“Clive?” Sukie called again. Clive Idaho gazed forlornly at the tightly-knotted vinelike pattern of the flowery wallpaper of his bedroom that even now evoked Sleeping Beauty agoraphobia. It always amazed him as a child, this tangled forest of vines surrounding him day and night; the way that if you stared at them for long enough the pattern of creepers, thorns and roses would lift from their backing, seem to stand out as if he could slip fingers between the gap and tear off the design.
“Clive Idaho.” the Cantonese rang out afresh, “It is lunchtime, you mustn’t keep us waiting, Clive. It is going to be cold. You mustn’t further offend our mother's house.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” Clive Idaho retorted. The wallpaper continued to practice its alluring party piece, conscientious to master the technique with so many years of exercise under its belt. Clive Idaho rolled off the bed.
“Are you coming down to lunch or not? We must have an answer.”
Clive Idaho didn't retaliate; too engrossed was he with the illusion taking place before his incredulous eyes. He attributed the vision to the fatigue of staying out all night with some blokes cock up his back passage. Ah, the disgust; the revulsion; utter contempt; self negation. He reached out, wishing he wasn't here to listen to...
“Right.” big sister Sukie shouted, “I am telling father, You are a disgrace to this family as always. Good-for-nothing lay-about.”
But Clive Idaho had heard enough. He found his slender fingers unbelievably between the tall, thin vine-columns, the vivid floral tapestry, and the cream base colour. He could actually feel the felt backing against his smooth fingertips; the nylon paper against his nails. It was a very convincing effect; a very consoling sensation. He didn't even look back into the room. Didn't even hear the door opening as he slipped his hand further beneath the design. Slid it in to the forearm. Felt wonderfully excited, yet sublime in the serenity of what he was accomplishing. Didn’t yet truly believe it ... but kept on pushing beneath the surface until his arm, shoulder, right log, head, chest, hips, left shoulder, left arm, left leg, left foot, left hand and fingertips were trapped behind the vinelike structures micrometers before his nose.
He could actually see the stunned reaction on Sukie’s face as she scanned the empty room; looking under the bed; in the wardrobe; even out of the curtains, drawn instantly by Clive Idaho on his arrival this morning. Clive Idaho was there, actually IN the wall, looking OUT.
He pulled his head back a touch; the vision faded. Pressing his face to the wallpaper once more, he could once again see his big sister, her face a ghost-white death-shroud, rushing out of his bedroom, screaming ineffectual Cantonese prayers of denunciation.
Clive Idaho giggled to himself, realising what he has just achieved. Oops ... can people hear if you laugh ... he wondered. Can they see me press my face out like this? Am I trapped here for ever? Is this to be my Purgatory? My penance for being such a willing party to such bodily and spiritual degradation? Or is it somehow to be my Paradise? My freedom from the laws of flesh? He moved his right arm ... heaved a sigh. Moved his right leg ... was impressed by the boundless ease of motion through such an inanimate medium.
He took a sideways step. Amazing. Like moon walking. Effortless. Gravity free. He wondered what sort of speculation surrounded his disappearance. What sort of derogatory remarks were being bandied about down stairs. You are always cruellest to those most loved. You always expect so much and are so easily disappointed. Even from up here in the bedroom wall Clive Idaho could hear the reverberant ranting of his family below, probably even now rising from their traditional places around the dining table and voicing slander. He didn't need to listen intensely to comprehend what they would be accusing him of. How could he? That sort of tripe …
It's time to move on anyway, thought Clive Idaho and, totally lost in thought, made a simple, natural action. Not until he had traversed one whole bedroom wall and begun his descent through the adjoining beam and struts did Clive Idaho notice the ingenious mode of locomotion his body had adopted. Like a dolphin gracefully gliding through water he was sliding below the visible surface of the walls; a rhythmic undulation his method of locomotion. Corkscrewing solid matter.
Clive Idaho undulated ever downwards, the shrieks and shouts of his infuriated family and the drone of the traffic rumbling by increasing in volume, and dived for the blind sanctuary of the foundations of the old Victorian house. Peace at last. Only occasionally disturbed by the double-thwop of cars and buses and lorries passing overhead. How can this have happened to him? This superreal transformation. Why has it never happened before? Surely it was in his genes all this time? He’d never imagined guilt could harbour such traumatic potential.
Mind over matter? The power of the human spirit under the stress of fickle consequence? No, if this happened to everyone suffering a minor guilt trip there’d be only one or two people, a few wretched tramps and the mentally insane psychotics who know no remorse, out in the real world. The rest of us would be bumping into each other in this polite underworld of concrete and steel and brick and soil. This maternal rock. This Mother Earth. Oh, sorry, as we allow each other osmosis. Perfectly freakish thought pattern to have, thought Clive Idaho.
And so pondering the possibilities of Metropolis Subterranea, remembered the one person who would always be there whenever Clive Idaho had a worrisome mind or wasn’t getting on with the English boys at school or had girl trouble at sixth form College or was sacked from his first and only job for his antisocial attitude ... his great-aunt Kya Yuen Ling resident a good six foot under the consecrated soil of the municipal cemetery across town since her heart gave up on her as she toasted the family name with her final, fatal dram of - Sake last Christmas.
Now he missed her. It was about time his guilt jolted him into action and he paid her a customary visit ... small recompense for all the problems he’d dampened her round shoulders with in his few sorrowful years on the planet. A displaced native haunted by so many neuroses. Sins of the cloth. Such a stubbornly closeted oriental.
Clive Idaho moved off in the general direction of the graveyard, following a similar route he might take if on foot. Snaking along in the sand and gravel under the flagstones of the pavement then at the appropriate location turning over in the earth and pressing his face out into the street to cheek that he was headed in the right direction.
Momentarily unaware of the shift of medium from gravel to tarmac, Clive Idaho had unwittingly pushed his face out in the town-bound lane of the high street. A grey Morris Minor rolled right over his face.
“Did you see that?!” the large man in the passenger seat demanded of his stunted driving partner. Body swiping this way and that.
“See what, Stanley?”
Stanley Washington was furtively searching the road behind them.
“See what, Stanley?”
“Nothing... I Just thought.” he laughed. “Look, Barry, this shite we pumped into our guests.” he palmed the sweat from his top, “I hope it doesn't work.”
“Now why would you hope that?” Mister Rhisland spotted the Police car in his rear view mirror, watched it turn off to the right .
“You want to know why?”
Mister Rhisland took a left at the lights, “Yes.”
Stanley Washington began to snort, “I’ll tell you why, shall I? You and your little drug have been given far too much fucking importance in this whole charade. I'd really like this shite not to work so I could take all my anger out on you.” His eyes lit up, “Oh, I'd have such a fun time working you over, little man.”
“There’ll be no need for that, Stanley.” he pulled his ‘total belief in the power of science’ face. “It's beautiful, you know what I mean? User Friendly.”
SESSION VII
I was walking in a dense forest that steadily rose to an unseeable summit. The terrain was loose and prickly underfoot. It must have been night time. I seemed to be following a fresh trail. Soon enough, I came across a scrap of glossy magazine. A corner pi
ece. Couldn't tell which publication it was as it had neither text or graphics on it, only the number. I picked up the triangle and walked on. A stiff northern breeze blew right through me, chilling me to the bone. And painting frost-white striations of my breath.
I found another snippet from the magazine - a flesh coloured portion maybe three inches square. And another - scarlet silk and a toenail. In a clearing obviously caused by a fierce struggle as all the surrounding shrubbery was snapped or squashed flat. I found a collage hastily compiled and left abandoned. An expressionist jigsaw of cut-up magazine pieces. They represented a naked young man, semi erect - you know what I mean. The segment that extended down from his chin through his throat and chest to his belly button was missing, a clinically precise rectangle. Mathematical disfigurement. He was screaming paper cuts. The red velvet about him was laughing lava. Squealing with sadistic pleasure at his gory editing.
A distant line of bushes hissed at a sinister presence which crept tall and slack Against its moon-blue thorny backdrop.
Down the slope, the sound of a motorbike engine revving away. What did I do next?
“I imagine.” Staff Nurse Lily Veyne said, “That you'd take the pieces of the magazine very carefully to the Police and tell them how and where you found them and that you disturbed the pervert in the act.”
“That's brilliant.”
“Flatterer.”
That's exactly what I did. I took the mutilated soft-porn picture to the Police. I had run most of the way. When I stormed into the reception area there was the one middle-aged officer handing a glittery helmet to a big, bearded man in a leather jacket as he left. He didn’t see me. I laid the magazine cuttings on the top between us and watched as the man's face blanched and seemed to drop, the callow flesh coming loose and hanging slackly from the crumbling facial bone.
“Please, take a seat.” the desk clerk mumbled.
After, oh, an hour - in which time the station seems to have been put on some sort of alert and officers had dashed about like newly beheaded chickens - the middle-aged officer said to me, “Er, excuse me.”
I looked up, half asleep. He beckoned me over. Directed me through the open-hatch top into the main body of the Police station.
“This way.” he mumbled, keeping both a safe distance behind and a watchful eye on me.
“Left.” he said as we reached the end of the corridor. Shuffling alongside me, he knocked respectfully three times on the frosted glass door plagued Chief Superintendent Bob Collins.
“Enter!” a voice bellowed harshly.
“In you go, young fellamilad.” the middle-aged officer said, backing away, still viewing me in a jaundiced light.
“Thank you.” my throat croaked like a sheaf of old parchment tightened in anxious hands.
“Enter!” the voice bellowed again.
Reluctantly, I tried the handle and sheepishly entered the tobacco-stale claustrophobic air of Chief Superintendent Bob Collins’ office. The weary faced man showed me a cheap, leather chair across the desk from his.
“Sit. Sit.” he seemed truly exhausted.
“What a night.” he muttered to himself before looking up from his desk and ordering me to sit again.
I curled myself into the cracked leather upholstery and began to feel more uncomfortable than I had ever previously felt in my short life. A thoroughbred neurosis. A cogent paranoia.
“Well.” Bob Collins began in a flippant tone, “Cold out tonight, eh?” rubbing the crusty lemon remnants of sleep from his puffy eyes.
I frowned at his ill-placed familiar tone.
“Indeed.” he grunted, “Now...” he opened a leather folder on his desk, not bothering to sit.
“Do you see this?” he asked me. Turned over a large ten by fifteen inch colour photograph so that I could study it.
“This is an actual scene-of-the-crime shot.” he began, “Taken just a week ago at the home of one Simon Baxter. The disembowelled man here is a mister Paul Kasparek, a local painter of no consequence.” He coughed dryly and held up the corner of the photo as he pointed out the most revolting nuances; the choicest cuts.
“You can see here the large amounts of blood about the victim's body. Copious. A real blood bath.” he tossed the photo to one side. Looked right at me with those blood shot tired eyes.
“The place was caked with the wretched sticky stuff. The stench.” he thumped his chest, “Someone had had a real party. See here how there is a wide-bore laceration running from here...” he pointed to the body's tattered genital area then traced his lurid tobacco-stained finger right up through the entire carcase, “Rupturing virtually every internal cavity, smashing bone and tearing off skin and muscle as it continues up to the face where the tongue, which had been wrenched down as if from inside, was found half-chewed lodged in the victim's trachea. To the major lacerations of the facial tissue itself. Now these are very interesting; our pathologist assures me that marks found in the facial bone and sternum themselves actually contained traces of a metal (stainless steel to be exact) meaning some sort of gouge or maybe more exotically... Chinese finger hooks. Very creative our pathologist, but something along those terrible lines.”
I threw up.
My mouth just ejaculated vomit far across the right hand edge of Chief Superintendent Bob Collins’ executive desk. I spat and spluttered as the acid shot up into my nose, burning the delicate nasal membrane below my brain, sending cerebellum into an insane gastric-acid trip. The maggot-crazy light of a sleek and blistered horizon. Myriad chemical implosions careening through my every nerve and fibre, fear raging ice-cold through my heart. Panic haring around inside my head. Tears of splinter glass in my eyes. I fell from the chair like a filthy drunkard after another night drinking the gutter.
Chief Superintendent Bob Collins picked me up and propped me back into the nauseous mess I'd made of his cheap leather chair.
“That wasn't very clever, now, was it?” he was not happy.
“No.” I spluttered, Sorry.
He wafted his nose, “We shall claim compensation for the damage all that acid'll do to my desktop, you understand?”
Oh, I understood.
“Now. All this is very fine.” he returned his attention to the discarded full-colour photograph, “Until, you brought in this...”
He laid out the cut-up magazine I had brought in. Their spatial resemblance - laid out as I had found them in the forest, with the red velvet all around the naked starlet's body and the missing bit up the front of him, even the body's sprawling pose - to the scene-of-the-crime snapshot taken by a Police photographer as the poor victim's glistening innards were still settling was uncanny.
“Far too good a facsimile to be coincidence, don't you think?” Bob Collins desperately tried to pin this one on me.
“I am investigating what all this means.” I spluttered through the tartyness in my mouth.
“I am the detective.” said Bob Collins. “I will investigate what all this means…”
The door to his office suddenly swept open. A kaleidoscope of light buzzed in all around the door opener. There was a suspicious smell in the air like some mechanical process discharging static electricity.
EIGHT
The man inserting a key into the underground garage door by torchlight was grinning madly to his short companion. The man’s knuckles, even as the corrugated steel door ground up and over, were burning with the sultry promises he’d made them, the fun he promised they might one day have with the experimental misfits held captive within. He looked over at his accomplice Mister Rhisland, self-proclaimed mentor. The man was really sweating, salivating, hyperventilating at the prospect of pushing those horn-rimmed glasses down the little bastard's throat. He flicked on the one lonely light bulb hanging naked from its tatty wire high in the ceiling. A putrid illumination vomited down upon the four trembling inhabitants, staining them with its stinking, sewer hue.
Stanley Washington, the man with tortuous thoughts scrawled into his eyes with dentis
t’s drills, ordered the squat Mister Rhisland to guard the wife and kids as he strode up to Carroll Maryland huddled naked in her corner of the cardboard matting away from the rest, glass crunching underfoot. He took the shivering girl, still streaked with the rust of dried blood and the black of infected lacerations, by the arm. The brutal insertion of the hypodermic needle had left a raw, seeping boil from which a septic syrup spurted on compression.
Little Irish girl Carroll Maryland’s drug-vague eyes ascended to the manhandler; saw nothing to panic about; felt no savagery in the grip of her captor; no pain from the bits of muck-and-old-oil-infected glass from her brush with the garage floor embedded beneath her skin. She barely registered her own existence: was barely aware that she was being hauled to her feet and bullied backwards, until the shock of the wall of six-inch nails she was being thrust towards raced through her back into her spine and ribs puncturing flesh and lodging in bones and cartilage.
Carroll Maryland screamed out loud, suddenly conscious. Felt the rusty metal embed in the back of her skull.
Vanessa and her daughters, roused from their drugged sleep by Carroll Maryland’s cries of agony, scrambled drunkenly to their feet despite Stanley Washington's threats of the harm that would befall them if they did so. Mister Rhisland was getting agitated and his trigger finger was itching like crazy. The gun, already cocked for discharge, trembled under its own weight barely holding in its lethal lead climax.
Joelle, the older of the daughters, made an uncoordinated dash at the monstrous aberration she used to take pride in calling Father. Shouting and screaming her hatred for whatever it was this once meek man had been twisted to resemble. A deformity of character so profound instant retribution, even by such a frail and helpless child, was the only justifiable course of action.
Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 7