Sinful Submissions

by Ed Bemand

  Sinful Submissions

  By Ed Bemand

  On the frailties of human passions, their enaction, consequence and redress.

  All text and images copyright © 2011 Ed Bemand

  All rights reserved.

  ed@edbemand.co.uk

  http://www.edbemand.co.uk

  This collection should be considered a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Venite, amici fideles. Absit invidia. Sicut volo sic erit.

  Foreword by the author

  Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

  The circumstances that led to the creation of this present volume are perhaps significant enough to be worthy of recording here. They were defined and constrained initially by my decision to participate in National Novel Writing Month 2010. For the uninitiated, the goal of this exercise is to create an original novel of 50,000 or more words during November. As a writer of previous works the idea of writing another one was not unduly troubling. Only the rapidity with which I would be forced to work gave me pause. I gather that some believe that it is only sensible to plan much of their work in advance, but to me this seemed an inappropriate approach to the task, in some ways tantamount to cheating. If November was when it should be written, then that is when it should exist fully and only in my mind.

  The start date is worth thought. November the first. All Saints' Day to those who may be Christian, a Monday that year to everyone else. The day itself is principally significant coming as it does after Halloween, which to me seemed like a significant enough fact to be worthy of further consideration. The traditional Welsh name for Halloween night is Nos Calan Gaeaf, Winter's Night. It represents the meeting point of the dark and light halves of the year. Its opposite is Nos Galan Mai, the eve of Mayday, also know to some as Walpurgisnacht. These two nights are known as Ysbrydnos, Spirits’ Night, because as they are the moment when the halves of the year meet, they are also the time when the worlds of the living and the dead are at the closest and spirits are abroad. Midnight on Nos Calan Gaeaf is the moment when they are most easily seen by those with the inclination to be looking. Of course, all sensible folk should be shut up in their houses with their fires stoked to deter unwelcome spirits from paying them undue attention.

  The moment that I was set to begin this endeavour was the very moment when the spirits of this land would be at their most active. Surely, when I was looking to find something new to connect to and write about, it was only natural that I should wish to make the most of this fortunate aspect of the timing of the event?

  The specifics of the actual ritual are perhaps best not recorded here, lest those with less understanding of the necessary precautions required before such workings are embarked upon attempt them for themselves and become the victims of their experimentations. Suffice to say, that in matters such as this caution, preparation and understanding are essentials. To those that have the genuine desire to explore the potential value of this kind of work further I offer my encouragement and suggest that it is better to have studied too much than too little. The same goes for preparation. I should emphasise that direct requests as to the methods and requirements for the working itself will go unanswered. There are many others far more inclined to share such information than I am and some of them may even have the skills to go with it.

  What follows is the complete record of the information as it was provided to me, complete with the misunderstandings, prejudices and beliefs of the narrator to whom I was playing audience intact. Their precise nature is one about which undue speculation would not be wise. I would suggest that this document be treated simply as a curio that happened to have a novel source. The veracity of individual accounts is something that I have chosen to not question and I would encourage any readers to adopt the same attitude.

  N.b. the Rolling Stones lyric that begins this record was my addition, as were the chapter titles. The rest of the document remains unchanged, recorded as it was presented to me. The images were formed within the body of the record and have been reproduced as accurately as possible.

  Prologue by the narrator

  Please allow me to introduce myself

  I'm a man of wealth and taste.

  What's the difference between a Maserati and the rotting corpses of six dead prostitutes under a tarpaulin? I haven't got a Maserati in my garage.

  Maybe it's just me that finds that funny, but then by nature I'm disposed to have what some people might consider to be a rather singular sense of humour. As I always say, what's the point of being depressed if you can't enjoy it? I don't expect people to agree with me. I'm not deluded enough to think that other people would share my point of view. Anyway, most of them are much too stupid to be able to understand it. Does that make it sound like I have a low opinion of humanity? If it does, then that is only because they have consistently given me such good reason to have it. Most of them are pointless, pointless drones, who think that the mere act of reproduction will earn them some kind of redemption. We'd be better if they had limited their creative outlet to masturbation. At least then there'd be a lot more space on the planet. As it is it's much too crowded for my taste. Bring back rape and pillage. Burn something down. Clear some space for those of us that deserve it. I've been told on more than one occasion by people that I'm arrogant. I think I'm justified in that. I've dealt with these people for longer than I care to think, and I have no doubts that I'm more useful than any of them could ever be, unless you're the kind of person that really does have a craving for the other white meat, in which case I would just encourage you to get your fork out and dig in. I can't see why anyone would even notice if a few of them got eaten. Go for it. Start with somebody close to you. That guy who lives next door to you. You know the one. He always plays the guitar at weird times of day. And it's not just that that really gets on your nerves. It's the endless months he spent practising the same riff for hours at a time, and even after all those repetitions of it, he gets the last note wrong, every time. Wouldn't it make you feel better to know that he wouldn't be able to do it again? Wouldn't it make you feel better knowing that he was just meat? Knowing that he was done with and that the only way he could continue would be as a good hearty meal that would give you the strength to carry on for another couple of days, and then to be ejected as chunks of effluent and flushed away, scattered to the far corners of the sewage system. There's nothing wrong in thinking that. You think you're better than him, don't you? I mean, if you spent as long playing the guitar as he did, you'd be good, wouldn't you? And if you weren't, then I'm sure there'd be somebody else, living right next door to you, slowly sharpening up their knife and getting closer to that point when they just can't take it anymore and it becomes your turn to pay for your crimes. That day is bound to come for you, just like it does for everyone else. Don't let that bother you. Just try to carry on. Try not to think about their mind slowly cracking under the pressure that your existence is putting on it. How much they hate you. How much they're longing to hurt you. There's someone like that for everyone, you know, and you're very lucky if there's only one of them. It's okay if you're feeling a little bit scared thinking about it. It's only natural to be afraid for your life. Nobody likes thinking about their own death. It's just one of those things that people have to deal with, but whatever people say about taxes, you can find a way around them, or you can run, or hide. That won't work with death. Nobody who's really alive can escape death. Even if you like to think you're immortal, it'll still catch up with you. Even the Universe gets scared by that sometimes and it's going to outlast all of us. It cheers me up knowing that everything is going to end one day, tha
t it's not just me. Nobody gets out of here alive. Maybe I sound morbid. You'd rather just get on with doing what you've got to and not spend time dwelling on the ultimate futility of it all. That's your choice. I have lots of time to think about things. I don't have to waste as much of my time on the mundanities that I know people worry about. I'm sure it all seems terribly important to you, knowing that you've got the right clothes to wear, the food you need to eat, somewhere nice to live, people that can convincingly pretend to care about you but that you can still manage to feel a bit smugly superior to. I don't need to criticise your choice of priorities. Deep down you already know that it's just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Make them as neat as you like. It's still going down and it's taking you with it.

  A lot of people worry about the end of the world, like it's something special, that it matters to them. Death is death, and if it's you that it's happening to it won't make a difference if it's a car, a bullet or a tumour that's claiming you. If the world does get consumed in the fires of a massive solar flare and billions die in an instant, that won't make your death feel any different to you. You'll be just as dead either way, just as finished. Just as over. Maybe it's just that they want to feel special when they die. They want to know that someone will give a shit about it, notice that they're gone. Who's going to care about you if everyone else dies with you? You won't even be a statistic then. Nobody will be able to cry at your funeral. People have such a problem with the idea of the world continuing after they're gone. You'd think that they'd be glad to be part of its utter devastation, gaining comfort from knowing that it really won't carry on regardless, that everyone else will be just as dead as them.

  I wouldn't want people to think that death is all I ever think about. It's just a big thing, one of the biggest that there can ever be, both for the individual and for the collective. It's something to reconcile yourself to rather than embrace. Some people live their whole lives watching for it and waiting. They count the days and worry about saturated fats and the ozone layer. I'm comfortable with what fate has in store for me, though I'm certainly not rushing towards it. I just ponder it in idle moments. Most of the time I've got other things to worry about. Maybe I'll tell you about them sometime.

  One: Bob Horsley and how his daughter Sally found fame but his son Steve didn't

  I once heard about a guy called Bob. Bob Horsley. He was a proper, upstanding, respectable, conscientious kind of guy. He paid his taxes, was too scared of getting caught to ever commit a crime, found himself married at twenty-five to the girl he’d been with ever since she’d suggested that they get together when he was twenty, was a father within a year of the marriage and by thirty-eight was stuck in his dull little life with his dull little family, with no real aspirations beyond making sure that he covered the payments on the cars, furniture and the like that his wife had decided that they needed and his wages couldn’t cover. I doubt he was exactly happy about his life but he wasn’t the type of guy to really think about it. He just did what he had to and didn’t expect more. His youngest, Sally, loved to draw. By the time she was ten she had learned the skills of balancing perspective and could draw a better house, car or pony than her parents or her brother. Bob liked to think that she could grow up to be an artist and had even once day-dreamed about being the proud, beaming father at his beautiful daughter’s first exhibition. Of course, he had never stepped foot in an art gallery his entire life.

  Three days before his thirty-ninth birthday, he was driving home from work one drizzly night when fate chose to collide him with the car of a drug-addled thief fleeing the scene of a crime. Bob died slowly and painfully, his body lacerated by shattered glass metal and plastic. The thief lost a leg but survived to stand trial for his crimes, albeit leaning heavily on the dock to relieve the pressure on his new and uncomfortable prosthetic.

  Bob’s wife Linda was a bundle of conflicting emotions. She had been looking forward to the divorce she had secretly wanted to get from him for years. She had been hatching plans to expose him as the evil, debauched and violent husband that he wasn’t so that she could receive the lion’s share of his earnings without having to waste time feeding him and washing his clothes. It seemed fate was giving her the chance she wanted to be free of him and able to fully commit herself to the arms of the boyfriend that she had until now only been able to see for snatched moments when her husband and children were at work and school respectively. Bob had life insurance, of course. Linda had always made sure of that. The pay-out was extremely generous, enough so that Linda was able to justify to herself leaving her children with her parents and fleeing to the Caribbean with her boyfriend for a month to recover from Bob’s death and start planning for the future.

  Perhaps fate considered her plans to be a little ungrateful to the benefits it had granted her. They never reached their destination. When the black-box recorder was eventually retrieved the conclusion of the investigators was that a fire had broken out in an engine, and spread throughout the wing despite the efforts of the crew and the automated systems. It was decided that potential existed for this fault to occur in a like manner throughout others of the same model. In a panic at the potential legal repercussions of this fault, the airline offered compensation to the kin of all deceased, judging the smaller payouts they offered as being greatly preferable to the amounts that a court might award to them, along with all the negative publicity that such attention would earn them.

  So, by age twelve, little Sally was both an orphan and very well funded. Custody of her and Steven was granted to their grandparents, who, already grieving the unexpected demise of their daughter were now in the awkward position of facing a dotage dealing full-time with a pair of increasingly exuberant children. The situation couldn’t last and the pair were rapidly aimed at a boarding school, in which they could be contained for the majority of their adolescence, giving the periods that they spent with their grandparents an air of refreshing novelty.

  Regardless of how good their intentions might have started out, as the children grew older, their grandparents found it increasingly hard to keep up with or restrain them. On his eighteenth birthday, Steve gained access to his share of their parents’ legacy and set to spending it with gay abandon. When Sally in due course received hers, she outshone her brother with the spirit of her excess and debauch.

  Is it a surprise anyway, when considering their early lives, wrought as they were with the random vicissitudes of fate’s whimsy, and thus left lacking in parenting but amply supplied with funds, that Steve and Sally turned so whole-heartedly to the pursuit of pleasure, wherever it could be found? We all want to find pleasure, be it pressed against the loins of another, or inhaling toxic but oddly enjoyable fumes, or exposing ourselves to pointless physical danger. So much of what we can enjoy damages us. Is that a strictly necessary aspect of pleasure? I don’t know, but it can’t be ignored that so much of what can be gained is at the cost of a part of our mortality.

  For Steve, it was fast cars, fast living, fast women, chaos, debauchery, silliness, mess and casual destruction. He was at his happiest when he was moving rapidly along the edge, often faltering and swaying a little too close to the abyss, but somehow managing to keep his balance and stay just shy of oblivion. It helped him get through the day, though more often than he liked to admit there would be moments when his own visage reflected back at him. The legacy that he received wasn’t big enough to support such a style of behaviour forever, but it was enough to stop him from having to care too much, in the short term at least. He was foolish and inconsiderate, capable of hurting those around him and not even noticing it, but he was never malevolent and sought to make recompense for his actions at every turn, even as he committed further transgressions.

  Sally was less exuberant in her approach to excess and oblivion. Not for her the flashiness of champagne cocktails. She preferred to push her past deep down inside herself, crushing it into a tight ball that stopped it from obstructing the expression of her freedom. For
her, the tools of choice were the powder, the needle and the cock. Her veins and her cunt were the paths to bliss and emptiness. She was a willing victim, granting herself to those that would take her. She didn’t love those she was with, but nor did she love herself. What art she made was by accident in the smeared makeup and bodily fluids that she scattered in her wake.

  By twenty-three, she had succumbed to a distressing and unpleasant combination of maleficence, catalysed by her profligacy into consuming her frame to the point of ultimate mortality. So upset by the demise of his beloved sister was Steve that it drove him in short order to deeper excess, and then in turn to embrace the noose and bring his own tale to an abrupt end.

  But our story doesn’t end there. At the time there was an artist, Antoine by name (one such as he had no need for so bourgeois a thing as a surname). He was a specialist in art using the human body as his medium. At the time, he had made his name in pieces that crafted the remains of unfortunates into beautiful, macabre and startling pieces. He was constantly struggling with the scarcity of suitable corpses that he could acquire through legitimate means, and was regularly forced to plumb the depths of the different channels by which they could be gained, where a little money would be enough to convince a custodian to allow him to take for his own purposes those who would not be missed overmuch. By chance, the body of poor, young Sally happened to enter his studio as a result of one such clandestine transaction. He was enough of an aesthete to recognise the beauty that she had held before life and death had in turn ravaged her and even to appreciate the characterful touches that these marks had lent to her features.

  Duly he designed a new piece around her. First, he studied her for a time. His assistants knew that at this crucial creative zenith of his work he was to remain undisturbed, that his privacy was paramount. He spent the day alone with her, and in that time he learned her form, admired the remnant of her beauty, and indeed he learned to love her as she was, in a way that no other man had been able to while still she drew breath. She had been dead for less than a week and though the decay had been setting into her flesh from long before she had finally fallen to it, he could still appreciate it. His fingers traced her curves lovingly, admiring the lingering shapeliness of her form and the pliant openness that she presented to him. There are but few in this life that would have been drawn to her as he was and left so tumescent by exposure to her present appearance but then perhaps that is what enabled him to do so much and to, in his own way, be great. Is it sinful that his artistic appreciation of her was to become manifested with such gross physicality? It wasn't enough to stem the tide of his engorgement, or to chill the ardour of his desire as he offered her body that last moment of intimacy, as she was left to the ages with the lingering traces of his passion deep inside her. And, if when they were later preparing her, his assistants happened to notice any slight residue of his zeal, they were committed enough artistically to the project that it drew neither comment nor censure.