The granite jaws of a gargoyle closed on my ankle — I yanked myself free. ‘You bastard,’ it yelled. ‘Lemme down. Lemme down or I’ll be sick again.’
Clambering down the east wall toward poor Mr Cannon’s window, I established a foothold which turned out to be the socket of poor Mr Cannon’s eye. Letting out a scream, he held his face like an objet d’art until assured it was intact.
‘An unprovoked attack,’ yelled Snapper, having roared me into Father’s study.
‘What do you say is wrong with that?’ I asked. ‘He enjoyed it, and it didn’t hurt me.’
‘How can you stand for this boy’s life?’ demanded Snap. ‘Clout him eighty-three times with a belt, brother.’
‘Or a hose,’ I suggested. But at this Snapper tore the belt from my waist, flipping the kid onto Father’s desk. To my dismay the corpse’s belly burst open, spewing maggots and slime onto architectural blueprints.
‘Pulverise him with this,’ shrieked Snap, brandishing the belt at Father, and began to laugh uncontrollably, his face scarlet.
‘Are you alright, brother?’ asked Father, frowning.
‘Don’t answer for my sake, Snap,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t slam an eyelid if you folded with a stroke.’
‘Just fall the other way,’ said Father, gesturing away from the desk.
‘The desperate acts of this demon child are more important than your imploding house!’ With a violent sweep of his arm Snapper sent everything flying from the desk — the body rocketed through an open window into a wheelbarrow trundled by Professor Leap.
‘Leap!’ I yelled through the window. ‘There’s an invisible corpse on the barrow!’
‘Now listen to me, laughing boy,’ he said, stopping and looking stormy. ‘Just because you’ve turned your back on logic’s province doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’
‘And just because I say there’s a rotting cadaver on the cart doesn’t mean — Wait!’ But he had given up and trundled on, shaking his head in dark disappointment.
‘This is a fine joke you’re playing on us all, eh boy?’ chortled Father. ‘A rotting child!’
‘Madness is climbing the ladder of the boy’s spine,’ Snap was saying as I slipped from the room, ‘and all you can do is sit there drumming like a clockwork chimp?’
The barrow stood empty at the back door. In the kitchen, Mother was carving up vegetables and the remains of the murdered boy. The body had pulped as though beaten with a claw-hammer. ‘Mother,’ I stammered, shaking, ‘what’s for tea?’
She turned to me, a shred of gut dangling from her knife. ‘Stew,’ she said, and to this day I don’t know whether she meant it as a noun or a verb.
My stomach revolved like a ferry, dumping its cargo with a splash.
‘Laughing boy,’ said Father’s voice. My eyes opened upon my own room, its familiar chains and ring bolts. ‘Collapsed in the kitchen — first sign of maturity. How you feeling?’
‘As though I have been nailed to a rural door.’
‘That’s the spirit. Sit up, boy, and sip some of this. Hot broth.’
I had swallowed three spoonfuls when I saw the broken rib in the bowl.
But there was no sense in trying to speak to these people. So what if there was a rib? I took the bowl from Father and poured it away when he left. Thriving for two days on scraps of curtain, I soon felt ready for anything.
Calling on the Verger, I gave him a spud. ‘Trying to bamboozle me again with votives?’ he rumbled.
‘And if I am?’ I said. ‘It’s no secret I think you’re useless. But seeing as you swan around in dark clobber and a hood I suppose you’re the man.’ I gave him a canvas bag containing all the remains I could salvage. ‘Blather a bit of ceremonial pap over this and I’ll stay out of your way for a year. Verger?’
He had gone. Squinting out of the window, I could see him already digging a hole half a mile away and nattering over a book.
The following winter I trudged to the burial site and lay some fishing weights on the grave. Brushing soft snow from the headstone, I read the simple epitaph.
Here lies
FREUD
Rest in peace
SO WHAT
Adrienne found that deja vu could be induced by arranging to have a condescending moron tell her something she already knew. ‘What’s the use of that?’ I asked, threading small predators into my hat and snapping the line.
She explained that the phantom events we recall during deja vu are enclosed in free-floating etheric bubbles squeezed off from the conscious time-stream whenever our time is wasted by vapid louts. She stated that some people had almost an entire lifetime stored up in deja vu timespace to compensate for an existence of abuse and distraction at the hands of the complacent. This much I already understood, and underwent a peculiar feeling of deja vu. But when Adrienne began to describe the fun of accessing and exploiting these auxiliary time nodes, the notion began seeping through the pale foliations of my brain. If several hundred deja vu experiences were lined up in a row and experienced as a seamless stream it would be akin to a clusterbursting hallucination. Whole months of wasted time would be given back to us in a single hit.
Me and Adrienne trooped off to Snapper’s tree and called up. ‘Can we come in, Uncle Snap?’
A shutter opened and Snapper’s vermilion face appeared. ‘A man’s home is his castle, you bastards!’ he yelled. The statement was null and void because although true of Snapper’s home it was untrue of those without defensive artillery.
‘You’re a bundle of nerves, Uncle.’
‘So are we all when our muscle and bones are removed!’
True and obvious, his remark roared us back to the moment at which it had first occurred to us. Adrienne had further to travel, being older, but we seemed to arrive almost instantly at a moment shortly before birth. The sensation lasted just a few seconds but it proved we were onto something.
Ofcourse we couldn’t sit around provoking the drab from Snapper all day — we needed a means of drip-feeding retrogressive data at a steady and constant rate. I happened upon a Hemingway volume in the reading room and found it was perfect. At no point was there the risk of being jarred back into realtime by a new idea — the only problem was that once in deja vu timespace we would probably stop reading. So we asked Professor Leap to read the book into his tape recorder. Sitting in Adrienne’s sanctuary room, we prepared ourselves and switched on the machine.
It was better than we expected. Some of the ideas went beyond the obvious into a kind of homicidal vacuum. I saw a riotous play of lights on my skullwall as the crucifying boredom ricocheted me out of the timestream. In what seemed like seconds I re-experienced the first few seconds of life and all of the author’s ideas, then I was accelerating through a starfield of polymesmeric beauty. Skimming blurseas of red gold and deep flaring gardens, we were thrown across a sky, our shadows darting over the architecture of clouds which were soon streaking into smears. Huge tidal blurs were gashing wounds in space. Half my short life hit me like a thump in the chest as I passed through the sky, making it blink. For an instant, white space was speckled with black stars. I was learning and forgetting at a blur. I lost my body like a broken fingernail. The sparking pattern of passing stars resolved into a white revolving web and then into a sun which was everywhere. The universe opened like a flower, and we were gone. A billion miles below, the self-evident scrapped and sizzled like incinerating trash.
My eyes opened to the room and Adrienne’s dazed, moon-pale face as the tape crackled and ended.
NANNY JACK
‘Death,’ my Father boomed, ‘cancels everything but truth, then buries us in uncomfortable trousers and no underwear.’ Nanny Jack kept death at bay by wielding her own scythe. She was a disquieting, chitin-hardened grandmother but she was all we had — I daresay on balance she was less spooky than a skeleton at a harpsichord.