But as the door creaked open, I was seeing a bit of evidence for both. The walls and the floor were mostly bare, but that was because all of Mal's stuff—cases full of instruments, his hi-fi, all of his mod furniture and his paintings—was stacked and shoved over to one corner of the room. Looking at it all piled up like that, I was suddenly struck with another odd image. This time it was of a kid, making a fort in his room out of cushions and blankets.
It was still dark enough in there to give me the creeps, so I made my way over to the light switch, which sat next to the window that opened up just to the left of the front door. It gave a lovely view of the city, and I wondered how much Mal was paying for that window as I flipped the lights on. Suddenly, the lovely little view turned into a mirror, with me looking stupid as the dark figure that had been crouched in the corner rushed in.
* * *
The darkness washed over me. That happened first, and it was only gradually that I felt the ache in my head and the smell of chemicals in my nostrils. I had an odd sensation of floating sideways, which actually turned out to be someone dragging me by my heels down a long hallway. I tried to open my eyes to get a good look around, but open or closed, the darkness still came at me in waves. Whatever was dragging me—across a rougher surface now—glanced back just long enough for me to get the impression of a great misshapen head, decorated with flat, dead eyes and a horrible needle-like snout. Then the black tide came back and flooded my senses with foam, and my head went mercifully blank.
* * *
When I came to, the first thing I saw was that face again. The flat eyes and metal snout were in fact attached to a cloth gas mask, which lifted off to reveal Mal's face, more or less. I say more or less because the Mal I knew had a head full of wild curlicues, whereas this man had all his hair sheared down to the scalp. But it had to be Mal, because he called me by name, giving me a slap on the arm and hauling me to my feet. I looked around. Overhead there was sky, choked with smoke and thunderclouds. Below, and on either side of us, there was only gray, stinking mud.
“Christ. Where the hell are we?”
“Back at the front. Just east of Ypres, by a little village called Passchendaele. I think we're in a German trench, or what's left of it,” Mal said.
“No,” I said, suddenly feeling quite ill. “This is mad. You're taking the piss.”
“Sorry, lad,” he said. I noticed, all at once, that he was dressed in an officer's uniform. “I had to bring you back. I gave myself fits, wondering if I should just leave you back there, but in the end I didn't have a choice. I need you. I need all the good men I can get.”
I looked down with dumb amazement. I was wearing a private's uniform, ragged and filthy. The air was thick with the stench of rot and gunpowder. The truth of the situation ripped through me like a knife, and I nearly toppled over again. Mal was there to steady me.
“Come on man, stay with me.”
“S-stay with you?” I said. “For god's sake, Mal, where the bloody hell have you dragged me off to?”
“Listen,” he said, squaring my shoulders with his and giving me a look of daggers, “my name isn't Mal. It's Arthur. And I've dragged you back from the brink, I believe. You've had a bad shock. We all have. We've been exposed to gas, and that last shell nearly knocked us all arse over tit, but it's going to be okay. You're back in the real world, now.”
“But this can't be. It just can't.” I wasn't just talking about the idea that we had suddenly hurtled across time. It was my most potent nightmare, that Mal's mind had finally turned on him, his curiosity and creativity had tricked him and sucked him into this other world, possibly for good. Worse, he'd somehow managed to drag me along with him.
“I'm sorry,” he said, “but I'm afraid that it is. The world's still a right mess, but it’s all we have at the moment.”
“But Mal, we were in London,” I pleaded. I tried to think of the right thing to say, something to break the spell. “We can't be where you say we are, we wouldn't even have been born yet.”
His eyes were still daggers, and they twisted inside me. Now his voice turned to steel, as well. He looked away from me.
“Private,” he said, “I can't quite explain the dream that we appear to have shared, but I assure you, a dream was all it could be. Who could believe all of that? It was nothing but a vision born out of madness, a world of decadence and easy pleasure, cooked up by a couple of poor, doomed Tommies.” He sighed. “I admit that, in a moment of weakness, I thought about staying. Staying there and living out that other life, as free and willful as a child.” Then he turned to face me. “But I won't be leaving my post to go play in some daft wonderland, and neither will you, Private. We'll sort out this nonsense another time. Right now we've got work to do.”
“But look,” I cried. “I came to bring you a copy of the album. We've been working for weeks now.” I had felt the stiffness of the disc under my uniform, still miraculously tucked away there, despite everything. But my heart sank as I pulled it out in two halves.
“A broken gramophone record,” he said, taking the pieces from my trembling hands. And he was right. It wasn't glossy vinyl anymore, just a ruined disc of fragile shellac. “Now where on earth did you get this? No label¼” I heard just the tiniest crack in his resolve then, a sound of faraway contemplation, but it was too little and much too late. “I'm sorry, lad. Even if it hadn't cracked, I'm afraid the portable Dulcephone was just another of far too many casualties today. Now, come along. We can't just sit here waiting for the Hun to come get us. Move out!”
I followed him mechanically, my body working out of habit while my mind spun in place. I tried to imagine the shellac being spun by a hand-cranked machine, spitting out a sickly tin-horn version of the Furry Houses' album. But such a machine would be running at the wrong speed anyway, the pitch and timing gone all wrong, and that world would remain cracked and broken and irreparable. Like so many things.
* * *
We were soon over the top, Mal practically dragging me up the ladder. I had the impression that we had been separated from our company by a German shell, but whether any of the rest of them remained alive, I didn’t know. I carried a rifle I couldn't even imagine knowing how to shoot. Mal brandished a light officer's pistol and fired periodically into the thick smoke that boiled and twisted over the battlefield. All around us were the sounds of machine gun fire and shelling, the wet pat-pat-pat of bullets making contact, and the wailing of those poor souls caught in between. I tried to keep pace with him, but I was wearing a heavy pack full of supplies—of what kind, I wouldn't have had a clue—that slowed me down considerably. All the time I kept trying to remember: did he tell me his grandfather had fought and died in the war?
I remember Mal yelling orders, trying to signal me in the proper direction. But the smoke billowed up and I lost sight of him. A shell hit near enough to pelt me with loose chunks of earth; rocks and dirt flew up hard enough to bruise. All around, the air reeked of some awful chemical mixture. I was lurching forward, eyes burning and watering, gone hopelessly astray. Then I felt the ground beneath me vanish abruptly, and I stumbled down into a waterlogged shell-hole. The slime was nearly knee-deep, and it sucked at my arms and legs as I tried to pull myself up. My rifle had plunged into the mud, gone forever.
Only a few feet away from me lay a pair of soldiers slouched against each other, nearly submerged in the muck. When I could finally focus my gaze on them I could see that it was David and Ian, eyes rolled back lifelessly as rank water sloshed into their gaping mouths. Just then another shell hit close by, raining more dirt down into the hole and setting both my ears to ringing like church bells. I didn't give a second thought to getting back up, or even crawling my way out. I just lay there on my side, face barely out of the water, eyes locked on Davy and Ian, and I tried very, very hard to be quiet.
* * *
I woke up in a hospital. But instead of being surrounded by those poor blokes with their limbs and faces blown off, I came around to the sigh
t of Ian and David, alive as ever, and both wearing theatrically stern scowls.
“Gave 'im a simple job to do, and he fucks it up,” says Ian. “Send 'im over to bring poor Mal back, and we find 'em both sitting round, dosed out of their bloody minds.”
They figured it was a drug overdose, you see, and we both got a thorough tongue lashing over it. Mal couldn't be bothered to say two words to anyone there the whole time, just made short, noncommittal noises at everyone. But that seemed fine to the rest of the boys, who were a lot more interested in getting out on the tour we had been booked to play.
Now, at first I was relieved just to see the bastards alive again, to consider the possibility that we weren't all to be found buried under a field of poppies somewhere. That waned somewhat as I realized the feeling wasn't necessarily mutual. It wasn't bad enough that Mal had gone potty, “but here he's sucked you into it too.”
Oh god, Ian, if you only knew.
* * *
After that it's all a blur from my end too. I started drinking heavily at that point. Just as soon as I was sure that too much alcohol wasn't going to send me tumbling back onto Mal's godforsaken battlefield again, I was pissed on a pretty much full-time basis. By the time we were in the middle of our tour, it should have been apparent to all that Mal was in no shape to be on stage. Not that I was doing much better, but I could see him twitching throughout the show as soon as the crowds started screaming. He didn't hear drums and guitars any more, only artillery shells and machine gun fire. When he could be coaxed into “performing,” he just stood there, staring off blankly and making the most awful, traumatized noises with his guitar and amp.
I'm pretty sure that, by this time, our manager and his little cronies were dosing Mal behind his back, even when he tried to stay straight. They thought they were keeping him docile and under control. I think they had a mind to keep him on in some limited capacity, turning out hit songs for the band and quietly drooling on himself. They didn't realize that every time he got dosed with acid—or hashish, or Mandrax, or anything that zapped his poor old brains with some mind-altering chemical—he was being hurled to the front and back again.
The others had also decided that it was best if Mal and I remained separated between gigs, which was fine by me; the stares he now fixed on me were too fearsome to bear. I was a lousy deserter, that was me, and I could tell that if Mal had his way we'd all be in front of the firing squad.
The night he finally lost it for good, he flung himself into the crowd, thrusting the head stock of his guitar around like a bayonet and howling like an animal. Broke some poor kid's ribs in three places before security had him down. After that, there was nothing else for it; Mal was sacked, and the mantle of leadership was finally handed over to the bastard bass player.
Looking back, I wonder if they were all in on it with Annie. Probably not. I doubt even Annie really knew what she was up to when she slipped Mal that dodgy acid. Although, who knows, maybe she had that stuff brewed up by a cackling witch doctor, or some hashed-out Aleister Crowley wannabe. Hard to say. I think they were all more than a little perturbed by the violent nature of Mal's breakdown. They must have really expected him to go softly drooling into that good night. That turned out to be, more or less, what they sacked me for not three months later.
So anyway, you know the rest, I'm sure. The Furry Houses went on to greater fame and fortune, trading Mal's bawdy nonsense for some of that beard-stroking, what-is-the-fate-of-mankind rubbish that came into vogue there in the 70s. Never saw them again, the bastards. Made a pittance on royalties and wallowed in myself for a while. Then I tried to dry myself up, kept playing and trudged on as a competent journeyman and something of a rock and roll survivor. Hell, there's lots of my old mates from back then that can't even say that, you know.
Never saw Mal again, either, although I heard that somehow, somebody at the label got him to record one last LP before he retreated from it all, moving into the basement at his sister's place and creating a sick legend that persists to this day.
Once, one of the members of Mal's little cult tried to foist a copy of the record on me—it was titled the Battle of Polygon Wood, and it sported a truly harrowing portrait of Mal on the front, gaunt and hollowed-out. Not for me, no way. I've got enough worries to see me through the end of my days. All considered, I got off easy. No more crazed groupies for me anymore. No more hazy nights of debauchery. Even at my age, I've kept working steady, and I've kept moving. Because if I stay in one place too long, I let my mind linger on things, and then I start finding myself unable to sleep nights. I lie there awake, and on the worst nights I can look up at the ceiling and almost see the stars winking out from behind a curtain of smoke and steam. And then the bedsheets start to feel very cold indeed, less like a nest of warm fabric and more like a makeshift grave, blown out by a shell in a patch of soft, damp mud.
Maxwell Price
Inspiration for “Poor Mal”
"Poor Mal" was inspired by the music (and the legend) of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. His early singles with the band are all sideways pop classics, full of misfit energy and surreal glee. At the same time, there's such an easy charm to his work that it borders on a sort of tuneful laziness. Those riffs and tunes seem simple enough that anybody could have come up with them, and indeed, Barrett's imitators are legion. You have to marvel at the guy, though—he stood up, cleared his throat, and then invented his very own rock-n-roll idiom before going off the deep end. And there he stayed, for the most part, until his death.
But the stuff about Syd frying his brains with acid never satisfied me. I mean, there are plenty of geriatric rockers out there touring stadiums, each of whom likely downed an entire MK-ULTRA's worth of LSD in their day. Syd didn't use the hard stuff or die young like most of his doomed rock star peers, he just trailed off in mid-sentence, pitched his guitar aside and scurried home. Why?
Oh, who the hell knows? There were rumors of occasional fits of violence, too, and an appalling attitude towards women, but those are par for the course for 60s rock stardom, I guess. A reclusive Syd quickly turned into one of music's great Rorschach blots, with everybody seeing a different cautionary tale.
In any event, this story is my (heavily-reverbed) riff on the whole thing, throwing designer drugs, time travel, and a botched séance into the psychedelic stew. Malcolm Marriot takes a few hits and waits to go down the rabbit hole, only to find that it's really a muddy trench at Ypres. There always was something positively Edwardian about all those English pop stars.
I dreamt of the Black Bitch again.
Out of the darkness of sleep, words formed, white words in block letters, huge like skyscrapers and small like footnotes, twisting into choruses of songs unwritten, hovering at the edge of my consciousness like the lost verses of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. They constricted me, pressed in at me, surrounded me with walls, barriers I could not break. They forced me down a path, a long uncertain corridor that ended in Trident Studios in SoHo. The sound booth was lit only by the lamp over the mixing board, and the RECORDING light filled the shadowed studio with an angry red glow. Beyond the window, the Bitch waited for me, a Mark II Mellotron, her keys yellow like decaying teeth, her black paint replaced with a wrapping of thick velvet, the fibers rippling like unruly, windblown hair. Like a beast in her lair, she seemed to breathe, four boom mics crouching low over her, like worshippers. I tried to speak, to beg, but I couldn’t. An ebony piano bench sprung to life and hobbled toward me like a wounded dog, and as I screamed, the base of the mellotron opened and miles of magnetic tape sprang forth, octopus-like, grappling with me and pulling me off my feet towards her gaping mechanical maw. And the Bitch began to play.
Then I awoke in my flat in Chelsea, tangled in bedclothes, my mind filled with chords I cannot remember.
* * *
Understand that I never thought I would end up a musician. It was my mother who insisted on my classical piano lessons, my father being the more conventional follow-my-footsteps-into-the-world
-of-high-finance sort of man. And to his credit, those skills came in handy when the band started to make it, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Nigel and I were best friends. During our days at Harrow, Nigel used his stipend to buy a guitar and taught himself to play. We spent our spare time in front of an old Bechstein upright, working out chords and tossing around words. His roommate, Devon, played the double bass, but more importantly, he bought us records, introduced us to The Moody Blues and Yes. This was a heady time, before the term “art-rock” was commonplace. Soon we attracted Christopher, an upperclassman and frustrated drummer who played the flute only marginally well, but sang with the strongest voice.
In the beginning, it was all about writing songs. As the parental opposition to our band activity increased, so we drew together. After an unsuccessful attempt to market our demo tape—“You don’t have a ghost of a chance in this business,” one producer told us—we found ourselves performing off-nights in quiet venues, the kind where bitter coffee is served in small cups to poets and lesbians. After one of our sets we met Ian, who was neither a poet nor a lesbian, but an experienced drummer looking for work. He asked if we had room for him. That removed Christopher from rhythm, to everyone’s relief. He concentrated on singing and experimented with makeup and bizarre costumes, finding comfort in both. Together we developed overly long and complicated arrangements that we soon discovered no one else could play. So we played them. Because of our penchant for oblique references, and that “ghost of a chance” remark, we dubbed ourselves The Eidolons.
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