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.

The old cat

It's colder than it used to be.
The sun takes longer to warm my bones.
Laps are not as comfortable.

The birds are faster and tree branches are higher.
It's too much bother to climb them.
I don't go out because the dogs are so much fiercer.

I sleep a lot. Sometimes I lose track of what time of day it is.
The food they give me doesn't taste of much.
I keep forgetting what I was doing, and I can't find whatever it was in any room.

There used to be more cats around here.
I can't smell them - they've gone somewhere I can't follow.
I hope it's warmer there than it is here.

When I sleep I dream of warmer sun, slower birds, the other cats.
But I keep waking up.

The Witches 4

She cultivated enigmatic condescension as a way to play hard-to-get. Her manques fell over themselves to assuage her apparent contempt for their offerings and themselves. But she has become trapped. Her superiority grows ever more real - and so does the tawdriness in everything around her. Nothing pleases her any more. The world has become shabby.

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."

Exact terminology 1

During the night Indagari dreamt there was a word for the colour of sunlight after two days of rain.

See the sites 3

Between the suburbs of Tunwich and O'Kieran there is a piece of open ground, not quite a park, not quite a wasteland. It is crossed by a line of worm-riddled pines that once might have been a windbreak. It is mowed occasionally, so there might be snakes, but mostly it is left to the joggers and walkers of dogs. Perhaps it dreams of the houses that can be seen glowing in the night all around it; perhaps it is glad to be free of them.

On the northern side of the space there is a single stone, about a metre tall, carved with scrollwork and a beady-eyed face that is not Celtic, Norse or Scythian. The stone itself seems old with its coat of lichen and moss, like an artefact of some lost indigenous culture, but it is not. It only dates back to the 1970s and the psychotic break of Charles Voss. One night in 1973 Voss discovered that consensual reality was not good enough for him and so he invented his own. In the occasionally violent transition to his new universe he decided his role was to carve guardian stones to 'cap' or block certain geomantic nexi around the City of Witches. He sought stone from particularly sympathetic places - the stone we started with originated in a quarry some 350 kilometers away - and gave them warding spirals and stony senses to do their work. He carved and placed five before the police arrested him over what he had done with his wife of 20 years, Lola.

Five out of a planned twenty-three stones are apparently enough to slow the onset of the ley-catastrophe Voss predicted, but he still worries about the shortfall in his ward in Greyhame Psychiatric Hospital, a safe 200 kilometers away in the Town of Rams. Another eight are still piled in his former home in Tunwich in various stages of completion. Voss had not even selected the stone for the other ten.

Waiting for the end of parrots

Leaving work, Arioch passed a parrot. It was on the ground amid the shrubs growing in perpetual shade by the office building's entrance. It eyed Arioch wearily. Arioch walked more softly so as not to disturb it into shrill chattering flight, and it did not do so. Arioch felt momentarily smug and privileged to come so close to the bird.

The next afternoon the parrot was there again, or perhaps still there. Arioch wondered idly if it were waiting for someone. In fact this turned out to be true.

The next afternoon the parrot was under the shrubs again, but this time it was obviously dead. It lay on its back, its weary eyes now milky with the sights they now saw. Arioch noticed its belly-feathers were a mess of mud - or dirty dried blood. Car? Cat? Collision? Cancer? No answers.

Arioch realised the parrot had been dying there in the shrubs next to the office entrance, for at least several days. Smug privilege soured into complicit guilt. Even though it was now too late to care or intervene, Arioch stopped, picked up the parrot and carried it reverently to a nearby bin. The body was light, cold and stiff. Its bright feathers were ragged and dirty. All its parroty animation had fled. Arioch disposed of its discarded husk thoughtfully, miserable that the bird's suffering had been prolonged by inaction.