The Apocryfan (24)
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Continued from: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_apocryfan_23.htm
When Dr Laurence Dumond looked at the wounds on Claura Gill’s body, he did wonder, at first, whether she was already dead. But somehow he knew that – without needing a doctor’s skill to fathom such matters – corpses do not usually have wounds that continue bleeding so generously. Parts of the body’s upholstery were missing where these wounds met flesh at raw-edged encounters of violence with long-term growth as a woman. The bones suddenly moved, a ratchet twist or twitch, as if the bones themselves regained consciousness intermittently … a series of startled awakenings. The scenario – at least up to that final point – reminded the doctor of a similar nightmare, when one of his own daughters had been brought into his surgery’s consulting room all those years before. In many ways, he claimed ‘surgery’ was a misnomer. And there had never been an A & E in Bonnyville. Even in the heyday of the NHS.
In the distance, he heard civil war turn global in explosive warmth.
*
The man with no name heard the very same dull rumbles shake the floorboards, sound-cracking the dormer’s flat roof together with an instinctive sense of a slight re-positioning from the eaves-cupboards around him. He heard his wife heavily moving about downstairs, to which he had ascribed the vibrations. A huge pink lady.
He chewed ruminatively on the end of a twine of liquorice. He proceeded to slap his thighs rhythmically with a bare hand. Then sipped at a shallow glass of Babycham.
*
As the very same rumbles took their inevitable path of vibration across Bonnyville, the watchmaker squinted at the diversification of his own glass eye as he prodded it with a tiny screwdriver. His daughter June was in the shop downstairs serving someone. He was in hiding upstairs to avoid protection. He had originally wanted to close his business down, especially as the passing trade no longer passed.
With his other eye, he swung a telescope’s view through the sweeping angle of his bedroom’s bay window. He lived in time’s past. The sea was a rich blue, with waves of light glinting off his watch face. Two huge indistinguishable vessels of furnished residue became breeze-blocks upon the horizon, as the floating current brought them together and then apart at each swell of alternate whim.
He took long glance from the mysteries of reality outside and gingerly pulled open the drawer of his desk where within sat several ostensibly incomplete repairs of complex timepieces, lucky if they ticked at all. Using large tweezers, he carefully extracted a miniature apocryphan of blue ormolu from a craftily positioned refraction stand and inserted it with righteous incidence within the contents of the drawer, as if it were to be the intrinsic part of a communal movement provided for some intricately age-perfected timepiece, a timepiece made from several broken ones.
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