She nodded, sagely.  "Yes," she whispered, with animal grimace disguised as a smile ... as though talking to the shadows, "You were expected."

            With a creaking of bones and rattle of chains, she turned, and made her way down the hall into the darkness of my soul.  I stood on the step and glanced first at the sunlight behind me and then into the gloom of the hall's interior.

            It should have been such a simple choice—darkness or light?  But nothing is ever that simple, there are a myriad shades of grey between the two extremes and, anyway, nothing is as it seems.

            I stepped into the house and was immediately swallowed up by the shadows which only served to hide a deeper darkness.  Now, I thought, I am lost forever.

            I had no idea which way to turn, whether going forwards would bring the rewards I sought—or only punishment.  Sideways, then?  I hesitated, my hand on the sweaty doorknob of the future.

            If the garden and surrounding rutted fields outside were signs of a torpid Mother Nature, then, amid the dark purlieus of damaged wainscotting that the house shamefully boasted, I was charged with a far more insidious ambiance.  I had indeed moved shiftily inside, my eyes fixed on corners rather than any full-frontal passageways.  The deeper darkness within had been of my own making, it seemed, as my eyes re-adjusted, but I still tried to ignore the identity of she who said she'd expected my arrival.  Her shape was bad enough without the added veneer of person. 

            I knew I followed her, though, by show of the shadows she cast within my field of vision.  There were stiff cats to avoid, nearly tripping, as I did, over bowls of mouldy milk.  Swinging from the ceiling of one alcove was what I decided, by instinct, was a pet's suicide.  Which kind of pet the darkness did not fully reveal, though I was reasonably certain that the means of hanging was its own tail.  Strewn over the floor of another inglenook were swags of straw and knotted faeces.

            "Your father was the last one to touch the knob and knocker outside," she crooned.

            My father.  Ah, yes...

            He was calling me from the recesses of the house and I was running ... running, as fast as my small legs would carry me down the hall towards the kitchen.  I had no time to admire the bright paintwork on the walls or the smooth varnish of the wainscotting, nor the elegant pictures and chandelier of decoration.

            My father was calling, and I could not tarry. 

            "Nobody has come here since," the crone added and I was back in the shadows of the present, peering through the gloom at the shape-shifter in front of me.  Her edges were blurred; impossible then to make out her shape.  Sufficient to know that she was there, my father's messenger—and suddenly I remembered who she was.

            "But surely," I protested, "The undertaker ... the priest ... they must have come."

            "Poof!" she uttered, and expelled a breath of grave-dank air.  "What would a priest have to do with your father!  And as for the undertaker—well ..."

            She left the sentence unfinished.  Just as my childhood was unfinished.

            My thoughts were that if I remembered who she was, as I had just assumed, then she must remember even more about me.  But, no!  I was wrong.  This creature was beyond remembering; she or someone like her had always crouched in every room where I'd lain my head since infancy.

            Then my thoughts took untried tangents.  The priest or the undertaker, they would have had absolutely no need to handle the knocker or the knob.  The door would have already been held wide—their distant approaching form long since espied by my little scurrying mother; she wouldn't countenance any professional caller (or even common tradesmen) waiting at the door.  She was of a generation where everybody was too important to wait for the likes of her.   But, today, it was me scurrying; never too old to sense the parental scold underlying each of my potentially naughty actions.  I was certain, though, it could not possibly be my mother who had poofed so crudely.  My mother, you see, had been far sweeter-mouthed, whilst this coffin-chested biddy was probably the ancient produce of some weak-moment floosie who had teased at my father's cockadilloes, having already larded him with false intimacies and dubious endearments in order to rid the house of my mother's influence. 

            I turned to face this intruder out.  How dare she welcome me as if I were her own son.  Instead, she pointed with her nose and I turned again to see what she indicated.  At first I thought it was a large dog in its basket.

            The creature that I had thought was a dog unwound itself from the shadows and came forwards, its hands held out as if in supplication.

            For years I had not given my mother a thought.  Indeed, I had banished all memories of this house from my brain as far as I could.  Every so often—usually when my conscience was pricking—my father's voice would invade the small corners of my mind that I kept hidden from outside interference.  He had been so strong that the walls I had put up were not strong enough to keep him out completely.

            But my mother—she was another matter; soft and gentle, I had been able to wipe her out completely until I had stepped over the shadowed threshold of this building.

            My father's shade continued to adumbrate from the recesses but my mother's personality had not made itself felt anywhere within these walls save in the kitchen.

My mother, I recalled now, was always scattered with a light covering of flour so that she assumed the appearance of a dust-laden statue that nobody had tended to for years.  I never saw her without a frilled pinafore tied round her waist—unless the vicar was calling, on which occasion my father would make himself scarce and my mother would take over the role of lady of the house.

I recall one day in particular.  Peter Pickle (as his rather ridiculous name sounded to my infant ears) was a family friend.  He drank with my father.  Indeed, many a tipple too far—a series of crosses my mother bore.  She and I stayed behind—toasting muffins over the open fire, hoping against hope the burning smoke would not stain the paintings.  She often spoke of her husband (my father) in sweet tones.  She blamed the Pickle bloke for most of the ills that beset the family.  He was supposed to be related to our family by some vague miscegenate link, but that made it no better.  It didn't give absolution.  Well, yes, anyway, that day of which I speak, Dad was "missing" longer than usual, having earlier grabbed—my young eyes spotting this when he thought nobody watched—a wad of notes from under the sink.  I knew what the notes were since my mother had often spoken in mysterious tones of them being her "pin".  She had been saving abstemiously over several decades of money-laundering.  But how we lived in such fine surroundings of wainscot and oil, whilst she needed tantamount to dust herself with the whitest self-raising, without even the sniff of a servant, I was not old enough to question. 

            The family business was breeding pedigrees.  Even in those days, purity was our watchword.  So any scandal stemming from a dusky mongrel called Peter Pickle would have been detrimental to our standing. 

            My mother made no mention of the passing of time that my father was away on this occasion, but I saw the surreptitious glances she made at the black and white clock which hung, chess-like, on the kitchen wall.  Oddly enough, my mother, in her black dress with its coating of white, blended in well with the draughts-board decor of the kitchen—I wonder now if this was deliberate, whether she chose to become indistinguishable from her surroundings.  If it was, indeed, by design rather than chance, then she achieved her aim admirably. 

            "Part of the furniture", my father would guffaw, "as necessary to the running of the house as the range on which she cooks."

            I think he thought of her as little as he thought of the range; she was just "there", a commodity to be dusted down now and again and used to its best advantage.  No wonder he paid her no heed when he was off with the Pickle jar.

            Ok, let's be straight.  Dad did eventually come back that night, with an expression not so hang-dog as half-board.  In comic strips of the day, wives were meant to lurk behind the latch-door, rolling-pin aloft, ready to pummel her wayward spouse with a right old tenderisation that would put paid to any further breaches of marital discipline (at least for a while).  Mum, though, was an easy touch.  Tonight, she had some steaming black coffee ready percolated, the brim of the cup whence it would be drunk ready planted over with a coily, curly hair-of-the-dog plucked from our supremest champion.  He sipped the nutty molasses of the bean through a head of cream, finally incorporating the wiry hair into his own hybrid moustachio.

            "That was sweet as anything, ducks," he slurred, not yet quite back to the even keel which allowed him to curse and swear.

            "You were longer than you've ever been before," she mewed, with a thoughtless flick of his quiff from his brow.

            Swatting the air, as if flies were zipping about his nose, he made the announcement I had been fearing:

            "Tomorrow, Pickle's coming to stay."

            Pickle to stay was a three-edged sword.  If my father’s absences in the company of Pickle were cause for distress, then being subjected to round-the-clock pickle jar was tantamount to disaster.  There was a pause as my mother considered the announcement and my father gazed round the room as if nothing untoward was happening.

            I could see my mother’s thoughts as clearly as if they had been written on the white flour-laden walls.  At least, she was thinking, if they are both here, I will know what they’re up to.  Then she glanced at me and wondered on the influence Pickle would have on me.  She needn’t have worried, though, I was already wise to Pickle and his ways – the annoying way he ruffled my hair was counter-balanced by the nips of whisky he would offer me when my mother had departed for her boudoir and “us men” were allowed a last glass of something “to keep the night chills away”.  These events only occurred at weekends when I had no school to occupy me the following day.  I think my mother allowed me the late night in the hope it would keep me to my bed for at least the morning following – and thus out of her way.

            “Well then,” she said at last.  “That’s all right then.”

            There was a great sigh as my father and I expelled the breath we had been holding – although our anticipation was laced differently for each of us.

            Pickle's stay eventually became more than just a holiday.  It was as if he belonged with us.  Cross-tippling with my Dad.  Making huge eyes at myself, in some half-joke he thought I'd understand.  He often more-than-just-playfully smacked Mum's bum, in passing, sending up choking clouds of white dust into the atmosphere and plenty of ill-spent guffaws that sent us all to bed in unaccountable moods.  It was when the weeds started growing in every available crack that I, for one, began to wonder at what was in store for us all.  The kitchen's stone flags, even, where no cracks could be suspected as existing, other than those barely decipherable ones that divided flag from flag, began to sprout a green fungus.  The cracks in the path outside were invaded with veritable triffids which no amount of hard pruning would dislodge.  The tree-trunks were sprayed with a hair of carrot-tops.  My bed's sheets were mossed over with a veneer of something that actually smelled of dead mushrooms.

            Pickle said it was good for business.  But how house-high toadstools—growing even taller than some of the trees under which Mum had loved sitting in the shade for our erstwhile endless summer holidays—could possibly entice paying customers to our canine stud, was quite beyond my young, untutored brain.   True, most of the growths were in my nightmares; but at least some were, I thought, real, and, therefore, if real, to be laid at Pickle's door.  The kennels and outhouses themselves were literally crawling with gangrenous vegetation ... festooned with fistfuls of fœtor.

            The cause might, of course, have simply been the lack of time my parents had to upkeep their home; it seemed Pickle occupied every waking minute of time in one way or another.  However, it seemed to me that the reason was more deep-dusted than that; more sinister.  Even my mother’s flour coating was now tinged with verdigree.

            And the changes he wrought was not just in inanimate objects, my parents themselves changed and, in retrospect, so did I.  Although that was not so surprising, someone of my tender years would inevitably be going through changes, but I often wonder how I would have turned out had I not been subject to Pickle’s influences.

            The change was not so noticeable in my father, who simply paid my mother less and less attention in accordance with how his administrations to the Pickle-person grew.  My mother, though, changed enormously – a different dress every day.

            She still simpered in corners, but it seemed to me as if she were undergoing a sea-green change.  She no longer spent her whole day in the kitchen, scurrying about, busy, busy, busy.  Now she would spend time languishing in armchairs and fluttering what few eye-lashes (these, too, dusted with green flour) she had.

            Green flowers.  Green petals.  All sprinkled over with green dust, like pollen.  The dreams took root, eventually.  I even had a dream that I returned home after many years to find the house derelict, its windows with withering glances, the garden bestrewn with weeds, some of which weeds were free-standing and rootless whilst retaining a thick-matted and ill-foliaged demeanour.  The woman who answered the door was not my mother.  How could my mother have got so very old, without my own age keeping pace?  Her breasts, judging by the folds of her clothes, would have reached the floor, given the lack of support.  I was reminded of the cows outside.  The pet's suicide.  The dream majored on such things.  Pickle once told me that pedigrees were more prone to depression.  I don't know if he was joking, but, at the time, it rung true.  Now I was the one who had last touched the sticky knocker.  My father, if he'd been the last one, where was he now?  The questions built up into vortices until one dream ended and another started without even the intervention of my waking up to bolster the next dream.  Waking refreshed the dreams.  But mine simply careered along with no touching of waking's base of reality.  The door was banging again.

            "That's Pickle come to find you," said my over-old mother.

            So Pickle was now the one who'd touched the knocker last.  Not me.  Not my father.  It was as if all of us avoided being the last one to arrive.

            But now Pickle was the last to arrive—unless he was followed by the vicar.  But no, the vicar would not step foot in this house, not any more.

            I turned to meet Pickle head-on; the days when I would scurry round corners to avoid his glance were long gone.  Now I was grown.

            Through the kitchen door came a flurry of dank air—and that was all.  I turned to the crone, a frown of puzzlement on my face,

            "That's Pickle," she reaffirmed, "Come to find you.  Just you wait and see."

            Life was all about waiting, I thought.  Wait for birth, wait for death and all between was waiting, waiting and dreaming.  They infiltrated each other, I felt, the waiting time made up of dreams and green dust-laden ladies-in-waiting.

            A bell rung from the nether reaches of the house.  If the kitchen was dull with its covering of green dust, then the rest of the house was black as the pit of hell—without the firelight.  Thick curtains were drawn across all the windows and no light penetrated.

            "Now who could that be?" My heavy-breasted mother said. 

            How many people were in the house!  Surely it could only be my father or Pickle—or both of them together, summoning ... who?  My mother or I?  And anyway, how would they know I was here.  I had sent no word of my arrival, mainly because I had not known I was coming until I got here.  In fact, I never did know if I was coming until I got there—another waiting game.  I had never known.  I shall never know.  Here or there, it mattered not a jot.

            The only one able to arrive last is you, dear sweet pretty reader.  Your fingers sticky from my doorknob.  Your face primed to grimace into an animal smile and your body to curl up into a cat's black rose.  Always the latest to arrive, you're still not sure if anybody's home.  Tap your head.  Your tendril-tressed face is simply a reflection of your mind.  All choked up.  Always ready to dust the joints, as opposed to oiling them.  High on weed.  Whatever the case, you know that a mother is the ultimate dogsbody.  With her front-loader welcome wide even for mooncalves.

            Hefty birds twittered as they hopped from plot to plot.  Beds of green roses in a seeping sun.  Ancient bleaters, waiting for another genetically modified set-piece of heavy knockers.  Non-sequiturs galore in an orgy of relevance.  A tale so well-bred, it tells of nothing but purity.  No house-room for mixed-up mongrels.  In any event, there was not even any reader at all.  You see, the tale strangled you—the ultimate pet's suicide.

 ===========================

THE UNHAUNTING OF THE HOUSE by Anthea Holland and DF Lewis

The sticky mist hung heavy across the grave-yard like a shroud, trapping the souls of the dead, like fish in aspic.

He turned from the fresh flower covered mound and retraced his steps across the damp grass.  Rooks colonised in the tops of the surrounding trees, their chattering raucous in the early morning air.

“Means that’ll be a good summer,” his father used to tell him, “Can always tell by them birds.”

He couldn’t remember how many times his father had been proved wrong after uttering such folk-lore legends.  It didn’t matter now, nothing seemed to matter any more.

Unable to sleep in the newly silent house, Dave had risen at dawn and cut across the fields to where his father lay, imagining, perhaps, some residue of his parent would remain.  But there was nothing; no lingering aroma of pipe-smoke, no whisper of a voice calling out from the body’s long sleep, no shift of the air as a spirit passed.

Reluctant to return to the house where death still held dominion, and where shadows caught him turning, expecting to see the spectre of his father, Dave made his way towards the river.

Dave wondered who owned rivers.  Riparian law was darn difficult to master.  After all, rivers snaked through various owners' properties, without bye or leave.  Who held the river's headlease?  Riverbeds, yep, they belonged to whoever owned the banks nearby, Dave believed.  But the surging power of a God called River, detached and insulated from the air and land, was just a seeking vein of an untenanted, unowned sea: a sea which suffered craft to float and nothing more. 

But a River started at its source, a tiny trickle, a pathetic spurt or, at best, spring, between two rocks.  That's where ownership should  be fathomed.  The spot where the snake emerged.

Dave's Dad loved this sylvan spot, when alive; now Dave traced the River to this knot of bubbles, this nest of fluid vipers ... to see if he could indeed track his Dad's soul to its real resting-place, a good hike or two from the graveyard where the actual mulchy remains of the body, no doubt, still resided, without even a posthumous fart, let alone a ripple

It hadn't been an easy death for Dave's dad; Dave would like to forget about the months of pain, the feeble body festooned with sores, the querulous voice pleading for release, but the memories stayed with him like a bad film - a snuff movie made in hell.  The producers must have been proud of their creation.

The fields bordering the river had been harvested - like his Dad - and ploughed; a series of striations scored into the very earth that gave life.   Dust to dust...

Suddenly there was a splash in the water and Dave turned in time to see a water rat disappearing into a hole in the bank.  Water boatman scurried across the surface of the water imagining they were Jesus.  Deep in the water's depths Dave saw fish, roach or bream, Dave didn't know and didn't much care.   Fish weren't his forté.  In fact, if he was honest, he didn't have any forté at all.  For the last few years his leisure time had been spent bowing and scraping to his father's every whim, wishing for the day the old man would be released from his suffering.

Time to get a life.

Time to get a sex life.

Now that Dave had reached the river's source, some spigot in his own soul turned ... allowing spirts, if not spouts, of spirit to haemorrhage.   Heretofore, Dave's Dad had kept Dave pent up, as had all such Dads of Dave done to each other back to year dot.   Repression was not even the word.

Dave waggled his fingers in the tiny gurgling fount, dreaming of something that made the water harder.  The bubbles softened the ickle cascade with a tantalising warm jacuzzi of nature's geysering, true, but the actual edge stung with a brittle flavour of winter.

There were silvery fish of insect proportions swarming along towards where the spring reached out for a stream's, then a river's, current.  Dave couldn't understand why his Dad had loved to sit here alone.  Then he saw - amid the gassy flints of floe - that one of these creatures bore a human face.  "A mermaid plankton" was the first crazy autonomous thought that interrupted his own thoughts.

A sex life was never straightforward under a microscope.   Dave shook his head and determined to find Mr Oliphant (Dad's fellow drinker) who, when he wasn't at the pub, sat in an open window one third along the village high street. 

It was early—too early for the village's riverside pub to be letting in the ribble-rousers normally found within its hallowed walls (it was, after all, just as much a place of worship as the fifteenth century building with the tower that stood at the far end of the high street—drinking was a religion).   Mr Oliphant—'Ollie-Beak' to his friends—would, then, be found at his window, no doubt with a couple of bottles beside him: one containing his medication.

As Dave reached the high street it was easy to spot the house in which Mr Oliphant resided; smoke drifted from the window and the beer-blossomed belches could be heard from 20 yards away—it was just like being home again in the days before his Dad was ill.

Mr Oliphant did not, as one might expect, beam with happiness at the sight of his old friend's son but Dave was not deterred by this.  Mr Oliphant's habitual expression was that of somebody who had just stuck his finger up his nose having forgotten that he'd just soiled it after wiping his backside.  Occasionally, when he was annoyed, the sneer gave way to a scowl, but only those well versed in semantics (or the antics of Mr Oliphant's features) were able to tell the difference.

He wore a definite sneer now, so Dave guessed his appearance was not unwelcome.

"And how are thee, young David?" Mr Oliphant enquired.

"Quite well, than you, sir." 

Sir?  Dave's Dad usually called Mr Oliphant 'Old Ollie'.  What was Dave doing treating this old drink-damned sot with such respect?  It was his Dad again, that spectre at his shoulder which never left him, constantly criticising, ceaseless carping over old misdemeanours and ones that Dave hadn't even dreamt of yet.

If Drink is a Religion, then its God is Rage. 

And Rage was catching.

Football hooligans, vilesters, rookers, heisters, piss-artists, strident streeties, lager louts and, yes, let's not forget the ultimate Road Ragers:  and Dave recalled his father's favourite expression which this Oliphant had seen fit to firkin fun out of...  Can always tell by them birds.

Dave could still recall his Dad's face as he said these words, with a thin grin.

The Oldster Oliphant deserved at least a poke for speeding up Dad's demise.  The old man's beak (fresh from catching sprats at every source and spring) now sucked on unbottled air, as if realising that come-uppance was afoot, in the shape of his old drinking partner's stripling son—a beak that was soon pushed back into the ancient neck as Dave's fist smarted from the blow he hadn't yet realised he'd delivered.

"That's for taking the piss out of me Dad!" said Dave.

"Thy Dad and me were pals..." snorted the oldster's neck.  "Seek thee in thy own waters and thou wilt spy buxom bugs which thy Dad did dally with in spawning the likes of thee..."

 Dave, sick of the addled bloke's drunken talk, paid him the final compliment: left him for dead, without actually killing him first. 

That was Dave's second mistake of the day.  The first was actually leaving the house—if it were spectres he wanted, this house was alive with them: Dave just hadn't learned to see them ... but he would.

Ollie Beak, not yet a spectre, but full of spirit—and spirit was carrion.  He fed on the dead; rejoiced in their passing; his beak-bill-call-it-what-you-will gobbled up the remains, their very immortality a tribute to his longevity.  No young fledgling would get the better of him.  He sat on his egg and waited for it to hatch.

Meantime, Dave, unaware there was still life in the old bird, if not a lively abstract, felt justice had been done.  Mr Ollie Beak Oliphant had been paid off.  Who else could be held responsible?  Dave supposed the only one left was himself—but what punishment could be meted out to assuage the lack of dignity and humiliation he had afforded his dear old Dad.

Still waters run deep, he thought, coming alongside the river again.  Very deep, he pondered.  How deep?  Death deep?  He could not fathom the matter.

Longer to reach the source this time, as if the river fled itself.  The churning current did not seem to narrow, only widen, as Dave followed its amber course inland from the sea.  The microscopic sex life was now amphibian and struggling to match his own size—and bosomy mermaids basked on the rocks of the distant bank, as they tried to unravel limbs from gluey ichthic insectness . 

He plunged in to the swirling poteen to swim to the other side.   An owlish adder swept from the sky and skimmed him off the runnelled surface with its huge forked-tongue.  Parthenogenesis needs no progenitors, only the strength of spirit.  But Dave was as dead as his Dad before he had thought such deep philosophy.

The unhaunted house became as sad and silent as the dust-laden graveyard, as rooks fled these purlieus.  Could always tell by them birds.

=======================

TOO DARK FOR HUMOUR

By D. F. Lewis & A. Holland

The road was a myriad of tiny black pearls.  He wondered where all this wealth had come from.   Black pearls - they were pretty rare weren't they? 

He knelt in the gutter, his attention riveted by the beauty of the iridescent gems; unaware of the cars that rushed past, showering him in a glittering stream of water and dust.

He stroked the surface, feeling the slightly curved feature of each stone. Each pearl was set in silver, he could see that now; they were like snow-flakes, every one different from its neighbour, each with its own individual shape.

He was captivated, drawn in by the magnificent lake which spread before him. 

"Oh, you beauties, I could drown in you," he whispered, moving slowly away from the gutter.

Cars sounded their horns and drivers weaved past the figure in their way, swearing as they did so.

But he was in another world, on a planet of his own warped imagination.

When he - eventually - got home, everything was neat, except the stairs.

Cupboards, under-bed spaces, hollows in the eaves, areas of floor where furniture didn't otherwise sit, ceilings (especially ceilings) and window sills, all these had been cleared of dirt, rubble and any largely unwanted items.

Only to be dumped on the stairs!

So, the feat of scaling them was an obstacle course representing the knottiest dimensions of negotiation, and all the beds were covered in white flakes that had settled there during a particularly frenzied attack with the extended scraper: and he couldn't easily rest upon their mattresses despite the tiring ordeal in reaching their otherwise open arms of slumber.

Still, the ghosts had been put to rest, if nothing else - thus preventing them from disturbing his sleep with shiny hard memories sticking into his back.

Ceilings were ghosts in disguise - plain planes of white which might have slumped into a stifling mode with his nose pressed nearly as flat as them, sticking into their back like the right irritant he surely was.

The ghosts may have been laid - but would they stay laid, that was the question.  Already misty memories slid into the room, under the closed door and through the gaps where the rain came in round the windows.

He covered his eyes.  No, he didn't want to see them, but his ears picked up the sounds.  Voices, raised in anger.  A child's cry.  Seagulls calling.  He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fists into his ears.  Think of something else; think of something else.  Anything would do - a plate of chips, oozing grease and carbohydrates.  He imagined them hot, straight from the fryer, burning his fingers and leaving red, sore marks when he dropped them.

He imagined the knife that cut the chips.  Sharp stainless steel, shining in the fluorescent light, the blade long and slender and....red?

Blood, it had to be blood.  He tried to will the picture away - that way lay madness, and he wasn't mad, no matter what people thought.

Thank Heaven for the clearance (albeit slanted) of all that unsightly bric à brac (bric à brac staring him in the face with lost loves, bitter squabbles, and yearned-for visitors who never arrived or, if they did, became as godawful a disappointment to him as him to them).  Yes, thank goodness, too, that such extraneous stuff did now lumber (clamber, even) the stairway.  He wasn't heading in any event.

He was trying to avoid any though of his blood which was indeed now rattling upon the parquet of the first floor hallway (at its point just before where the rubbish heaps began their staged climb even further upward, beyond the bedroom areas, amid scattered stair-rods and crumpled eruptions of carpet off-treads) - yes rattling, just like hard red beads ricocheting in all directions: as when he recalled, from childhood, his mother's pearl necklace inadvertently spilling from her snapped neck-string upon which they had previously been threaded.  Glen Miller was on the radiogram at the time.  A strange memory.

It was then he noticed a special little brown jug among the clutter, clutter actually spilling towards him from the stairway rather than like most of it which was striving on an ascendant path towards the mansion's highest storeys.

That jug:  he remembered that jug.  Strange it should appear now, he had thought it lost years ago.  He wondered, idly, if the pearls were still in it - for surely that was where the pearls had been deposited for safe keeping that day they had broken.  Must look, he thought, must look.  There was little enough of his mother left to him, it would be nice if the pearls were still there.

Nice?  NICE?  What kind of a word was that to describe the discovery of something that had been so close to the woman who had given him life.  With a sudden spurt of energy he dragged his weary, fast emptying of blood body across the bedroom floor and put his hand round...emptiness.  Where moments before had perched that special - oh! so special little brown jug was now a handful of dust mites, dancing their intricate steps through the air.

He giggled.  Ha ha ha, hee hee hee, little brown jug how I love thee.

What a stupid rhyme - but another memory of his mother as she had sat him on his knee and tickled his tummy while she recited the meaningless words.

He smelt her now, the scent of  Lily-of-the Valley she always wore, the aroma of baking and that earthy womanly smell he desired.

He giggled again, but the tears that ran down his cheeks weren't tears of laughter, they

were the result of pain, both physical and mental.

Then, with a numb impetus to disturb life's inertia, he found himself half following and half being followed by the bric à brac towards the mansion's tallest, most roof insulated attic.  There he was disgusted to see that all his favourite toys had merged with this abject treasure chase trail: (tops, jacks-in-the-box, whips, marbles, pick-a-stix, chemistry set, meccano set, dolls even) scattered willy-nilly in the barely ghost-lit darkness.  Nursery rhymes never reached this far up.

And the cross purposes of impetus and inertia allowed him to comfort an even darker shapelessness into a better sleep than his, cooing his own versions of war-time ditties.

He'd never been in the mood like this before.  The scent of blood in the valley of the shape's shapeless frontage rocked.  But then he felt it noticeable shudder with delight as he fed the shiny pellets to the guzzling jug-neck blackness of a larger wider negative effulgence.

At last, there was a ceiling on revenants ... and the ghost was nicely laid to rest.

And he could trip back to the gutter whence he came, happy in this at least ... but still too dark for humour.  And least, as a would-be stand-up act, he wasn't kneeling now.

'Ere Ere, have you heard the one about a bandleader called Max Miller...?

===============

NEAPTIDE by Anthea Holland & DF Lewis

It had to be in here somewhere, Cove thought, as he rifled through the stack of papers on the cupboard shelf.  Sheets of paper became dislodged and fluttered to the floor like huge cabbage-white butterflies drifting to their death at his feet.

Surrendering, finally, to the knowledge that it wasn’t there he turned and gazed, scowling around the bed-sit.  This was it, then, all this garbage was the detritus of a failed life.

“Not much to show, old mate,” Cove muttered to himself as he reached for the whiskey.

“And whose fault’s that?” the bottle asked.

To possess anything was better than nothing, but the bottle, in its turn, was a nothing more nothing than the emptiest nothing of all.  There was no jar or jug or jeroboam (not even a random permutation of Platonic Forms masquerading as a pisspot) that would even own up to recognising the contents of this bottle as a potential quencher of their thirst to be containers.  The bottle's jurisdiction shown by the concavities of glass wall began nowhere, ended nowhere and, worst of all, blamed Cove for its own existence.

Last weekend had been a lost weekend.  Drinking was like forgetting how many bottles.  Or pretending, to others, how many.  The ultimate or (as Cove smirked to think in a renewed drive of cheerfulness with his lot in life) the optimum was denying even the existence of things that unquestionably existed.

Like this empty bottle which had (at least philosophically) once been full.

The bottle's echoing emptiness as a voice was approaching the truth of the matter.  Revealing a fault-line in the bottle's otherwise perfect blowing as an open-ended brittle balloon-trick.  It was neither full nor empty.  Merely subsuming Cove's soul with its own.  Half and half.  And Cove smiled as he recalled the old red kipper about whether you deemed things half-empty or half-full showing how positive a person you were.

Still, at least the bottle existed - he could see it, and smell its contents.  Cove wondered whether the bottle would continue to exist when he left the room.  He shrugged.  Difficult to tell.

He placed the bottle on one of the few remaining spaces on the mantle-piece (the detritus of his life spilled on the every surface - Cove hadn't yet mastered the art of selective hoarding) and went out of the room, closing the door behind him.  He leant against it for a few minutes and then, quick as a flash, threw the door open.

Everything was there.  Nothing seemed to be in the process of putting itself back in place.

He picked his way across the paper laden floor and took up the bottle again.  He supposed the experiment had not really been conclusive, but it satisfied him; he had a feeling that if nobody else was around to observe him it might mean he didn't exist.

Not such a bad thing, all things considered.  It would mean the events of the previous weekend hadn't happened at all.  But that was just it - nothing had happened.  Nothing ever happened.

So was his life half-full or half-empty?  He had a vague recollection of a time when he would have said it was at least half-full, maybe more.  But things had changed.

Changed.

Like his mouth.

An open and shut case. 

Unlike the door.

He  often wished he could have engaged the brain before the mouth had uttered so many infelicities of tact.  Shooting it off wasn't even half of it.  Not half the battle.  Not even half the bottle.  He couldn't articulate even the sketchiest diplomacy he'd've needed to bring into play for this outrageous gob of his to be ignored, let alone forgiven.

No wonder.

No wonder he'd been left to moulder amidst such scratchiness of nib.  Mapless scrawlings on a patchwork quilt of ill-sewn parchments of scrap.

No wonder Cove hadn't the bottle (nor the nous) to keep a woman.  And, after all, the success (or otherwise) of a man's life depended (didn't it?) on scoring?

He kept tabs to testify the tally of potential better halves he wooed.  Not kept upon these haphazard papers that littered his pad.  But kept (like notches on a gun-barrel) upon the very bottle where Cove's philosophical doubt was centred (the bottle doubts, therefore the bottle is).  

Yes, upon the very first-mover of a "bottle" created by God for Man to set about snogging, upon a whiskey wino's narrow-necked french-kissing of glass-blown dregs, upon the frangible furnace fodder of some useless hollow-vesselled dream, upon a legendary glass mountain of spent cartridges, upon a still stagnant corruption of barley and rye ... he used to score, scratch, gash and etch the tokens of his pyrrhic conquests amid the fair sex.

Not that there were many.  Not half enough.  In the half-empty emptiness of his life (for surely he was alive; he thought, therefore he ought to be) there was not nearly enough even potential victories, and the absolute total of complete conquests was nil.

He had thought he was on to something though.  Before his north and south had spewed forth its torrent of annihilistic gibberish, he thought he had cracked  it.  Another notch for the bottle.

The bottle was where it all started.

And finished.

Its contents: ice-breaker; courage-maker; thirst-slaker; sense-taker.

Certainly the contents of a bottle very similar to the one he now held had ripped all the sense from his brain and had directly caused the weekend's disaster.  It must have been the bottle—it surely couldn't have been his own fault that he now existed in this living void.

Perhaps if he hadn't drunk the whole bottle ... if he'd started with a half-empty one things might have worked out better.  Resipiscence was all very well, but would it make any difference next time?  Concupiscence, though, prevailed, whatever a skirt's warning signs.   He'd've even eschewed swimming in Scotch than miss a Miss.

Then he recalled that he'd been looking for a piece of paper (one with writing on it, no doubt) before getting bottled up with bottles.  A message in one?  Police sang a song about it, didn't they?  A thin line tracing a blueprint for dying.  Even England never scored.

Or especially England.

Dutch courage was double such to Cove.  Bottle-green corpse sloughing in with the tides.  He actually found these very words for which he had been half-heartedly seeking amid his other flyleaves and tickertape ... but he'd even bottled out of signing  this ... merely leaving us with this half-finished page of a letter, message, note, billet-doux (whatever monicker could dignify this scrap of bogpaper where he doodled with a generous dose of felo de se), and simply appended——

And finished.

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