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."

The Milestones Are Right

Arioch glares at the Mi Go squatting awkwardly on an office chair on the other side of the table.

The Mi-Go regards Arioch with equal distaste through its curious organs of vision.

Since the cult-in-government inflicted its sacrificial decimations upon the bureaucracy, the bureaux in the City of Witches and on Yuggoth were amalgamated. Adjustments were hard on both worlds. Arioch is very sceptical of the advertised financial efficiency, considering the expense of rebuilding locally the cyclopean, windowless basalt temples the Mi-Go inhabit. There is also the language problem. Arioch, a veteran of the arcane traditions of the bureaumancers, finds the polychromatic jargon of the modern business solar system frustrating.

Ecru. Smaragdine wenge azure. the Mi-Go pulses with what, on any normal person, would be a forehead. This one also uses it as a place to wear a tie. It’s a shiny green tie.

“Again? We went over this at our last meeting,” says Arioch. “We can’t bring forward the completion milestone because bureaucracy in a hurry leads to holes in Space–Time. In this bureau, we have Procedures. On this planet, we still have a crust.”

Sinoper. Sarcoline, murrey amaranth, taupe. The Mi-Go emphasises the last shade with a clatter of one of its grooming claws on the tabletop. Coincidentally, the Mi-Go’s iPhone buzzes pregnant with new import. The Mi-Go immediately checks it, buzzing to itself in bistre and drunk-tank pink.

This is another thing Arioch dislikes about the bureaucrats from Yuggoth: they are grafted to their cellphones.

Arioch waits, seething, while the Mi-Go shoots a quick text back to its cohort. When he is pretty sure he has its attention again, he tries to show it a chart showing the size of the holes in Space–Time that resulted from the last arbitrarily truncated bureaucratic project. The Mi-Go gestures contemptuously with its feathery basidiocarps and utters a series of colours Arioch can barely follow. Several of them seem to be from spectra other than Earth’s. Arioch thinks that’s unprofessional: the Bureaumantic Code specifies Euclidean chromosemantics are to be used at all times.

Nacarat onyx. Aeneous nacarat gamboge!

Arioch is angry now. That was uncalled-for. “It’s not a matter of the Stars Being Right. It’s a matter of due diligence and not blowing holes in Space–Time. I don’t care if your demiurge wants it ahead of the project plan, nor about its—and your—career aspirations.”

Atrous icterine subfusc?

“By all means. Refer it all the way up to your demiurge. You know I’m in the right, and you’re just a corner-cutting fungal cowboy. Crepusc in your own subfusc!”

Falu.

“Falu too.”

That went well, Arioch thought later.

The Fear

Indagari can not be alone any more. The fear is there. It is a small thing, like a wizened child. It crouches on furniture and lurks behind curtains. It touches things: examining them, sniffing them, sometimes quietly tasting them. It is always quiet, apart from the furtive rustling, and never in the way. Indagari acknowledges its discretion, but the way it lingers is oppressive and eventually, chilling. Indagari only works out why that is after a few days. A mirror betrays the fear in the act of reaching when Indagari's back is turned, touching a shoulder-blade, and softly insinuating surprisingly betaloned wizened fingers deep into Indagari's back. Indagari feels a new coldness, a new sickness, as the fingers draw back a tiny sliver of heart which the fear nibbles at like a mouse at a corncob, its thin-lipped mouth scarlet with Indagari's stolen heart-blood.

The fear rides on Indagari's shoulders from room to room and sleeps on the pillow at night. Its prurience when Indagari is in the toilet or shower is disturbing.

The fear is an unpleasant companion, but for Indagari, now, it is better than the silence.

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.

The doom that came to Tunwich

It was three weeks before those outside Tunwich realised what that last bout of roadworks had wrought. It took them another three weeks to work through the accumulated go-slow zones, diversions, reversions, revisions, turnbacks, turnarounds, roundabouts and traffic police. And when they did, they discovered that Tunwich had been cut free, excised from the city, and was sunk without trace. There was a lake there now. At least there were ducks.

Song for Ulysses

She gave me love
She took me in her arms and made me whole
She gave me love
I never wanted anything else but to be in her embrace
There in black and white.

They took me away
They put me in with the mad and dangerous souls
They took me away
Ten years and more I suffered alone
There in black and white.

But I prevailed
My ruses killed my liege’s enemies
And I prevailed
When the walls were burned I realised all I'd won
There in black and white.

I strove for home
I wandered long and lost though I was found
I strove for home
It took me time to understand how much I’d won
There in black and white.

She took me back
She took me in her arms and I was whole
She took me back
Gone was youth, and gone was passion, but our love remained
My black was streaked with white.

The grass is soft
Sun dappled shadow softly warms my head
The grass is soft
I wish I could hold her in my arms to console her for her love
Lost in black and white.

She gave me love.

Deliberation

"Only God is perfect," mutters Arioch to himself, making a deliberate error while completing a new edifice of bureaucratese.

The mistake leads to a loop of definition, a stopping problem, a semantic black hole that sucks all matter and energy out of the entire nation.

The cockroach civilisation that follows worships Arioch as a god.