A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction
Page 9
‘Then it is more than decently curious, because the doors do not open, and there is nothing beyond the windows but dull yellow light,’ said the carol singer. ‘What were houses, my friend, are now nothing but a flat lifelessness.’
‘But there are other streets – my home, not a hundred yards away …’
The carol singer’s face was pale. ‘At the end of the street,’ he said, ‘is nothing but white cardboard.’
Their companion gave a terrified scream, climbed into the frame, and was soon lost to view. After a few seconds they heard his shout, which the coachman screamed to me, also:
‘May This Day Bring You, Every Year,/Joy And Warmth And All Good Cheer!’
Several of the ladies in the carol singers’ party were quite hysterical at this point and insisted on joining the company. Thus, after much heated debate, it was resolved to return to the mail coach and, with considerable difficulty, snow and luggage and the glitter were piled against the frame sufficient to allow it to be manhandled down on to the plain.
At this point the coachman’s tale becomes quite incoherent. It would seem that they set out to seek yet another entrance to the real world, and found for the first time that the strange windows had an obverse side. If I can understand his ravings, they seemed to be vast white squares in the sky on which some agency had written lengthy slogans of incredible yet menacing banality, whose discovery had so unhinged the London gentleman.
I can hear the coachman’s mad giggling even now: ‘I have come a long, long way,/To bring you Joy this Christmas Day!’ and he would bang his head on the wall again, in time to what I may, in the loosest sense, call the rhythm of the phrase.
Then he would drum his heels on the floor.
‘Merry Xmas to All at No. 27!’ he would scream, ‘From Tony, Pat, and the kids. Remember Majorca?’
And, ‘Get lots of crackling this Christmas!’ This last one seemed particularly to affect his brain, and I cannot but wonder what the poor man must have seen. ‘Merry X-mas from Your Little Willy!!!’ and it was at this point that I had to get the gardener to come in and help me restrain him, in the apprehension that he would otherwise manage to do himself an injury.
How long were they on that fateful plain? For it appears that they were in a world outside Time as we know it, and sought for days an entrance into a world that was more than a flatness.
And they were not alone.
There were other people on the same dreadful journey. And Monsters also.
I fear that his mind is quite gone. No sane man could have seen such things. There was a window, if such I may call it, into a world of desert sands under a night sky, wherein three men of African or Asian appearance had made their camp. One of them spoke passable Latin, which the Oxford scholar was still just able to understand, despite his state of near inebriation. They too had found their world running out into a cardboard waste, and after considerable study had put it down to some event, possibly astronomical, which had severely distorted Space and, who knows, perhaps even Time itself.
They made common cause with the coachman’s party, much to the chagrin of the ladies present, but it would seem that they were well educated by heathen standards and indeed kept up the spirits of the company with their tales and outlandish songs. They were also men of considerable wealth, a fact of some importance when the swollen caravan of benighted travellers met a party of Shepherds, orphans of their world, and were able to purchase several Sheep which the coachman, who had been raised on a farm, was able to slaughter and dress.
The Shepherds, being nomads by persuasion, had been wandering for some time from their Window, and told of many fearful wonders.
‘Happy Christmas!/It’s Your First One!/Wishing You Joy/And a Lifetime of Fun! Sweet Jesus! The dreadful Beagle!’
What more dare I write? He babbled of four giant kittens with blue bows around their necks; and a rectangle within which was a vast Pie of mincemeat, which they carried for their continued provisions. There were also several glasses, taller than a house, which – after considerable effort with ropes and the utilization of a giant sprig of Holly – were found to contain a sweet Sherry, in which the Oxford scholar unfortunately drowned.
And there was the bellowing red giant, bearded and mad, sitting on a rooftop. And other things, too dreadful to recount: men who were merely coloured shapes, and the enormous black and white Caricature of a Dog watching them balefully from the top of its Kennel, and things which even as a man of Science I would blush to record.
It seems that at the last he resolved to quit the company, and came back alone across the plain, believing that to die in the bitter hills of Wiltshire in mid-winter was a better fate for a Christian man than life in that abominable world.
No sooner had he reached it, and was crawling in extremis across the strange glittering snow, than behind him he heard once again the eldritch creaking and, upon looking around, saw the dreadful oblong slot disappear. Cold winds and snow immediately forced themselves upon it, but he felt it to be a benediction after that dreadful warm world of the brown plain. And thus, staggering in the fresh blizzard, he was found … It is now fully dark. The carol singers have gone, and I trust it is to their homes.
And now my housekeeper departs, having brought me the strange news of the day. A blackamoor on a Camel has been arrested near Avebury. In Swindon a man has been savagely pecked to death in his own garden, and all there are to be seen in the snow are the footprints of an enormous Bird. Here in Chippenham itself a traveller has reported seeing, before it leapt a tall hedge and ran across the fields, a cat larger than an Elephant. It had a blue bow about its neck. What monsters have been let into the world?
And on my desk I see my reflection in the shining, tinselly shard that the coachman had clutched in his hands. Who would cover the snow with this to make it glitter, and what fearful reason could there be?
I open the curtains, and look out upon the busy street. The local coach has come up from Bath and is outside the inn, and all is bustle and Christmas cheer, a world away from the sad ravings and pleadings of the man downstairs. It is a picture of hope, a reminder of reality, and perhaps he is, after all, no more than a man mazed by exposure, and the tales of giant Beagles and flying sledges are no more than strange jests. Except for the shard of tinsel …
‘The tinsel on the straw! Amen! Wishing you all the best, Mum and Dad!’
And I see the falling snow, how it glitters … And I hear the creaking. God help us, every one.
INCUBUST
THE DRABBLE PROJECT, ED. ROB MEADES AND DAVID B. WAKE, BECCON PUBLICATIONS, 1988
This appeared in 1988 in the first of what turned out to be three books in The Drabble Project, produced by Birmingham fans to raise money for charity and add to the gaiety of nations.
A drabble is that once popular SF format, the short, short, short – one hundred words, not a word more or less. Every word counts. Oddly enough, I really enjoyed doing it, and even managed to fit in a footnote.
The physics of magic is this: no magician, disguise it as he might, can achieve a result beyond his own physical powers.1
And, spurned, he performed the Rite of Tumescence and called up a fiend from the depths of the Pit to teach her a lesson she wouldn’t forget, the witch.
The phone rang.
‘Nice try,’ she said. ‘It’s sitting on the bedhead now.’
His breath quickened. ‘And?’
‘Listen,’ she said.
And he heard the voice of the fiend, distant and wretched:
‘… frightfully sorry … normally, no problem … oh god, this has never happened to me before …’
1 See the Necrotelecomnicon, p. 38.
FINAL REWARD
G. M. THE INDEPENDENT FANTASY ROLEPLAYING MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1988
I’ve tinkered with it since, and I can see it needs further tinkering. Once or twice I’ve thought about extending it into a novel, and then thought better of it. But I’ve always had a soft spot for this
story.
Dogger answered the door when he was still in his dressing gown. Something unbelievable was on the doorstep.
‘There’s a simple explanation,’ thought Dogger. ‘I’ve gone mad.’
This seemed a satisfactory enough rationalization at seven o’clock in the morning. He shut the door again and shuffled down the passage, while outside the kitchen window the Northern Line rattled with carriages full of people who weren’t mad, despite appearances.
There is a blissful period of existence which the Yen Buddhists1 call plinki. It is defined quite precisely as that interval between waking up and being hit on the back of the head by all the problems that kept you awake the night before; it ends when you realize that this was the morning everything was going to look better in, and it doesn’t.
He remembered the row with Nicky. Well, not exactly row. More a kind of angry silence on her part, and an increasingly exasperated burbling on his, and he wasn’t quite sure how it had started anyway. He recalled saying something about some of her friends looking as though they wove their own bread and baked their own goats, and then it had escalated to the level where he’d probably said things like Since you ask, I do think green 2CVs have the anti-nuclear sticker laminated into their rear window before they leave the factory. If he had been on the usual form he achieved after a pint of white wine he’d probably passed a remark about dungarees on women, too. It had been one of those rows where every jocular attempt to extract himself had opened another chasm under his feet.
And then she’d broken, no, shattered the silence with all those comments about Erdan, macho wish-fulfilment for adolescents, and there’d been comments about Rambo, and then he’d found himself arguing the case for people who, in cold sobriety, he detested as much as she did.
And then he’d come home and written the last chapter of Erdan and the Serpent of the Rim, and out of pique, alcohol, and rebellion he’d killed his hero off on the last page. Crushed under an avalanche. The fans were going to hate him, but he’d felt better afterwards, freed of something that had held him back all these years. And had made him quite rich, incidentally. That was because of computers, because half the fans he met now worked in computers, and of course in computers they gave you a wheelbarrow to take your wages home; science fiction fans might break out in pointy ears from time to time, but they bought books by the shovelful and read them round the clock.
Now he’d have to think of something else for them, write proper science fiction, learn about black holes and quantums …
There was another point nagging his mind as he yawned his way back to the kitchen.
Oh, yes. Erdan the Barbarian had been standing on his doorstep.
Funny, that.
This time the hammering made small bits of plaster detach themselves from the wall around the door, which was an unusual special effect in a hallucination. Dogger opened the door again.
Erdan was standing patiently next to his milk. The milk was white, and in bottles. Erdan was seven feet tall and in a tiny chain-mail loincloth; his torso looked like a sack full of footballs. In one hand he held what Dogger knew for a certainty was Skung, the Sword of the Ice Gods.
Dogger was certain about this because he had described it thousands of times. But he wasn’t going to describe it again.
Erdan broke the silence.
‘I have come,’ he said, ‘to meet my Maker.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I have come,’ said the barbarian hero, ‘to receive my Final Reward.’ He peered down Dogger’s hall expectantly and rippled his torso.
‘You’re a fan, right?’ said Dogger. ‘Pretty good costume …’
‘What,’ said Erdan, ‘is fan?’
‘I want to drink your blood,’ said Skung, conversationally.
Over the giant’s shoulder – metaphorically speaking, although under his massive armpit in real life – Dogger saw the postman coming up the path. The man walked around Erdan, humming, pushed a couple of bills into Dogger’s unresisting hand, opined against all the evidence that it looked like being a nice day, and strolled back down the path.
‘I want to drink his blood, too,’ said Skung.
Erdan stood impassively, making it quite clear that he was going to stay there until the Snow Mammoths of Hy-Kooli came home.
History records a great many foolish comments, such as, ‘It looks perfectly safe’, or ‘Indians? What Indians?’ and Dogger added to the list with an old favourite which has caused more encyclopedias and life insurance policies to be sold than you would have thought possible.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that you’d better come in.’
No one could look that much like Erdan. His leather jerkin looked as though it had been stored in a compost heap. His fingernails were purple, his hands callused, his chest a trelliswork of scars. Something with a mouth the size of an armchair appeared to have got a grip on his arm at some time, but couldn’t have liked the taste.
What it is, Dogger thought, is I’m externalizing my fantasies. Or I’m probably still asleep. The important thing is to act natural.
‘Well, well,’ he said.
Erdan ducked into what Dogger liked to call his study, which was just like any other living room but had his word processor on the table, and sat down in the armchair. The springs gave a threatening creak.
Then he gave Dogger an expectant look.
Of course, Dogger told himself, he may just be your everyday homicidal maniac.
‘Your final reward?’ he said weakly.
Erdan nodded.
‘Er. What form does this take, exactly?’
Erdan shrugged. Several muscles had to move out of the way to allow the huge shoulders to rise and fall.
‘It is said,’ he said, ‘that those who die in combat will feast and carouse in your hall forever.’
‘Oh.’ Dogger hovered uncertainly in the doorway. ‘My hall?’
Erdan nodded again. Dogger looked around him. What with the telephone and the coatrack it was already pretty crowded. Opportunities for carouse looked limited.
‘And, er,’ he said, ‘how long is forever, exactly?’
‘Until the stars die and the Great Ice covers the world,’ said Erdan.
‘Ah. I thought it might be something like that.’
Cobham’s voice crackled in the earpiece.
‘You’ve what?’ it said.
‘I said I’ve given him a lager and a chicken leg and put him in front of the television,’ said Dogger. ‘You know what? It was the fridge that really impressed him. He says I’ve got the next Ice Age shut in a prison, what do you think of that? And the TV is how I spy on the world, he says. He’s watching Neighbours and he’s laughing.’
‘Well, what do you expect me to do about it?’
‘Look, no one could act that much like Erdan! It’d take weeks just to get the stink right! I mean, it’s him. Really him. Just as I always imagined him. And he’s sitting in my study watching soaps! You’re my agent, what do I do next?’
‘Just calm down.’ Cobham’s voice sounded soothing. ‘Erdan is your creation. You’ve lived with him for years.’
‘Years is okay! Years was in my head. It’s right now in my house that’s on my mind!’
‘… and he’s very popular and it’s only to be expected that, when you take a big step like killing him off …’
‘You know I had to do it! I mean, twenty-six books!’ The sound of Erdan’s laughter boomed through the wall.
‘Okay, so it’s preyed on your mind. I can tell. He’s not really there. You said the milkman couldn’t see him.’
‘The postman. Yes, but he walked around him! Ron, I created him! He thinks I’m God! And now I’ve killed him off, he’s come to meet me!’
‘Kevin?’
‘Yes? What?’
‘Take a few tablets or something. He’s bound to go away. These things do.’
Dogger put the phone down carefully.
‘Thanks a lot,’ he said bitterly.
It wasn’t that Erdan was invisible to other people. Their eyes saw him all right, but somehow their brains seemed to edit him out before he impinged on any higher centres.
That is, they could walk around him and even apologized automatically if they bumped into him, but afterwards they would be at a loss to explain what they had walked around and who they had apologized to.
Dogger left him behind in the maze of shelves, working on a desperate theory that if Erdan was out of his sight for a while he might evaporate, like smoke. He grabbed a few items, scurried through a blessedly clear checkout, and was back on the pavement before a cheerful shout made him stiffen and turn around slowly, as though on castors.
Erdan had mastered shopping trolleys. Of course, he was really quite bright. He’d worked out the Maze of the Mad God in a matter of hours, after all, so a wire box on wheels was a doddle.
He’d even come to terms with the freezer cabinets. Of course, Dogger thought. Erdan and the Top of the World, Chapter Four: he’d survived on 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth, fortuitously discovered in the frozen tundra. Dogger had actually done some research about that. It had told him it wasn’t in fact possible, but what the hell. As far as Erdan was concerned, the wizard Tesco had simply prepared these mammoths in handy portion packs.
‘I watch everyone,’ said Erdan proudly. ‘I like being dead.’
Dogger crept up to the trolley. ‘But it’s not yours!’
Erdan looked puzzled.
‘It is now,’ he said. ‘I took it. Much easy. No fighting. I have drink, I have meat, I have My-Name-Is-TRACEY-How-May-I-Help-You, I have small nuts in bag.’
Dogger pulled aside most of a cow in small polystyrene boxes and Tracey’s mad, terrified eyes looked up at him from the depths of the trolley. She extended a sticker gun in both hands, like Dirty Harry about to have his day made, and priced his nose at 98p a lb.