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.

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.

Optimising performance

"You have to edit and recompile your source code for the next twelve months," the Hierarch told Arioch.

"I have source code?" Arioch asked, wincing inside. It never looked good to appear bewildered in front of the hierarchy.

"All minions must edit and recompile their source code so they are optimised for the due prosecution of corporate goals in the next work year."

"What are the corporate goals?"

"They are in your source code."

Arioch frowned. "...But I wasn't here at the last compile. I don't have them."

"Then create some in accordance with corporate goals."

"But I - Okay." Arioch was desperate for time to work out how to fake something. It was not as if anyone would ever look at the source code.

"By the end of today."

"Okay."

The Hierarch bustled off to harrass a stapler. Arioch looked over his collection of corporate manuals and found them big on profundities, short on procedures. "It's not even as if I know what language I'm compiled in," he muttered, reaching for the Pause/Break button at the back of his skull.

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.

Wrong vision

One morning Arioch put the wrong eyes in. The night before he had inadvertently put down the glass with his eyes in it too close to the tray on his bedside table where he kept his pocket-watch, pounamu hole-stone on a string, verdigrine drachma and other assortments. In the cacaphonic scramble at the stupid o'clock alarm he ended up with the pocket-watch in one socket and the drachma in the other. It gave him entirely the wrong view on the world.

The owl of Athene was not his friend. Baleful omens surrounded him, mispelling his emails and chilling his coffee. He could not free his taste and smell of the lingering sourness of fur-packaged owl regurgitations.

The pocket-watch, unwound, made him late and staccato. His words, shorn of tempo, bewildered and even offended those used to more fluid, tuneful statements. Towards the end of the day he even developed a nervous tick.

Vexing though the day was, Arioch considered the experience educational and decided to repeat the experiment with other combinations of eyes. The metallic chrome-green of the preserved tropical scarab tempted him particularly. He had always wanted green eyes.

The things inside the end of the world

We're all of us mere surfaces over structures. Our bodies as well as our personas. Skin, politeness, the reflection of incident light. We mistake these superficialities for realities. No wonder the things inside became jealous, wanted to share the limelight.

From where I sit the bone-tide is only a few hundred metres away. The sky over it is also bone-coloured, darker, like old ivory. It hungrily sucks the air to it.

Might air have bones too?

Splinters of bone jut from every surface that the bone-tide has touched: rigid explosions of jagged material, fractally sharp, as painful to touch as it is even to look at, or think about.

There are people there amid the spears and pickets of bone. They remind me of cordyceps caterpillars, far gone in parasitic submission to the fungus that has turned their bodies into fruits. Bones erupt from their skins, eyes, fingernails. It looks painful. But they are as immovable as everything else over there. Their skins are bone. So is their hair, and clothes, and mobile phones. Their suffering, if they are still capable of anything at all, is as passive as it is eternal.

The tide is moving. The keys under my fingers are becoming prickly. Sharp. I can feel my bones ache, desperate to be free.

It won't be long now.

The old cat II

It wasn't where I looked
It wasn't in any room
Or in the yard.

The other cat didn't have it
Nor did my people.

It didn't come in tins or packets
It didn't come at night
It didn't come when I called.

I had a hole where it should have been that I couldn't fill.

But I think I know where it is now
And I don't have to look any more.

Gomez, the Mad Cat of La Mancha. 1991? - 14 November 2007

The Messiah

Arioch has a new job. No one knows exactly what it is supposed to do, but they're all terribly enthusiastic that the position is finally filled.

"You must have great plans for the temple!" they say.

Arioch smiles agreeably to hide the bewilderment. Second day on the job: not a good time to admit cluelessness. "What do you need from it?"

"Oh, you know - stuff! The temple must limpidly express the quintessential truths that we strive for, in the public's name."

"What truths?"

"Just the obvious ones."

In the lunch hour, Arioch has begun fashioning an escape rope out of old phone-cords. For some reason, phones are scarce.

Blattodeacino

After several minutes' silence across the breakfast table Arioch said, "I have a confession."

"Hmmm?" Indagari enquired around a sip of coffee.

"The coffee maker. While you were showering. I thought the water reservoir looked a bit manky so I pulled it out to give it a good clean.

"...There was a cockroach in there."

Indagari's coffee cup was placed back on the table with fastidious horror. Indagari was not one for histrionics.

"It's OK - I made your coffee only after I disposed of the corpse and cleaned out the reservoir and tubes. "

Indagari could not help but continue to stare in horror at the coffee.

"The thing is, the cockroach was mouldy and going transparent. I wonder how long it's been in there." Arioch scratched one antenna with a middle leg thoughtfully. "Still, we don't seem to have suffered any ill effects."

Random litany

On the third morning of her trial for heresy, Acanthe Almathea Telmacris was asked by the Rathist Heresiarchs whether she denied that the wife was subordinate to the husband.

She replied, "It is true that the in the Book of Life it states plainly that the wife shall be obedient to her husband's spoken commands. But did not the Reith also cause to be written through the prophet Lycurgus that the husband shall also be obedient to his wife's unspoken wishes? That for the wife to obey is easy since her orders are words, but the husband's burden is such that only one man in fifty enters the Second-Highest Heaven?

"Does he not also write that the key to the Gates of Silver and Steel is Love? That Love alone allows a man to hear the murmurs of his beloved's soul?

"And does he also write that the Highest Heaven is reserved only for those men and women who realise the key is not a key, but a window onto the Most Numinous?"

The Heresiarchs were silent. One finished scratching a note that he passed to his neighbour. It read, "I told you we should have purged that bloody gnostic from canon a decade ago."

The Edge

Arioch stands at the edge of the rocks, as close as he dares to the gravity-poisoned space beyond. It's not that he is particularly prone to vertigo or acrophobia. But his nerves scream "Get some perspective!" so that his fingers hurt as if they've been hit with a hammer. The wind, gusting, mischievous, cold, doesn't help. It makes it quite clear that it wants to fling Arioch into the void and snatch away his screams on the way down. It just can't quite work up the strength to do so.

Arioch regards the view: the objective for climbing to the edge. It's larger than he can keep in his mind at once - he turns his head from side to side to take it all in. Wind-tormented clouds scud across the sky, bringing spitting rain, lances of sunlight and staccato shadows. The sky is kept aloft by brown-sided mountains, their jagged tops still splashed white with snow. Below the edge the rocks sweep down to a scree slope partially covered in dun tussock grass and bramble thickets. To the left a swift stream chooses today's path amid its grey-bouldered alluvial fan, expanding into a rushy mere and swamp before disappearing off behind another slope to the right. There are ducks.

The wind tries to tear the air from Arioch's mouth and nose so he can't detect the coldness and flinty hint of snow on its breath, but fails. Arioch inhales deeply, enjoying the freshness turning so very cold. It has better luck with his unprotected eyes, finding moisture in them to drag out and spatter on Arioch's cheeks with its icy claws.

Arioch grimaces into the wind to show he is not afraid of it. In disgust it flings a hawk past him, feathers ruffling in its grip. The hawk meets Arioch's gaze with one exultant yellow eye: it also plays with the wind.

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.