-Manchu and Sherlock Holmes books, all appear or are mentioned.

I apologise: I was a first time novelist.

Incidently Veber's painting The Doll-Maker is a real painting, but alas I have *never* been able to find a picture of it: the description of it in DOA, is from
an art book I happened to be reading while deciding what plot to submit to Virgin, but it mentions it only in passing.

Simon BJ [Post for Tuesday 5th May 2009]

From the archive: a note on gallifreyan tenses

The 4 basic forms of the pure present tense.

1. Present, colloquial uninflected
Eng trans, example: "I run (implicitly for a causal
reason embedded in a genuine organic
timeframe)".

2. Present, Atto-bundle, colloquial inflection A
Eng trans example: "The majority of me run (across the
local micro-parallels which are a natural set of
multiple world events and which are again for casual
reasons embedded in a genuinely organic
timeframe)".

3. Present, divergent, colloquial inflection B flat.
Eng trans, example "I run (but probably only I run and
I don't know why yet because the universe has just
shifted and my perceptions haven't enmeshed with the
local causal chain at this subjective point, oh
bugger)".

4. Present, post-divergent, collequial inflection C
Eng trans, example "I run (and the rest of me are
probably dead)!"



Simon BJ [Post for Monday 4th May 2009]

MATEUSEO INSUKI OVA (12 Episodes) Review

MATEUSEO INSUKI AND THE PEBBLE PENGUINS 1997 (Episode IV) 58m

Little more than a sub-average episode in this long running saga in which Mateuseo Manuka, his mother's robot analogue/maid Insuki, Princess Pemican, and the Ambiant Fountainhead Corporation, contend to see who can return a loveable penguin to the frozen wastes. A quest rendered more difficult by a number of factors (one of which alas is not the return of the fan favourite Minki Tesku). As a standin villain Lord Zalmon (the head of AFC security) is as boisterous as ever but loses credibility when forced to wear the exo-armour of the Space Piratess Ludi.

In the end the Dance of the Space Penguins redeems the lack of fan-service with its can-canning Space Penguin Girls. Dubbing is best described as imaginative, and the Directer's cut release 2003 has a subtitled version which is both more accurate, and less painful to the ear. For some reason the end-titles theme of the 03 release has been replaced by what sounds to the non-japanese ear, like a rendition of 'I've Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts', but this is not given the Penguin-Girls' costuming utterly inappropriate.

Simon BJ [Post for Sunday 3rd May 2009]

Mrs Jonah: A Carol Ann Duffy Poem

This night we wait. Sheltering from the falling fire
or the dark angels, as it might be, that the Lord
held over Ninevah, circling, their sound the repeating
chatter of stones, boulder-rolling oblivion, the old
thunder, over and over, again, overhead.
Fine reward for loyalty, if the stones do not fall, what
use the warning. What use our travels.

For this we had travelled, but not directly,
Rather fearful that the Ninevahites would put us, both,
to death for preaching out their fate, we went
half-robed, hurriedly packed, sea-sick, and arguing
to Jaffa and by ship to Tarshish. My husband
Amittai’s son – the truth! – importuning sailors’ company
Anything rather than talk to me.

Without even a storm for an excuse,
preferring my favours they threw him to the sea froth.
What could I do but jump after. They were Ill-favoured men
from Nod, the ship rotten-boarded, unlikely to make landfall.

Speak not to me of fish. I couldn’t eat them now,
Not after that: long gulping sea-monster swallow into
The grey fleshed dark. Too initimate that place for husband
And wife; too intimate for body and soul.
Three days in the live-grave.
He says, he is sure God will portend much by this, make
Lessons of this for future Prophets.
I knit furiously by touch, taking care to jab him with the needles.

Then brought up at the sea-side, we came to Nineveh afterall.
Fish beached like a lost inflatable attraction,
Adrift from it’s moorings.
Only to spout (like the fish did) warnings easily heeded.
Without even the comfort of a fireful revenge.

Simon BJ [Post for Saturday 2nd May 2009]

THE TABLE OF THE SEVEN SINNERS

‘It was built,’ the smallest man said, ‘originally for the encouragement of public virtue. To sit in it was to be subjected to the residuum of all your worst memories, keyed to the one of the core psychological weaknesses. Eventually after the Revolution had run its course and the time of the Intuitive Terror was over, it was locked away with all the other unhistorical artifacts; all the things we didn't like to admit we'd done.’

‘A sort of seige perilous,’ the curly haired man boomed, shucking his multicoloured coat. I'm game, no ordeal can shake my resolve.’ He hesitated for a moment even so, between a blood red upholstered throne of a chair with a carved ruby eye set in its dark mahogany back, and a black spindly chair of iron with edges like razors. ‘I've always been tempted by anger and pride, but I doubt the Seige Prideful would stand up to me.’ His voice was mock ruthful. He drew back his foot to give it a hearty kick, but seemed to think better of it.

‘There's always the Seige Sloathful’ the man in the cricket togs said, pointing to a deck-chair incongruously drawn up against the vast circular table. In the tables centre, a great twining gold seal ate itself, the uroborus of the Time Lords the Omniscrate Emblem.

The old man who was already seating, snorted. ‘Hurry up can't you, what's a table for if not sitting at’.

‘We're just considering’

‘Only a moment’

‘We haven't agreed yet why we are here,’ the untidy little man said, ‘being plonked down like skittles, and frankly if I'd wanted to be at everyone's beck and harry, I'd never have run away from home in the first place.’

The old man glared, ‘Run away from home? You make me sound like an errant school boy!’

‘Weren't we?’ the man in the smoking jacket asked, ‘if you face up to it. Didn't we want it all? Everything outside the iron prison yard. Everything that wasn't exile?’

‘Why!’ The tallest man exclaimed, ‘this is Gallifrey, nor am I out of it! Think you not I, who saw the ends of time and worlds beyond the scope of all our dusty years, am not tormented with ten thousand devils by being thus deprived of eternal bliss’

The eighth man held up a tentative hand, ‘Excuse me, would one of you mind explaining
who you guys are?’

***

‘Hey, only kidding, I had this problem with amnesia, but it’s all fixed now.’

They gaped at him.

‘Yes, I know you all.’ He numbered them round the table starting with the old man. ‘One for sorrow..’

The little scruffy man with the Beatle's hair cut, ‘Two for joy’.

The man in the smoking jacket leaned over, ‘Well he doesn’t remember you, very well.’

‘He’s referring to my rendition of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, for the Recorder,” the small man hissed.

It was the Smoking Jacket’s turn. ‘Three for a girl’

The recorderist beamed, ‘Fancy Pants!’

The tall bohemian took it on the chin, booming out ‘Four for a boy, ah I was a lad once’.

‘Five for silver,’ the fair hair of the man in cricket whites gleamed.

‘Six for gold,’ the curls of the man who until recently had worn the multicoloured coat, nodded as he smiled.

‘Seven for a secret never to be told.’ ‘That,’ the man with the red umbrella said, ‘Is what we’re here to discuss.’

‘One to Seven,’ the forgetful man shouted, ‘I know you all now. You,’ he pointed at the old man who had levered himself up ramrod straight behind the table, ‘you were my old army sergeant.

And you,’ he beamed at the scruffy little man, ‘you met me at the station with a magic box, or was that a dream. An evil wizard had stolen all the clergy and the Christmas Bells wouldn’t ring.‘

He ran up to the man in the velvet smoking jacket, and stopped puzzled. ‘But I remember you all raggedy’ He was almost pouting.

The man he’d accused of having a magic box sniggered, ‘Scarecrow,’ under his breath, and the third man scowled.

But the eighth man was after the bohemian now, only to be withered at a glance, as the fourth man lurched forward. ‘I? Oh yes, I was a dread sorceror, whether on the steps of Russia or the great oceans of the gulf of Arabia, I gave of myself to animate the inanimate, to heal the Czarina.’ He took a step towards the now scared, man – his eyes large and dark, ‘and in the end, I died and became a mentor in white in a House that Moved.’

‘Stop it,’ the fifth man said, ‘I thought we were here to help him.’

‘Lets hope its not the way he’ll remember you helping cows,’ the fourth man shouted eyes wild, ‘I’m the one he’ll remember if he remembers anyone.’

‘The one who was too stuck on himself to come out of a time eddy,’ the one who had taken off that dreadful coat said. ‘We’ve all had our chances, some here some there.’

‘We make the chances,’ the Seventh man said, ‘and what happens next here is up to us and to the Table.’

'Just as long as you don't put ferrets down my trousers,' the eighth man replied.

[A part of a 'how the eight Doctor *really* got his memories back, story collection that was once mooted and came to nothing.]

Why did the Chicken cross the Road?

Extracts from the Eggthology Symposium

by Simon BJ (Envoi to Beatles, by Zap)


H P LOVECRAFT - because of the festering abyss that yawned behind it, that hidden portal of which all chickens are aware. For is it not written: "It is not dead which behind the road lies, cross quick with chickens then or curse your eyes!"

RAYMOND CHANDLER - it was a road that a chicken had to cross, who could not himself be crossed, a double-crossed chicken who knew that when your partner was dead you had to go to the other side of that mean road, alone.

JANE AUSTEN - It is a well known fact a chicken of moderate income and personable in appearance who crosses a road, must be in search of a hen.

MELVILLE - It was a great white chicken that crossed the road, and I alone return to tell of it. Call me Chickspyall.

KENNETH ROBINSON - Why the chicken had crossed the road to the towering midtown skyscraper that housed Doc Bantam’s headquarters no one could tell. They couldn’t tell because the chicken had died with an expression of hideous unfowl-like terror on its beak while pressing the button on the hidden express elevator that lead straight to the 86th floor. So began the case of The Scarecrow Doom.

SAX ROHMER - Nayland Smith turned the body of the chicken over with his toe. 'Good God Petrie, to think I was too late', he gritted. 'If I had only guessed the cursed riddle of the Chinese Road of Death before the expiry of the Council of Seven's 3rd Notice, this chicken would not have been lured into the noose of one of Fu-Manchu's Burmese stranglers.'

ISAAC ASIMOV - Seldon spoke slowly. 'Psychohistory predicted that given the increasing chicken population on Terminus one would, at this time (to within a non-significant sigma-variation at this stage of the Plan) cross the road.'

E E DOC SMITH - Gharlan of Edore snarled, why were his chickens in such disarray on Tellus crossing roads whose chaotic cloverleaf he had planned expressly to curb and break their migratory instincts, was some hidden enemy involved? Perhaps one of the Innermost Circle? If Gharlan had been a less paranoid thinker in short not a Eddoran he might from one chicken had deduced in toto the existance of the forces of Arisan and forstalled the way of the Lens.

DICKENS - Mr Charcken outstretched his plump hand and waved it, plumply, across the plump old table. "If this was a road now," he said, 'why I'd cross it, and damn the man who dare say I would not.' 'That you would,' his wife piped in her thin treble tones,' a regular man for road crossing he is Mr Charcken. Day in day out.' 'Wife hold your tongue,' Mr Charcken snapped crossly, 'you have as much sense as a roadsweeper in August.' And satisfied with the plumpness of his remark he took snuff up each plump nostril.

AGATHA CHRISTIE - To poison the soup.

MEATLOAF - 'Cause chickens in the rear-view mirror may be faster than they appear.

ASSORTED - To get its kicks on Route 66.

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER –
Seeking, what the chicken was seeking /
In its heart a call speaking /
and then leading it on /
take the first step /
the step that leads on its way /
from the farmyard into day!

BUDDHA - If you see the chicken on the road, remember a crossing of a thousand miles begins with one step.

ELVIS -
Rockin' Rooster on its way,
Rockin' Rooster here to stay,
that bird's a coxcomb on a spree,
but I warned that bird off my chickadee.
I said Rockin' Rooster this is a bad hard road.
Rockin' Rooster I'm gunning to explode,
if you try to cross my babies' road.
You're a Rockin' Rooster stay off my heart's highway.

BRAHMA (after EMERSON) (after ANDREW LANG) -

If some lost chicken thinks it crossed
Or it the road thinks that it rolled
They know not poor misguided souls
They too will perish unconsoled
I am the roadsign, and the path,
I am the chicken stutting tall
The car that honks, the wheels that smash,
The KFC franchise and all!

T S ELIOT

The crossing of chicks is a puzzling matter
It isn't just one of your sordid affairs
In fact it would puzzle the whole alma mater
Was it chased by a Dalek that could go upstairs?

OGDEN NASH -

A Chick on the run
Can be plenty of fun
A Chick on the highway
is goin' my way.

PATRICK BARRINGTON

I had a chicken for a pet who sauntered with insouciance
But its lack of common road-sense soon became an awful nuisance
I had to trail it everywhere and interdict its rambles
For fear its lack of green-cross code would end up in a shambles.
It did not look to right or left, it did not stop and pause,
And trying my patience oft I cried "o tempora o mores"
Until it met its destined fate, on a roundabout in Purley
Crushed beneath a juganaut through crossing much to early.

BEATLES [WELL RUTLES] -

Goin'ta write a song, have you heard the word
It's a freaky story of a beaky bird
Don't know why it had to but it had to cross
If you ask its motive then I'm at a loss
I'm a hack songwriter. (Hack songwriter)

Sling some words together like you want me too
We'll be frying omlettes for a week or two
'Cause to make an omlette gotta break an egg
And to stop that chicken gotta break a leg
Like amateur actor. (Amateur Actor!)

It's a metaphor, metonomy, or simile,
’cos that freaky chickens quite a lot like me
Don't know where I'm going, or if I'll be great
Arrive in a limo, or just with a crate
Like a late milkman (Late Milkman!)

Envoi

I've got something to say that might cause you pain
I saw you crossing that road again
I'm gonna let down, and leave you flat


LEONARD COHEN –

The road has a splinter, the chick has distemper,
the flame of its longing has burnt to an ember,
it may shake its feathers, it may stop to preen,
but the roots of its life are not green.

It stopped in the ash-pit, to pick for a worm,
and if it found one it was not my concern,
to save it
caught in the early bird's mouth,
in that slow wind from the south,
that never blows tears,
from the eyes, from the eyes of my fears....

[Some years ago some friends and I tried to solve this
most intractable of philosophical problems. These were
my contributions...]

The Nine Cities Of The Immortals

In the valley of Chan-Tu, lie nine cities in which it is said a form of immortality may be had for a price.

In the first city, artisans will carve the name and the accomplishments of a mortal into a block of diamond using chisels of light.

In the second city, recursive editing applied to the germ-plasm will allow a person to be reborn as his or her own child.

In the third city, a clockwork copy of a person can be made with miraculous fidelity save for its one additional characteristic: its ability to make a copy of itself accurate and inclusive of that additional quality.

In the fourth city, a drug exists, which speeds the perceptions of the mind and body so that its takers live a billion years while a rain drop falls.

In the fifth city, a guild of meme-engineers undertake to build a religion around the purchaser's eventual resurrection, and life among the gods. When a criticality of believers exists, they affirm, it will be so in truth.

In the sixth city, all names are set aside in pleasures masked, and unrecorded, and no deaths have ever been known within its walls.

In the seventh city the seeker of immortality is taken apart cell by cell, and each miniscule atomie implanted in another person. This is the process known as the Immortality Homeopathic.

In the eighth city, the seeker is granted a number of extra lives, which her or she carries in an eggshell. The eggshell must be carried in the mouth.

In the nineth city, there is a mystery.

Each cities methodology has disadvantages: yet each is hailed and draws its quota of pilgrims.

It is also said that there is a tenth city: reached by secret railroads and hidden canals. In the tenth city, those fleeing the first can buy the erasure of their histories from eternal light; the children of the second can earn the right to sire new and novel offspring; the clockwork artisans of the third can run down; the madmen of the fourth can rest their billion year unblinking eyes; the martyrs of the fifth can hail their eventual iconoclasts; the pallid, and sheepish escapees from the sixth can locate - eventually - their own longed for clothing; the gestalts of the seventh can each donate the tiniest fragment to a petra-dish before denying their identity. Those from the eighth can spit the broken egg-shells from their mouths and see the tiny birds of life fly free. But from the ninth and most mysterious city, it is said no one has ever come to the tenth.

This then is a true and verified account of the nine or ten cities of Chan-Tu, to which should be added only this.

From the outside all the cities are identical: nor can a pilgrim know which immortality his or her coin buys until it is given.

Doc Zarathustra : Chapter Two [revised]

CHAPTER TWO - CLIPPING THE LOVE BIRDS’ SILVER WINGS

From the Diaries of James Rothberg “Four-Eyes” Patterson

I set out to get on board the great silver bird from Panama, as soon as I got Doc's Western union telegraph. Doc had an idea for bouncing long-range radio waves off "relay moons" placed in space, but even Doc didn't have the resources to try that on his own – not yet anyway, and many an adventure had been heralded by a western union telegraph boy's cheery whistle as he handed a summons to one of the crew hammering nails into a jury-rigged hospital for the victims of a disaster in Equador or as they left city hall brushing the ticker-tape off their clothes or fighting another wrong-headed cease-and-desist order from the Federal Government over another group of criminal dopplegangers.

This time the message had been more than usually long winded for Doc. `Known criminal died suspiciously, blue face, return as soon as feasible, ditch Pamela if you can. Ask Professor Mulberry to supply details of the Observatory's studies of Venus. Doc Z.'

The reference to `mulberry' and `venus' were the code-words for the month to indicate that the telegram had actually come from Doc, it hadn't been that long since nearly the whole crew had been misdirected into mortal peril at the hands of the masked fiend known as the Platinum Scarab, and Doc was taking extra precautions. The reference to Pamela was because Doc felt that the adventurous life-style of the crew should exclude the fair sex, and because frankly he was tired of Pamela's riding him with hints of things he couldn't remember, adventures and escapades that seemed far more unearthly and impossible than any of the unearthly and impossible things that constituted his daily round.

I’d grinned at that. Personally I liked Pamela, heck I'd proposed to her twice – and while one of those times I'd been under the influence of The Evil Eros and his synthetic love – the last occasion I'd had nothing but frank admiration on my mind. That and Pamela's fire-alarm knock-out figure, as Spats had put it. Still I did as Doc asked, and timed it just right. From the observatory to Panama City, to the airport and the privately hired four engined monster that was carrying me Northward, I'd driven the twin turbined car that was his tinkerer's pride and joy as fast as it could go. There was no chance that Pamela would be sticking her pretty pert nose into this adventure.

From Pam Vane’s Journal

He settled back into his seat, and accepted a cup of coffee from the air-hostess, an innovation that I could tell he was all for. Then he choked, as he saw that the hand passing him the coffee, wore the two-dollar engagement ring that Spats had switched for the thousand dollar hunk of rock he'd planned to offer me – the two dollar ring that I’d kept `on approval' even though I hadn't said yes.
`Careful, tiger,' I said, my other hand brushing her my trademark Titian red hair back under her air-hostess' hat, `that coffee's hot.'
I love to catch him out.

Next to dealing with Doc, it’s such an innocent pleasure.


***


`How the hot hades, did you do that Pamela?' James spluttered. Pamela smiled, `Thought you'd lost me at the observatory, eh? lover. Well I had the foresight to leave a short-wave radio set at the Western Union office in Panama City, and those lusty young telegraph boys are only to willing to get a lady news of her intended's planning to skip out before the wedding. I was on my way down the mountain while your telegram was on the way up.'

`And the air-hostesses, uniform?'

`Just something I thought you might like. Shift over, I don't intend to spend the rest of the flight in the galley, and spill the beans – who's the blue crook?'

`Don't know yet,' James shrugged, `Sorry fire-top, you know if I had my way I'd bring you in on all the adventures, but Doc's got his quirks and your safety's one of them.'

`You mean I've been riding him? I only want the big lug to get his memory back. You think its easy being the only one officially to know the family history?'

James looked into her eyes, well he didn't need an excuse, but he also reckoned he could read sincerity there. Not that that meant anything. That smoothy Spats, said Four-eyes couldn't read women worth a plugged nickel, and James had to concede he was right.

The plane juddered, and yawned to the right sending James coffee out of his hand to splash against the curtained window. `Hell, that's not turbulance, not in one of these birds. They've got the new gyro-stabilizers Doc patented last year, come on.'

Pamela reached the door to the pilot's cabin first, with James a long legged stride behind her, a pressurised air-pistol (designed for use safely aboard a plane) in her right hand.

Flinging it open with her left, she stepped in, and James - unable to see what caused her to scream in horror – forced his way in after. Slumped over the plane's control's the hired pilot lay, his face stained a deathly and unearthly blue.

`Remind me, Pam,' James said, `You did get that flying license finally?'
`Uh, no. I was halfway through and I was kidnapped by the Red Blimp's Raiders. You?'

`With my eyesight problems? You know my interest in optics stems from my appalling short-sightedness. I couldn’t even get them to teach me to fly a plane if the Red Baron came back as a seeing-eye dog.'

`Fine, we’ll do it together.’ She kissed him.

‘Hot dog!, You might like to reconsider my marriage proposal too. I make it that we've got about twelve minutes before this baby drops to sea-level. Can dead blue pilots legally conduct weddings?’

‘Down, tiger, and watch the horizon!’


From the Memoirs of Donald “Spats” Diamond

Five hours earlier, Doc had been wiping the blood of his hands, and we'd withdrawn form the medical lab at the penthouse to the main reception room.

`So, let us sum up,' Doc said. `Pugs Layfette's heart was kept beating by an artificial mechanism. Its construction is remarkably well engineered and in some respects I do not yet understand it. It appears to have ceased operating in response to an external signal. This raises a number of issues. Firstly, was Pugs aware of the mechanism, and if so was it the reason he had sought to meet me? Secondly when and why was the mechanism installed. His heart showed little sign of fatty degenerative diseases and while I postulate that a device of this kind, could have been used to regulate a defective heart-beat like a metronome setting the time for a piece of music, he would not have needed such a device.'

`So you think someone stuck this gnome-setter into him, to keep him under control, Doc?' I asked, `you do as we say or we make your heart go fritzy?'

`Possibly, Spats – but if so would not taking a group of nurses hostage and contacting me have counted as being `fritzy'? In which case why not trigger the device when he was first awol. Besides I have an additional problem. The device as I say is complex and precision engineered. I would be hard pressed to duplicate it in less than a month, and it bears every hallmark of being a device at the limits of medical thought. Leaving aside the questions of successful implantation and surrounding tissue rejection which I won't bore you with.'

`So it’s cunning, heck Doc, we've had men come flying in the windows with clockwork ornithopters strapped to their backs, we know the sort of mad focused science that's being churned out these days.'

`Yes. These days. In our industrial post-War society with all the advances the world war caused in treatment and science. But I can tell by the scarring and the way the heart has healed and grown around it, that this device – with it seems the same power source – was implanted in Mr Layfette twenty seven years ago, in 1905, when – if his driving licence date of birth is correct - he was no more than six years of age.'

`In 1905? But Doc that's impossible!'

`It would certainly seems so Spats, Nick, any thoughts? You're our electrical supremo.'

`Ah, Doc – you and Unc Tesla were the bigwigs there. I suppose you could make a micro-compact battery but they'd be all sorts of difficulties sticking it in a hot wet environment like the body. Er, no offense Mam,' Nick ended realising he'd been talking about hot, wet, bodies with Nurse Weathen still present.

`None taken, Nicky,' she beamed.

I winced inwardly the little squirt was wowing the dames again.

`Nicky and I did some tagging of carabo, last winter,' McGurk offered in his deep rumble, `the idea was that they'd have these collars see and they'd give off a radio signal and we'd be able to track their migrations. In the process I got talking to a lot of frontiersmen about the old days of the carabo herds, and then on to other things. There were a lot of weird things going on back at the turn of the century, ghost-airships sighted over the midwest, and agood deal of foolish hysteria. Now while you was digging around in Mr Layfette I got the police commissioner to rush over his police file. He was born in Dome Ridge, Indiana and lived there until he was ten.'

`And, in 1904 Dome Ridge Indiana was the centre of a number of ghost-airship sightings.' Doc stated, his encyclopediac memory confirming the man-mountain's research. `I’ve seen that town's name recently.’ He strode to his desk, and keyed the intercom.

`Personnel director, Panama airlines – I want access to the school history of Philip Cray Harland. Yes you'll have a record he's currently employed on a special charter….'

***

James, and Pam were struggling with the controls but the plane refused to respond to her partial and his non-existent abilities as pilots. If anything they'd made it fall slightly faster, and the best they were hoping for was a flat splashdown. The plunge and drown option looked more likely by the second.

The crump of something impacting on the ceiling of the cabin and the hiss of thermite burning through sounded as it in a dream. Still more so did the dropping into the cabin of the one man, they had thought out of reach in New York City.
`Doc!'

In his practised sun-bronzed hands the plane pulled up, and he was able to fill them in quickly. `Luckily I had reviewed, as is my policy, the personnel record of the pilot assigned to this special charter, when I cabled James before beginning the autopsy. When I confirmed thereafter that he had been educated, as I remembered, in Dome Ridge at the same time as someone had operated on the gangster, I decided that your safety might be at stake. The experimental rapid-air-expulsion-craft I was working on, was able to make the flight to Panama in four hours thirty seven minutes, and one of the Red Blimp's old "ariel boarding tubes" enabled me to enter your plane without danger to its infrastructure.'

Pamela whistled softly, `You've got the Vane Family luck, by crikey if you'd only believe it.'

James pulled at her arm, `Not the time to open old family questions Pam, look!'

Hovering in mid air, the size of – insofar as it could be judged against the morning clouds - a football stadium, was a thing that the eye refused to take in. A silver oval brimming with pylons, levers and veins that ran out to strange gasbags and sails.

`What is that!' Pam gasped.

Doc, reached for the radio-phone at his belt, `Spats, disengage the Reb Blimp tube your end we've got troubles. That,' he paused, `is either a fair reconstruction of the eye-witness accounts of the mysterious ghost air-ships of the nineteen hundreds.'

`Or?' James asked

`Or, it is a ghost air-ship of the nineteen hundreds,' Doc deadpanned.

Pam gasped, `ghost or not, it's firing on us!'

In a 2004 discussion of fictional US Presidents.......

It was disgust, routed in the one hand on Puritan
traditionalism and on the other in a peculiar alliance
of high brow liberal musicological and cinematographic
tastes that finally saw the ousting of Presidents
Springsteen and Norris, whose (some-say-not-simply)
symbolic adoption of gay-marriage as a campaign
gimmick, had alienated one constituency just as their
artistic efforts had annoyed another. It was this
unlooked for upheaval that was ironically to allow the
under-the-counter granting of retro-active Statehood
to Austria within the United States Of The Americas
and Western Europe (USAWE) that enabled President
Arnie to ride to power in a Humvie, on a platform of
no-male messiness, better action movies, and an avowed
commitment never to sing in the Oval Office.

From Patrick Vospick's "From Wagon Train To White
House: A History of the Ludicrous Men We Elected My
God What Where We Thinking" Armageddon Press, 2102
AD. [Purchasers of this book on Amazmoon.com went on to buy:
"Antichrist(s) At Downing St: A History Of The
Fortress Parliament from 2004 to 2025 'Britain's
Darkest Hour'" and Bin Laden's "How I Was Framed".]


....of course now this is clearly ludicrous, thank
heavens for Obama! But see the Alternative world Guardian here
for Norris's Presidency of Texistan McCain's 100 days

Simon BJ

Cranking The Extravaganza back up a notch

Statement of intent: I must write more or I will go mad. I also have an unfinished project I must refire my enthusiam for, and the only way to write is to write.

So, therefore: for 1 year, at least one post a day on average from now. Some will be new, like today's poem 'The Rose', some will be material from the Bucher-Jones archive like today's 'Lost Proposal' a novella rejected by Telos back in 2007, and today's snippet 'Yes Minister, there is a Rentaghost: Code Violet' last seen in a Jade Padogda post in 2003.

In return I'd like to see a bit of feedback. I know some people read this....hello!...

Simon BJ

Triple crossover(s) #1

"So you're saying what Humphrey, that the British
Isles are infested with Vampires?"

"That rather depends what you mean by vampires,
Minister. The security service prefers to refer to
them as Code V cases, it makes it all so much more
believeable."

"Its the odd that it makes MI5 more believeable when
their called Spooks, but Vampires more believeable
when they're...I'll get some tea shall I."

"If you would, Bernard. However its interesting that you raise
the question of Spooks, I understand that there is a free-lance
organisation that might give us the edge in these
matters".

"And its run by Spooks is it Humphrey?"

"Indubitably Minister".

From "Yes Minister There Is A Rentaghost: Code Violet"
by Simon BJ

THE ROSE

THE ROSE

Upon the grave the briar lies
My husband's grave, whose stone surprise
is weighty, ponderous, and new.
I visit perhaps one day in two.
A thing I never thought I'd do.

Upon the grave the briar lies
I do not – or did not surmise
That I could find in a mere place
A hand’s touch or re-glimpsed face
My love I thought was past replace.

Upon the grave the briar lies
Its blossom’s buzzing now with flies
Whose buzzing sounds a kind of sense
Of empty, yearning eloquence
A yawning void, agap, immense.

Upon the grave the briar lies.
“In death there is no lover’s ties.
No fond caress, no touch, no life,
No husband now, and hence no wife,
No heaven’s host, no hell’s vast strife.”

Upon the grave the briar lies.
“Death’s eyes are knitted up with styes.
No sights are seen, no thoughts enact,
The brain is mute, sight: cataract,
An endless nothing, brute as fact.”

Upon the grave the briar lies
“No angels sing, above the skies.
And even that exultant worm
Devours too weakly to affirm
That blank eternity has its term.”

Upon the grave the briar lies.
IT LIES
IT LIES
I SAY
IT LIES!!!!


Simon BJ, from an idea by Mark Michalowski

Lost Proposals, a rejected Telos Lovecraft/Doctor Who crossover

Proposed Novella

“A Trembling Of The Waters”

By

Simon Bucher-Jones


(interior subtitle)

Extracts From The Classified Correspondence Of H. P. Lovecraft.

The novella’s form is a series of letters written by H.P. Lovecraft (HPL), to a friend an un-named Doctor. Footnoted by the person preparing the letters for filing by UNIT.

During the course of the correspondence he (HPL) encounters evidence that there is something strange loose in the world, and with the Doctor’s long distance (as he thinks) support – despite their mutual status as “Outsiders” – defeats it.

He is also assisted by the Doctor directly, although, the “Professor Smith” he encounters, is connected with his correspondent only by the readers.

He is corresponding with a 3rd Doctor who is briefly trapped in the 1930s during an experiment on the grounded TARDIS’s console – and he meets the 2nd Doctor, Victoria, and Jamie. The 3rd, having had his memory disrupted by the Time Lords can’t provide any foreknowledge of the meeting in his letters, although he may unconsciously have directed HPL to the place where he will meet the 2nd Doctor. The person sorting out the letters for publication is a latter 3rd Doctor after his exile has ended, who by then has a full memory of events, and who in an epilogue deals with the aftermath of the events.

The purpose of the footnotes will make clear this surrounding structure, as well as providing all the background readers unfamiliar with H P Lovecraft’s life might require, and add verisimilitude as needed.

The threat:- a great beast, living under the New England woods and lakes since it “fell” here in pre-history. It strives murkily and unconsciously in the toils of its suspended animation to call to anyone who might rescue it, both on Earth, and in the Stars. As its sleeps its essences seep out and taint and alter the environment. To the dreaming, and sensitive, HPL its mind is a trap – and it has trapped many minds in the limbo of its grey fetid psyche. To defeat it, the 2nd Doctor, Victoria and Jamie are forced to enter its dreams and free its prisoners. Reducing it, by doing so the 2nd Doctor is able in the end to trap it in the mind of a caged canary, and return it to the stars.

A taster…..

To the gentleman of Fabled Atlantis
Dok-Tor. In The Hour Of Startled Flamingoes When The Grey Moon Rises
Over Yoom-Tish.

Greetings.

I must admit I am finding the village exactly as you described it to me. The spare gabled houses suggest my natal city, yet preserve even more the pristine feel of another less tainted age. After the horrors of New York, this is a welcome respite to what, if I were tempted towards a fallacy long exploded, I would have to term my soul.
Away from the clamour and rush of the cities, it is pleasant to find there are still places in New England where it is possible to breathe deeply and cleanly, to live humanely, and to imagine for a while that the antheaps and crawling sprawls of the diseased monoliths of modernity, that rise impiously under a blood red and infected sky, are not threatening from the horizons, and gradually hemming in the world.
I appreciate your advice about Sonia, and I feel more than I can easily write about her circumstances, but it was a choice finally between my sanity - precarious as it may be (you recall my mother’s sad final condition?) - and my continued residence in that city. Fleeing, I freely admit as much, from the new and the changing, I can not expect that Sonia would flee with me, nor that my Aunts would accept her into the family home in Providence. Further I think it unlikely that she would consent or desire to live on the terms that my relations’ foibles, long fossilised into inviolate custom, would demand of anyone outside the Lovecraft family circle, and I am resolved then to live and eventually die in such solitude as an elderly gentleman of letters, somewhat shabby and worn down by the grind of the metrop, alone may find fitting.
The money which you were kind enough to cable me, which I hope that I will one day be able to repay, is more than ample for my needs both in relocating my possessions and in taking for a week the cottage here from whence I will travel back to Providence refreshed in time’s fullness. I feel the more gratitude for the loan, knowing that you are by no means a man of substance yourself, and no doubt require monies for the experiments of which you write so guardedly. I know that like me you find yourself a man out of step with this frantic and awkward age, and while I must confess that I doubt if the mysteries you seek to plumb lie within the divination of man, I wish you every success, and every comfort commensurate with your efforts, and a resolution to your own misfortunes.
The owner of the cottage, a grey-haired yet still straight-spined lady of indomitable New England stock, greeted me with that wariness of outsiders that persists even among those who perforce make their living tending to the needs of the travellers through the surrounding woodland. That I was able to reassure her as to my own native right to the landscape, and to my connections with the local church – now that I wager you did not know despite your odd and one sided erudition – the Rev Thomas Lovecraft preached here as early as 1732, a copy of one of his sermons was interleafed in the family bible in my father’s library when I was a child, and I later found a volume of them privately printed in 1759 that – while it omits the one I had earlier perused – retains the great charm and forcefulness of the man’s naïve piety. Some of the stateliest phrases and most rolling sentences I have ever encountered flowed out in the good old man’s prose. A sentence that has forever remained in my memory, for instance is this:- “ And Leviathan was a great beast, greater than aught else God had made or caused to be born after its kind on the Earth, and it’s movement was the earthquake, and it’s step the trembling of the waters”.
The village stands in woodland as you know, and there is neither sea, nor river like the Miskatonic!, nor lake of Hali nearby. I wonder why therefore the Rev. Thomas Lovecraft’s sermons so often fixed upon the image of the sea, and the disturbance thereof, surely the lilies of the field neither toiling nor spinning would have served him better in his ministry to that puritan farming stock whose grim faced narrow visages are still the prevailing type today.


Simon Bucher-Jones

Sequals to Old Poems continued...One for Easter

The Challenge of Thor by

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I AM the God Thor,
I am the War God,
I am the Thunderer!
Here in my Northland,
My fastness and fortress,
Reign I forever!

Here amid icebergs
Rule I the nations;
This is my hammer,
Miölner the mighty;
Giants and sorcerers
Cannot withstand it!

These are the gauntlets
Wherewith I wield it,
And hurl it afar off;
This is my girdle;
Whenever I brace it,
Strength is redoubled!

The light thou beholdest
Stream through the heavens,
In flashes of crimson,
Is but my red beard
Blown by the night-wind,
Affrighting the nations!
Jove is my brother;
Mine eyes are the lightning;
The wheels of my chariot
Roll in the thunder,
The blows of my hammer
Ring in the earthquake!

Force rules the world still,
Has ruled it, shall rule it;
Meekness is weakness,
Strength is triumphant,
Over the whole earth
Still is it Thor's-Day!

Thou art a God too,
O Galilean!
And thus singled-handed
Unto the combat,
Gauntlet or Gospel,
Here I defy thee



The Reply Of Christ

by Simon Bucher-Jones

Not mine the thunders,
That were my fathers:
Jehovah of Battles
He would have met you
As an army of banners
Flame-Pillar before you.

I , Baldar forshadowed
Renewed from the deathstroke
Launched by blind god’s hand
Plotted by Loki
In me, forgiveness
After all battles.
In me the green-shoots
On sword ploughed land.

I bear the burden
Of the blind battle-fury
Crucified on the world-tree
For prideful soldiers.
For their camp followers
For their supporters,
For all mankind.

The thunderous darkness
That shook the Temple
In the first Easter
Is your great hammer
Falling its final
Time, its power then taken,
By healers and doctors.

Force does not conquer
Peace outlasts its clamour
Even where war springs.
True strength is blessed meekness.
Thursday remains but the
Loud Thor is silenced.
Good Friday follows.




Simon BJ

Song For Remembering German Finance Ministers

The story of high German finance
Is Müller over and Wissell for it.
And when Wissell’s purse-strings were busted
He past on port-folio to Schmidt.
Schmidt’s reign is hiatused by Ernst
That’s Scholz if you want a last name.
Schmidt’s back to do 1922
After which Johannes Becker’s to blame.


Then Raumer and Koeth, and Hamm’s Sandwiched
between Koeth, and then Hamm again
It’s a new page with Neuhaus thereafter
But Krohne’s only acting (in name).
Curtius and Moldenhauer are up next
And then, well we’re back with the Schmidt.
Dietrich it seems *wasn’t* acting,
But Trendelenburg’s (acting) a bit.


Warmbold does the warm up for
Trendelenburg who’s (acting) under his own name
Then Warmbold is back before Hugenberg
Schmitt (that’s not Schmidty again).
Schacht is perhaps scared by Goring, and then they go
Into a Funk. And the finances under the Nazis
Are a lot of old Aryan junk.


Simon BJ

Caution SPOILERS:a Poem

Some might call them spoilers
But none who love do so
They're letters from the future
Where we but dream to go
The prophets of the ancients
They seized such fleeting shards
The broken pottery of dreams
They read, as, tarot cards
So I hail spoilermancy
The new occultist's tool
Who sees in what fans' promulgate
The burning tower, or fool.
A fly-man and a lost bus,
A sand-dune and a storm
Of flying kites with gaping mouths
They speak of what's to come.
So cross my palm with silver
And I'll pull back the caul
The wrecked bus is the credit crunch
That's obvious to all.
I speak first of the thing that's known
As the witches to Macbeth
That you might value what's beyond
On the long path to death.
The fly-man is the child we spawn,
Who's eyes show not the soul
But looks at us across a gulf
Longer than ages roll,
The flying mouths are time itself
They gnaw us all away
To Doctors we may look for help
But time they can not stay.


Simon BJ

John Betjeman Poem

I had a memory of Dorothy Perkins
At the back of my mind where the rambling rose
Climbs the forgotten terrace that borders the darkness
Where the loves that have passed and the dying thought goes.

It was there in the sixties I used to meet Ceilia
Dressed in the nylon smock, cerise and zipped
When she was free at lunchtime we had macaroons once
But where now is she? Where the jokes that we quipped?

You can go to a hundred shops that bear the name proudly
At least if the credit crunch withholds its jaws
But though I'm sure its PR still makes its point loudly
The days of my Ceilia are mine and not yours.

I had a memory of Dorothy Perkins
I pressed Ceilia's hand as she went back to work
We came closest to lovers one time in Prestatyn
But the hotel was full: now I feel such a berk.

Why did I let her go into the darkness
Why didn't I hold her and keep her with me.
My love, oh my love in her nylon so purple.
The sweet rose of England, my thoughts are with thee.


Simon BJ

New CSi5M: Helium Audrey

Helium Audrey
She's never tawdry
Living Off Broadway
Rides on a Segway
Down to the dregs, yay!
Her voice is squeaky
Like the treble's all tweaky
Whining and peaky
That's peekanesey
Concertina squeasy
She dresses snazzy
Like 20s jazzy
A look some call passay
For one of her class, hey?
And yet she's lovely
From winkletip toes to glovely
Velvet black fingers
Some glamour lingers
So I wish she would call me
Squeakily implore me
Place her fingers on my forearm
Like I could save her from all harm
I'd be lighter than air
In her Helium Lair

24 with Bertie Wooster part 2

24 with Bertie Wooster


Hour 2: Elevenses


Those of my public who’ve followed my struggles with international communism, homegrown fascism and aunts, will know that while Bertram is ever eager to don his dove-grey spats, natty gentleman about town apparel, and clutching his whangee in hand and tipping the rakish homburg atop his cranium, sally forth to accomplish his good work by stealth, there is little reason to do so (rogue dynamiters not withstanding – if that’s the word I want) – before the preprandial hour: for it is at elevenish, that the clink of bone-china on bone-china can be heard in the land, and the addicts of Indian, Chinese and Ceylonese leaf, gather to complain about the tea cakes, and swap the first gossip of the day.

Eleven and an oddish number of minutes therefore found me at the blasted tea shop where Bingo Little once fell in love with a waitress, and where in the red-hot Eighties, Marx used to polish off a good slab of dripping on toast before rushing to the British Library Reading Room to get down his feelings about Industrialists and the state of his digestion.

It wasn’t long before the old Wooster sixth sense (It is six, isn’t it? I must remember to ask Jeeves) began to exert a peculiar tingling as of the scalp trying to crawl up and then down the small of my back. Seated in this benighted tea-shoppe (an establishment so declás, that it adopts an extra ‘e’) was none other than Lord Sidcup, formerly the wouldbe Dictator and proud wearer of the Blackest Shorts in Christendom: Spode. What on earth could have drawn this man-mountain from his forthcoming nuptials with the county’s premier gawdelphus Madeleine Bassett, to lave his blood-stains in the sparkling limonardo, I could not at first conjecture. But then my ear detected a faint but unmistakable ticking sound from the black doctor’s bag under his Lordship’s table.

Had he reverted to type, and was planning a suicidal gesture: exploding himself among the hated proletariat? Or perhaps had he been targeted for political assassination himself; hobnobbing - as he now was – with any number of volatile politicos in the Upper Chamber, where if I recalled my briefing his presence on the Cheese and Wine Committee had caused substantial ructions with his campaign for A British Cheese Cache.

Simon BJ

The Vulture

No one mourns for the bird that flies
To the thief’s resting place, alone
And from his ever-healing side
Devours the daily sacrifice
Day after weary, self-resembling day
Until at liver, even Vulture gags.
Endless the wingbeats, on the barren air
That bears me hence to wet
My beak's worn edge on flesh
Grown hard with long resistance
Until I can no longer decide
Whose punishment is worse.
Prometheus? Fire-thief and Titan, or
The unnamed servant, wingborne
Executrix. Half sister to the famed
Eumenidies.

What sin ‘gainst Zeus, was mine?
Unless too narrow an obedience
Oh ‘ware the patronage of Gods,
As, vast and irrecoverable as their enmity


Simon BJ

Sequal to La Belle Dame Sans Merci

‘The Knight’ by Simon Bucher-Jones

Now what can irk, my Princess Fay
With brows drawn tight as any bow
The searing sun at high noon-day It glimmers low

What frets and pines, my Princess Fay
That is not soothed when Moons arise
And Stars in their flight pause and stay
To catch your eyes

I see a handprint on your arm
Where mortal hand once dared to thrill,
And on thy lips a ghostly charm,
It blushes still.

***

I met a Solder in the woods,
A solid man, a mortal born,
And armed he was with the cold, cold iron,
And pale horn

He made a garland for my head,
Of meadow sweet and dandelion;
I looked at him, and in his eyes,
I tasted time.

He set me on his saddle’s side,
And gazed upon me as we rode,
I sang the brambles from our path,
The earth un-hoe’d

I found him roots of relish sweet,
Guessing mayhap at mortal taste,
And woo’d him with a faltering word,
And seemly haste.

I took him to one of my bowers,
And there the time right glad we spent,
And if we speak of mortal towers,
Well towers were rent.

And afterwards the Soldier slept,
And, from his moans, he dreamed of wars,
But neither war nor dreams have swept,
Our fairie shores.

I know not what pale death and lies,
His wicked dreams cast at my feet,
I only know that when awoke, his eyes,
Mine, would not meet.

I saw his starved soul in his fears,
That could not see freedom from woe,
So sorrowfully and with tears,
I let him go.

And this is why I mourn the day
Although at night the Moons arise,
And Stars in their flight turn and stay
To dry my eyes.

Simon BJ with apologies to Keats.

Sequals to Forgotten Poems #1

The Abyss Triumphant

By Clark Ashton Smith

The force of suns had waned beyond recall.
Chaos was re-established over all,
Where lifeless atoms through forgetful deeps
Fled unrelated, cold, immusical.
Above the tumult heaven alone endured;
Long since the bursting walls of hell had poured
Demon and damned to peace erstwhile denied,
Within the Abyss God's might had not immured.
(He could but thwart it with creative mace. . . .)
And now it rose about the heavenly Base,
Mordant at pillars rotten through and through
Of Matter's last, most firm abiding-place.
Bastion and minaret began to nod,
Till all the pile, unmindful of His rod,
Dissolved in thunder, and the void Abyss
Caught like a quicksand at the feet of God !


The Reborn Abyss,
By Simon Bucher-Jones (in memory of Clark Ashton Smith.)

When longer ages than all time unfurled
Had passed in timelessness without a world,
As naught existed that could aught forbid
Something must happen, and therefore it did.
From nothingness came form, that form to trace,
All interaction in all time and space,
Dark matter’s womb: its inner birthing fire
Ignites the cosmos from its long dead pyre!
Chance replication then, that thoughtless brute,
Leads on to complex weaves, and life’s first root.
Life comes and leaves, and changing where it can,
Gives rise to dodos, germs, wombats and man.
Man’s intellect in eagerness to mold,
A warm embrace from all the eons cold,
Gives rise to virtuality’s great arrays
Its Halls of Heaven, its Ancient Of Days.
God shakes the quicksand stains from off his feet,
And in that instant makes His thought, complete.

Short Short Story: The Supposed Fate Of Professor Eich

The Supposed Fate Of Professer Eich


I can not of course claim to be the last person to see Professer Picot Eich alive, although I was working with him, in conditions otherwise utterly solitary up until his depression of the final control. Things being as they were the honour of being the last person to observe his contorted and distorted features can not be assigned with certainty, and that observation in general must be considered the least unique of all human experiences. That being, obviously, the case, it may be contested that of all humanities’ multiform ends, the fate of that savant, sensualist, and self-styled ‘emotioneer’ must be the least suppositious, and my use of the word is open to question. Nevertheless, in so far as, to observe is never to experience, I maintain that in its ultimate phase, his dissolution however ubiquitous remains as unplumbed as any experience outside those of our own sensoriums. We may have seen, but, we must remain hopeful that, we can never assuredly know the finality of the fate of Professor Eich. His machine – his ‘omni-eidelon’ – remains in its shallow crater outside Utrect, and is decorated annually by both the Picotianist, and Traditionalist factions of the Church, the one in memory of his, again suppositious, sacrifice, the second against his final feared return.

Simon BJ

Christmas Story 08

REPORT OF A SURVEY OF A DEAD PLANET

The survey had been running for almost a local year in the desolate polar wastes of that lost dead world.

We still hadn’t determined which of the fourteen standard socio-catastrophies had ended this ancient and mighty civilisation, or whether we were looking at an undiscovered fifteenth. Naturally we hoped not, an extra catastrophe meant one additional chance that back at the far end of our near light speed, relativistic, trajectory our home world was already dead

We still hoped to find a world that had solved the unsolvable, that had lived past the horrors our best sociopredictions laid out inexcapably before us. Oh we could dodge the terrors of ‘nuclear war’ [socioprediction #1, 47.2% probable] but only by running straight into ‘ecological collapse, via pollution’ [socioprediction #2, 39.4% probability] and so on down to ‘inability to breed’ [socioprediction #14, 2% probability]. The cumulative odds of our living past the present century as a viable species were next to nil. Failing the miracle of a functional world, we looked for clues that could solve at least the higher order disasters: but this world didn’t look like it had any, not in its empty impossibly neat ghost cities.


Gchan had a theory (he always had a theory). ‘Imagine a society in which technology has become indistinguishable from magic in accordance with Metchin’s Hypothesis, anything that can be accomplished in the real world can be accomplished faster and better in virtualised intracomputer space, in which there is neither dirt nor decay.’ Gchan had developed an obsession with recycling systems during the voyage, and had on arrival refused to leave the ship.

‘Such a society will, eventually decay in its little rooms, bodies ending as in its great and airy palaces of the mind the souls of its citizens flicker and go out, eaten by the non-virtual aging of their murky flesh.’

‘That’s number Fourteen,’ Yurik said. ‘Virtualisation beyond no-return, is a subset. What does it matter if it’s female-hormone exposure, or decay of the male Chromosome, or too long in windowless rooms. No breeding equals no children.’

It was a telling point, even within our voyage – itself a risk – we had a breeding pair aboard, their two young, our own reminders of our race’s hope.

****

The terror began that night. The ship’s long range rangerscope detecting activity at the opposing pole. A launching of some ancient robotic composite weapon of destruction perhaps for it gave no believable life-readings to the ‘sparkometers’ only twelve strange signals, the foremost peculiar lead signal so energetic that its radio wavelength foreshortened into a red light as it moved so impossibly fast. There were twelve strange signals and one different ghost signature in their midst, a bloated parody of the ship’s computers best guess at one of the worlds long gone dwellers, and yet not real life. Not as we knew it.

‘A cyberweapon’, Gchan spluttered fearfully, ‘a ghost wired into a machine, accreting erroneous code over the eons. A lost purpose set loose. Pray it doesn’t find us, here at the bottom of the world.’

It wove a pattern over the world visiting everywhere, pausing and hovering then zooming at near light speed, accelerating at velocities that suggested a gravitic drive we had never accomplished. Was this some horror alien to this world that had picked its cities clean, or as Gchan thought, a last remnant of its own menaces. We shut down the power and huddled in the dark, the children wimpering in their parents’ arms.

Came the dawn. We woke with a child’s cry.

In the children’s arms, toys. Alien toys. Fat ursoid tumblies; spun-sugars in the form of orthoplastic supports. Teetertotes that spin forever.

In the ship’s arboretum and hydroponic gardens, fused beads of glass and scilica glistening on the tree bows. On the Captain’s desk in a wrapping of bright coloured paper: woven pedal-extremity covers, a set of hi-octane fuel samples in ornate bottles, a set of hardback books. The labourious translation engines of a near year’s work rendered its title: “More Luck Than Judgement!: The History Of Humanity: How We Moved Beyond Space-Time And So Can You”, a thin strip of card attached also carried the phrase ‘Happy Christmas, copyright Santa Perpetua Inc’

Simon BJ

'Nick's Cave' New CSi5M

“Nick’s Cave” From ‘Manslaughter Hymns’.

I went walking in the wildlands
I went where mountains shear
I went to the old black cave mouth
To prove I had no fear
I said old Nick, old Satan
Come out and sit a spell
And the rumbling voice of the Devil said
My son I guess I will!

We sat at the stenching cavern mouth
And set the world to wrongs
And talked of war in the Middle East
Of Hammas and of Tongs.
We drank our fill of the burning spill
That imps make from the old damn’s bile
Well we drank our way through most of Hell’s
Cellars, that had been laid down a while.

A fine old glass of vintage spite
It fired me up a treat
So I bad fairwell to the Devil o’ Hell
For the Devil of Oxford Street.

And the Devil in me, in Oxford Street
That devil had a wife
And the Devil in me, in Oxford Street
Introduced her to a knife.

Telescopolis

Modelled in part on Maduradam, which he visited as a child, this spectacular piece of 'macromodelling' was devised by Otto Strabismus III, the grandson of the famous savant of Utrecht (whom God, alas, eventually did not preserve) as the visual and tactile representation of his theory of 'joyous intricacy'.

Entering Telescopolis through a darkened gatehouse one finds first a microsope through which a model of the earth can be viewed, then as one progresses through larger chamber to small courtyard, to open space, one is presented in turn with graducally larger scale models each of a smaller area. The continent of Europe, the Netherlands, a Dutch town (very like the marvelous models of Maduradam), a single street (this at quarter scale down which visitors creep), finally a construct that appears to be a single house in one to one scale.

Telescopolis does not however stop there, entering the house, one finds that its walls are cunningly constructed illusions that it contains a larger space than a single residence could, but that, that space is filled with an immense single room, which contains furniture that grows as it is approached until at its centre (through astonishing arrays of mirrors) it presents an expense infinite in extent stretching upwards towards a ceiling more distant than the ends of the night sky.

Leaving the Telescopolis installation, by side exits into streets of other houses seemingly built to the same one to one scale, is to experience human civilisation anew, to marvel at buildings as impossibly tiny or impossibly vast works of art, to see mundane existance as a vindication of humanity.

Simon BJ

Sweeny Todd (guest writer)

SWEENY TODD by Ann W. Jones (my mum)

Sweeny Todd, the demon barber
Walks tonight in this dark street
Though long dead, his spirit's restless,
Moving on unsteady feet.

He who sent so many clients
Unsuspecting, to their doom
Keeps returning to his workplace
In the dank and dismal gloom.

Where his razor, sharply flashing
Slit their throats from ear to ear
Then the chair slipped, and they vanished
Down into the cellar drear.

Mrs Lovett who lived next door
Heard the sound of bodies - plop!
She began her preparations
Making pie-crusts in her shop.

She and Sweeny - strange co-partners
Did good business far and wide
She provided short-crust pastry
He the filling for inside.

So think of him when eating gaily
Juicy pies so full of meat
Who knows, the ghost of villain Sweeny
May be laughing in the street.

Emily Dickensonesque poem #1

In pausing in the Midst of Life
We make a Space in Air
A Space that Emptiness can fill
And take its Proper Share.

For Nothing is Deserving of
Its Place beneath the Sun,
For Nothing is the Meaning
Behind all that Man has done.

If we preserve a place for Naught
A Hole within our Heart
Where Nothing speaks and Nothing's Taught,
We Bless our Hidden Start

Before we birthed then Nothing Was,
When we are Dead, the Same
Betwix those Poles, we Nothing are,
Oh praise the Empty Name.

Johnny Cash CSi5M

Between the twin mountains there stands a lone valley
A valley of homesteads whose lights they burn low
And no one can pass by unless they bear witness
For these were the homes wence the soldier boys go.

They struck up the drums when they came there recruiting
They came there recruiting with tales of the bold
And the nation's brave flag and all things high-falutin'
But they never mentioned the graves dark and cold.

So whistle an air when you pass by that valley
But do not look back as your horse you spur on
For there are some places it's best not not tarry
And the dead kin, of the dead are not good to look on.

For no one remaisn there to keep the light's burning
And the low flames that burn are the lights of the dead,
Awaiting their youngsters to come home returning,
When skeleton sextons will bury their dead.

I heard of a preacher who went to those homesteads
He went there determined to lay the ghosts there
But though he still preaches he keeps his own council
About what he saw there that turned white his hair.

Between the twin mountains there stands a lone valley
A valley of ghosts whose voices they sound low
And no one can pass by unmarked by lamenting
For these are the homes whence the soldier boys go.