Tales of the Talking Picture

by Tom Slemen

  Matthew and Christina felt their disembodied consciousnesses being pulled back towards the bedroom in a descending helter-skelter spiral. They glided back into their bodies and looked at one another for a few seconds. Christina swore, and then said, ‘Man, what happened? That was so cool.’

  Matthew described the ‘dream’ he’d found himself in and was relieved to learn that Christina Masters had experienced it as well. He looked down at the little toy robot Mechanizmo, thought about the robotic bank robber, and smiled lopsidedly.

  Christina stood up before the Talking Picture and earnestly asked, ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘I’m a witch,’ was Rhiannon’s simple explanation.

  ‘I would love to be a witch one day,’ Christina told her.

  ‘I’d like to be a wizard,’ said Matthew, ‘someone like Merlin. Did you ever meet him?’ he asked the Talking Picture.

  ‘No, I’m not that old; he lived centuries before my time,’ Rhiannon replied, ‘I was only born in 1624.’ The witch was slightly annoyed at Matthew’s estimate of her age.

  ‘Did you know any wizards?’ Matthew stood up and coiled his left arm around his girlfriend’s waist as he gazed into the portrait.

  ‘Oh Yes, I did,’ Rhiannon replied as she nodded, ‘I knew a few.’

  Matthew’s mother shouted from downstairs, telling him it was almost 10pm.

  ‘I’ll be down soon!’ Matthew shouted back, then opened the bedroom door and repeated his promise in a louder voice.

  ‘Ten minutes, then I’m taking Christina home!’ Mrs Brindley announced.

  ‘I don’t want anyone to walk me home, I’m not a kid,’ said Christina, feeling belittled.

  ‘I’ll walk home with you, take no notice of her,’ Matthew reassured his girlfriend. He closed the bedroom door and resumed the interesting conversation with the Talking Picture. ‘You were saying - you knew wizards?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rhiannon, ‘I knew a few of them. Most of them were good, but there was one evil one. What was his name now?’

  ‘Tell me – tell us about him, please, can you?’ Matthew implored the witch to take him and Christina on another metaphysical adventure.

  ‘Very well,’ Rhiannon collected her thoughts as she cast her mind back to the 1940s. She smiled as she recalled the evil wizard’s name. ‘Myrk,’ she said. ‘Sit down and I’ll tell you a tale about him.’

  Matthew and Christina sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Are you comfortable?’ the witch asked, tongue-in-cheek.

  The couple nodded enthusiastically as they held one another’s hand.

  ‘Then I’ll begin,’ said the witch, and as she began to narrate her tale, Matthew and Christina could see the glowing vibrant hot colours of countryside as a bygone summer infiltrated the walls of the dark bedroom…

  Myrk

  One torrid June afternoon in 1944, an American convoy of tank-carriers and army trucks moved eastwards across Essex, bound for a secret rendezvous point on the coast where they would sail across the Channel to engage in the apocalyptic battle that would save civilization. The two-day journey from the United States airbase near Great Dunmow was almost coming to an end, but there was one little setback which threatened to seriously delay the military men’s advance. Captain Tom Garfield slowed his jeep as he approached the towering long black stone that stood at the side of the road up ahead. The snaking chain of army vehicles ground to a halt behind him. Garfield chewed on his cigar stub and halted his vehicle. He grabbed the old ordnance survey map on the passenger seat and impatiently unfolded it.

  ‘Where the hell are we?’ Garfield’s nicotine-yellowed forefinger ran along the planned itinerary line on the map. It stopped at the current location – the outskirts of a sleepy little village called Blackmere, just to the south of Chelmsford. The map was not detailed enough to note the presence of the ancient twelve-foot-high stone that was blocking the convoy’s progress.

  Sergeant Johnson appeared at the side of the jeep and interrupted Garfield’s map-reading. ‘What are we gonna do Captain? We’ll never squeeze between that thing and those trees. Shall I direct the guys around it?’

  Garfield was incensed by the suggestion, and he spat his cigar butt at the sergeant’s boots. Johnson never flinched, for he was accustomed to the Captain’s crabbiness.

  ‘Around it? Are you out of your mind Johnson?’ Garfield asked the Texan sergeant with gritty sincerity. ‘It’d take hours to take our hardware around this limey rock, and we can’t afford to waste time doing that. Uproot the goddamned thing.’

  ‘Uproot it Captain?’ Johnson said, surprised. The standing stone looked as if it weighed at least three tons.

  ‘We have a deadline to meet; the most important deadline in the history of the world.’ Garfield reached under his hat to wipe the trickles of sweat from his brow. ‘We have to reach our base at eighteen-hundred hours, and I have a feeling that this time it’ll be the real thing; I think we’ll going across the channel to kick the kraut’s ass.’

  ‘Ok sir!’ Sergeant Johnson saluted his superior.

  ‘It’s just a rock.’ Garfield spat in the direction of the standing stone then sped off in his jeep, kicking up a trail of hot dust.

  Sergeant Johnson began to muster a small task force that would hopefully remove the tall tapering stone – or menhir as the archaeologists call them. Ropes were tied around the stone and fifteen soldiers and a truck pulled until it began to lean ever so slightly. The engine of the army truck shuddered and the men groaned with over-exertion. A few of the soldiers said it would be easier uprooting the roadside trees but Johnson had specific orders and he had to carry them out.

  Two miles away on the main high street of the village of Blackmere, old Jerome Jode was strolling through the searing sunshine with his little friend; a twelve-year-old boy named Christopher Glazenby, the only son of Mr Jode’s neighbours. Christopher had his suspicions about the old grey-haired Mr Jode; he definitely had an aura of mystery about him. He had this intriguing habit of talking about historical events in fine detail – even down to the weather conditions - as if he had actually been there as an eyewitness. He talked about Cleopatra, Henry VIII and Robin Hood as if he had actually known them personally, and stranger still, 105-year-old Edward Carr, the oldest man in the county, claimed that Jode was twice his age, but everyone just surmised that old Carr’s mind was going – yet Christopher knew that Carr’s memory was perfect and he was as mentally lucid as a man of thirty. When that wrinkled old man with bright blue eyes had been but a boy of six, Mr Jode had given him an apple every morning. Carr was sure of that – but how could that be? Christopher had a way-out theory, but he told no one about it – especially his dullard parents. He believed Jerome Jode was some immortal who had always been about. On this magnificent summer’s day, Mr Jode did something awfully strange that backed up Christopher’s outlandish theory.

  ‘Watch this Christopher,’ said Mr Jode, nodding at the wiry policeman on his village beat who was walking away from him fifty feet straight ahead. Jode walked in step with that policeman. The constable’s left leg swung forward, and so did Mr Jode’s. The policeman’s right leg strode forward, and Mr Jode’s did the same in perfect synchronisation. The policeman walked on whistling, unaware that he was being aped in his movement by an old man who was walking fifty feet behind him.

  Jode pretended to trip, and as he mimicked a stumble, the policeman walking his beat fell over. The old man had caused the constable to fall through the exertion of some invisible influence, and Christopher naturally wanted to know how the “trick” was done.

  ‘How did you do that?’ the boy asked, smiling with excited eyes.

  The policeman meanwhile, was getting up off the floor and looking at the spot on the pavement where he had apparently fallen over something – but he could see there was nothing there – not even an uneven flagstone. He rubbed his palms together and continued on his beat.

  ‘That “trick” was somatic resonance, and I’ll teac
h you the basics of it soon my boy,’ Mr Jode told his protégé in his usual matter-of-fact way.

  ‘Can’t you teach me how to do it now? Please?’ Christopher yearned to know how to perform just a few of the old man’s tricks.

  ‘I will, soon,’ said Mr Jode, and Christopher sulked.

  A plane droned somewhere in the higher regions of the cloudless azure heavens. In 1944 such a sound caused many a fearful head to tilt and look skywards. The plane flew so high that Christopher could only see it as a speck-sized black cross.

  ‘It’s one of ours. A spitfire,’ Jode told the boy as he squinted at the sky, zooming in on the warplane with his third eye; the nonphysical organ of second sight that remains blind in most untrained minds.

  ‘How on earth can you see that well?’ Christopher asked, baffled at the oldster’s telescopic vision, but received not an iota of an explanation.

  ‘Come on, your mother has baked a delicious apple pie for us,’ Mr Jode walked down the lane to the little red-brick house, pushed open the gate, and waited for the dawdling Christopher as he tried to clap his hands around a Holly Blue butterfly.

  How does he always know what mother has made for us? Christopher wondered, and upon entering his house with Mr Jode he immediately detected the distinctive delicious aroma of apple pie and cinnamon.

  Three steel hawsers had been tied around the standing stone and the ends of these cables were fastened to the tow bars of three military trucks. The combined traction of these powerful vehicles did not even budge the stone. A fourth cable was lassoed around the menhir and attached to the tow bar of a US Army kitchen truck. The stone tilted by just a few degrees. A group of children and an old farmer watched in awe as a bulldozer - destined for war-torn France to fill in shell-craters - approached the megalith and steadily pushed its steel shovel against it. The caterpillar track of the bulldozer threw up clods of earth and the dozer blade screeched against the ancient granite. The locals were dazzled by the hardware and vehicles of the American soldiers; the Harley Davidson motorcycles, the Jeeps, Dodges, Chryslers, Cadillacs, levellers and bulldozers. The four taut steel hawsers twanged as the engines of the four US Army vehicles revved in unison. The great ancient stone seemed to fall in slow motion as its base, which had been buried for centuries, levered up into the sunlight, excavating a great bulk of wormy earth. The long black stone landed with a thud, and the four trucks shot forward and braked. A cadre of soldiers cheered, and a few of the children looking on ran forward to inspect the toppled stone, but curiously, the old farmer who looked on made the sign of the cross and shook his head with an expression of intense apprehension.

  Sergeant Johnson gave orders for the uprooted stone to be dragged into a ditch.

  Meanwhile, at the home of the Glazenby family Mr Jode was telling Christopher about the influences of the Moon, when he suddenly stopped talking and clutched at his chest. The old man felt a great wave of intense anxiety course through his heart.

  ‘Mr Jode! What’s the matter?’ Mrs Glazenby rushed from the doorway of the kitchen and came to his aid. She believed he was having a heart attack. Christopher sat open-mouthed at the dining table, full of concern for his adopted grandfather. He’d never seen him ill in the few years he’d known him. Mr Jode had never once succumbed to even a common cold.

  ‘I’m fine Mrs Glazenby, it was just indigestion,’ Jode smiled in a disastrous attempt to allay the fears of the mother and son, ‘Sorry to startle you.’ He gasped, short-breathed. Mr Jode had not experienced such a sensation of fear since his master Merlin had thrown him off a cliff-top to encourage him to use his powers of levitation. The old wizard had a very bad feeling about the menacing sensation.

  The military convoy that would soon become an active component of the Normandy Landings on D-Day drove on along the most direct route to the rendezvous on the coast. Many of those brave soldiers would be among the thousands who’d lose their lives in the life-or-death struggle to destroy the evil murderous Nazi regime.

  As dusk gathered to end that sunny day, two shabby poachers from Blackmere village came creeping across a field, up to no good as usual. Bob Jenkins and Charlie Bowen were their names, and both men were in their fifties. Bowen’s old black Labrador Ben reluctantly followed his cruel master. Ben was a friendly and clever dog, much too good to belong to a pitiless brute like Bowen, who often kicked the dog when things weren’t going his way. Low clouds slid in front of the newly-risen full moon, casting an eerie penumbral darkness across the land.

  The poachers looked for the old standing-stone. Like everyone else in this vicinity, they navigated the vast patchwork of fields by it. Bowen and Jenkins couldn’t believe it was gone. ‘Look!’ Jenkins pointed to the long black uprooted stone lying horizontally on the grass. ‘Who has done this?’ the old poacher asked. He became speechless and angry, because that stone had stood there when he was but a boy.

  ‘How did they do it?’ Bowen knelt at the toppled monolith and felt its rough black surface.

  ‘It must have been the military – the Yanks,’ Jenkins reasoned, and after uttering a few profanities, his thoughts returned to the matter at hand. ‘Anyway,’ he said to his friend, ‘the snares.’

  On the shooting estate of Lord Caldy just a mile away, the poachers had left snares – wire nooses designed to trap rabbits and hares, and how Charlie Bowen loved to beat the brains out of those animals when he found them helplessly trapped. With such sadistic delights becoming a real possibility, there was a real spring in his step on this cool darkening evening.

  The dog Ben usually walked ahead of the poachers, but upon this evening, for some strange reason, the dog suddenly stopped in its tracks with its tail between its legs and made a strange high-pitched growling sound as a clump of hairs rose up on its back. Bowen laughingly kicked the dog’s tail and asked him why he was acting scared. ‘You haven’t spotted an adder have you?’ Bowen said to his long-suffering hound. The dog had been bitten by an adder when he was a year old and had never forgotten the near-fatal experience. But it wasn’t a viper that was frightening Ben.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Bob Jenkins squinted at the strange silhouetted figure standing in the field about fifty yards in front of him. He looked as if he was only three-feet-tall.

  Charlie Bowen’s eyesight wasn’t as good as his friend’s, and he surveyed the twilit gloom until he saw what looked like a pointy-headed little man with a cloak which was flowing gently in the breeze. He was standing there in the field, and his face was as white as chalk. The clouds suddenly parted as the winds stirred, and the full moon silvered the fields. The lunar light revealed something peculiar about the hooded and cloaked stranger; he was not three-feet-tall at all, but standing in the hole left behind by the uprooted standing stone.

  ‘I don’t like this, I’m going,’ Jenkins whispered. He was a superstitious fellow and that ghostly-faced man in black looked very sinister indeed.

  Bowen grabbed the arm of Jenkins. ‘Stay put you coward,’ he said. Bowen reached for the bone handle of the knife in the leather sheath attached to his belt. ‘There’re two of us, and a dog.’

  ‘Leave him be!’ Jenkins tried to pull himself away from his associate’s iron grip, when suddenly, the weird caped stranger rose up out of the hole as if he was being drawn up by invisible wires. Silhouetted against the full moon, he floated towards the poachers, and as he drew near, the gravity-defying oddity uttered three unintelligible words. Ben howled, while Bowen and Jenkins froze in fear. Each man wondered if this was the Devil himself at large, unaware that the supernatural being was a 3,000-year-old resurrected wizard named Myrk Tramorgon, a member of an evil sect known as the Lords of Darkness. Myrk had been bound by a telluric helix and placed beneath the ancient monolith 2,500 years ago, and there he had lain in a dreamless sleep – until the stone was uprooted by the American soldiers. ‘Jerome’ Trevalyon Jode had been one of the warlocks who had imprisoned Myrk in that bygone age of apocalyptic sorcery.

  The hooded head of Myrk bowed as hi
s pointed black shoes came silently down to earth. His eyes remained closed as he murmured softly to himself in his unknown language. By now, Bowen had drawn his honed, well-kept blade from its belt-sheath and was more than ready to plunge it into the wizard, even though his hand trembled.

  There came a loud crackling sound from the direction of the uncanny entity. Simultaneously an iridescent halo of shimmering blue radiance appeared around the head of Myrk, and two thin undulating streams of pale green light emanated from each poacher. This was the very life-force-energy – known to the Ancients as “vril” – being siphoned off from the rustlers to Myrk. Bowen and Jenkins felt weak, drained, and they both tried to turn away and run, but they had barely the energy to stand up, let alone flee.

  A vortex of electrically-charged wind whirled around Myrk, wrapping the master magician’s lengthy cloak around his long thin body. The listless poachers were easily knocked to the ground by the tremendous force of the spiralling mini-hurricane, and the same whirlwind pinned down the dog Ben. The animal lay on its side, the upper eye bulging in shock, and its mouth drawn back like some rictus of death. Myrk raised his face to the moonlit sky, and his body shook violently with spasms as the siphoned-off life-electricity coursed through his muscles. Seconds later it was over. The vortex blew itself out and in its wake it left a spiral pattern imprinted in the blades of grass, similar to the enigmatic corn circles that cereologists study today.

  Ben whimpered and began to drag himself out of the circle. Myrk bent over the canine and stroked its head, but the dog growled and bared its teeth. It recovered from the unearthly ordeal and circled the wizard, who was rather amused at the sight, for he had not seen a living thing for three millennia. The poachers sat up, groaning, and Myrk sensed that one of them had cruelty in his soul. The wizard pointed to Bowen, and a bolt of blue energy leaped out of his index finger with a sharp crackle and struck the poacher’s chest. He vanished in a flash of light, and a rabbit appeared in his place. Jenkins looked at the metamorphosised Bowen, and watched him run off – as a white rabbit. ‘Get that rabbit!’ Myrk said firmly to Ben, and the dog bolted off across the fields in the moonlight, in pursuit of the ‘rabbit’.