by Steve Aylett
The Inflatable
Volunteer
by
Steve Aylett
*
The Inflatable Volunteer © 1999 by Steve Aylett
All rights reserved
Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press
First Edition
Cover: Brandon Duncan, www.CorporateDemon.com
Book Design: Jennifer Barnes
www.RawDogScreaming.com
*
Steve Aylett is author of LINT, Slaughtermatic, Toxicology, the Accomplice books, Atom, Shamanspace, The Crime Studio, Bigot Hall, And Your Point Is?, Fain the Sorcerer and Rebel at the End of Time.
Eddie
A street thronging with grave-fillers.
‘One false move and your guts unspool to the floor is that right.’
‘Pardon me Eddie?’
‘Just don’t move a muscle you bastard and hand over the cash.’
‘Eddie it’s me.’
‘Eh? Oh.’
‘What are you feeling the pull to do now Eddie? And in that jacket?’
‘It’s a bad jacket I’ll admit brother.’
‘What’s with the knife?’
‘A precaution brother.’
‘Against the cold I suppose.’
‘Ah you’ve got me there—against the cold yes.’
‘For all that’s holy Eddie. Follow the rest of mankind to the bar now and begin making a sense someone can understand.’
‘I will brother. I’m sorry. Yes I will and—and no jokes eh?’
The cigarette smoke had expanded to the exact size and shape of the bar. People made of meat sat at tables made of wood. There was an open fireplace above which a wheezing rubber belly bulged and deflated as though a fat man was bricked into the flue. People came for miles to understand why it was done and who had the notion. It was nothing to do with me.
On the wall hung ornamental trilobites which would fiddle their legs when it was time to go.
‘Counting coppers in a gale-strafed shed Eddie—there’s your future.’
‘No.’
‘Only the furniture to keep you warm.’
‘Not me.’
‘Oh yes,’ I assured him, drinking and settling down. I glanced about me and considered all I could do here with a match and a scrap of courage. ‘You couldn’t possibly be serious about opening a bait shop Eddie, you see possibilities in it?’
‘I had you in mind.’
‘In a way that can be understood by a sane man?’
‘In a way understandable to all.’
‘Is it for the fun of killing small grubs which are defenceless Eddie?’
‘It is, to tell the truth.’
‘The day you tell the truth I’ll be assuming my true form in a municipal cemetery.’
I’ll explain here that friends had always held a terror for me due to my considering what colour their innards might be. Wouldn’t it be terrible if they were violet and white, or blue and yellow, or all of these? Drinking with Eddie was a cheap enough distraction. Gnarly nights staggering baffled who’d sewn the bushes together.
Of course if I dropped dead Eddie would have been first to steal my hair, the ideas at their root, my clothing, money, women, music, words and reputation. Then he’d start saying I did the murders. Then it would be dog-rodgering practices and the poisoning of badgers he would charge me with as I lay cross-armed in the ruffled silk. Praying at the dark far rear of his head my eyes don’t spring open and my purpling mouth demand the evidence.
Eddie himself didn’t know he was possessed until his teeth were punched out from the inside. Unnecessary mess—drama for its own sake. We’d both of us had too many dealings with John Satan to be appalled but some kind of dire warning was now gathering momentum behind my throbbing forehead.
‘Eddie you simple fool,’ I said, ‘don’t you understand what that teeth scenario was meant to imply? Hell and damnation in the ancient style?’
‘Hell? But a man like me would be instantly toasted.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘I’ll be unrecognisable.’
‘Isn’t that a boon after your crimes?’
‘Don’t know what you mean. My bones’ll lock for starters—from both the fear and the constrictions of the venue.’
‘I’m telling you that.’
‘So what to do brother?’
‘Seek to overwhelm others with your foreknowledge. Tell them you’ve been there before and nothing surprises you. Talk about the decor, the colour of the flames. Light your fags off the firelake. Whistle in the dark Eddie, it helps them find you.’
Eddie watched the flame-reflections on his glass a while, his expression foreshadowing a question he’d regret.
‘You’ve been promising for years now to give me the full facts of how you made a pact with the forces of evil. Was it by means of an advert for those seeking love and companionship by any chance? And how does it tie in with the election and those things you were growing and Minotaur and all that business with your girl and the veins?’
‘Well Eddie if you don’t mind being here a while I’ll explain things you never thought needed explaining.’
‘Because there’s stuff about Bob and so on I don’t understand.’
‘If you let me clarify it in my own sweet way is it a deal.’
‘It is.’
‘Right then.’
‘None of your games like.’
‘Are you quite ready now.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sitting tight.’
‘I am.’
‘Well then.’
What I told Eddie
Bone midnight Eddie—the little red lizard curled up in a rose. Yeah there’s nightmares and nightmares—you know what I’m saying. I’ve taken part in some where the curtains have caught fire off the devil’s roll-up and the clueless ghosts have barged in late and we were all of us shuffling apologies to the poor sod on whom we were meant to be slamming the frighteners. Torment’s not what it was. Subjective bargaining and the bellyflop of the old smarts flung a spanner in the works an age ago Eddie. That and lack of imagination. Nothing like a spider in the mouth to get you thinking.
But everything went up a notch when I met Minotaur. Bob introduced us, you know how he is. Took me to the Shop o’ Fury. Whispered ‘Familiarise yourself with the exit’ and shoved me in. ‘Want you to meet someone. No end of friends but gets through the embalming fluid, know what I mean. Crowded cellar, bare lightbulb, table, places set, rotting food, waxen faces.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘You’re a man of the world brother—you know.’
‘I…’
‘Brother, meet Minotaur Babs.’
‘Er…how do you do.’
‘So this is the one. You didn’t exaggerate. So, my new friend, what do you care for my establishment?’
All I could perceive was that his domain exited on to a crude skull burrow, smoking with accidents.
‘A shop can be corrupt but…’
‘I know I know,’ he said, but stopped so that I wasn’t sure he did. And when my eyes became true to the dark I finally had my opinion. That place had everything. Kile water. Spine dust. A pie containing an embryonic core creature—eat it and one of those apparatus would push out, stretching your scream. I felt like a kid in a candy store.
‘Are these skin stitches likely to block a plughole?’
Once again I’d asked the wrong question. They were staring as if I’d punched a gran.
What’s the point of it all? I thought.
‘Forming in the mirror,’ said Minotaur, pointing at my reflection in the very same betsy glass I’d later use to bring a demon through for the Mayor’s campaign.
/> I got involved with that because of an enormous spider which filled my kennel and drained my good intentions through an etheric aura pump invisible to all but myself. The sinister activities of this bug excused my every offensive act but still it scared the bejesus out of me. I thought getting into politics would neutralise any goodness I harboured and starve the parasite, leaving it weak and vulnerable to assault. After the campaign I hacked an axe through the kennel roof and split the bug’s thorax, which rustled like a dry seedpod—the thing had been dead for years.
In fact when I showed people the carcass they claimed there was nothing there at all. I’m surrounded by jokers.
Lazy and senior, the Mayor was a gabbing, hollow bastard whose function was to shorten the distance between the start and finish of endurance, and inevitably there were murders. Eleven, if you believe the papers. And smashing windows if you believe me—I was there when a young clerk’s nerve snapped and he began shaking like a sign in a storm, bagging a vision of the Mayor with bugging eyes, and ran at him with his hands outstretched to receive the Mayor’s throat for the purposes of strangulation and, later, punching. The Mayor, by now used to this and prepared, opened a small drawer, removed a gun and shot wide, hitting a small chrome effigy of a music-hall tart. The clerk tripped on the carpet, hit a window and went through, carrying with him a vase which had been on the sill. His skull broke like the vase and the vase broke like his skull, and both burst forth water mainly, and from the vase some flowers. If I could choose a death I’d make it something like that, except I’d add a good woman and some lard.
‘So tell me,’ I asked the Mayor later on. ‘What’s your secret for successful negotiation?’
‘Well I invest a small hatchling core creature with the idea I wish to impress upon a person, then throw it at that person’s face in the middle of a conversation. It digs soundless through ruined eyes, pulling its after-tail and unfurling an umbrella skullnest fairly quickly.’
‘Aren’t there drawbacks to the method?’
‘A few, of course. Old brains rattle like blown eggs, victims shudder in chairs with caved faces, moving abandoned jawbones like a visor.’
‘Don’t you find the whole thing distasteful?’
‘Swallowed muscles must live.’
‘I suppose so.’
He was running his campaign on the ‘raise the reeking dead’ platform. The dead and silent wanted to come back, he said, they felt they’d been forgotten and the workers owed them salvation. I told him about the mirror and my ability to drag shriekers out of infernal hibernation on to the carpet like the bloody newborn.
‘You propose to bring demons in here.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘To work.’
‘What could be more appropriate?’
‘Demons.’
‘Yes demons. That’s the song isn’t it? Raise the reeking dead?’
‘Yes but. We gave them tombs and memory didn’t we? Names against loneliness, what else do they want?’
‘Oh now it all comes out. True colours, I get it. Flap a practicality in your slack face you’re backpedalling to beat the band. Do you want to deliver ghouls and revenants or do you not. It’d demonstrate your point beyond all repair like.’
‘I’ll. I’ll have to think about this, I need time.’
‘Why, to put on your thinking dress?’
Again and again shoving me with a kind of bailing instrument, the Mayor tried to move me off his desk and I shouted—don’t remember what now—but only enough to frighten him a bit. Voles started abandoning the desk like rats from a sinking ship—out of the drawers and undercupboard—and the Mayor ran out of the room covering his grimace. Ill with anger I suppose.
Monsters hadn’t a thing on that bastard. Black eyeballs and flick-knife ears, standing in the right place to cast a shadow, you know what I mean.
The glare of the Mayor’s campaign was painful to look at directly. Here are the main points in his manifesto:
1. Wooden skulls don’t work for long.
2. If we accept for the moment that reptiles have a way of knowing their own smooth charm, should we trouble ourselves with any other question?
3. Two cans of doubt and I’m anyone.
4. Bones from polar bears make grand mallets.
5. From space this Earth is incandescent with abominations—the gods write their signature in our entrails.
6. Life is much more pleasing by the standards of others.
7. Clamping those big eyes? Notify us a week ahead.
8. The main thing which has remained with me to this day is the way a severed head will become bleak when dropped underwater. A film of air will cover it to no avail. There’s a lesson in that.
9. I raise my glass to rage—too pious and the stones hurl.
10. Multitudes here we go.
The opposition was a frail barber hoping to win on the ‘whisper when distant’ ticket. The Mayor insisted on someone making this man ‘disappear’. Nobody but me knew what he meant, so I had to tell everyone the Mayor wanted him to disappear ‘into the land of the dead’. What with the difficulty in getting everyone in the same place at the same time I decided to get organised and make the announcement on television. That bit of foolishness set the campaign back a full week. During that time the barber developed a tragic rapport with an oncoming truck and the Mayor laughed the big laugh.
Finally me and Bob took the mirror to the rindwoods at night and ripped the piss out of the Mayor for being scared and fronting off. ‘I suppose sap is mandatory in these trees?’ he asked as we trod through the dark.
‘Don’t make us cross,’ I said, stopping abruptly—though he never noticed. Seven engines were thrumming in the centre of the forest, running the harvest and dead years. The prow of nature needed a shove these days. We laid the mirror over the old well mouth and lit a few fires.
‘Ditch the cigar and read this crap Mayor.’ Bob handed him a scrap of paper.
The Mayor read it out, portentous and frowning. ‘The worm of the umbilical snip, head and tail subsisting—oh my brothers, that one could die. Something grows from bud to flower in darkness and fades knowing only itself. A key and a strangler—this is all a simple tale requires. Nose smuggled into the kitchen, every social custom defied.’
By now the mirror was a doorway bright with hurricane light, pouring moments over the rim in a howl of nuclear wind. A rudimentary fiend was clambering through, its form eaten down by the glare—behind it were glimpses of tolling spars, old nightropes and windlass cables bridging remains with the creak of stretched evil.
Of course the ghost was that of the murdered barber, being the latest one in. Had to cram the bastard back again, using a broom as a plunger.
Got another one out through a deeper channel, older and wiser—name of Ken.
It was all coming together. The truth was whatever you could put up with while my hands came out suddenly and punched you two at a time, not to be stopped.
In other words, anything.
The Mayor instructed everyone at the office to administer ink to a million cats—even the black ones. Nobody dared waste time telling him we planned to ignore the order—every time he raised his face we tensed for the euphoria of disobedience. Houses sank in the mush of his reasoning and that’s the way we liked it. Nuns would run shrieking, but as far as I can tell that’s all they’re for.
Bob was instantly repentant at his part in the scam. Glared at me in the bar, growing his beard a little more. Everything in the world seemed to stop as it grew—it took that much energy. ‘Flush in the sun eh?’ he rumbled. ‘A spear’ll puncture your pear-base belly brother.’
‘Will it now.’
‘Neighbours processed to believe doodles.’
‘What’s flotsam but the measure of a land’s effect on its people Bob?’
‘I’d tell you what else if I felt you were ready to hear.’
‘I’m ready for any wisdom you believe you possess.’
‘Not you bro
ther—and take that smile off your face before I smack it off and it lands slap on the portrait of Our Saviour over there.’
‘That’s a picture of me Bob.’
‘You can finish my pint brother—I’m late for an appointment.’
When it was time for the Mayor to give a speech he took out the wrong bit of paper. ‘The worm of the umbilical snip,’ he began and pretty soon revenants poured out of every reflective surface, including the Mayor’s reading glasses.
‘You consider this a campaign winner?’ he shouted at me from the gore-hung podium, his sparse hair flagging in the winds of hell.
‘I’ve seen worse.’
‘But the contradictions.’
‘So what.’
‘So what you bastard? The contradictions I said. D’you speak English? D’you know what you’ve done?’
‘What I’ve done?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Nothing to do with me, grandad,’ I said as he was swept aside by mayhem.
Ice soon scabbed over the Mayor’s guilt and we thought nothing of skating on it—or on anything. ‘You cannot ice-skate and be bewildered at the same time brother,’ Bob rumbled. ‘Try it and make me a liar.’
‘It won’t take that to make you a liar,’ I remarked. I was poised to fall asleep when a smack in the mouth reclaimed my attention.
That’s Bob for you. He now had the daunting task of peeling all the skin from his body. ‘Thank heaven I’m not a heavier man,’ he told me, laughing. ‘Or it would take a week.’
But why had the Mayor objected to the ghost idea so much in the beginning? It’s become accepted very quickly that a decomposing fiend can aid in that kind of hype but as recently as that ghosts were sort of ignored. Had a failing nobody wanted to confront—no sense of smell apparently and that marked them out. Had a hell of a time convincing the Mayor after the barber fiasco—but the other fella shrieked like a good’un out of the roof-bugle on that van. Not about the election, but some sort of hell and torture nonsense—concentrated a lot on eyes and blood, if I recall. Death was just the start, it said. Anyway the Mayor was reelected and we were all quite upset when the revenant pissed on the floor and said this expressed what he thought of us and our approach—slapped on a hat and left for Africa, of all places.