Songs From Spider Street

by Mark Howard Jones

  It was over in seconds, Carrie’s eyes stinging as she struggled to readjust them. She hit the brakes as soon as she thought the car had slowed enough. She killed the engine. “What the fuck …?!”

  She forced herself to take a couple of deep breaths. Had she been caught in a searchlight? The cooling engine ticked to itself in the night air.

  Turning the key, she started the big car. Her eyes had just about returned to normal. About to drive off, she noticed that someone was standing right in front of the car. It was a man; probably a drifter, she thought.

  She honked her horn twice. Sliding the window down a notch, she yelled “Hey, get out of the way!” She honked again. Still nothing. She’d had just about enough for the one night - if he didn’t move she’d go over him. “OK! Have it your way.”

  She pumped her foot hard against the accelerator and the roar of the beast below the metal suddenly died. She turned the key; it coughed pathetically a few times before giving up.

  The man reached forward and, strong and swift, yanked the badge from the front of the car. He lifted it to chest level and slid it inside his clothes.

  Carrie’s anger now overcame any fear she might feel. “Hey! Hey, you bastard!! Stop wrecking my fucking car!” She was out of the car, slamming the door, walking towards him. Then she halted, stepped back a pace, unsure, as the man began to walk towards her, one step at a time, stopping for a moment between each one as if to prove he was in charge, completely unafraid.

  Carrie backed away, wishing she’d been smart enough to stay safely inside the car.

  She ran around to the back of the car, her mind racing. As he followed, she continued to keep the car between them. Now she had drawn level with the rear door of the big vehicle. She glanced through the window. ‘Of course,’ she thought. Now she was back on familiar territory. She quickly opened the door and climbed into the back seat.

  If he was thinking with his balls he wouldn’t be using his brain and that would give her time to outmanoeuvre him. She sprawled back across the seat, hitching up her skirt. She tore open her pantyhose to save him the trouble.

  The man was outside the door. She could see his ragged trousers and, for the first time, she could smell him. She covered her mouth. He stank like a cross between a junkyard and a butcher’s shop, the mingled stench of metal and flesh corroding.

  He bent lower, putting a scarred and pitted hand onto the seat to steady himself. He eased himself forward. Now she could see that his clothes were mere rags.

  The Buick badge he had ripped from the front grille was embedded in the center of his chest, becoming a bloody emblem of triumph. Everywhere his body was studded with parts of cars, flesh melding with metal before returning to ruined human meat.

  Carrie held her breath. Finally the man’s head dipped below the door arch and into the pool cast by the interior light. She shook her head in disbelief.

  His mouth was the ragged-edged bullet hole in a vulnerable diplomat’s windscreen; the rest of the face bore the craquelure pattern of broken glass, the fissures eating deep into the flesh, held together by a flimsy inner membrane.

  Carrie whimpered, then screamed, then twisted to try and open the door behind her. The creature was too quick for her and she felt the heaviness of his metal-enlaced thighs bearing down on her own flesh, cutting into it. She yelped.

  He had her pinned on the back seat, unable to pull free. Carrie saw something fall out of the torn garments around his crotch. It was a grotesque mechanical parody of a penis, dripping a rare cocktail of engine lubricant, blood and semen. Her plan to outwit him had gone badly wrong and she sobbed as she anticipated the pain to come.

  Now he was on top of her. She gagged on the stench as she felt him inside her. The big Buick bucked as the backseat ballet began.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat, awake at last from her long slumber of pointlessness, Carrie glanced over at her new lover.

  He didn’t move. He sat staring ahead through his shattered bulb eyes at the dark road ahead. He flexed his hands, the bolts embedded in his knuckles making a gentle noise as they knocked against each other.

  The landscape ahead looked the same in the dark yet she knew that it was a different place. A place that ran alongside the place she had just left.

  Carrie saw again the giant figures that she had seen earlier in the day but now they towered over the roadside.

  The three striding figures came closer, revealing themselves as a family group sculpted from twisted metal and charred flesh, compacted bones making up their smiles, still-sparking electrics lighting up their eyes, striding forever together towards the horizon they would never reach.

  She understood the figures marked the signpost to a very different future. The sky reflected the rainbow hues of a pool of engine oil, the stink of petroleum filling the car like the relief of breathing fresh air after being stuck in a fetid room.

  Her blood-bloated skin was as finely stitched as sumptuous automotive upholstery. Staring out at the road from behind the smashed dials of her broken eyes, her radiator mouth purred with joy, the sound of the bug-filled wind sighing through the front grille at 90 mph.

  The white line down the centre of the road became a thread drawing her to infinity. She pressed down on the pedal harder, eager to reach the destination she knew would never appear. Incendiary synapses flickered to life through her oil-flooded brain as the thought filled her with joy – ‘I’m home’.

  WINDOW

  There he is again; the twin that I’m not one half of. Where does he come from? And why is he mine? Why not … someone else’s … anyone’s?

  His eyes stare into mine. His glassy gaze almost empty, except for the last wisps of bewilderment that refuse to burn off in the morning sun. Huge eyes, sometimes, that could only belong to an idiot, a member of the brigade of the mentally disenfranchised that seems to grow daily. A phantom limb that can never grasp what I mean.

  I’m not you. I’m not you. I’m just not.

  The first time I saw you was memorable, of course. You seemed to wander from nowhere into the small garden that sits outside the window. You were just suddenly in view, standing next to the small tree.

  I waved frantically and you looked at me and smiled. A smile full of hope, or that’s what I wanted to see. I beckoned to you and you came over to the window, curious.

  Dumbshow, I tried to explain to you that I needed to get out. Could you help me? Could you let my family know where I was? You seemed annoyed at my amateurish mime act, shaking your head often.

  Your face was pale and so beautiful. Not a storybook actressy beauty but a real beauty, with wonderful eyes and a kind mouth and a mind behind the face that would devour me whole in a single second.

  Finally you seemed to sense what it was I was asking for. “The door,” you said. I’d forgotten about the door. Yes, the door. I spent the morning looking for it, and then part of the afternoon. It’s not there anymore.

  I’ve spent so much time since looking for the elusive door.

  There are plenty of doors. Six, at least (sometimes more). But none of them is the right one; the one you mean, the one that leads outside. Someone must have stolen it; that’s so fucking typical these days, isn’t it?

  Or maybe it’s just a door that doesn’t look like a door; a door disguised. But what would be the point of that … except deliberate cruelty? Yes, that would be it.

  The lack of a door brings me back here, to this window; the huge eye in the wall that sees only what it wants to see. And back to me, staring back at me; a half-me, a phantom from this doorless internal world.

  Then you started coming back every day, finally you became ‘you’ in my mind; no longer simply ‘the girl’.

  Within a week of your daily visits I knew you were extraordinary. With the use of exaggerated gestures, near-somnolent dumb show, we conversed at length about so many things. You made shapes with your body that successfully communicated such abstract ideas in a way that was wholly understandable. Or mayb
e there was some form of telepathy involved, a sympathetic vibration that passed through the glass without setting it humming.

  I’d met only a handful of women like you before. Some I’d loved. Some I’d wanted to but been prevented from doing so. They were I sensed, under their different skin, my sisters. And I had not wanted to fuck them (although I did, of course, giving way to that inevitable, ancient urge). Instead I felt an urgent need to fertilise them with my self, my mind; to fuck them with my soul and not my body.

  I want to see your soul standing in front of me instead of your flesh alone. Or at least to be able to gaze into your soul. But that is denied to me, too. The best thing, the nearest I can get, is to gaze in through a window. Behind which is a mirror.

  Sometimes I wonder if he’s really out there, standing by the single tree in the small ornamental garden, or is it simply a reflection. When I retreat into the room, he usually steps back to lean against the high wall at the back of the garden. My confusion doesn’t give me any tools that I can use to disentangle my muddled sensations.

  At other times I look at him so hard that I think he becomes you. That can’t be right, can it?

  At other times I imagine you changing under the tiptoe of my fingers on the keyboard. I can see your face burn off like a cheap plastic mask, revealing the identical features underneath, unblemished, unscarred.

  Are you indestructible, then? In a state of permanence that not even flame or character development can assail? Something from a life completely alien to the one I’ve always known, where the only certain thing was flux and decay, where I feel in a constant state of falling, inevitably drawn magnetically to the point of my own demise, with no deviation possible from that set course.

  There are moments in the day when the glass appears to quiver, as if from some unheard and unseen shock, and I pray that it will crack, shatter and fall. Almost unconsciously I cower away from it, aware of the damage it could rain down on me even as it offers me deliverance.

  Memories of a story told to me about a man who punched through a plate glass window only to have it descend on his arms, severing his hands completely, flash into my mind and I close my eyes shut very tightly; attempting to squeeze the image from my head, feeling it run down both my cheeks as I expunge it from my immediate memory. Because I don’t want it to be me.

  There you are again with your insistence that there is a door, a way out of here. But your mere repetition seems like a sort of betrayal to me. Why don’t you come through that door, showing me the way to escape this place? Why do you stand out there, detached and seemingly unwilling to help?

  I suspect you came here merely to stare; to enjoy the unenlightening show in this one-man zoo. No saviour, simply a spectator.

  He’s there again, with his idiot glare. I’d shout but I know he wouldn’t hear me. “Why don’t you do something about this?” Even if he heard me, he wouldn’t understand; dumb incomprehension is a career choice for him, it seems.

  Sometimes he dances my dances, shouts my shouts. But I’ve become convinced that it’s an empty mimicry. He simply turns himself into a mocking mirror of my frustration and anger.

  But then there are times when you do the same, it seems to me. Is that me being him being you out there? Or are we all in here? “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,” as the song says. I look around but I’m alone.

  When night comes the glass turns its reflections in on me, like the black blank surface of a vertical sheet of still water. I press my head against it and steam my breath over it, watching the mist of moisture shrink as soon as it forms.

  Are you out there I wonder, standing in the darkness? I often hope that your features will suddenly appear on the other side of the glass, your breath misting up the other side – mere millimetres away from me; your mouth against my mouth, you breathing out as I breathe in.

  Maybe you are there and I simply can’t see you. Maybe our lips are echoing each other’s, letting our enraptured respiration pass between them to wear the glass away within a mere million years. But how would I know if that were the case?

  This damned glass meniscus, with you out there and me in here. Or vice versa. Forever. Forever.

  And ever.

  Amen.

  DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF CLOWN

  I’ve been blackmailing myself for years. I haven’t got a penny left. “If you dare even admit to it, I’ll ruin you. Finish you for good!” I keep threatening myself.

  A new life is supposed to be just that. Clean and fresh and untroubled. That was the plan, anyway. The hope. My pointless prayer for myself.

  But it hasn’t left me.

  The memories still pursue me, calliope-music choreographed and sawdust-scented. The stench of the mangy animals let loose from their cages clings to me, night and day; with every move I make, they pad heavily behind me. The dreams I race through in my sweat-soaked bed inevitably leave my pillow greasepaint-smeared every morning; yet I haven’t put the make-up on for years. Years, now. But not long enough, it seems.

  From the top deck of the bus each morning, the department store windows reflect back the bright-faced loon in the seat where I am sitting.

  On the stairs at work, I trip incessantly over giant invisible shoes. My colleagues burst out laughing before a brief, unconvincing show of mock concern. Am I OK? I nod dumbly, an unseen hat several sizes too big waggling back and forth on my head.

  Sometimes I see the elephants performing in the park across the street from my house. The first time was early one Tuesday morning as I pulled open the bedroom curtains. There they were, Bella and Zion, doing their funny dance, the one that always delighted the children. I was so sure they were real that I dressed quickly and dashed out to them, looking around for Sonya, their trainer. But there was nothing except the frost on the grass and a few sparrows.

  In a bid to destroy the circus inside me, I had even taken the box with my old costume and paints out into the garden one Sunday afternoon. I smiled as the greasepaint pots cracked in the heat, chuckling even when my neighbour complained about the smoke and threatened to call the fire brigade. If I’d been wearing my revolving dickie bow, I’d have had it going round like a demented windmill trying to take off.

  Nothing could wipe the smile off my face that afternoon as I watched the flames take my past, just as they should have done five years before.

  But that night the faces still bled out of the darkness, seeping into my dreams to poison my sleep and destroy my rest. The bearded lady joyfully, desperately copulated with the headless ringmaster as my fellow performers stood around them, flames streaming from their gaping mouths. The animals processed around the edge of the ring, turning this way and that to show me their wounds.

  The invitation was clear. So was the condemnation.

  Every morning I look for answers smeared in the greasepaint on my pillow. But there never are any. By the time I get to the bathroom mirror the gaudy colours have faded from my skin, evaporating in the stale air of the stairway, worming their way into the worn carpet.

  I’m standing back in the field now, just outside town. First time I’ve been back in five years. It’s not hot tonight but I can feel the heat of the flames from back then. That night when the circus died.

  When Flaming Frederic literally exploded with his own talent. The straw catching so quickly; the terrified punters running; the beasts screaming as they cooked in their cages; the high-wire snapping in the heat, decapitating the ringmaster as it fell …

  Rosa’s facial hair shrivelling up in the heat as she screamed in outrage and horror at seeing her lover’s fate.

  Escaping people tripping over the guy ropes, pulling them free in their panic, bringing the burning big top down on everyone inside, trapping them, burning them. Blazing sails, huge and bright as they moved against the stillness of the dark above them.

  Only me left. And two wailing children. And the ‘geek’, aching for his whisky, all boiled away in the heat. And a baby elephant, so
badly burned that it died two days later.

  The police and the ambulance crew looked at me with their prosecution witness eyes, as if I were to blame for it all. “And how did you escape?”

  “But I didn’t.” That was the truth. That’s what I should have told them. And then squirted my joke flower right in their eyes.

  CLOUD HARVEST

  Suddenly all the clouds I’d harvested during my life were there in the room with me. The breath of the heavens, clinging to the walls and ceiling, crowding in on me. Silent and reproachful.

  To exist they will rob me of my air, I know it. They hang there like threatening memories, their insubstantial forms pushing and moving and somehow growing. They’ve been with me since my childhood but this time it’s different.

  I look down, hoping to escape seeing them; out of sight, out of mind. But a soft mist is beginning to creep across the floor, too.

  The door is only two steps away, I think. And, yes, I could simply go through, shut it behind me and lock the floating fear inside. But that would only be a temporary respite. They would be back, later today or tomorrow. Next time it might be in public, or while I slept. I don’t know which would be worst.

  I don’t know where the best place to die would be.

  There are broken days now, stuck between the annoyance of a fresh morning and the dark lure of night, when my memory fails to fail me and I can remember her. Too many days like that, now.

  It was a purely private love affair totally unrelated to the crimes with which he was charged. This was a lie her husband told himself often, I believed. Maybe it was the only way he could carry on. Yet he was still absent; segregated from the world in which she and I lived, at liberty.