Commutes of the Living Dead

"Why do I take the Aurora Crescent to Bellwich line to work rather than Brood End even though it adds forty minutes to my commute?

Because of the smell. In the end I couldn't stand the smell.

Look, it's not their fault. They're ghouls. They smell like dead things. They know it. But they try to fit in. Overdose on deodorant and perfume. Bottom shelf brands that blare like nasal trashpop vids. Sickly sweet vanillin and musk top notes. Greasy middle notes. Benzene bottom notes. In a closed crowded tube carriage on a Tuesday morning, you can cut the moist fug with a butter knife. A blunt one.

They all work at the Cerise Terminus plant. You heard of them? They're in maintenance and waste logistics. It's all right, no one has heard of them. Thing is, no: two things. First, they have the contract with City Central for hazardous waste disposal. Second, do you have any idea how many people die in the Greater Met on an average day? How many of them have families rich enough to afford funeral services like you see on Downton Abbey? Yep: the point one perfuckingpercent. All those other bodies: not cremated, no. Greenhouses. Particulates. Not buried, no. No land left not given over to hab or ag. Seriously. Bodies are a significant waste issue in our Modern Society.

So. Ghouls. They eat the dead. Always have. There used to be a terrible fear of them, something something resurrection and the life. Recycling dear old granny's empty meatsack was a terrible wossname, desecration.

Cerise Terminus employs them as abattoir workers, with a well stocked on-plant canteen, and doesn't even mind if they take their work home with them. They do: newspaper parcels with greasy wet patches that leave stains on the seats in the tube. They're sorry about that and wet wipe them up.

Don't ask me what eats wet wipes. Nothing, I think.

But the tragedy is, the ghouls are dying off. Modern corpses aren't what they used to be. Heavy metals, radioisotopes from Russ, PCBXYZ chem fragments, nanokibble, more ronas than you can name. The poor old things can't cope, any more than we could. The sin of the apex consumer: shit accumulates uphill. A generation and they're all dead: poisoned.

Then we will be all buried in our own dead. And we'll stink."

Dust from dust

Piers is at war with entropy. Rust offends him as does mould on an orange or the grey dust that betrays the passage of entropy's rough tongue on every surface. These things haunt him: pot-holes in roads; data crashes; gravel driveways; lost memories; ancient history.

Others have tried to defeat entropy through vigilance. At the first touch of entropy's rough tongue these people run riot with cleaning goods, repairs and reinforcements. Perhaps it seems that entropy is rebuked for a time, but it always creeps back. No merely human sentry can watch forever.

Piers has a different tactic. He has set a booby trap. So that entropy will suspect nothing, the bait is not anything perfect and uncorrupted - it's not a challenge. It's an old station clock on whose face entropy has written with mouldy water and bleaching sun. It is also marked by entropy's rough tongue. Piers hopes entropy liked the taste of it, and will return, some night, to take another careful lick...

At that point the kilogram of amateur alchemical mayhem that Piers made with meticulous direction-following from a recipe he found on the internet will intercede and hopefully, entropy will be blown to bits.

Piers lies awake at night in the next room, listening for entropy's light tread and the gentle rasp of entropy's rough tongue.

And just in case, he also has a knife under his pillow.

Dressing for work

Each morning Jeremy puts his suit on the outside and his hate on the inside. He finishes it off with a matching tie and drives to work, negotiating traffic, parking station attendants, passers-by and co-workers with quiet contempt and distaste.

The hate keeps him upright during the day. He recharges it with hateful meetings, hateful tasks and hateful corporate coffee. He never shares his hate - never lets it out, never explodes. He is saving up for a rainy day.

The problem is that each day, the hollowness inside Jeremy where he wears his hate grows a little larger. The hate's corrosive biliousness dissolves fine layer after layer of Jeremy.

Each evening he takes off his suit and tie, takes out his hate and puts it into his wardrobe for the next day. But what's left after the rigid, articulated, knife-edged, glittering hate has left him is limp, gelatinous, and all he can do is flop on the couch in front of the telly.

Blind date from Yuggoth

"What was I thinking?" she asks herself whenever she remembers last night.

So embarrassing.

He had been charming enough. They met in a supermarket queue. Attentive, humorous, modestly ostentatious. The gold filigrees embossed into his chitinous carapace advertised his trendoid edginess. His shopping trolley showed he ate healthy - frozen prawns, sambal oelek, potting mix, cloudy ammonia, cat food. He worked in advertising. He lived alone. He drove a Lexus. He asked her out for coffee.

Throwing her mother's advice about paracosmic horror to the interstellar winds, she had agreed.

The first clue that he could not be The One For Her was the bouquet of luscious long-stem shiitakes he gave her when they met at a cafe in town. Stubbornly undaunted, she wrestled down her disquiet over the following coffee and cake, and tried not to stare at the curious organs he used to ingest the contents of his cup and plate.

But the second clue was the attention he paid to the waiter. Or more properly, the waiter's shining brocade waistcoat. The glittering threads mesmerised him and he started to pulse colours in time with the reflections on the increasingly embarrassed waiter's torso.

The third, and final, clue was his offer to take her home to meet his hive queen on Pluto. He explained it would be necessary to extract her brain and place it into a cannister of transmundane metals that would keep it alive and moderately sane for the decades it would take to transport her there and back. He explained he had to take a trip home and wanted her company. When she demurred he confessed he had fallen in instant and impetuous love with her, and wanted nothing more than to unite their brains in mycophilous glory until Yog Sothoth Returns. He stretched a clawed tendril across the table to stroke her fingers.

She stormed out, leaving him to pay. What a creep! On a first date!

Fun guy from Yuggoth? No chance.

Hobbies of eternity

Having once misread a National Geographic article about mummies, Rory has been diligently preparing himself for eternity. His shirts smell of camphor, bitumen and nitre. His house is eclipsed by the shadow of the mastaba he paid the local scouts to build in his back yard. His ushabti stand ready.

Preparing himself for judgement and blessed Duat proved more difficult. In his garage, on the shelf at the back of his work area, are lined up the canopic jars Rory has filled with considerable effort and sacrifice. Modern tools are sharper than their ancient ancestors - Rory takes consolation in that.

Rory lies on the table he has added to his work area. A bright overhead light and a mirror on a cantilevered arm reflect a bright pool of light on his face. He contemplates the sharpened hook he needs to use to fill the last of the jars. A bowl containing a fresh poultice of sawdust, camphor and bitumen sits on a stand nearby. It will be an additional blessing to have clean sinuses, Rory reflects as he adjusts the mirror to show him his nostril.

Back in the house, Rory's gold and white linen clad high priestess Susan adds kohl to her eyelids with a fine brush. She hopes once Rory has finished mucking about with his mummification in the garage, he'll have the time to fix the tiles in the shower stall.

Persistence of umbra

After sunset the hunched shadows ride their bicycles home. They're easily seen against the dun and dark azure of the sky; they're almost invisible against the shadow of the ground. They shine little lights fore and aft to cast themselves. It would be a tragedy for a shadow to lose its lights, and so become indistinguishable from its bicycle or surroundings.

File pending

At night after even the cleaners have left, the forgotten clerks creep out of their filing cabinet hidey-holes and go to work through the office. They do not make much sound any more: a witness might hear the careful rustle of paper on paper, a cardigan sleeves brushing blotters, or pencil erasers tapping teeth. Their voices are whispers and they express themselves in passive hypotheticals. They do not disagree except in silences, which in some cases can last for months.

The light from the emergency globes and from logon screens from computers left turned on paint their pallid skins with ghostly hues. Some of them are so tentative in their work they are actually translucent. They do not cast shadows: they do not have seniority for that since the new workplace agreement went through. They work quietly and constantly during the dark hours adding to, multiplying, the paperwork left by the day workers.

They do not like each other particularly well but during the day, when the day-workers fill the office with noise and chaos, they gather together in the dark corners of the cabinets as close together as they can. They almost touch.

After seven hours and twenty-one minutes each they pile up their unfinished paperwork and sign off. They slink back to their cabinets and fall asleep before they can remember how they came to be like this.

Talisman

Even Mrs Pearson's little toes have turquoise-set rings on them. But it's her fingers and thumbs that clatter and glitter with silver and turquoise-blue the most. She wears nearly half a kilogram of the stuff, carved into icons or left au naturel, on silver chains at her neck. Often too an aegis-shaped brooch or three are pinned to her blouse and jumper.

She reeks of vanilla and sometimes lilies. Turquoise has no smell, but her pieces resonate to her favourite scents through long association. Despite the olfactory chorus she is still able to smell the difference between real turquoise and its paltry imitators, howlite and chrysocolla, or dyed chalcedony or (mercy!) plastic.

Mrs Pearson's turquoise is her talisman. It protects her from arthritis and gout, the unwelcome advances of lechers, the pretensions of her subordinates, the jealous attacks of her rivals, and the humourless attentions of the tax-man. Piece by piece she is assembling a personal tomb-shroud or mummy-wrap of turquoise and silver, by which she subconsciously hopes to defeat Time and Death as well. She dreams of endless, eternal reaches of blue-green stony silence and yearns for their sanctity.

Watch the spies!

Mr Jones's job is to watch, as it has been all his working life. He worked his way up to a supervisory desk from Field Services, where he (and his fellow operatives) furtively installed cameras and microphones in citizens' lives. And their toothbrushes. And their lapels, their pets, and behind their eyes. The technology has improved markedly since Mr Jones first started working. Lapels no longer weigh hundreds of grams and need steel reinforcement. Pets don't hum electrically. Except for some cats, who seem to have picked up the habit.

The Bureau that Mr Jones works for is secret, an arm of the Executive that is not ever mentioned in parliament. Its budget is entirely discretionary, and its executives are discreet. All they want to do is to watch.

Mr Green sits four desks away from Mr Jones, and watches him through the tiny camera he had installed in Mr Jones's bifocal spectacles. Right now, notes Mr Green, he's watching a cat perched on an anonymous window-sill, watching a blackbird through the glass. The bird hops nervously over the lawn searching for worms and watching for cats but is foiled by the window's reflection. Neither can the cat reach out to catch the blackbird.

Mr Jones sits back and takes a sip of cold milky tea from a mug that says 'World's Best Grandad'.

Four desks away, Mr Green watches him do it.

Will mimic for food

The Indo-malayan mimic octopus came to the City of Witches to complete a degree in economics and politics. Exposure to an environment that was not a dull muddy sea-floor provided a myriad of entertaining distractions, however, and he ended up quitting uni. His family cut off his allowance, expecting him to ship home with his legs between his, well, legs, but he stubbornly stayed on in this paradise where all his new wild friends lived.

He supports himself now by busking, since his ability to even get casual work has been nixed by his visa expiring. He lurks in a corner of the city piazza pretending to be a mantis shrimp. He makes balloon animals and bubbles filks of indy classics like 'Smells Like Teen Squid'. If the police look to hassle him he shifts colours and rearranges his legs into the threatening semblance of a venomous lionfish, or if necessary a banded sea-snake. When he has to flee he pretends to be a skate.

He lives in a burrow on the outskirts of the city with a never-ending medley of students, skaterpunks, drug addicts, shrimps, nudibranchs and gobies. He dreams of moving into improv and stand-up comedy, but worries his accent is still too strong.

The aquarium

Jeremy keeps mi-go. In his living-room he has a 100-litre tank stocked with about a dozen tropical mi-go of various colours - green, red, orange, mottled. At night, under the UV light in the tank, they glitter with pale fluroescence as they display their antennae-lights to each other, a constellation of tiny eldritch horror. During the day they shelter dreamily among the non-Euclidean basalt monoliths that Jeremy had imported for them. Occasionally they make forays across the tank's pale grey gritty substrate, singly or in groups of three or seven, leaving little trails of intricate occult import in their wakes. Sometimes, when all else in the house is quiet, Jeremy thinks he hears them clicking to each other with their tiny crab-claws over the constant humming and bubbling of the filter. He has begun to think he understands them, although he laughs this off self-deprecatingly.

Jeremy has kept things in tanks since he was a child. Starting off with goldfish and sea-monkeys in a glass bowl, he spent his pocket-money on ever grander tanks and more finicky occupants. He had his failures, of course: the yabbies cooked when a filter short-circuited and the octopus kept escaping, getting as far as the bus-stop down the road before expiring. The mi-go are by far his most complex project. He wrote a web article on the best way to use LEDs to simulate the stars being right to keep the fungi alive, how to reproduce the transmundane essences that they feed on, and how to stop their chelating fungal dreams clogging the tank's filter. He idly dreams about becoming an authority among aquariumists on keeping mi-go. He hopes that his pets will someday breed, but no one has managed that with captive mi-go since Alhazred's day. He studies the ancient sage's cryptic aquarium notes for hints on how to make the stars right for the fungi to sporulate.

Jeremy's wife Deb hates her husband's obsession with the star-fungi, and especially the way they gather at the front of the tank to observe her when she's watching 'Idol'. Given half a chance Deb would get rid of them or kill them - a kettle of boiling water over the lot! She has begun to think the repulsive little beasts know her intentions and mock her for her inability to act on them.

Deb knows the old adage that pet-owners come to look like their pets. Is Jeremy growing more fungal? Have his ears and nose begun to glitter at night? All she knows is the longer the little beasts are in her house, the less she wants Jeremy to touch her.

Deb has bought an Elder Sign on eBay and keeps it in her handbag, despite its brooding heaviness. One excuse, one final straw, and she will not hesitate to use it on him.

Checkout

Behind Arioch at the supermarket checkout was a family of pottery-faces. The father, his face a chipped and crazed bowl of rustic sienna, had already battered Arioch's legs with their shopping trolley as if to hurry him along. Not that Arioch was buying a lot or taking up very much time - a single basket, with slightly more individual items than the gannet-faced store supervisor would allow through the express lanes. Sienna's wife wore a face of faded Delft in blue and white, a country scene complete with windmill, perhaps an heirloom.

Four children: two boys, two girls. The boys, their faces juvenile daubs of random green and brown glazes and blank patches of barely-fired white jobbing clay, were arguing over a magazine. The two girls, ditto but pinker, just looked like they wanted to be anywhere else.

"You can have the magazine, Todd, but you can't read it until after we visit Gran's," the father said. This satisfied neither child: the essence of successful parenting. "That's not fair!" the boy whined in reply. "That's not fair!" his sibling chmed in. "Why does Todd get a magazine and I don't?"

"Life's not fair, Joshua," his father snarled with surprising venom. "You learn that as you get older." As an answer it satisfied no one, but Todd put the magazine back on the rack and began to quietly punch his brother whenever the father's back was turned.

Arioch paid for the groceries and on leaving the supermarket, head full of ponderous thoughts, nearly tripped over a Tupperware(tm)-faced child. The child belched loudly around a feral grin before being clipped across the lid by his mother, a somewhat brittle-looking green lettuce crisper who probably drove a Lexus. "Don't burp in public, Dylan."

Mirrors in the sky

Arhenius raises towers. After lengthy preparation with geomantic tomes and the intricate use of spider-fine pencil-lines and crystals, he attends a prepared site and begins his incantation. The genii of the city arrive along his predetermined leys. They crystallise into a drab cocoon of steel and board that often get brightly decorated by the punk advertisers.

Arhenius stands in all weathers, patiently incanting, for several months as the tower grows slowly skywards. Within the cooon heavier orange genii lift great beams out of the earth and bind them. Smaller, faster green ones finish floors, fittings and wiring before sealing the structure's surface with mirrored glass. Finally the genii carefully remove the new tower's cocoon and dry its sleek new skin with drafts from their beating wings.

Where once was horizon and sky there is now a tower of shadow and reflection: from one side the sky is made infinite; from the other the sun is exiled. At night the tower lights up its guts in fluorescent glory in the hope of attracting a mate.

Arhenius often has to be lifted out of his incantatory coma (and well-worn hollow in the ground) by the genii as they leave the new tower. He stretches massively, cracking joints, and regards the tower with paternal satisfaction but hopes never to see it again. He loves his towers but he detests their tenants. They put his towers to uses he did not incant into them. They deform them, rearrange their organs, maintain them shoddily, leave them to moulder. Sometimes they ask Arhenius to return to fix their ailing buildings' woes and Arhenius always marvels at the gap between the perfection of creation and the vicissitudes of existence.

But there is another reason why Arhenius dislikes visiting his children: as he prepares each incantation, and as he recites it and causes the tower over a course of months of glorious creation, he is striving to touch the Divine. The moment of completion is a moment of blindness made of pride and exhaustion. Only a few more months' perspective and recovery allow Arhenius to see where his children are flawed, perhaps even beyond the tenants' abilities to tell. But Arhenius can tell. And he hates it.

Arhenius could not live in a tower he had caused. When his friends ask him why he still rents, he shrugs and changes the subject.