Carkesomee
(published 'The Third half' 1988 )
There is good and evil, the one offsetting the other. Without one, there would be no possibility of the other.
That was until Carkesomee arrived on the scene; neither good nor evil. Or was it that he was too good or too evil - and was this a he, she or it? Did he begin or end....or ever be....or never be...?
#
Captain Abraham Bintiff had fought what he had considered to be his own war. He had conducted his men like musical notes in a cacophony. As they went over the top, he fled the other way, running, running, running...
...The notes became minimal, repetitive, cyclic, scales sliding under scales, perpetuating. He arrived panting in an area surrounded by the fog gods of his nightmares. He recognised them by their winding, weary shapes and by their desperate groaning, groaning attempts to break free from the earth's pull.
Abraham was a round-faced fellow with a military moustache and, as some ladies said, dapper with it too, ripe for any army quickstep or quadrille. But he was not dancing now. Breathless, sweating and on all fours, he found himself in a foggy valley, far from earshot of the war in which men were manfully unmanning. Silence is always the same, except for the breed of silence which prevailed around him now: like the never-ending, toneless sucking back of notes from woodwind.
One touched his shoulder briefly and retired into that part of the past where the future could not reach. Another unwound a long, whipping coil from a blind corner of the present but was irimediately blocked out by the encroaching future. And, finally, the past grew big like the black hunching hills and squeezed all the action into this one small parcel of his dream....
He was amid the thick of it; stinking with the fire and brimstone of it. He was living the living deaths of his men as they wallowed in the blood of it. He joined with their choruses of pain and angst as they drowned in the sorrow of it, in the tide of their orphans' tears. He became a dropped stitch in the texture of it and a mere cog in the history of it.
But the fog gods did not need his nightmares to continue, for they took on an independent existence, created out of all the horror and pointlessness of it. They shed the shackles of the earth and floated free like giant blind balloons. They urged themselves to newer and newer shapes from the wreaths of cannonade and sword flash that they crested.
The sky was a-waltz with them. One took up a remnant suspicion of Captain Abraham Bintiff and played with it like a child with a pussy cat....
And the cat played teasingly at the end of the ball of wool which the little boy dangled from afar. The nursery fire was a-blaze in the corner - around which Nanny had placed a metal guard.
To the boy, the fire was like looking into the mouth of hell, for he had been taught about the opposite end of Heaven by Nanny's carefully-chosen rudiments. He stared at the sparks marching up the back of the chimney and thought of his father (or was it his grandfather?), who had been a brave Captain in the war. To be given a posthumous hero as father (or grandfather) was a weird idea to the boy's mind and he could not garner as much comfort from it as he had been led to expect.
He could not remember opening the musical box just before going to bed, nor being put to bed by Nanny. Nor could he fully recall exactly when afternoon had turned into dusk, and dusk to night. Nor could he remember the precise timing of the nursery fire roaring into nothing but the sound of falling ashes.
However, he heard the incessant tinkle of the moving spikes across the rubbery braille of the musical ribbon. He could not see, but it was in his mind's eye that he saw a tin soldier with a fine, bushy moustache turning, turning, turning in an endless dizzy dance, marking time, reflected by a thousand mirrors....
That suddenly shattered and blinded him, not forever, but certainly until he died.
#
One of the fog gods broke off from the rest of the pack and hunted through the whole of reality past and future for more of its kind. It still carried a memento of the religion it had founded in some obscure corner of the universe, where a small number of worshippers still consider it to be the one true God....
But now we knew he was called Carkesomee and no one could take that away from him. Scales sliding, flowing under, over and through other scales, he covered Time. He gave birth to the notions that there are such things as just wars and that one man's mind is a universe.
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