24 July 07 - 12:21Dognahnyi (part two)
The starving man crouched like an insect with raised elbows, dry tongue flickering…
He held out a wooden bowl containing a few dull coppers seeping sickly lamplight from their milled edges. I had been walking for miles in the oppressive heat of the City, night catching up with me still within the confines of the centre . . . I was attempting, in my innocence, to walk straight out of the City, but the place was far larger than I ever imagined. I hit upon a likely alleyway to sleep out the rest of the dark hours which, hopefully, were shorter at this time of the year. It was leaning against some restaurant’s backyard gate that I found the starving man or who, at least, I assumed to be in the process of starving, from the haunted look of his demeanour.
“Jus’ one coin, gent, not too much to ask…”
He croaked, more in tune with the constrictions of his throat than the empty echoing husk of his belly. ...
(more)
24 July 07 - 12:19Black Ceilings
Ricky lived in a house wherein his parents had spread seed for more than a generation. He was the prime stock, the elder brother, the one who, however long in the tooth, would take over from them when the death threat had worked itself through various layers of red tape.
The other siblings, some of indeterminate age, if not sex, clustered at the foot of the television, mooning up at the screen. They cared little for the future, except for the scheduling of programmes. However, a girl among them, Lucinda, had only one eye for the flashing screen in the corner of the parlour: the other eye being for the more hazy, slightly less understandable, gradually more noticeable flickerings in the opposite corner by the hallway door. Being the early Fifties, reception was brilliant in neither corner. None of it was in colour, of course.
Ricky knew about the master bedroom in the higher reaches of the suburban house, where his parents kept themselves to themselves. ...
(more)
24 July 07 - 12:15Notes From A Dream
He woke with a start, scribbled a few notes from his dream. He had been sitting on a hillside, the climb to which had been through steep woodland, at the bottom of which he had left his children in the park, playing on the witch's hat, in the care of someone he could recall neither in the dream nor now. He watched the gliders taking off and landing on a raised airstrip across the valley. Each soared into the sky like an angel in splints, crested the thermals, as it dropped the winch line and circled above the model town in the valley.
His note. did not attempt to cover the precise nature of the town below him nor the whys and wherefores of the before/after of the precise moment in dream time. But, in writing the notes at all (which he often did after dreams he at least recalled having, if not their actual content), new visions came, ideas for future dreams and undercurrents of old ones that would otherwise have never seen the light of the day. ...
(more)
13 July 07 - 13:19Two Kings
HORRORS IN DREAM DO NOT A NIGHTMARE MAKE ... were the words etched above the door, words at which King Ullie - who was staying as a guest of another King - glanced. He was being shown into salubrious sleeping-quarters by a servile Palace porter, someone who looked too much of a weakling to carry luggage at the best of times.
"If you need anything in the night, your Majesty," piped the porter, "I shall be no further than where your voice will reach, be it whisper or be it shout."
Or be it scream, thought King Ullie as he waved the porter away through the door of words.
Primary sources reveal that King Ullie was due to meet his host, King Alez, on the morrow. He had arrived late - so very late, the porter whose name was Lurkenwell (or some such name that ...
(more)
