It was a handjob, so he had only one set of fingers free to dab at the pouches under his wriggling lashes. Pulpy to the touch, it made the eyeballs bulge from their sockets and threaten to burst out from their wild stares.

“Don’t forget the nose,” hissed Scarlet Lady, again reminding him of her continuing presence at the back of his mind.

He took the fleshy wadge and squeezed it so hard, the sealed nostril bulbs became just snot between the fingers.

“And the mouth...”

He made as if to reply, but instead wrinkled up the lips into a kiss shape: laid them gently to the coldness of the glass. He attempted to tongue...but the shimmering glass had several ingrowing edges across its iceweb surface.

It was the mirror tonguing back at him with a jagged shard that audibly splintered into the soft palate.

He turned questioningly, almost innocently, towards Scarlet Lady, as the light seeped from the laddering black veil that her face had become.

Blood drooled down his chin, as if he had over-filled at the human pump.

He had recalled the windscreen heading towards him at breakneck speed; and instantaneously, with the realisation he and the giggling girl had forgotten to fasten their seat-belts, and had a gratuitous vision that only death in the first few milliseconds of its life could make him forget.

(published 'Dementia 13' 1990)

I've started doing real-time reviews over the last year. i.e. reviewing Collections or Anthologies as I proceeded through the book in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way.

Do you think this is a valid way to review - showing future trends as provided by the pros (rather than the cons) of the Internet?

My view:
It's not only significant for the author of a book reviewed in this way to receive a possible new audit trail of leitmotifs or a new gestalt proposed by another party, but it is also beneficial, I have found from my experience of doing this, for a reviewer to review books in this way. It opens the 'reading eyes', I suggest, in ways in which they would not otherwise be opened.

I've real-time reviewed a lot of recent single author collections here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm

(Published 'Stand' 1990)

Knowing this did not make much sense, even to myself, I decided to strike up a conversation: Anything was better than all that turning in on myself, following my recent bereavement.

“Had many train journeys like this one?”

I pointed to the fields held in view by the train’s delay.

She shook her head, either to indicate a negative reply to my question or to give me no illusions about her reluctance to talk at all. Maybe it was because there were no corridors on the train, no other sign of life other than the fact that there must be at least a driver somewhere towards the front. I’d in fact been the second of the two of us to get into this particular carriage. I pulled down the window and leaned out, mainly because it told me not to do so. This brought the fields into sharper focus and I could just make out the blur of a figure walking slowly along the sky-line, to where the brightness of the late afternoon had been relegated. Night was too early, hustled from bed (I laughed) by the darkening of an unseasonable storm on the other side of the train.

I turned back to my fellow passenger to see if she was now in a more talkative mood.

As the train began to move and the rain spattered the window, I thought she must have silently slipped from the carriage, rather to negotiate the tracks than remain alone with the likes of me.

Then I realised that she had indeed been alone all the time, as I smoothed down the tweed skirt, on resuming my corner seat.

(Published ‘Iron’ 1990)

The town centre was near empty of shoppers. Its covered walkways echoed with the cold steps of no more than a few others.

Fitful waste paper, in all shapes and consistencies of stickiness, had managed, piecemeal, to climb from the wire containers ... and this, despite the wind, if anything, having dropped along the funnels of the precinct.

Trails of quarter-inch proud footsteps, bearing the cross-hatch pattern of heavy boot-soles, were avoided by end-of-day shoppers, gingerly picking their way between them towards the exits.

Darkness, even in these shop-windowed cloisters, crept relentlessly towards the last late-night shopper. And there always was a last shopper, who provided the only bait for monsters born from the common-law marriage of bestiality and sundown.

Today's last shopper on a spree was a teenage girl. She screamed before she saw any monster. She had read her big brother's horror books, Stephen Kings, Clive Barkers, Ramsey Campbells, even H.P. Lovecrafts. She had not understood all the words, but the fear in them had stood out nevertheless and borne the test of childhood's endless past.

The man whom she had passed appeared to her to be a designer antique lamp-standard, so popular in shopping-centres. She did not know that his bones, lusting after flesh to cushion them, were putting out feelers, as they simultaneously planted tapering, crackling roots through the boot-leather, even through the upper crust of civilisation's concrete veneer - heading towards their own mindless version of the Earth's core where unadulterated, unwritten horror flourished with the craving jaws of its own jump-leads.

Not understanding, she did not even realise that the figure she passed was a man at all.

Her elder brother had said the shops stayed open so late on certain nights of the week, you could never find them shut. So, she had taken the last bus to town, in search of her mother's birthday present which she had uncharacteristically forgotten. Maybe she was growing up, just old enough to be relatively independent ... despite the media-led dangers of the world. The concerns of such fledgling adults tended to obliterate earlier, more innocent preoccupations - like remembering birthdays, playing pass-the-parcel or hunt-the-thimble, reading Enid Blyton, Capt. W.E. Johns, Richmal Crompton ... Wurzel Gummidge the scarecrow...

She looked back. The darkness stained the shop windows with moving lines of soldier words, in strict spit-and-polish. Other shadows moved closer, taunting her with a brother's typical back-chat. "Go away!" she screeched, thinking he had followed to frighten his little sister.

She suspected the shops had always been shut and never properly opened - the glorious sunlight only seeping in from the outside as some celebrity had snipped the ceremonial opening-tape with heavy-duty snicker-snackers, clacking, clacking blades, the tape being made of some alien fibrous stuff that could never be cut.

She shook her head vigorously as if to clear it of something. She had been fed too much pap at teenage "slumber parties" - all night films in Dutch Elm Street, the images of splatter flickering over the huddled shapes upon the settees, petting heavily but falling short of humping, desperately seeking carnal secrets amid the concert crescendo of screams from the screen which had no erotic context but pain.

She tried to shake herself free of all this.

Could her brother have tricked her here to test out some outlandish theory of horror which had been bugging and buzzing in his head ever since the fast-forward, sharp-zagged trails of the Evil Dead. Even when he realised that true horror could only be found in books - not videos - the neat straight lines of print merely wound, coiled, rippled tantalisingly towards meaninglessness.

She panted. She was determined not to scream again. That would only tell the monsters where she was. The shop-window dummies stared in disbelief. Many were undressed. She had often wondered why they had such small heads and stylised black-and-white bodies. The nippleless breasts moved as if hands were feeling them from within glove puppets. Flecks of pulsing blood-light stained the inner thighs. The glass between them and her drained the light from the now slow-flashing Coca Cola sign.

The upbedded patterns of the footprints surrounded her like hour-glass cowpats. There never were invisible monsters in Stephen King, she thought. This was more like an old black-and-white B movie. But she had never seen one and could not draw the comparisons which life left clues about at every turn of its pages.

The waste paper, like discarded manuscripts for stories, crawled back to its bins, scaling the wire meshes with the aid of lolly-sticks and can-tabs. They had yearned for the rubbish frights of low budget colour-gore, not the shadowing subtleties of Cat People, Mannequins and Ghosts, all good value at double the cost.

The roots shrunk back, as she suddenly smiled.

Her brother's eyes stared at her from behind the impenetrable shop-front glass where he had found himself trapped inside a dummy, in a dream worse than any of his nightmares.

The invisible monsters took up their print-marks and placed then towards the squally night outside the precinct - where all was boarded up for the night, even the bedrooms.

The lamp-standard man eventually stepped free, his bony roots fully withdrawn from the ground. The man indeed knew that she had forgotten her mother's birthday present - but the best possible present now would be the daughter's return next morning after a night away. He took the girl's hand and chuckled at his own good will.

He did not hear the rattling fingertips on glass somewhere behind, frantic though they were. Nor did the girl.

(Published ‘Trash City’ 1994)

Rain spatters on the parlour window like a thousand furious demons gobbing on it from the pavement outside.

Too many horrible thoughts ... I try to shake them off, but bashing one sloped-up ear with my fist does not seem to help at all. Makes it worse, in fact.

Shall I switch on the TV? I look up at its empty screen, only to find it staring back at me. It must be dark outside now, as I am no longer able to tell the ill-gathered curtains from their crack.

I suppose I could invent a story for myself ... but with all my ideas fast becoming senseless morbid thoughts, not much hope of that. I cannot summon any impetus, mainly because of the lethargic doom threading my mood in the guise of these words, words that probably don't exist at all, even in my own head. And butterflies clot together in a panic to escape by the narrowing exits of my stomach ... or so it feels.

If it were not for the music on the radiogram, there'd be nothing but the utter silence around me. I assume I must be having some thoughts to prove I'm not a vegetable. If I were truly stagnant, my mind would be a blank ... like the TV screen.

A vehicle roars up the wet hill beyond the curtains, forging a path through all the loneliness out there.

What was that? A thought just that moment careered through my mind like a distraught pet. Inevitably, I've forgotten it. There it was and there it was gone.

The music on the radiogram is now almost becoming part and parcel of the silence, not quite obliterating the knowledge that there IS a silence-in-waiting.

There it was again - that thought! It weltered inside my stomach like the rotting corpse of that pet ... and then abruptly disappeared in such an act of conjuring my mind was incapable of grasping it.

How do I know there was a thought, if I've forgotten it? I can only imagine it leaves something behind inside.

There it was again! I nearly grabbed it full square that time. I seemed to visualise a single bed, a very tidy one, with a cover neatly tucked, a lip of white at the top where the sheet must have been folded over with the use of a set square. Merely an impression, nothing more.

During this thought, I appear to have forgotten about the music. No wonder - the LP has ground to a halt and the sound of reinvigorated silence jeers at me about its victory.

As more cars swish up the hill outside, the thought blinds me more and more with its crescendo of wordless meaning.

There is a child in pyjama trousers that are tied with a straggly cord. It must be a boy. Why is he standing by the bed ... shivering? He's afarid to get in and his breath comes out in misty jets.

The toing and froing of the thought grants me further detail. There is a strange hump at the bottom of the bed.

Amid other unknowable thoughts which interfere with the main one, I comprehend that the vision must be of my own creation. That's the way with thoughts. Something, I suppose, for me to use as a raft to escape the hissing sea of silence ... from its tittering victory over sound ... from the swishing cars which tote dire luggage in their boots ... from the haemorrhaging upon the window pane ... above all, from myself, worse than any of them.

So, if the thought is of my own volition, I can surely do what I will with it. I can encourage that sobbing child to get into the cosy bed and drift into the best dreams I can muster for him. That would warm my vitals. Clear my stomach of the butterflies and ease my concern for his well-being.

No, I won't do that. Too glib. Too easy. But what shall I do? A problem, perhaps, but a diverting poser nevertheless. I know, I'll wheel in his mummy with a carpet beater for his bottom. Serve him right, probably ... the little wretch is begging for a good old-fashioned spanking.

The thought again. This time the child was kneeling down by the bed, tiny hands pressed together, praying ... to God ... to ME? Peculiar that I should make him do that, since I've never believed in God. What shall I make him do next?

The flowers in the Woolworths vase, which my father arranged this morning, are beside me as I think. Clustered together, a bunch of pastel colours, each petal pointing at me ... or reaching out for me ... or perhaps they're demons' tongues eager to tell me something if they were not drowned out by the bumptious silence. The cackling silence. The flowers will be good as dead by tomorrow, little do they know. Lost their damn roots, poor bleeders. But, isn't that what has happened to my thoughts? One moment almost laughing at the predicament of the flowers, the next finding myself in the very same boat.

I probably lost my root when I was born, wrenched from my mother's womb ... that's why I'm dying ... like those same flowers plucked from Mother Earth ... that's why all of us are dying.

Back to the little boy. What have I next in store for him? Ah, he appears ready for beddybyes, now preparing to fold back the lip of sheet I thought of earlier on. His tentative movements still reveal the undercurrent of fear ... but fear of exactly what? Perhaps the lump under the covers at the end of the bed gives him the jitters ... and so it should. I would not have thought of it, if it did not have a purpose in the scheme of things.

Let's scrutinise this boy somewhat closer. But, too late, he's gone - I've given up thinking of him. Perhaps I shall return to him later ... only if I want to do so, of course. Shall I switch on the TV, now? The face of my familiar on the screen is very disconcerting. No, I won't switch it on, since I yearn to show the one who watches me that I am impervious to his cold stares. I have the supremacy, after all - by merely filling the screen with the transient images of real life, I can rid the parlour of my familiar's presence. Little does he know that he is at the mercy of the faceless laughter people on the box of tricks.

Yes, he IS staring at me - I just had a look.

The little boy is now getting into the bed very slowly. He has a sweet face. His soft eyes are wide with fear, teeth clenched like a vice. What an angel he is! He gradually slides his legs down the bed ... and I realise that they are not long enough to reach the lump. Frantically, I try to elongate his legs, but to no avail.

Wait ... the LUMP is moving up the bed. Trust me to think of that. I don't believe the little boy is aware of the covers humping along towards him from the footboard. But, IS the lump moving, though? Yes, it is, never fear, but very painstakingly.

Oh, I've faded the thought out. That gives me an opportunity to invent a good ending.

Let's consider the situation - a frightened little boy in bed with a mysterious lump moving up towards him under the covers. What can the lump be? Let's make it something really nasty! The silence whispers in my ear to make it a giant beetle. It's creeping up to nibble the child's toes with its clicking pincers. What a hoot! But this does not seem to fit the thought ... something not quite right. Damn it, I must think of something suitable.

I pick hold of the bright orange cushion from the sofa as if seeking for inspiration in its loud softness. It is so bright, it is a blasphemy to silence. I hug it close as if it's a vital part of me. It feels hairy. I appear to view it as a dead cushion. But if I tore it apart, there would be no blood, no tissue, no swollen innards ... no mind, no thoughts. But one cannot see thoughts ... anyone knows THAT.

I now seem ready to complete the thought. It would be the little boy's pet cat which had fallen asleep in his bed. The child's face is to light up with joy as he pulls it out and strokes the fur. He is to cuddle it close.

The silence is quite correctly silent. The rain has stopped, no longer feeding the walking rootless ones. I'm switching the TV on, at last...

Like a rabbit from a conjurer's hat, a yawning head reaches the blinding light of the bedroom, its long ears taking purchase one by one upon the top lip of the bed-covers to extract itself.

There is, of course, no sign of a child. Only the dead silence of God praying.

(Published ‘ Not One of Us’ 1991 – but written in the Sixties)

He knew his candidature should be based on a river scheme . . . circling St. Paul’s with a wondrous moat or entering its very portals, curling from aisle to aisle through a straddling church for worshippers to hymn across its surging shores. That was centuries ago. . .

***

“Jack’s in the salt-cellar Gammy ga ga,” was chanted by the marchers as they wended between the East End streets. Incidents and causes had been forgotten since the demonstration started in the years following the war. All that was known stemmed from a Messiah in South Wales tying himself to the railings of Llanelly’s town hall . . . a trek that spent itself even before the enthusiasm died. The call was taken up; the chords were struck and echoed from mind to mind along their collective sewers.

“Jack’s in what bleeding salt seller?” scorned the gossips as they churned along the streets in ungainly array. They were off to the pub near St. Paul’s tube station, to quaff the new brew. Their banter reverberated along the cobbled wharves and lean-to warehouse ways, as the night drew black clouds across the sky in the shape of a giant necromancer.

In the snug, later, the gossips doffed their caps and did what they knew best:-

“You know who broke the dome in two?”

“Was it the war, wasn’t it, yobbo?”

“No, ol’ Tom Hopper – he did it while all the burghers slept off a drunken foray.”

“Mere pipe talk . . . git Guv!”

One particular gossip, with a homely hat seemingly sewn to his head, signed halt to the idiosyncracies that pub talk characteristically embodied:-

“It was the night that the Great Railway Station exploded and the train careered driverless through the square mile . . .”

“.. . . like a beast off the river . . .”

“ . . . ending up in the pews!”

Chortle guffaw chuckle.

Old Tom Hopper popped his head over the bar-counter and scowled. Taunts were thrown at him by the motley locals and the landlord, Matthew Shakewell, poked his tongue out at him in mock salute. And drinks inspired a royal flush and a crate of laughter.

But colour drained from all the faces, as night drew on. Arthurian figures and Welsh wizards, etched on the bar mirrors, faded in the afterglow of yet another sudden blackout drill . . . and tongues wagged and coiled to tales of deeper myth and machination. Hours on . . .

“Well, nuncle,” said one nearest to Tom’s hangdog brows, “tell us of the shapes in the sky . . .”

Tom fetched a cough, broke a pork scratching between brown teeth and chose a word to start off:-

“Wings . . . and scales across the nose of the storm. Cometh the Great Old Ones, mighty as the mountains of Scotland, and stretching from Cardiff to Croydon, casting their mammoth shadows and dire doom across the heartland of our squares and inns’ swinging signs. Jack and Jill went up the hill but ne’er was the top in sight. A pinch over yon shoulder, and ‘scape the tomb’s very dungeon . . . not in mine eye though, for it’ll sting, it’ll weep, and I’ll then not warn off the signal shapes . . .”

“You told them that, nuncle?”

“I told ‘em till I was blue in the chops . . . they strung me over the railings for preaching witchdom, and others too in far off lands within our seas were broken-backed for swearing out the shapes . . . in the darkening skies of our green and pleasant land.”

A tear budded at the corner of old Tom’s deep well . . . and he told of a river of his dreams, where gondola-steamers would stretch their paddle-wheels to the strong wine of song.

The locals gathered in close formation as if to hear the ensorcellements of Tom’s tales. They crowded in so tight, that only his voice could be heard piping . . . until even that stopped.

A black sun was coughed from the throat of dawn, as the drunkens barged home, their wings folded tight above their nodding heads to protect them against the shedding of the sky.

Published in 'Cerebretron' 1987.
This was my second ever published story and the title derives from a black and white snapshot of me as a little kid standing by a milestone saying: 'Seven Miles To Kidwelly'. Like a lot of my stories then, it was inspired by my own novella 'Agra Aska' written in the early eighties and by my unpublished novel 'The Visitor' written in the early Seventies. The story leaves a lot to be desired!