CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

by Mike Allen

  HOLBORN: What do you think he’s going to end up doing to us, Soraya? After he’s fucking well done with everybody else?

  MOUSCH: Look . . . Look, Max, Christ. Liat, Laszlo, even that crazy fucking moron dude who made the clip in the first place, let alone sent it to us . . . (BEAT) And why would he even do that, anyway? To, what . . . ?

  HOLBORN: I don’t know. Spread the disease, maybe. Like he got tired of watching it himself, thought everybody else should have a crack at it, too . . .

  (FIVE SECOND PAUSE)

  MOUSCH: I mean . . . it’s not our fault, right? Any of it. We didn’t ask for—

  HOLBORN: —uh, no, Soraya. We did. Literally. We asked, threw it out into the ether: Send us your shit. Show us something. We asked . . . and he answered.

  MOUSCH: Who, “he”? Clip-making dude?

  HOLBORN: You know that’s not who I’m talking about.

  (TEN SECOND PAUSE)

  HOLBORN: So, anyhow, ’bye. You’re going dark, and I’m dropping off the map. I’d say “see you,” but—

  MOUSCH: Oh, Max, Goddamn . . .

  HOLBORN: —I’m really hoping . . . not.

  (CONNECTION TERMINATED)

  * * *

  OFFICE OF FORENSICS

  TORONTO POLICE SERVICE 51 DIVISION

  EXCERPTED REPORT

  Casefile #332

  Final analysis of X-ray images taken of Liat Holborn (dcsd) shows no known cause of observed photographic anomaly. Hand-digit comparison was conducted on all possible candidates, including Maxim Holborn, attending physician Dr. Raj Lalwani, attending nurse Yvonne Delacoeur, and X-ray technician John Li Cheng: no match found. Dr. Lalwani maintains statement that cause of death for Liat Holborn was gliomal tumour. Conclusion: Photographic anomaly is spontaneous malfunction, resemblance to intact human hand coincidental.

  Following lack of forensic connection between Maxim Holborn and Site of Death 1, and failure to establish viable suspect, this office recommends suspension of Case #332 from active investigation at this time, pending further evidence.

  * * *

  July 26/2009

  “BACKGROUND MAN”, Lescroat,

  strangerthings.net/media

  (cont’d)

  One year later, the crash which brought kerato-oblation.org/cadavrexquis down—melting the server and destroying a seventy-four minute installation cobbled together from random .mpg snippets e-mailed in from contributors all over the world—has yet to be fully explained, by either Wall of Love founder. While Mousch cited simple overcrowding and editing program fatigue for the project’s collapse, Holborn—already under stress when Kerato-Oblation got underway, due to his wife’s battle with brain cancer—has been quoted on Alec Christian’s blog as blaming a slightly more supernatural issue: a mysterious figure who appeared first in an anonymously-submitted pieces of digital footage, then eventually began popping up in the backgrounds of other . . . completely unrelated . . . sections. Background Man? Impossible to confirm or deny, without Holborn’s help.

  Still, sightings of a naked man wearing “red” around his neck wandering through the fore-, back- and midground of perfectly mainstream movies, TV shows and musics videos continue to abound. Recent internet surveys chart at least five major recent blockbusters (besides Mother of Serpents) and three primetime television series rumored to have inadvertently showcased the figure.

  At the moment, the (highly unlikely) possibility of pan-studio collaboration on a vast alternate-reality game remains unresolved, while at least three genuine missing persons reports are rumored to be connected with a purported Background Man personal encounter IRL. The meme, if meme it is, continues to spread.

  Neither Mousch nor Holborn could be reached for comment on this article.

  * * *

  . . . and up they come—

  (the dead)

  Crawling through the hole with their pale hands bloody from digging, their blind eyes tight-shut and their wide-open mouths full of mud: Nameless, faceless, groping for anything that happens across their path. With no easy end to their numbers . . .

  (For once such a door is opened, who will shut it again? Who is there—

  —alive—

  —that can?)

  No end to their numbers, or their need: The dead, who are never satisfied. The dead, who cannot be assuaged.

  The dead, who only want but no longer know what, or from who, or why. Or just how much, over just how long— here in their hole which goes on and down forever, where time itself slows so much it no longer has any real value—

  —can ever be enough.

  OPEN THE DOOR AND

  THE LIGHT POURS THROUGH

  Kelly Barnhill

  What he wrote:

  My dearest Angela,

  I have spent weeks dreading what we must do today, and even as I write this, I am not entirely convinced that it is right. We are, and have been, and will be for the foreseeable future, overrun with soldiers, which is to say, our dear American guests. (Which is worse, love, their public drunkenness, or their incessant leering?) Far better, my darling, that you should be far away from this nursery of convalescing men, and far from the multitudes of explosives that spin like vultures in the sky. London will be flattened before the year is up, if the rumors are true. How could we not be next?

  My family members, yes, are tiresome. The house, yes, is drafty and unpleasant. But the grounds are lovely. And if you cannot paint the sea, perhaps you could paint the wood. Or paint the sea from memory. Or paint me from memory. Or paint a memory of me. Dear god, my girl, but I shall miss you.

  Ever yours,

  John

  What he did not:

  John watched the train wait at the platform with Angela’s pale, lovely, and utterly petulant face framed by the greasy window. She would forgive him in time, of course. She always did. And for the things that she did not know, she had no need to forgive.

  The train shuddered, then rumbled, then slid out of sight. John stood still, watching the empty space where Angela’s face once was, as though a shadow of his wife was still hung in the air, like a ghost. Unaccountably, he shuddered and his skin was damp and icy cold. He breathed in, deeply, through his nose, luxuriating in the smell of oil and smoke, and faintly, he was certain, the smell of lavender and lilac that was ever his wife.

  He missed her.

  And yet, he did not.

  Shivering again, he rubbed his arms briskly with his long, narrow hands. Hands that were meant to entertain; fingers that could coax music from reluctant instruments and a sigh from hesitant lovers. Hands that now produced documents, perfectly accurate and deadly quick, for his superiors in the RAF. His instruments lay untouched and abandoned in the music room. His lovers—well, that was a different story.

  He turned and headed out of the station.

  The day was fine again, the fifth in a string of fine days, with a warm sun set in a cool blue sky with a bracing wind coming up over the water. The Promenade was beset, as usual, with soldiers—big, strong jawed Americans with their strange shimmer and stink, their arms weighted by simpering girls. There were English soldiers too, but by comparison they were pale, worn, their edges fraying to dust and light. And they were without women.

  He cut through the gardens into a street of row houses followed by innumerable streets with innumerable row houses. A man stood framed between a doorway and a shuttered window, leaning against the house. The door was red, the shutters, green. The man was trim and pale and clean. He shimmered. He did not smell like lilacs or lavender. And yet. John approached the man and leaned where he leaned. The bricks were warm and solid. They smelled of sun and oil and smoke. Without a word, they both slipped inside the red door and disappeared.

  In the weeks that followed, John tried to piece together the events following the departure of his wife, though for the life of him, he could not. He did not know how long he leaned. Similarly, he did not know how long he had been inside. A gentleman does not, after all, keep time in such cir
cumstances. Nevertheless, over the course of the late morning and early afternoon, the wind increased, and began to rattle at the windows, at the plaster, at the door. Later, John heard the sound of moaning. And whether the moaning was the wind or the lover or something else entirely, John could never be sure.

  Until he was. And by then, it was too late to do anything about it.

  What she wrote:

  Dear John,

  It was a disaster, my love, and it was all your fault. When one travels, one should be rested and fresh, and am neither (and I believe you know why, you naughty man). As you suggested, I had my sketchbook on my lap, and prepared myself to draw my last images of the sea before I was delivered to that den of stuffy rooms and tiresome conversation that is the place of your birth, but instead of a picture, all I have are the first intimations of wind before my hand drifted to the side of the page and I drifted to sleep. So the sketch is ruined, the painting is ruined, and you, dear husband, are dreadful.

  To make it worse, I missed my stop at Westhoughton, as I was fast asleep, dreaming of you (my love, you wretch). The train stopped with a terrific jolt just outside of Bolton, in view of the station, though not pulled in. Whether it was a faulty engine, or that we simply ran out of fuel, I do not know. No one could say. In fact, no one spoke to me at all. The other passengers milled about outside of the train for some time, muttering, the lot of them, like idiots. I marched myself to the desk and attempted to ring the bell, which did not ring, and I immediately began to hate the war. Now in addition to sugar and jam and beef, we must also, apparently, give up bells. And I, the sea; and you, your wife.

  What will be next?

  The man did not turn away from his telephone as I tried to talk to him, and instead just jabbered endlessly about the train. What was there to say about the train? It didn’t work, clearly, and it had, evidently, devoured my trunk.

  A kindly man with a truck agreed to give me a lift, though he did not speak either, deaf and dumb, poor man. But I listened as the station guard gave him directions to Westhoughton, and then repeated the directions, not once but three times, the poor, dear simpleton, and then wrote them all out. So I sat next to him on the cart as we drove. He never once glanced upon me—I daresay he is little used to female companions, so I drew his portrait for him and left it on the seat with a note. I assume he liked it, because as I walked down the track to your infernal mother’s house, I could hear him weeping. Weeping like a child.

  As I wept. Then. When we were children. How strange that I should think of that now!

  Forever yours,

  Angela

  What she did not:

  She should have been thinking of greetings and directions. But as she walked down the well-trod track that led to the dark hulk of her mother-in-law’s family home, she barely noticed where her feet touched the earth. For all she knew, they might not have touched the earth at all. What she did notice was memory. A memory so sharp it pricked her tongue. After a while, she tasted blood—a cool, sharp and sour taste in her mouth, like light and shadow blurring into one.

  When Angela was a child, John spent the summers at her family’s home, as their parents were all musicians and spent the summers playing endlessly in the garden. John, being four years her senior, had little time for Angela the child, and spent most waking hours in the company of her elder brother, James, who, some years later died of pneumonia while a student at Oxford.

  One summer, however, when the boys were thirteen and Angela was nearly nine, James had taken ill with a fever and could not be seen for two weeks. Angela found John in the library, pouring over a stack of books. Angela the child sat next to John and patted him on the thigh. John rolled his eyes and made a pretense of pouring more heavily into his book.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Watching,” he said, not looking up from the page.

  “Watching what?” she asked.

  “Ghosts,” he said, turning the page. In later years, Angela would come to know John’s expression of aggressive not-looking as one of his signature methods of avoiding unpleasant conversations. But she was young and bored and had not learned to hate anything. Not yet.

  “What ghosts?” she asked.

  John sighed deeply and rolled his eyes again. He shut the book with an impatient snap and looked at the little girl, a malicious glint in his thirteen-year-old eyes. “Well, it’s an old house, isn’t it? The older the house the more spirits haunting it. Thought everybody knew that.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. Her voice wobbled. She swallowed and bravely set her chin as she met his eye.

  “Well, it’s a true as I’m sitting here. Look around you. You can see ’em trapped in every window.”

  Angela looked up. She saw them. Saw them. In each window stood a face—pale, dark eyed and livid. Each with a pink slash for a mouth. Each with seaweed hair and seafoam skin. Each moving softly, as though underwater. Angela screamed and covered her face with her hands. She wept for each face, each pink mouth. She wept for things lost and forgotten and for something else that she could not name. John laughed loudly, with gusto, and slapped Angela hard on the back as though they were both men.

  “Poor little idiot,” John said both kindly and unkindly. He glanced up at the windows. He saw nothing, expected nothing, and assumed, condescendingly, that an overactive imagination was the source of the tears. “Poor little thing.” He kissed the top of her head, turned and left the room, still laughing. The door shut with a hollow click.

  The ghosts remained in the windows for the rest of the day. Only Angela saw. She shut her eyes when she could and stared at the floor when she could not. Her parents thought she was ill and sent her to bed.

  The next day, Angela started to paint. She painted faithfully every day thereafter, often for hours at a time. That same day, upon seeing Angela smeared with graphite and paint and dust, concentrating mightily on the page, John decided that she would one day be his wife.

  She was, he said, the only girl for him.

  It was mostly true.

  What he wrote:

  My darling,

  I set out today, prepared to be cross. Deeply cross, if you must know. When the post arrived, I tore through the stack of envelopes looking for the clean, sure stroke of your most beloved hand and found it was nowhere to be seen. Is this, I asked, what a devoted husband should expect from his wayward wife?

  In the meantime, Mrs. Wooten at the teashop scolded me this morning for not sending my beautiful wife away from this unholy den of lusty soldiers.

  —They pant after her like dogs, the poor little lamb, she said, smacking her wooden spoon upon the counter with a deafening crack.

  —My dear lady, said I, I sent her to my mother’s house not three days ago.

  She did not believe me, of course, and insisted on calling me everything from a horse’s ass to a fiend-of-a-man, unworthy of the angel who is my Angela. She insisted that she had seen you just that morning, sitting in your chair by the sea, painting a landscape of wind. She said that your hair was undone and you had a carpetbag at your feet.

  And just as I was about to speak ill of you my dear, I placed my hand in my pocket and withdrew your letter. How it came to be there, I’m sure I don’t know, but I assume I must have slipped it in without even thinking. Oh, to see your lettering, my love! Oh to hold the paper once held by your dear fingers. Perhaps this is what happens when we force the artist into the office instead of the studio—a weakened mind, my dear. I do hope you’ll forgive me for it.

  Mrs. Wooten, I’m glad to say, was pacified, my darling.

  And so am I.

  Ever yours,

  John.

  What he did not:

  Although he had offers for company the previous night, he opted to sleep alone. The wind continued to hiss at the windowpane and insinuate itself between the cracks. The brass bed beneath him creaked and whined each time he shivered. Eight times he attempted to sleep. Eight times he slept, though
briefly and not well. Eight times he woke to a dream of Angela. Angela, seated by the sea, her hair undone and sailing like tremulous notes in an insistent breeze. Angela, whose long fingers were brought to her mouth as she puzzled over her paints. Angela, whose head was cocked curiously to the side, listening to a far away sound of twisting metal and dying engines—the percussive slap of compressed explosives hurtling themselves into the sky. She listened as though hearing music. A smile played upon her pale pink lips. John woke in tears. He did not know why.

  What she wrote:

  Dearest John,

  It is official. Your mother is not speaking to me. I do not know what I have done to offend her, but whatever it is, will you please inform her that it is your fault, and I, as usual, am blameless. I arrived last night in the dark and though I knocked endlessly, the house was silent. So, like a thief, I entered your mother’s home by stealth and settled into your old room. The next morning, at breakfast, I greeted your mother and sat down across from her. She ate her egg and sipped her tea—she hoards it you know—and said nothing. I was dying for tea. Dying for it, darling. Yet no place was set, no breakfast called for. I was glad to see that dear old Charles was still in her employ, though he did not speak to me either—doubtless, on his mistress’s orders. Once, I tilted my head in an utterly charming way and fluttered my fingers towards him. He looked at me then, managed to raise his eyebrows in hello before turning quite white and staring at the ground.

  —Everything all right, Charles? Your mother said with toast in her mouth.

  —Fine, madam, Charles whispered. I wondered if he was trying not to laugh.

  And your mother said —Would you be so kind as to ring my son, I’d like to speak to him.