Notes From A Darkened Room

NFADR Officially moves to Darkenedroom.net

2006-12-29T23:18:00.000-08:00

"Thanks to everyone for everything you've done, but now It's time to go. You know it's hard, we've had some fun, but now the moment's come. It's time to go."

I heard a vicious rumour that NFADR had moved here. Best update your bookmarks and links, kids, I'm not going to be posting on Blogger again. Oh, and if you want to look at a Coming Soon page, go here.

Exciting, eh?

For the slow people: THE BLOG IS NOW LOCATED AT WWW.DARKENEDROOM.NET/JOURNAL. THIS PAGE WILL BE A PART OF THE AS YET UNFINISHED WWW.DARKENEDROOM.NET. THAT MEANS THAT THIS PAGE WILL NO LONGER BE UPDATED.

Now move along, folks. Nothing to see here. Move along.

We Interrupt This Interruption...

2006-12-11T12:11:00.001-08:00

...to inform you, monsieur or mademoiselle reader, that although work on the all-new NFADR continues apace, time is short and web design is long and success is reasonably far off. In other words, it's the holidays. This means that my day job is busy as fuck. It also means that Jennifer and I are planning on scampering off to Vegas for the weekend before attending various family fun-fests.

But it's coming. Just a little while longer...

...and while we're here, it looks like I picked a good time to jump ship. This all-new Google-ised Blogger sucks balls. Way to plaster your stupid navbar over my painstakingly-designed header, dumbass.

Moving On

2006-12-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

"I'm running out, I don't know when to stop. I thought I'd wait until I saw the penny drop. It started raining, pennies falling in my lap. And I could spend it but I'd never get it back."

Some of you may be wondering why I haven't posted in about three weeks. The reasons are legion, and we will get to them shortly...but not here and not now. You see, NFADR is moving house. I have acquired a domain name and purchased some space beyond the Walls Of Blogger. As we speak, I am packing NFADR's many secrets, lies, and revelations into unmarked canvas bags of the virtual kind. Seasoned readers will be aware that this process could take anything from two days to two months, depending on the creative whims of your incredibly lazy host. But I'm aiming for sooner, and hoping to post a shiny new link by this time next week at the very latest.

Further Memery

2006-11-10T22:52:00.000-08:00

"You hang anchors over my neck. I liked it at first, but the more you laugh...crazy."

Heads up, kids. I know I'm being an awful poster at the moment. Trust me, there are reasons. Here's a meme I stole from Chris to keep you entertained.

DO YOU SNORE?
According to Jenn, yes. I also breathe strangely. Occasionally, I even mutter.

ARE YOU A LOVER OR A FIGHTER?
A lover, for sure. I haven't been in a fight in years.

WHAT’S YOUR WORST FEAR?
Mediocrity (As in my own. I don't run screaming from average people)

AS A KID, WERE YOU A LEGO MANIAC?
Not especially.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF “REALITY” TV?
I think they should take every person from every one of those fucking shows, put them all on a big island, and then set me and a bunch of like-minded folk loose with an arsenal of insanely destructive weaponry. They could call it Celebrity Apocalypse Island, and it could be the orgasm that finally ends this utter wankfest of an outplayed fad.

Honestly, though, I don't care one way or the other.

DO YOU CHEW ON YOUR STRAWS?
Nope.

WERE YOU A CUTE BABY?
Horrifically so.

IS THE SINGLE LIFE FOR YOU?
I loved it once. Now I can't imagine going back.

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR KEYBOARD?
Black.

DO YOU SING IN THE SHOWER?
No.

HAVE YOU EVER BUNGEE JUMPED?
No.

ANY SECRET TALENTS
I have many, many secret talents. But they're secret, see.

WHAT’S YOUR IDEAL VACATION SPOT?
Since moving to California, an ideal vacation spot has basically become anyplace that actually has weather as opposed to endless sunshine.

CAN YOU SWIM?
Like a fat, hairy fish.

HAVE YOU SEEN THE MOVIE DONNIE DARKO?
Yes, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

DO YOU GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE OZONE?
I do, but I can't honestly claim to be really bothered about it.

HOW MANY LICKS DOES IT TAKE TO GET TO THE CENTER OF A TOOTSIE POP?
I don't think I've ever had one. Isn't that odd?

CAN YOU SING THE ALPHABET BACKWARDS?
I can do it drunk. Take that, roadside sobriety test!

DO YOU PREFER ELECTRIC OR MANUAL PENCIL SHARPENER?
I can't write or draw in pencil at all. The sensation of lead on paper is like fingernails down a blackboard to me.

WHAT’S YOUR STAND ON HUNTING?
For recreation? It's pretty disgusting.

IS MARRIAGE IN YOUR FUTURE?
If it is, then so's Bigamy.

DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING?
I do, actually. It's uniquely bad.

WHAT ARE YOU ALLERGIC TO?
Chocolate. Prolonged exposure to sunshine. Morons.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SAID, “I LOVE YOU” ?
This morning.

DO YOU CRY AT WEDDINGS?
No.

HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR EGGS?
Scrambled.

ARE BLONDES DUMB?
Depends who's asking.

WHERE DOES THE OTHER SOCK END UP?
Halfway down the corridor between my apartment and the laundry room.

WHAT TIME IS IT?
11pm.

DO YOU HAVE A NICKNAME?
No.

IS MCDONALD’S DISGUSTING?
It's foul.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WERE IN A CAR?
About an hour ago.

DO YOU PREFER BATHS OR SHOWERS?
Baths.

IS SANTA CLAUS REAL?
Yes. So is the Easter Bunny. And the Tooth Fairy. Not to mention God...

DO YOU LIKE TO HAVE YOUR NECK KISSED?
Not especially. I don't dislike it, but it's not really a fetish of mine.

ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK?
Sometimes. I was terrified of the dark as a child, and I still have a residual fear.

WHAT ARE YOU ADDICTED TO?
Everything bad.

CRUNCHY OR CREAMY PEANUT BUTTER?
Crunchy.

CAN YOU CRACK YOUR NECK?
No, but I can crack my right ankle.

HAVE YOU EVER RIDDEN IN AN AMBULANCE?
Several times.

IS DRUG FREE THE WAY TO BE?
Depends on the drug and the person. On the one hand, I think we're way too medicated as a culture. On the other, I really do think everyone should take a massive dose of mushrooms and just go lie in a field on a beautiful summer's night at least once in their lives.

ARE YOU A HEAVY SLEEPER?
I used to be. These days, someone sneezes two states away and I wake up.

WHAT COLOR ARE YOUR EYES?
Blue.

DO YOU LIKE YOUR LIFE?
My life is a big Awesome Cake with slightly bitter sprinklings of Obligation and Routine.

ARE YOU PSYCHIC?
No, and neither is anybody else.

HAVE YOU READ CATCHER IN THE RYE?
Yup.

DO YOU PLAY ANY INSTRUMENTS?
I can play the drums, the piano, the bass guitar, and the trumpet with varying degrees of skill. I've got a pretty good singing voice, too.

HAVE YOU EVER STOLEN MONEY?
Yeah, I used to steal from my mum when I was young and delinquent.

CAN YOU SNOWBOARD?
I've never tried.

DO YOU LIKE CAMPING?
Never done it properly. I've camped out at festivals, but that's not the same thing.

DO YOU SNORT WHEN YOU LAUGH?
No.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?
Yes. And Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny...etc.

ARE DOGS A MAN’S BEST FRIEND?
Not literally, no.

YOU BELIEVE IN DIVORCE?
Sure. Nothing is sacred.

CAN YOU DO THE MOONWALK?
Can I do it? Yes. Does it look like a Moonwalk? No, it looks like a white boy walking backwards.

DO YOU MAKE A LOT OF MISTAKES?
Nobody's perfect, but fuck, I'm close.

IS IT COLD OUTSIDE TODAY?
Not in the slightest. It was like ninety degrees this afternoon.

WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU ATE?
Potato wedges.

DO YOU WEAR NAIL POLISH?
No.

HOW MANY PEOPLE DO YOU LIKE RIGHT NOW?
Too many to count or list.

WHAT’S THE MOST ANNOYING TV COMMERCIAL?
I don't really pay attention to commercials. I only remember the ones I like.

DO YOU SHOP AT AMERICAN EAGLE?
Why, do they sponsor these endless memes?

FAVORITE SONG AT THE MOMENT?
Hole In The Earth by The Deftones.

Training Days

2006-10-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

"I never really gave up on breaking out of this two-star town. I got the green light, I got a little fight, I'm gonna turn this thing around."

Tired, tired, so very tired. The training I'm doing at the moment is really taking it out of me. Not that it's incredibly demanding or anything like that. It's more a matter of the classroom days being so soul-crushingly dull. I don't think anything is more exhausting than utter boredom.

This is by way of apology for the first part of the story I promised not being up yet. I'm hoping to get it done in the next couple of days. If I don't, you can go on ahead and blame Target.

I am, as always, guiltless.

Mail Rage

2006-10-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

"Libraries gave us power, then work came and made us free. But what price now for a shallow piece of dignity?"

To Whom It May Concern,

I write regarding my recent experiences with HSBC and my concerns regarding its treatment of me as a customer. I have been banking with HSBC for some ten years now, and have, for a decent portion of the time, been in debt. Given that I also have a credit card account, I expect that I have been personally responsible for making the company many thousands of pounds. So if I'm an unwilling customer in one sense, I'm certainly a good example of one. I make my payments on time the vast majority of the time, and I'm sure to communicate any issues I may have with making payments before they become a problem. In other words, you make money from me without ever having to chase me around to collect debts or remind me that payments are due.

In February of this year, I emigrated to the United States. I maintained my account in the UK largely because I couldn't afford at that time to pay it off. Unfortunately, as there is no facility online for me to make payments INTO my account, I ended up relying on relatives back home to make deposits so that I could cover those direct debits still coming out of it. Obviously this was difficult and inconvenient, and I made HSBC aware of my problems in early June via the messaging system attached to my online account (Case xxxxxxx) after multiple phonecalls were made to my mother's address despite it being explained on multiple occasions that I was no longer living permanently at that address.

By September, I had full-time work in the US and found myself in a position to resolve my financial issues. I wrote to HSBC via the same messaging system regarding the possibility of perhaps transferring my accounts to the US in order that I might pay them without massive inconvenience to myself, my extremely patient family, and even HSBC itself. In response to this enquiry (case xxxxxxx), I received a message I'd like to share with you:

Dear Mr O'Mahony

Account Transfer

Thank you for your e-message received 27 September 2006.

Unfortunately it is not possible to transfer account .

You will have to close this account and open a new account in USA.

Kind regards
Mr. X
HSBC Internet Banking Customer Support

Now, I work in customer service, and if anybody who worked beneath me ever responded to a customer in this fashion, they'd be out the door so fast their feet wouldn't touch the ground. Even if we ignore Mr. X's apparent struggles with basic English and grammar, it's clear that he hadn't so much as glanced at my account before sending this response. If he had, he might have noticed that being in debt to you means that I cannot simply close my account and open a new one. My problem is not that I wish to maintain my account with HSBC. My problem is that I wish to square my debt with you and move on.

Incredibly, my next message - in which I tried to communicate my concerns that the point had been quite thoroughly missed - earned a response from a Mr. Y in which I was warned about the dangers of being overdrawn. I would have replied to Mr. Y, but by that point I was simply too staggered by the breathtaking stupidity being shown by your Customer Services department to type. How much do you pay these people?

To cut a long story short, I have since gone to Wells Fargo here in the States to enquire about setting up a wire transfer so that I might send money to my account each month. This will add a further financial inconvenience to my already well-burdened shoulders, but I gather from HSBC's response thus far that it doesn't, as a company, care too much about such things.

For the record, I expect this missive to be met with some kind of rambling form letter about keeping up payments, but should someone that can make a difference have occasion to actually read it, here are my concerns in clear, concise English, bullet-pointed for your convenience:

1. I am making an honourable attempt to clear my debt. Your customer service department appears hell bent on stopping me from doing this. Does that strike you as at all odd?

2. When replying to a request from a customer that I am unable to fulfill, I often offer the customer an alternative solution. I am, after all, there to serve that customer. It's what I'm paid for. Funnily enough, it's what the kids who work at my local supermarket are paid for, too. I manage it, they manage it, and yet I'm writing a letter of complaint because a multinational corporation doesn't seem capable.

3. You are not The World's Local Bank. I have tried to make you my local bank and you have responded by making it very, very clear that you are five thousand miles away. On the subject, if there was a World's Local Language, it would be English. Many of your customer service representatives don't appear to understand that particular language. Perhaps you should change your name to The World's Extremely Distant And Virtually Incomprehensible Bank.

4. I have never, as a customer, felt so insulted, mocked, and ignored as I have in my dealings with HSBC over the past three months. I still want to clear my debt with you, if only so I can go and bank with an institution that can find its way to within touching distance of common courtesy. If you could see your way clear to letting me know what my options are regarding this matter, I would be so grateful I'd probably cry. Surely it benefits all concerned to get this matter resolved as soon as possible. One more time, and just to be sure, I'll put it in caps: I KNOW THERE IS A DEBT. I WANT TO PAY THE DEBT. I NEED YOU TO FACILITATE THE NECESSARY TRANSACTIONS. THAT IS ALL.

Thanks. Again.
Michael O'Mahony

On Speculative Fiction And Writing What You Know

2006-10-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

"Backstabber, hope grabber, greedy little fit-haver; God, I feel for you, fool. Shit lover, off-brusher, jaded, bitter joy crusher; failure has made you so cruel."

You don't, generally speaking, find purveyors of speculative fiction mentioned in the same breath as writers of what I suppose I should call - for lack of a better term - non-speculative fiction. There's a sense that modern mainstream storytellers like Stephen King and Clive Barker, or even noteworthy speculators of the past like Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein (who coined the term 'speculative fiction'), or even Tolkien simply aren't in the same league as their less imaginative but allegedly more literary and therefore legitimate contemporaries.

Why is that?

Let's start by defining it. Heinlein's definition of speculative was very much limited to what we would now refer to as science fiction. Later, writers such as Harlan Ellison used the term to free their work from the stifling archetypes of sci-fi, and even as a stick to beat those cliches with.

More recently, though, the term has come back into fashion. Stripped of the constricting and contradictory definitions that characterised it in the sixties and seventies, it has become a catch-all term for a variety of genres that can generally be considered fantastical. Essentially, and for the sake of argument, let us say that modern speculative fiction includes horror, science fiction, and fantasy.

All fiction is necessarily speculative (it'd be in another section of the library if it wasn't), but for some reason, sci-fi, horror, and fantasy attract at best the ire and at worst the ignorance of a literary community which, for reasons I've never fully understood, puts great stock by a phrase so familiar to anybody who has ever taken any kind of writing class that it's almost an axiom.

Write What You Know.

That amateur writers all over the world have been fed this particular nugget of wisdom since time immemorial is not a debatable point. That its meaning has been lost is perhaps one of the symptoms of a disease that has troubled literary criticism for almost as long. Writers, it seems, are placed on pedestals not for their ability to tell a story, but for the way they manipulate language and structure. Hence 'clever' writers who pen novels based around, say, a single telephone conversation, are more revered than those that might take a road more epic.

Write What You Know has its part to play in that perception. I've often heard it invoked as a call for realism in fiction. Realism, in this case, equates to 'gritty' and 'hard-hitting' and other such critical money shots. In actual fact, WWYK is closer to Crawl Before You Walk than Stick To The Facts, Jack. It's a motto for the beginner, a call to rein in those creative instincts and first learn how to actually write.

Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of wordplay, literary experimentation, and any talented writer that fucks with language. I can also fully understand why it is that so many become so frustrated with the genres that inhabit the realm of speculative fiction. There's something about this style of writing that attracts people for whom attempting Tolkien-esque flights of creative fancy is a spectacularly bad idea that generally leads to badly written stories populated by unimaginative characters with unpronounceable names. Sadly, the advent of the internet has only encouraged these folks to come together and produce quite incredible amounts of dross. Worse than that, work of such quality gets published more often than you'd think.

But then no genre is free from the curse of having hundreds of shitty books published in it each year, and there's really no reason to single out speculative fiction just because there might be a few more elves and vampires running around than most would consider appropriate at this stage of the game. Much of the disdain is, I suspect, of the same variety directed at the kids who play Dungeons And Dragons or have an encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth century horror movies. There's a sense that people who want to write about those themes are almost certainly on the run from Real Life and unworthy of anything but the cliches that dog them.

I've always felt that that people who don't understand escapism on anything other than that superficial level aren't really in a position to critique anything, least of all art.

I don't know everything about the story I'm going to begin telling you with my next post, but I do know it's a sci-fi tale entitled The Scavengers, and it'll come with its fair share of cliche, concerning as it does a rag-tag band of miscreants aboard a small and unreliable ship travelling through a galaxy that isn't quite our own. It may not be a tale that draws from my own experiences, but it won't travel too far from Writing What I Know. After all, what universe could possibly be more familiar than the one inside my head?

Winging It

2006-10-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

"Come ride with me through the veins of history. I'll show you how god falls asleep on the job."

I hope you all enjoyed that little trip into fictions past. We'll shortly be moving on to fictions future. But first, an update.

Target made me an official job offer today. It was, financially speaking, well in excess of my expectations. In fact, it wasn't far away from being roughly double my expectations, which was a pleasant surprise. I'm waiting for a confirmation e-mail from the district office, and then I'll be off to Target School for a while, which promises to be nothing if not interesting. It has, after all, been almost ten years since I've had to think about taking notes and getting my homework in on time, and I wasn't much good at it then.

There are fun times ahead, I can feel it in my water.

Meanwhile, the promised NFADR-exclusive novella is almost at the stage where I put fingertip to keyboard. I intend to approach this one in the same manner I approached Lanterns And Shades, that is writing and posting first drafts edited only for copy. I'm not sure how long it's going to be, and I don't yet have a title, but I'll be covering some of my thoughts regarding the sci-fi genre and this story in particular as my next post, which should serve as a preface of sorts. I thoroughly enjoyed myself the last time I attempted to write something on the fly like this, and a lot of people seemed to like L&S, so let's see if we can't get something similar going this time.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 11: Lights Out

2006-10-03T01:03:00.000-07:00

"I'll go none too bravely into the night. I'm so tired of living the suicide life. That ain't no reason to live"

They say that when you’re sure you’re going to die, your life flashes before your eyes. In the precious few seconds before all hell breaks loose in my world, I gain something of an understanding of what that means. It isn’t my whole life, there isn’t time for that; It’s just the important things. I remember my mother and father dancing in the living room; the brunette lying on her back in her garden, blissfully unaware of my lustful gaze; the cold fingers that once brushed my spine and came so close to dragging me down. I remember the Shades dancing and twisting in the air above me; a shoe in my back pocket; Dennis’s half-smile when I’d told JD I loved her; my father saying she was a good kid; her face in the darkness when she’d breathed my name and her thighs had gripped my waist so tightly that I gasped.

“I don’t think you’re a murderer or even a con artist,” I’d said to Cartwright. We’d been walking in Oak Park. I’d been starting to trust him. It had felt like everything was going to be okay.

In my head, JD smiles beneath the Lanterns of Abbot Street, twin tear-tracks glittering on her cheeks like something from all those fictions you wish could be true. I’d watched her and felt so damn sure of myself and my plan. I’d believed I’d see her again. I’d trusted my judgement and it had come through in almost every department. But almost can never be enough. Somehow, I’m sure, Patrick Cartwright has fooled me.

“You bastard,” I murmur.

And, as if that curse were a call, the shadows come to life. Henry screams and I hear him scrambling beneath the truck, despite the fact that we’re both invisible and safe within the aura of light from the Lanterns. I stand my ground, though I feel and understand his terror, feel it every bit as much as I had in the Curfew Bar, when I’d finally realised just how many there were. The Shades are a swarm of pulsing, undulating shapes, crowded so closely that they might be a single entity rather than thousands of individuals. They burst from the mouth of Witches Path at an unspeakable, predatory speed, as though they’d been tensed and waiting for this very opportunity. Crowded together the way they are, the pack resembles nothing so much as a giant snake that rushes past the Lantern Truck without pause, gathering its brethren from every place the light does not reach, growing ever larger as it arrows towards Quarter B.

“Henry!” I scream. I’m wrenching open the door of the truck, sliding in behind the wheel, turning the key the way I’ve seen Dennis turn it so many times. I have never driven before, though I’ve seen it done enough times to know the logistics. I stamp on the clutch, find first gear, and then accelerate.

“Handbrake! The fucking handbrake!” Henry yells. He is halfway into the passenger seat, his voice almost lost beneath the roar of the engine and the awful grinding sound coming from beneath the truck. Before I can react, he disengages the handbrake and pulls the door shut, drags himself up beside me.

“What do we do?” he asks, his voice high and hysterical. “Ken?”

The engine screams, I change gear and we are both jerked back into our seats, the truck shrieking and coughing in protest at this treatment. I have the accelerator pressed all the way down to the floor. Ahead of us, the snake has disappeared from sight, leaving only the drifting forms of stragglers. I drive straight through several of them, the Lanterns rendering their outlines in silhouette, making them turn to face the oncoming truck like luckless pedestrians in the instant before impact. Even in this frantic, desperate state, I can’t help but notice the one particular Shade raises its arms as though for protection. Such a human gesture, like building a material memorial in the woods. Then it, like the others, becomes a soft thump against the front of the truck, tossed aside or wrapped across the grille like an obscene, writhing blanket.

I wrench the wheel hard to the left and we veer into the residential part of Quarter B, carrying such momentum that two wheels momentarily leave the ground. Henry gasps and falls against me. Our heads meet with a sickening crack I both hear and feel, a white flash of pain lighting up the left side of my face and leaving me stunned. Without my foot stamping down on the accelerator, the truck slows and almost stalls, and when I blink to clear my vision and glance back at the windscreen, I see a vision from a nightmare:

If Shelley was right, and there is a hell, then this must surely be it. Beneath the high-pitched whine of impact inside my head, beneath the low growl of the truck, I hear screams punctuated by the sound of breaking glass. Some of the shapes ahead of us now are not floating but running, chased down and covered by deadly blankets of darkness that bring them swiftly to the ground. The slaughter is in the road, on the pavements, in front gardens and living rooms. All around us, the Shades are stalking and attacking their prey, silent assassins in their natural habitat.

“So many,” Henry whispers. “My God, there are so many. How do we save them?”

“We can’t,” I say, stepping on the accelerator once more.

And we don’t. Most of the people we reach are gone before the light from the truck can drive the Shades away. Those that remain are lying in extremity, jittering at the effects of being terminally Touched, taking their last, trembling breaths beneath an open winter sky. The first few times, I slow down and see Henry reaching for the door-handle. Not once do I stop, though, and not once does he get out.

“We should go,” he says finally. “We can’t do anything here.”

I shake my head, both at his words and the scene playing out before us. “I can’t leave them, JD and dad and Dennis. I can’t.”

A Shade, confused and lost in the glare of the Lanterns, thumps against the windshield, making us both jump. Its fingers claw at the glass for a moment, and then it slides away, the awful whispering of its passage sending a shiver up my spine.

“Drive,” Henry says. “For crying out loud, drive!”

On we go, up Park Hill and then another hard left onto Abbot Street. I slow outside JD’s house. The windows are smashed, the door hanging off its hinges. All is darkness. Even as we watch, a group of Shades appears from inside and rushes across the road in front of us, arcing to bring down a lone figure stumbling on the pavement opposite. It is over before I even have time to turn the wheel.

“Ken?”

Panic, grief, and rage, like I’ve never experienced. I open my mouth to reply and what comes out is a single, strangled sob. My anger is huge and hot in my throat and stomach, my loss like a cold hand squeezing my insides.

“Ken?” Henry says again.

He may as well be dead. I may as well be dead. This time, I let the clutch out gently, let it bite and draw the truck forward. The road ahead is filled with shadows, some dormant now that there is apparently no life on Abbot Street. I find second gear, third, fourth. I haul the wheel to the right and hit two of them, back to the left for another, clipping an old telegraph pole and ripping the wing mirror off my door. Through a screen of tears, I watch them as they feel the oncoming light, always just a little too late to move out of the way. I no longer have a destination in mind, only some kind of revenge, some recompense for what they have done. I am dimly aware of my passenger screaming at me, his words garbled and lost beneath the howl inside my head as Shade after Shade disappears beneath the truck, those subtle impacts becoming almost percussive, a soundtrack to my fury.

When I reach the end of Abbot Street, I slow and begin to turn around, meaning to make another pass, to get all of them.

“They don’t die!” Henry screams. “Do you hear me? They don’t die!”

I close my eyes, feel for the first time how hard I’m crying. His hand closes around my upper arm and squeezes hard enough to hurt.

“Look,” he says. “They’re going somewhere. Something must be drawing them.”

Though a part of me has ceased to care, I look and see that he’s right. The Shades are leaving Abbot Street, heading over and between the houses, out towards Oak Park.

“Someone’s alive out there, Ken,” Henry says. He seems calm and assured now, as though we’ve switched roles. “Let’s check it out and then get out of here. It’s a long time until dawn.”

I nod, still unable to find words. I turn away from Abbot Street, from JD, and steer us towards Oak Park.

Without the familiar and comforting glow of Lanterns, it is a dark and empty place. Even here, Shades can be seen, still more of them taking on the aimless drifting that tells us there is no life here, no warmth or light. There is a short slope leading up to the main path, and while I’m almost sure that I could take the truck up over it were we carrying enough speed, I now realise that almost is a foolish assumption to base any plan on. I pull over and kill the engine.

“There’s nothing here, Henry,” I say. “This is a dead place.”

“This is where they were going,” he replies.

“Then we’re too late. Let’s go.”

Henry frowns and shakes his head. Wherever he is drawing his calm from, there must also be courage, because he opens his door and steps out into the night.

“Don’t,” I hear myself say. I sound young, panicked.

“Something…” he says.

A flicker in my peripheral vision, light between distant trees. I turn my head and watch it move out into the open, a single orb of luminescence bouncing and swaying in the night. All around us, the Shades freeze and then move quickly in that direction, as though the light were a magnet. Henry is already off and running across the park, and before I’ve even processed what we’re seeing, I’m out of the truck and sprinting after him. In moments, I have caught and passed him, my young, strong legs leaving him easily behind. For a moment, I listen to the voice in my head telling me that if I was the second-fastest runner in Quarter B, I’m certainly the fastest now. But it’s only a moment. I’m closing rapidly on the light, dodging between groups of Shades that become increasingly dense, forcing me to slow down to avoid touching them. Ahead I hear shouts, men’s voices raised in anger and fear. Between the bodies and limbs crowding out my sight, I see them fighting; Cartwright and my father and another man, surely Daniel Nolan. They are surrounded by Shades, but those Shades refuse to tempt the light, and I realise that what Cartwright has in his hand is a portable Lantern. His invention. My father and Nolan are wrestling while he stands as close as he dares, holding the Lantern above his head so that its influence extends as far as possible. My father throws one of Nolan’s brawny arms back, frees his own right hand strikes the other man in the face. Nolan staggers, loses his balance, and falls. He is out of the light for less than a second, but that is all the Shades require. There are so many now that they simply drag him away. One moment he is there, the next he is gone. He makes no sound.

“Dad!” I am so close now, maybe ten feet away from the circle of light where my father staggers back, his breath coming in great clouds of condensation, his face dark and glistening with blood. He turns towards the sound of my voice.

“Cartwright!” I scream, my voice cracking, my throat raw.

The last Lanternman swings the last Lantern with all the force in his body. It meets the back of my father’s head with a sickening crunch. His mouth falls open and his eyes widen. Even as he slumps forwards, I see that there is no life there, that he is gone.

I do not see him hit the ground. The light is drawn away as Cartwright turns and runs back towards the trees. For a moment, I am frozen to the spot, Shades rushing by me on all sides, one passing close enough that I feel its numbing touch against my elbow, that sensation of bitter, endless cold making me feel weak even through my thick sweater. The world spins and I feel myself beginning to fall. Only Henry’s hands are enough to keep me on my feet. He is breathless, confused.

“What is that?” he asks. “What’s happening?”

“Cartwright.” The word sounds distant and empty. “He lied. He killed them all.”

And then I’m running again, chasing down Cartwright with no emotion left to slow me down. I am nothing inside, cleansed of everything I was by an all-consuming anger that burned out almost as quickly as it was brought to life. All that had meaning in my life is gone, and there is no way I can ever bring it back. The only thought in my head is to catch the man responsible, and see him dead. In the cold night of Oak Park, I am a vengeful wraith engaged in a hunt that can only end one way. I am faster and stronger than my victim, and my intent will not be denied.

I know exactly how it feels to be a Shade.

I catch him on the edge of the woods, throw myself at the backs of his legs so that he goes sprawling onto his front, the small Lantern rolling just beyond his reach. I climb over his struggling form and grab its handle, standing to hold it over him.

“Ken…I…you…” he gasps, scrabbling backwards away from me before turning his head to see how close he is to the edge of the light and pulling up short. I smile and take a step back. He shrieks and crawls back towards me.

“Please…I…I…only wanted to…I…”

While he struggles for the words, I listen to the whispering in the branches around us. The Shades have gathered like an audience, lending their ears to this final display.

“Hear them?” I ask, taking another step back.

“Yes!” He scrambles towards me again, and when he gets close enough, I kick him in the face as hard as I can. He cries out and grabs at his nose, fresh blood pouring between his fingers.

“Listen,” I say.

He glances up as though expecting me to speak, and when I don’t he looks puzzled. The movement amongst the trees grows louder, the sound of the gathering dead. I wait until I see the look of terrible understanding in his eyes, until his body tenses and he opens his mouth, perhaps to make one final plea or to tell one final lie.

I wait, and then I smash the Lantern against a tree. Darkness. The whispering rushes in from all sides, Cartwright screams in terror, and then the shadows claim him.

Henry and I spend the night in the truck. He sleeps with his head resting against the window while I sit motionless in the driver’s seat, watching the moon cross the sky until the clouds begin to pale and an orange glow spreads slowly across Oak Park, a barren, empty field surrounded by dead Lanterns. In the distance, I can see the dark shape that must surely be my father’s body.

“I’m sorry, dad,” I whisper. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”

I turn the key in the ignition and Henry stirs as the truck stutters and coughs into life. He looks at me and says nothing. There is nothing to say, only one last journey to make, back through Quarter B and out to the main road, looking for another town or even another Quarter where there is enough time to make a difference.

For memory’s sake, I take the long way. I drive slowly down Abbot Street and out towards Witches Path, where I pull over and get out of the truck. For a moment, I stare at the wooden box on the back. If I thought I could laugh, I would. I’m not the person I was yesterday, though, and all my laughter is gone.

Henry doesn’t call me back and I don’t look to see if he’s following. I walk up Witches Path feeling old and exhausted, make my way through the woods, and gaze down at the final mystery of the Shades one last time.

“Something human,” I tell the pile of clothes. “Something left behind.”

As I turn away, a shoe rolls from the top of the pile. I freeze, remembering the rumour about Shades in the daytime, remembering how they hide. Beneath this canopy of branches is dark enough, as naked as they are.

The mountain of clothing bulges just shy of its peak. Jumbled, ruined garments fall away. Something is emerging, lifting itself up from the Shade graveyard, stretching to its full height and shrugging layer upon layer away from itself. I take a clumsy step away, biting back a scream. The shape matches the movement, reaching up to snatch an old summer dress from its head. I see the hands just before I see the tangle of dark hair, just before I see her face.

“You…” I breathe.

“Surprise,” JD manages. Her face is pale, her eyes red-rimmed, her clothes damp and dirty. “I tried to find you. The lights went out. I ran. They…” She closes her eyes and stumbles towards me, old clothes wrapped around her legs and feet. I catch her when she falls into me, marvelling at how warm she is, how there.

“They got everybody,” she says, pressing her face into my shoulder, muffling her voice. “I tried to get to you…to the truck. But you were gone. I hid.”

“You ran. You outran them.”

She looks up at me, just enough of the old JD beneath her grief to remind me of all the times we raced them, all the times she won.

“What did you expect?” she asks, and offers a ghost of a smile, a Shade of a smile.

“I thought you were dead,” I say, and with the words come tears. I turn my face into her hair, inhaling deeply, unable to quite believe that she is alive just as I couldn’t believe she was gone.

“I thought you were dead,” she says, wrapping her arms around my neck, kissing my mouth and then the side of my face. “I thought everyone was.”

“They are. It’s just you and me and Henry. It was Cartwright. He knew all along. I…I killed him.”

“You…” Her hands move back to my face and she kisses me fiercely. “Only here,” she says. “It’s only you and me and Henry here. There must be others, must be. We can find them and tell them. There’s a world outside Quarter B, Ken. There always has been.”

“A Daylight World.”

“Then we’ll show them. We’ll prove it to them.”

Looking down into her eyes, I see that she means it, that she believes it. When JD believed that we’d make it down Witches Path, we did. When JD believed she would outrun the Shades, she did. And when JD believed that we’d get out alive, well, here we are. I nod and kiss her forehead, lacing my fingers through hers.

“Come on,” I say. “Henry’s waiting.”

We leave the graveyard behind and walk away up Witches Path, towards the waiting Lantern Truck.

The End

Lanterns And Shades - Part 10: The Beginning Of The End

2006-09-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

"This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend. The end of our elaborate plans, the end of everything that stands, the end. No safety or surprise, the end. I'll never look into your eyes again."

My mother and father were in love. That might sound like an odd and rather obvious statement to make, but then I’ve come to realise that there isn’t an awful lot of room for love in the Daylight World. Marriage, children, and a lifetime of tasks to be carried out before it gets dark, sure. But not much love. It’s been nearly thirteen years since she died, and if I’m honest with myself, I don’t really miss her. There is an ache, an absence, a sense that there was pain here once, but it isn’t grief and it isn’t mourning. I barely knew my mother, and trying to recall her features gives me that same feeling of distance. I can see her as a photograph, but not as a living, breathing person.

A few months ago, I came home from work to find my father sat on the sofa with a glass of brandy in one hand and her photo in the other. Of course, that was before all this, before the Daylight World began to show cracks and this sense of tension and finality became so all-encompassing. He’d looked up at me, eyes glazed and lips trembling.

“She was my little firecracker,” he’d said.

I’d remembered then. Not her features, not the way I’d felt when I was six years old and at my own mother’s funeral. Those things were gone forever. But I could smell her perfume and I could hear the angry yet somehow amused tone of her voice when they argued or when I did something wrong. Blue eyes, she had. Faded blue, like well-worn denim. Blue eyes and a soft voice that could harden so fast it scared me. My mother the firecracker.

Lanterns protect us from Shades, but not from each other. Laura Trent was stabbed in the throat for a purse containing only seven pounds and her house keys. The struggle that preceded the robbery was heard by several residents of the nearby houses, but by the time an ambulance arrived, she was already dead. By the time the police arrived, whoever did it was long gone.

Maybe that’s a part of it. My memories tell me my parents loved each other. When my mother was taken from us, it wasn’t such a literal thing as it is with those who get Shaded from our existence. She was dead, but there was a body, and we were able to bury it with all the ridiculous ceremony we attach to such things. Twelve times since then, once for every year that has passed, we have gone to her grave and laid flowers. We remember the woman we loved, and because of that, her absence from our lives is not a source of fear and insecurity.

Those clothes in the wood. I can’t stop thinking about them.

I’m standing at the front door, watching that weak winter sun come up over the rooftops, its light falling slowly over Abbot Street, Quarter B, and what once was a town called Oakfield. The birds are singing the dawn chorus, and from behind the house, I can hear a lone hammer thumping steadily at nails that will hold together a trap I’m hoping can cage a Shade. Henry works alone now, tireless in his rage and grief, perhaps the most determined of us all. Dennis and my father retired a few hours ago, JD long before that, as soon as her work was done. I haven’t been able to stop thinking and planning and speculating, and it seems foolish to even entertain the idea of sleep.

“Are you actually coming to bed anytime today?”

JD is standing at the foot of the stairs, wrapped in my blanket. Again it strikes me that she seems to have this knack for knowing where I am and what I’m thinking.

“Can’t sleep,” I say.

“Who said anything about sleep?”

And I can’t help but smile, can’t help but go to her. She opens the blanket to include me in its embrace. She’s naked beneath, and all of a sudden the thoughts in my head have nothing to do with Shades or Lanternmen. We kiss slowly, thoroughly, still exploring and adjusting to this change in our relationship.

“You should sleep,” she says, pulling away just enough to free her mouth. “You and Henry both. You said yourself you can still be Shaded. You need to be alert.”

“I don’t think I can, I really don’t. As for Henry…he’s like a convert to a new religion. He’s running on something a little stronger than the rest of us.”

“And that’s dangerous,” she says.

“You’re dangerous,” I reply.

“Me? How am I dangerous?” She frowns.

I pull her body closer to mine, bend my head to kiss her neck, inhaling the scents of sleep and yesterday’s soap. “You’re a distraction,” I tell her. “Why the hell would I want to go out there when you’re in here?”

“You need distracting, and you need sleep. Come upstairs.”

And she does distract me. And - after she has dressed and gone out with a bagful of leaflets for the residents of communities A and B - I do sleep.

The voices from the living room drag me back to consciousness. It’s still daytime, but the quality of the light is fading, and it’s time we were moving. I take the briefest of showers, more to wake myself up than anything else, then dress and head downstairs.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” my father says.

“Right,” I say, suppressing a smile.

Here they are, the people I’m relying on to carry off a plan that seems more ridiculous every time I think about it. My father sits in his usual seat, tall and stocky and looking somehow younger then he did just a few short days ago. His eyes are bright and alert, and he is clearly both tense and excited. He is not, as far as I know, a fighter, but he’s big enough to be physically intimidating, and smart enough to know what he needs to say to the Lanternmen. Sitting beside him is Dennis. An old drunk, they say, but a wily one. He’s been around the community for a long, long time. He will back up my father’s words. The combination, I hope, will have enough credibility to make them think, to make them argue. I don’t think it’s an argument we can win, not if Nolan and his supporters mean to have their way, but it should buy us enough time.

Us. Henry Nicholls and I. Henry sits in the armchair opposite the other two. Like my father, he seems tense. Like my father, his eyes are wide and bright. Something like hysteria in Henry, though. He is already dressed for Witches Path, gloved hands clutching each other, one heel bouncing almost frantically up and down, like he can’t stay still. JD was right; he’s dangerous. But there’s no way I’m going to catch a Shade by myself, and no time to find and convince other sufferers of our rare affliction.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is JD that seems the most relaxed. She’s worried, of that I have no doubt, but compared to the terrified girl I had to force to flee the Curfew Bar, the woman perched on the edge of the coffee table is a picture of confidence and calm.

“I’m not going to have a lot to do with this once those leaflets are posted,” she’d told me this morning. We’d been lying in bed, the sweat still drying on our bodies.

“You’d be surprised,” I’d replied. “You’re a reason to do this, a reason to pull it off. Maybe even the reason, for me anyway.”

“I’m not a damsel in distress, Ken. The Lanternmen are mostly a boy’s club, and they look at a girl, especially a girl my age, as an inferior. There would be no point in going with Dennis and your dad. As for going with you and Henry, that’d be suicide. Unless you need bait.”

I’d laughed at that. I’d pecked her on the lips and it had turned into another of those long, slow kisses that set butterflies loose in my stomach, butterflies that had kicked it up a notch when she’d slid her lips away from mine and her warm breath had tickled my ear as she’d said the three words that meant we had to make it through tonight. Somehow, we had to.

Now, standing in the living room and staring at her in a silence that’s dragged out for long enough to embarrass everybody, I offer her a smile and ignore the heat in my face. I take a deep breath.

“Everybody ready?” I ask.

Dennis and my father nod. Henry looks up at me with his disconcerting green eyes.

“I’m gonna go crazy just waiting here,” JD mutters.

“Why don’t you go home, see your family?”

“And tell them what?” she asks.

I shrug. I don’t know.

“Better than being alone here,” Dennis says.

It’s that very thought that makes her nod. Lanterns or not, doors and windows and walls or not, there is nothing comforting in being by yourself after dark.

We go outside in silence. My father closes and locks the front door and we stand in a loose circle on the driveway, shivering with cold. The Lanternmen meet only two streets away, and Henry and I have a burden to carry. It is for that reason that we will take the Lantern Truck while Dennis and my father will walk.

“Take care with her, Henry,” Dennis says, handing over the keys.

Henry nods. He has spoken only three or four times since he arrived.

“And you take care of yourself, Ken,” my father says to me. “Please…be careful out there.”

“You too, dad,” I say, sparing a glance for Dennis. “Both of you.”

He hugs me a little clumsily, kisses the side of my face. When he steps back, he is blinking rapidly.

“What he said,” JD says.

“If anything happens…” I say.

“Shut up. No speeches. You’re going to be okay. We all are.”

She wraps her arms around my neck and holds me tight for a few seconds, a few seconds that make me feel the first surges of panic. I don’t want to go to Witches Path and catch a Shade. I don’t want my father and Old Dennis to be anywhere near Daniel Nolan. Most of all, I don’t want to be so far from JD.

She draws away and turns her back, probably because she doesn’t want to cry in front of all these men. I watch her walk up the drive to the pavement, turn and head towards her house.

“Janey?”

She turns back, and even from a distance I can see the Lanternlight catching the tears on her face.

“I love you.”

It doesn’t feel stupid or awkward. It feels right. It feels true. JD walks backwards a few steps, blows me a kiss, and then turns away again. My father is looking down at his feet. I’m pretty sure he’s grinning. Even Dennis, that drunkard and one-time scourge of Quarter B’s womenfolk, is looking at me with raised eyebrows and just a hint of a smile. For Henry, it barely registers.

“Come on, Dennis. If we leave it much longer, they’ll be drunk,” my father says.

Dennis nods. The four of us look at each other a moment longer, and then they break away, moving quickly and purposefully up Abbot Street, two men with their heads down and their hands in their pockets, looking for an argument and perhaps even a fight.

“Ready, Henry?”

“As I’ll ever be,” he says.

“Then let’s go hunting.”

A few minutes later, the Lantern Truck is coasting slowly down the main road. In the back, where JD and I always sat when Dennis picked us up after work, a tarpaulin covers our trap, an amateurish construction of wood and nails that is, essentially, a box with one removable side. The plan is to lure a Shade into the three-sided cul-de-sac and then close the box. That simple. Despite all that has happened, I am still sure that a lone Shade is not strong enough to break anything that a man cannot, and though we had tried our hardest to damage the oak panels that Dennis had suggested we use, they had resisted. A weaker creature in a confined space, I reasoned, couldn’t possibly get out.

Henry slows the truck and steers it to the side of the road. Again I’m reminded of JD and I running Witches Path. This was safety and sanctuary, and never more so than the night I was Touched.

“Henry?”

He’s clutching the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. He’s shaking.

“Henry. Get it together.”

“I’m together,” he says, his voice barely a whisper. “I’m just scared, Ken. They killed my daughter here.”

“I’m scared, too. But we’re the only ones. You know that, right? They don’t see us.”

He closes his eyes and nods, swallowing. I reach into my coat pocket and pull out my gloves. They’re leather, the insides lined with a thick layer of soft cotton. In order to get the Shade into the box, one of us may have to touch it. I know it won’t be Henry.

“If anything goes wrong, run if you have to. I will. Whatever happens, remember that they can still touch you. We’re looking for one, and I’m prepared to wait a while if the opportunity doesn’t immediately present itself. We can’t risk a pack of them.”

“How long do we have, do you think?”

“I don’t know. Dennis and dad will be there by now. Let’s say no more than half an hour.”

I get out of the truck and Henry follows suit. Together, we pull back the tarpaulin to reveal our trap. It looks flimsy and ridiculous out here in the dark, and we both know it. Henry actually manages a smile.

“That film,” he says slowly. “With the shark.”

“Jaws,” I reply, looking across at him, knowing exactly what he means. “Except neither of us is going in this thing.”

“Still…” he says.

“I…” I freeze, staring back up the road.

“Ken?”

I’m not breathing. My heart is thudding hard in my chest. I’m realising that for all my thinking and planning, I have forgotten a detail, and it is not a minor one.

“Cartwright,” I manage, in a strangled voice. “Cartwright. He…he never came back.”

I raise my arm and Henry turns, his gaze following my trembling finger to the streets of Quarter B, where everything looks somehow different. He doesn’t immediately realise what it is, just as I hadn’t, but then the sheer enormity of what we’re looking at strikes him and he lets out a low moan of horror.

“Fuck,” he whispers. “Oh, fuck me.”

In Quarter B, the Lanterns have gone out. In Quarter B, all is darkness.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 9: The Last Lanternman

2006-09-24T12:40:00.000-07:00

"There was never any place for someone like me to be totally happy. I'm running out of clock and that ain't a shock, some things never do change."

By the time I arrive home, the day is losing what little light it had. Voices from the living room take me straight there, and I find JD sitting with my father and Dennis.

“Where have you been?” she asks me. “I was worried.”

Dennis and dad exchange an amused glance.

“I’m okay. I went to Quarter A. I was with Henry Nicholls.”

I sit down beside her and touch the small of her back. She closes her eyes for a moment, smiles.

“Henry’s a little…” Dennis touches the side of his forehead with his index finger. “Had a run in with our friends a few years back.”

“I know,” I say. “Like I did.”

“I get it,” my father says. He looks more awake than he has in a long while, and I have a sudden and painful memory of him dancing my mother around the living room, the pair of them laughing loudly. How old was I then? Four? Five?

“The Touch,” JD says. “He’s like you.”

“Bingo. What did you guys find up at the Curfew Bar?”

JD turns to Dennis.

“There was nothing wrong with that Lantern, but some of the piping that comes from the generator up there had been tampered with,” he says. “It’s not really my field, so I couldn’t say for sure. But there’s a possibility somebody was playing silly buggers the other night.”

“You know Lanterns, though, right?” I ask him. “I mean, anybody could cut into the pipes.”

“Absolutely. But those generators aren’t obvious or easy to get into. The one up that way wasn’t vandalised or damaged. Somebody knew what they were doing.”

“A Lanternman, in other words.”

“You realise what you’re saying here, don’t you, Ken?” my father says.

I nod. “Dennis, do you know any of the guys in this union?”

“Sure, some of them. You’d have to ask Cartwright if you wanted the whole story. To them, I’m just an old drunk who drives a truck. I’ve never been invited to their little get-togethers.”

“Hey, I know the Lantermen are supposedly the bad guys here,” JD interrupts. “But you’re talking about them trying to kill us. I mean, what’s the motive?”

“The motive might not have been you two at all. Shelley was a pillar between two communities. A lot of the old folk really respected her. She wouldn’t have given a Lantern Tax the time of day,” my father says. “If there was a terrible accident and it resulted in both her and a couple of local kids dying, especially so hard on the heels of the Judy Nicholls thing, what greater argument would you need for the presence of Lanterns?”

“New Lanterns,” says Dennis.

“What?” my father and I say, almost simultaneously.

“I mentioned it to you the other night, Ken. Pat Cartwright says he’s been working on something, says he has a working prototype of a new Lantern.”

“But it’ll cost us,” I say, glancing at JD.

“He’s been our Lanternman forever,” she says, frowning. “I can’t accept that, Ken.”

“I second that,” says my father.

“Actually, I agree. Cartwright and I had an interesting chat this afternoon. That’s why I was asking you if you knew anything about the union,” I say to Dennis. “I’m thinking that maybe there’s a core of Lanternmen from the Dead Quarters who might be looking for a repeat performance of what happened there. Cartwright and his new Lantern might even be their opposition.”

“Now wait a minute,” my father says. “Pat might be greedy, but he’s not a murderer.”

“I’m not sure those Lanternmen are either. My theory is that they switched off the Lanterns to give the people of C and D a jolt, make them more receptive to the idea of a tax. It went wrong and they were pretty much the only ones that got out. If our theory about the Curfew Bar is right, then that same tactic has already raised its head here. Only this time, whoever it was had no desire to switch that Lantern back on. Rather than put the whole community at risk, they chose to sacrifice three people with the same goal in mind.”

“Daniel Nolan,” Dennis says, and we all turn to look at him. “He’s a big Irish fella. Hell of a temper. Came out of Quarter C, if memory serves.”

“I know him. Well, not personally, but I know who he is,” my father adds.

“I’ve never heard of him,” I say, and JD nods in agreement.

“You wouldn’t have done. Nolan’s a Lanternman, but Carrie Lewis does the maintenance up Northwood Gardens. That’s where he lives. Keeps himself in the background, does Daniel. But he’s very vocal in the union.” Dennis lights a cigarette and offers my father the packet.

“Very vocal how?” JD asks.

“I wouldn’t know. I only hear what others tell me, and even then only down the pub when tongues are loosened.”

“We…” I begin, and then there is a light tapping at the front door. “That’ll be Henry,” I say.

“Henry Nicholls?” my father says.

“You know any others? We need him.”

But when I go into the hallway and open the front door, the man on the doorstep is not Henry Nicholls. It’s Cartwright.

“We need to talk,” he says.

I nod and say nothing, turning away from him and going back to the living room doorway.

“It’s Cartwright,” I tell them. “I’m going out for a bit. What I want to do,” I say, mostly to Dennis, “is catch a Shade. Why don’t you guys think on that until I get back?”

My father’s mouth falls open. Dennis blinks. JD actually laughs.

“If Henry comes, include him. I don’t think I can do it by myself, and so far as I know, he’s the only one that could possibly come with me. That would leave the other issue to you three.”

“You’ve gone insane. You’ve really lost it this time,” JD says. Her eyes are alive, though, and she’s smiling.

“I’ll try not to be too long,” I tell her.

I grab my coat and join Cartwright outside. We walk in silence for a while, along Abbot Street and then through the alleyway towards Oak Park. Neither of us leads the way, it just seems like a natural destination, an open space where there are Lanterns but no people after dark. I feel like I’m in some kind of spy movie, meeting an agent from the other side to talk where no-one will see or hear us.

Even in my lifetime, we’ve played football and rugby in the park until well after dark during the summer. It has always been a centre of my community, and while that spirit may be dark and somewhat lost these days, this is a place of sunlit memories and triumphs that would mean nothing to a tourist. As long as there are Lanterns, we will always spare a few for Oak Park.

“You’ve been doing a lot of prying,” he says. We’re off the path and walking the grass now, hunched in our coats and keeping our heads down.

“I’ve been looking out for my own. I gather that’s a concept you’re pretty familiar with.”

“Maybe so,” he says, and there is something of a smile in his voice. “Maybe so.”

“Things are getting pretty fucked up around here, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know. I have my suspicions. I’ve seen some odd things. It’s been a strange day.”

“Up at the Curfew Bar?”

“You’re full of surprises, Mr. Trent,” he says.

“You can still call me Ken, Mr. Cartwright. Reason being, I don’t think you’re a murderer or even a con artist. I think you’re the guy that has always looked after the Lanterns round our way. We need you. I’m sorry if I came off too hostile this afternoon. I’ve had a hard few days.”

“If I’m calling you Ken, you’d best call me Pat. You were up there, at the bar.”

“I saw Shelley die. I thought I was next.”

“I don’t…” he sighs heavily and stops, looking up at the sky. “I don’t think that was an accident. But then you seem to know that already. There is a union, and we do want a tax, Ken. I was a little dishonest about that this afternoon, just as you were a little hostile. But there isn’t any blood on my hands. I promise you that, God as my witness.”

“Then who does, Pat? Nolan?”

We start walking again.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he mutters. “What don’t you know?”

“I’m guessing, mostly. Looks like I’m scoring plenty of points, though.”

He nods. “It was Nolan wanted the union in the first place. We’ve always had drinks together, played cards, talked about the work. That’s only natural. But it wasn’t until Nolan came up from C that the idea of a union came about. He’s got a lot of influence, you know? They respect him and they’re a little afraid of him. He’s a big guy, smart, has a reputation as a brawler and a short temper.”

“And you?”

“I’m the only qualified Lanterman in these parts. I got my certificate through the council. Used to work for them, back in the day. The others taught themselves. That’s a respect thing, as far as they’re concerned. We can all do basic maintenance, and there are a few that can fix a truly broken Lantern. But I’m the only one with that qualification and the only one that can build from nothing. I’m the last real Lanternman around here.”

“Dennis told me you were working on a new one.”

“It’s done. Finished it back in the summer. I’ve been keeping it to myself.”

“You want to introduce it, like at a meeting or something. Give people hope so you’ll get what you want.”

He looks at me, and in Lanternlight he is drawn and white.

“I’ve thought the same thing,” I say. “If I had a weapon, something to fight them with. All I have is ideas.”

“Like?”

“The Touch makes you immune.”

“What?”

“I walked down Witches Path last night, around ten o’clock. I went right up to a Shade. I spoke to it. I’m still here.”

“That’s…”

“Impossible? There’s been no reason to notice it before. They all went crazy, didn’t they? I only know two people that got Shaded and are still walking around and talking sense. The others are all messed up.”

Cartwright says nothing. We complete a lap of the park and set off on our second.

“If I can be immune, so can anybody. If you’ve been Touched and survived, they can’t see you anymore. You could still be Touched, sure, but not if you were careful. All you’d have to do is keep your eyes open around the dark places. Of course, we’d still need Lanterns, to keep from being overrun. But if we were safer, maybe we could get back to thinking about how to destroy them instead of just holding them at bay.”

“The tax would…”

“This isn’t about the tax. If you want to talk about that afterwards, then fine. I’m more concerned about Nolan. There is justification for saying he killed Shelley, and also that he had a hand in what happened in the Dead Quarters. He doesn’t believe your idea will work, does he?”

“No.”

“That makes him dangerous. If he doesn’t have the support of the union, or if the union’s divided, he could be off planning to do exactly what they did in C and D right now. What happened at the Curfew Bar proves that he, or someone, is capable of it.”

“I can’t oppose him, Ken. When it comes right down to it, he has more authority.”

“Maybe not alone you can’t.”

“Who’s going to stand with me? Dennis? They couldn’t care less about that old sot.”

“My father, too. He’s known around here. Everyone knows the story about my mother.”

“And you?”

I shake my head. “I’ll be up at Witches Path.”

“What?”

“I want you and my father to confront them, but not with a view to winning an argument. I’m thinking more in terms of a distraction so that we can catch a Shade.”

“Do what now?”

“Tomorrow,” I say, and I’m thinking it through even as I’m speaking, “we go around Quarters A and B, posting leaflets through every door calling a meeting the day after. You let me know where all the Lanternmen live, and we don’t post there…”

“They’ll find out anyway. Gossip.”

“That may be, but we can delay it as much as we can, cut them out of the loop. That night, you, my dad, Dennis, and your people meet up with Nolan and his. While that’s happening, Henry and I will be up at Witches Path catching a Shade. Maybe you’ll turn the tide in the union, but to be honest, I doubt it. That’s okay, though. Only tomorrow night is crucial. We hold the meeting the next morning, and my dad tells the whole story. Getting the whole community to actually touch a Shade is another proposition entirely, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I think enough will to set the wheels in motion. When word gets around about this immunity thing, Nolan’s idea will be obsolete and he’ll be powerless. If and when that happens, we can debate the rest the way we should.”

“Why is the distraction so important? They don’t know what you’re planning or how much you know, Ken. I can tell you that for fact. And that’s just my first question. I have no idea how much of this madness is true. How do I know you’re not just another one gone crazy with The Touch?”

“As to the distraction, I’m not sure how important it is. But if nobody knows a thing, why did they turn out the lights at the Curfew Bar while I was there? And why are we out here talking instead of at my house or yours? As for my theory, I will walk you, right now, to the edge of the community, and you can watch me take a stroll up Witches Path all by myself. How does that sound?”

“Insane.”

“You want to do it?”

“No. I think I believe you. I don’t know why, but I do. Probably because I think you’d really do it, too.”

“I have and I would. They don’t see me, and they don’t see Henry.”

Cartwright closes his eyes and turns his face downward. Minutes pass. Finally, he looks up.

“I need to think, Ken. Let me go away and think. I’ll stop by your house tomorrow morning.”

“Promise me something. Promise me that even if you decide I’m a nut you won’t tell anyone in the union about this. You owe us that much.”

He nods. “Okay. I promise. I won’t breathe a word.”

“You should get home. Any longer out here and folks might wonder what you’re up to,” I say. I’m smiling, but it’s just a facial expression. I don’t really feel it. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You will,” he says, and walks away, leaving me standing alone in Oak Park.

My mind is racing, planning. Me and my father and Dennis and maybe Henry working on some kind of trap, JD doing leaflets. We could do it, I think. One frantic night with no sleep. We could put this plan into action so fast that nobody would see it coming. Speed is of the essence now, I know that much. The Shades are gathering, the Lanternmen are planning, and there are only so many hours between now and tomorrow night. That’s when everything will happen.

For better or for worse, this will be the end.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 8: The Ghost Of Cavanaugh Close

2006-09-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

"Through early morning fog, I see visions of the things to be, the pains that are withheld for me."

Morning barely reaches Abbot Street. It is after ten when I reluctantly leave JD’s arms and open the curtains to find a world that looks listless and dull. The day has been postponed until further notice, and the sun will not be crossing the picket line of thick grey cloud that blots out the sky. The Daylight World is still and quiet, windows and doors closed and locked, trees undisturbed by all but the faintest of breezes.

“What time is it?” JD murmurs.

“You don’t have to get up for work,” I reply.

“No…” she says.

“I know. Everything feels different”

I turn to see her struggling up from the blankets. She is pale and tired in this colourless light, her lips an angry red, her eyes a startling green flecked with slivers of brown. She rubs the sleep out of her face, then catches me looking at her breasts and pulls the covers up to her chin with a shy smile I’ve never seen before. For the first time, I find myself thinking of the line we’ve crossed and what it means.

“You okay?” she asks.

“Yeah. Still a little stiff.”

“You look terrible. Come back to bed.”

“There’s a lot to do today.”

“You’re not doing anything until I get the explanations you owe me.”

It hurts the side of my face to laugh, but she looks so stern that I can’t help myself. A more calculating person might decide that there really isn’t time for the kind of talk I know will be punctuated with kisses and maybe more, but then a more calculating person probably wouldn’t have a naked girl pouting theatrically at him from a warm bed. I go to her, and we waste some precious time reminding ourselves of how our mouths fit together and how we taste.

“They don’t see you because you were Shaded,” she says, a little while later. I am lying flat on my back with her head on my chest and one leg draped across mine.

“Right. Like the papers used to say it was a disease. I have it. I mean, it’s in me.”

“But you’re not sick and you’re not crazy,” she says, tickling my stomach with her nails. “Not as crazy as some, anyway.”

“I know. But then, how many people do you know that have been Shaded and lived to tell the tale? Maybe a handful, and most of them went a little loopy afterward.”

“From the disease, you think?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I felt…different after I got Shaded. I looked at the world a different way. I guess it stays with you.”

“But you didn’t lose your mind.”

“No. I don’t think that part is sickness. I think that’s just being afraid.”

“Understatement.”

“But you know what I mean.”

She nods. “So what now? You have a plan?”

“I have ideas, but I’m not sure about a lot of things. I’m going to talk to Cartwright today.”

“Can I come with you?”

“There’s something else I want you to do for me. It involves going back to the bar.”

JD looks at me. “What’s on your mind?” she asks.

“Something I want you to check out. You’ll need help, though, so you’re gonna have to wake up Dennis. That works because you need to talk to him anyway.”

“You guys went to the Dead Quarters before.”

“Yeah. I think he can tell you the rest, maybe help you understand why I’m going to see Cartwright.”

A pause, and then: “Are we going now?”

“The bed’ll still be here later, JD.”

She smirks and then kisses me hard on the mouth, sliding on top of me just the way she had last night. For a moment, we’re both getting carried away, and then I remember all that I need to remember and hold her face away from mine. She pouts and wriggles a little, laughing at my reaction. Finally, her face becomes serious.

“Listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“Good. Here’s what I need you to do…”

On Abbot Street, I check my watch and see that there are perhaps seven hours before dusk. The grey stillness I observed from my bedroom window is everything. In fact, the only member of our community out at all is Mr. Cartwright, who is propping his ladder against the side of JD’s house and preparing to climb to the Lantern. He is too absorbed in his work to register my presence, and I decide that there is time to keep another promise. I want to talk to Cartwright at home, not out here. I walk on in silence.

Witches Path yet again, but it barely registers. My mind is on my destination, and on the bulky weight in my back pocket. Where a right turn would take me to the Curfew Bar, a left leads along an old and disused road where weeds force their way between the paving stones and Lanterns are nowhere to be found. This represents something of a no-man’s land between the two Quarters of Oakfield that are still inhabited, and a route few people walk, even on the sunniest of days. The solitude doesn’t bother me. Quite the opposite. I’m tired of the Daylight World and I’m tired of bearing witness to the quiet desperation of my neighbours. I can talk to JD, and after the last couple of days, maybe I can talk to my father. The rest seem faceless. I’m almost glad for this grey day and this lonely street. Abbot Street and Quarter B seem like a fantasy or some strange dream.

Cavanaugh Close is only just inside Quarter A, far enough from its heart to have more in common with the wilderness I have just left than the more populous streets beyond. It has the look of a private estate, though any cameras or gates that may have once adorned its walls are long since gone. There is only one Lantern, and I know without closer scrutiny that the bungalow it guards is the residence of Henry Nicholls. Nobody lives in a home with no Lanterns.

It is a long time before he answers my knock, long enough for me to have taken his daughter’s shoe from my pocket and pushed my hand into it, wriggling my fingers to give shape back to its flattened form. I remember the graveyard of discarded clothing, and something of the enormous grief that filled me that morning finds its way up into my throat, making me squeeze my eyes closed on the threat of tears. When I open them, I see a vague shape moving beyond the frosted glass.

“Can I help you?” Henry Nicholls asks. He has opened the door only a fraction, and he peers through the gap like a frightened child. His face is small and white, and the semi-circles of bruised skin beneath his eyes indicate a stressed and sleepless man.

I can’t find the words. I take the shoe in both hands and hold it up between us like an offering.

“You…where did you find that?” he asks. He lets the door fall open and stands before me in a dressing gown that hangs loosely from his tall, skinny frame. His eyes are fixed on the shoe, yet he makes no move to take it from me.

“On Witches Path. It’s…Judy’s?”

He nods. Finally, he lifts the shoe from my hands.

“My girl,” he says. His voice is hollow. “Now we’ve all been Touched.”

“I’m sorry. I found it a few days ago. A lot’s been going on and this is the first chance I’ve had…”

“No…it’s…it’s okay. How did you find me?” He’s crying and I don’t think he even realises it. The tears simply spill from his eyes and down the sides of his face.

“My father is John Trent. I think you might know him. Or at least, you might have known him five or six years ago. I looked in the old phonebook to get your address.”

“Kennedy, isn’t it?” he asks the shoe.

“Ken,” I reply. “Just Ken.”

“Thank you, Ken,” he says. “I think…I think I’m going to go back inside now.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Nicholls.”

“Yes. We’re all sorry, I think. Thank you,” he says, and closes the door without once looking up at me.

Deep in thought, I walk back up Cavanaugh Close and along the disused road to Witches Path. We cannot go on like this. I have a plan, but right now it feels as frail and fragile as the look on Henry’s face when he’d taken his daughter’s shoe from my hand. There is no way of stopping the Shades, of destroying them the way I’d like to. I think I can make a difference, but nothing I have is even close to the weapon these people need. If I could stand before them, show them something huge and powerful and awe-inspiring, then maybe they’d believe, and maybe then they’d stop walking around like they’re already dead. As things stand, I have nothing but theories, and the only one I think truly believes in those theories is JD.

I cut into the woods without really thinking about what I’m doing until I find myself standing before the pile of damp, discoloured clothing once more. This is the one mystery I cannot seem to solve, the one contrary piece of evidence in my carefully constructed theory of the Shades. Why would they do this? What does it mean? It just doesn’t fit with everything else I’ve learned and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s somehow important.

“Ken?”

I jump and spin around, my lungs squeezed empty by shock, my heart accelerating to a staccato rhythm. Cartwright stands a few feet behind me. He’s holding a large wrench in his hand.

“You scared the shit out of me,” I say, and my voice is loud and unsteady.

“You look like hell, Ken. I thought you were hurt…Touched. What are you doing out here?” he asks. He is looking around me, at the graveyard.

“I might ask you the same question.”

“Mining the old Lanterns. No-one’s going to be using this path anymore and they barely work anyway. Some parts degrade faster than others.” He shrugs. “What’s that you’re looking at?”

“Clothes. I think the Shades left them here.”

“The Shades,” he says, and that’s all.

We stand in silence for a few moments and I find myself sizing him up, gauging my youth and size against his labourer’s strength and the fact that he’s holding the wrench. I have known Mr. Cartwright all my life, yet he is a Lanterman, and in my mind, that word is more loaded with possibility than it used to be. I think I could take him, if only because he wouldn’t be expecting it and because he doesn’t strike me as the fighting type. He is not yet as old as Dennis, but he has several years on my father, and he is losing what was probably once an impressive physique. If I moved first, I’m pretty sure I’d come out on top.

“Actually,” I say, “I’m glad I bumped into you. I was on my way to your house. There were some things I wanted to ask you.”

“I’m pretty busy. I need to get these parts and then get on up to the Curfew Bar. Maybe you could pop round later.”

I’m almost sure that JD and Dennis will have been and gone by now. Almost sure.

“Important things,” I say, and my voice contains a cool insistence I didn’t know I was capable of. It’s a voice that suspects it might be being fucked with and doesn’t like the idea one little bit.

Cartwright frowns and scratches his head with his free hand. Maybe he sees my eyes flicker to the wrench, because he relaxes his grip and lets it hang limply from his fingers.

“What’s going on here, Ken?”

“I hear you guys are forming a union.”

“A union?” He laughs a little. “Maybe a social club.”

“I also hear the words ‘Lantern Tax’ pretty often.”

“That’s just gossip. There’s…”

“Like the gossip in the Dead Quarters before the lights went out?”

“Now hold on just a minute. That’s specu…”

“No, you hold on just a minute.” My voice has risen again, but this time it is firm and clear. “Some of the gossip around here is so much bullshit, I know that. But I also know that pretty much everybody in C and D got Shaded except for maybe a few lucky Lanternmen. You want to talk about speculation? Fine, let’s speculate. Let’s speculate that there were rumours of a Lantern Tax in C and D, and that maybe those rumours were getting close to a reality. Let’s speculate that some bright spark had the idea of throwing a scare into the citizens by maybe turning out the lights for a few minutes. While we’re at it, let’s also speculate that they underestimated the Shades in the same way that have and things got a little out of control. That’s a lot of dead people, Cartwright, and I have to say that the thought of similar ideas being tossed around the Quarter I live in doesn’t exactly fill me with joy. Are you beginning to see where I’m coming from?”

“I would never…” he says, and then trails off. His face has gone white. “I mean, we’ve been talking about getting paid for what we do, but that’s only fair. It’s a hard job, and not too many can do it.”

“No-one’s going to go for that idea, and you know it. People around here are beginning to wonder when the next lot of bills are coming, and after a while they’re going to start getting used to the idea that maybe they’re not. I’ve been getting paid cash in hand since June, and I know my dad hasn’t paid for electricity or gas since around about the same time…”

“Neither has anyone else around here, Ken. The reality is that the council has broken up and the government doesn’t seem to be keeping an eye on things anymore.”

“Backed into a corner,” I say. “A country and then cities and then towns and then Quarters and then streets. And nobody really notices and nobody really cares. The old ways are going out of style, Cartwright, and nobody’s going to be too pleased if you start trying to bring them back. Sure, we need the Lanterns. But then what happens when we need electricity and water and gas, too?”

“People will supply them. And those people will need to be paid. That’s how it works.”

“And the Shades?”

“What about them?”

“Like I said, we’re backed into a corner. There are thousands of them, man, maybe millions. Don’t you think that might be just a little more important than getting paid?”

“No-one’s going to switch off the Lanterns,” he says, but his eyes slide away from mine, and for the first time, he looks unsure. “A and B won’t be Dead Quarters.”

“Your profession has blood on its hands,” I say.

He looks startled. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“You’re wrong, Ken,” he says. “You’re wrong.”

And then he turns and strides away up the path, stooping to pick up his toolkit from beneath one of the old council Lanterns. I watch his retreat, knowing for the first time that there’s something in the story Old Dennis told me, something that Cartwright knows. I scared him, I think, but not with my arguments or my hints at physical threat. He’s either a very good actor or a man only just realising what’s going on around him. Cartwright, I think, isn’t one of the bad guys. But if he’s in some sort of union, and if he’s familiar with the idea of turning out the Lanterns, then he’s the key to finding the Lanternmen from the Dead Quarters. I’ll be talking to him again, but it seems wise to let him think about it first.

For the good guys, for me and JD and my father and Old Dennis and whomever else, there is now a certain clarity to the questions of both Shades and Lanternmen. I think I have something of an answer to the former, but the latter requires the community. I cannot go against a ghost of an idea by myself. Their influence touches all of us.

“We’ve all been Touched,” I murmur. Henry Nicholls’s words. He was referring to his family; to Judy and Judy’s mother. To himself. Henry Nicholls has been Touched.

“Touched,” I say, into the silence of Witches Path. “Like me.”

Instead of going home, I turn and head back towards Cavanaugh Close.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 7: Healing

2006-09-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

"Shell smashed, juices flowing. Wings twitch, legs are going. Don't get sentimental, it always ends up drivel. One day, I am gonna grow wings, a chemical reaction. Hysterical and useless."

My dad was waiting up for me when I got home. Or maybe he was waiting up for news of the Curfew Bar and my fate. He ran into the hallway when he heard me coming through the door. He looked old and tired. He wore a mask of relief that failed to cover the belief I could see melting in his eyes and beginning to run down his cheeks. He’d been sure I was gone.

My exhaustion was beyond anything I’d ever experienced. His babble was just that, and I didn’t understand a word. I held up a weary hand and he fell into silence.

“JD…” I said.

“She got back,” he replied. “She told us what happened.”

And as if my desire for that knowledge had been the only thing holding me up, my knees buckled and I fell forward into my father’s embrace. He lifted me like the child I had once been. He murmured in my ear. He kissed my forehead and the side of my face as he carried me to my room and laid me down on my bed. I fell into a dreamless sleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

Later, I was aware of further kisses, all over my face. These were from lips far softer than my dad’s, lips that were surrounded by smooth, warm skin. Through half-lidded eyes I watched JD straighten and strip to her underwear. She pulled back the covers and slipped into bed beside me. I lifted my head only to let it fall on her chest. She wrapped her arms around me.

“I love you,” she whispered, and I did not know whether those words came from memory or reality or the sleep that was dragging me down into healing oblivion.

I dreamed that The Daylight World went on without me. I was rumour and speculation. Mine was a name on the tip of every tongue. The Chinese Whispers went around, and by the time dark fell once again, I was a non-person. To mention my plight was to mention what had happened to us at the Curfew Bar, to mention the beings that had visited such devastation upon us, to mention things we do not talk about.

Darkness in my room. Silence broken only by the breaths of the girl lying spooned in my embrace. The fading tastes of whiskey and adrenaline are coppery and sour in my mouth. My entire body aches like a rotting tooth, various injuries competing for my attention while my muscles complain of the exertion I have put them through. One arm rests on the naked curve of JD’s hip, my hand flat on her belly, her fingers laced through mine.

“JD,” I whisper.

“Ken,” she says.

My eyelids feel glued together. It is an effort to force them apart, to see her face in extreme close-up when she turns toward me. In hope she is truly beautiful; hazel eyes and creamy skin and a full-lipped mouth waiting for a reason to smile.

“We made it,” I say.

“Shelley?”

I shake my head.

“I thought you were dead,” she says, touching my cheek, tracing the line of my jaw.

“I am. We all are.”

“How did you…?”

“Later,” I say. “Please. Talk later.”

We kiss, we touch, we undress. We make clumsy, delicate love. She sits astride me and holds my hands, moulds her mouth and her body to mine. For however long we are together like this, in the timeless darkness of my room, I think only of what she’s doing to me, what I’m doing to her, how she tastes and feels and smells. At the moment of her orgasm, I devour her mouth and her sigh rushes down my throat and into my lungs, making me feel resuscitated and finally alive. Consumed by the heat of my excitement, I lift my hips and say her name and then gasp as I am tensed and then released by my own climax.

We hold each other in wordless relief. I stare at the cracks in my ceiling and consider our reality as it all comes flooding back. When I am sure she is asleep, I gently disengage myself from her arms and walk stiffly to the bathroom.

My father looks up with a curiously childlike expression when I enter the living room. I feel clean and strong where he is dirtied and exhausted by grief and lack of sleep. For perhaps the first time in my nineteen years, I feel like a man.

“What happened out there?” he asks. “Tell me everything.”

And I do, starting with the moment Shelley told us the Lanterns were out and ending with my discovery of the mountain of clothing in the woods. He listens and does not interrupt, even when I pause to think or attempt to clarify those moments where I wasn’t in my right mind. He nods at my untidy narrative, looks puzzled and thoughtful at the moments of revelation, pins me with careful, sceptical scrutiny when I move from the events of last night to the theories and beliefs they have instilled in me.

“You look like hell,” he says, when he’s sure I’m done.

I touch my face and wince. “It was a table or a chair. Something fell on me. When I ran through the woods, I guess I wasn’t too worried about the branches. I guess I fell a few times.”

“I didn’t think you were coming home. I really didn’t. I’m…sorry for that.”

He lowers his head. He won’t meet my eyes.

“I know you didn’t, dad. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Last night is…it’s over. It happened, but it’s over. Nobody wanted to go to the Curfew Bar, did they? No Lanterns, no safety. I get it. I wouldn’t have gone either.”

It takes him a long time to look up. When he does, I see in his eyes what is almost an acknowledgement of the experience I have had and the change I have gone through. What he sees, I think, is that I am no longer afraid, and that I am quite prepared to go out there and walk amongst the Shades to prove it.

“So what now?” he asks me. “I believe what you’ve told me, but I’m not sure how it helps us.”

“To be honest, neither am I. I have an idea, but there are a lot of holes in it.”

“You want to share it with me?”

“Not yet. I need to talk to Mr. Cartwright. I also need to go back up to Witches Path.”

“Christ, why?”

“An experiment. I need to know that last night had nothing to do with those specific circumstances. That’s the most important part of my idea.”

“Ken…please,” he says, staring at me.

“If it doesn’t work out, I can always run. I’m not afraid.”

“That what worries me. I don’t know how it was for you last night, not really. But don’t get carried away, okay? I don’t want to lose you.”

“I don’t want to lose me,” I say.

“Janey still upstairs?” he asks, relaxing a little.

“Sleeping.”

He nods. “She’s a good kid. I’ve always liked her.”

“Is that your blessing?” I feel my face colouring, even after all this.

“You need my blessing?” he asks, and a genuine smile finally cracks the mask of his face.

“Need’s a…funny word. It means a lot that you approve of me.”

He takes his cigarettes from his breast pocket, pulls one of those slim, white sticks free with a trembling hand. As he lights it and the room is filled with a smell that will always remind me of my childhood, I take enough of my uncomfortable pigeon-steps that I can fall down onto the sofa beside him. He sighs and a thick cloud of smoke forms before us, hanging in the air like words unspoken.

“Since your mother…since then…I’ve tried hard. I think you’re turning into quite a…into quite a man. I don’t know how much of that was me, but I’m proud. I’m really proud of you.”

Tears standing in his eyes, his stare fixed on the wall opposite, somewhere just above the photo of my mother that’s been gathering dust on the mantelpiece for as long as I can remember.

“I’ve never resented you,” I say. “I love you. I can say that and not have to worry that it might not be true, dad.”

He nods, smiles a little, closes his eyes and takes another huge drag on his cigarette. He turns to look at me.

“Do what you have to,” he says. “You’re not a child anymore.”

“I know. It would take forever for me to tell you everything. And maybe…maybe I don’t really have the words. It’s so hard to explain. I know what I think, but it’s so fucking hard to explain.”

“Go on,” he says. “But mind her. She’s fragile.”

I get up and leave the room, go straight out the front door before how it is to be in the same place as my father and JD overwhelms me and all the things I must do become too much to bear.

Abbot Street is darkness and silence. The Lanterns glow and bring a warmth that is all metaphorical. Winter is coming hard now. Every surface glitters with frost and the warm vapour of my breath parts the night and is dragged away into a purple sky. I watch my feet and concentrate on walking, feeling trepidation overcome with the relief of using these muscles again, of warm blood flowing into my tired limbs. It is another healing, and while it is nothing so satisfying as finding my place with those I love, it signals what is almost a defeat of the ghosts I now seek to confront. I have been amongst them. I have seen them in a way no-one else alive can claim. Yet still I walk, still I have substance. I am not afraid.

I walk Abbot Street and the fringes of Quarter B. I stray beyond the comforting blanket of Lanternlight and out onto the main road. My feet find Witches Path and stop only when I reach that spot where I was Shaded, where terror made me quick enough that they could not finish what they started, where this story began. I remember that icy touch, but it feels distant now. In my body, I am sure, that cold has spread and numbed me in ways my senses cannot comprehend. In my mind, it has faded and become a memory. I will never really forget it, I know that, but it has receded far enough that terror seems a distant, powerless emotion.

Witches Path, then. A winter’s night. The moon is full and powerful, casting its ghostly light through the trees and down onto the glistening asphalt. As I walk down the hill, I wonder if this is the sight Judy Nicholls saw before she died, if she had time to appreciate the desolate beauty of this place before its shadows stole away her young life. Even now I see them floating between the scattered spotlights of that stark luminescence, lifeless bodies constantly struggling against old definitions as though trapped in the memory of what they once were. Witnessing them like this, I feel something akin to sympathy, almost an understanding of what it is to be dead. I remember Shelley’s words and wonder if she had something, if her definition of these spectres wasn’t closer to the truth than any I have heard. I do not believe that there is a God in any scripture that could turn his back on these tormented souls. Such cruelty could surely never be. But the Shades are dead, of that I have no doubt, and I sense that if there is anything at all that they want, it is to finally be at rest.

I stop at the edge of this small wood, standing close to a tree I’ve come to think of as my own, its branches offering the same shelter they’d given when I was alone and wounded. I watch a Shade drift silently out onto the path less than ten feet in front of me. My heartbeat accelerates, empathising with memory, recalling all the times I ran and all the fear I have experienced.

“I’m here,” I say, and my voice is loud in this place of silence.

The Shade, of course, does not respond. It is facing me, drifting towards me. Perhaps it senses the light against my clothes and my hair. I really have no understanding of these things. Perhaps it is curious of motion. Perhaps it is knows that there is a solid object where previously there was nothing. But it does not see me in the way they could see me before. If it could, I feel sure it would already be too late.

“See me,” I say. “I’m right here.” My voice rises to a shout. “I’m right in front of you!”

The Shade moves closer and a shiver runs up my spine, as though I can sense the proximity of it, of its absence. At this distance, it doesn’t seem so much a thing as a hole. It is almost as though a human shape has been cut from reality, leaving a dark vacuum that exerts its own cold gravity. I remember my fascination at the Curfew Bar, how it had seemed like I was in shock. I feel drawn. I feel I could walk forward and just step into that shape, disappear into a world where all is lifeless shadow.

I blink. I take a clumsy backward step. This is the glamour. This is the pull they exert over us, the fascination that gives rise to The Daylight World. Beneath sunlight, we dream of their dark mystery and conduct our daily business in a sort of hysterical daze. We kiss our loved ones, we talk about the weather, we hang out our washing and go about our chores. All the while, they haunt us and taunt us as though they were an ambition and not a fear. Their great power is not their speed or their touch. It is the fear we have of what we are, and a feeling that perhaps the only reality is the darkness of this embrace.

Now I take a sideways step. The illusion that the Shade was somehow watching me is dispelled. It passes over the spot where I was standing without pause or curiosity. It simply drifts with that same blankness, that same absence. I turn and see so many more hanging between and behind the trees. I see them, but they do not see me.

I can still be Touched, though. That they are blind to me does not change what they can do. I am careful to give the Shade a wide berth when I rejoin the path and head for home.

The house is in darkness. In my bedroom, JD is an untidy shape beneath the covers.

“Where’d you go?” she murmurs, as I undress.

“Witches Path,” I reply.

“What?”

“They can’t see me,” I say. “The Touch. They don’t see me anymore. They were chasing you.”

Silence, and then: “You went out to…what…test this out?”

“I had to know.”

“You’re insane. What…I mean…I don’t know where to start. You haven’t told me anything…I’m…I don’t know.”

“In the morning. I’ll tell you everything in the morning, I promise.”

“You’d better.”

I laugh, and it feels natural and good.

“Ken,” she says.

“Nothing. Really, it’s nothing.”

I slide beneath the covers, wriggle into her arms where it's warm and safe and wonderful. She kisses my forehead and my cheeks and my lips. I touch her naked skin and she wraps her legs around my waist.

“Promise me you won’t do things without telling me anymore,” she says.

“I promise,” I say. “I want you with me.”

“You’d better,” she says, and then: “I want you in me.”

And then all is kisses and sighs and the delirious warmth of her embrace. For now, at least, I am home.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 6: The Long Walk Home

2006-09-18T21:42:00.000-07:00

"Sinner - I have never learned. Beginner - I cannot return. Forever I must walk this earth, like some forgotten soldier."

I sit with my back resting against the trunk of a gnarled old oak tree, staring up through its twisted branches at a small and impossibly distant sun that bathes Witches Path in weak, watery light. I see it, but I cannot feel it. My skin is wet and cold, my limbs numb. The only thing that seems real is Judy Nicholls’s shoe. I have been turning it over in my hands for some time now, feeling the light, furry texture of suede and the barely perceptible lashings of frayed and broken laces where they fall over and between my trembling fingers. The left side of my face throbs without obvious rhythm. It feels swollen and bruised. When I close my right eye, I see that the vision from its twin is narrowed and distorted. My shirt is torn and dirtied, the skin beneath scraped and penetrated in too many places to count.

Everything is different now. I have seen the Shades in all their capering glory. I have seen how they flock to light and warmth, how they smother it and make it their own, how they steal away what they can no longer have. Any naïvety I once possessed is gone, dragged to the ground and claimed as Shelley was, buried beneath those warped and reaching forms until no trace remained. At least Judy left a shoe. It is a ridiculous memento, incongruous and meaningless without its partner, but it’s something. It is a memory of a girl that once walked here. Perhaps not a statue or a diary or some grand memorial to recall a life taken well before time, but something her parents might hold or keep and know where and how their daughter was claimed. With that knowledge, they might at least begin to come to terms with tragedy. If I can ever find the strength to pick myself up, I will take it to them. This much I promise.

I am no longer afraid of the dark or the ghosts that call it home. On the floor of the Curfew Bar, beneath the death-dance of the Shades, I lay screaming and weeping, curled into the tightest of foetal balls. Even then, their glamour was such that I could not bring myself to close my eyes. It wasn’t that we were wrong about their insubstantial nature or their comparative lack of strength. We were mathematically fooled, stupid enough to never really understand that every missing person was likely a new Shade, and that their numbers had swelled beyond our worst nightmares. The doors were broken and the windows shattered not by some surprising and hidden power, but by the sheer weight of the crowds that had been drawn by the light to gather at every entrance. There were hundreds. Outside, perhaps thousands. Beyond the Lanternmen, nobody has ever mentioned anybody being a refugee from the Dead Quarters, and if that is the case then perhaps the entire population of those doomed communities now drifts in shadow, irresistibly pulled to those places where there is still light and life.

Yet I was not Touched. With Shelley gone, her murderers span and flew in the light like dervishes, ricocheting from the walls and the ceiling and each other. They turned over tables and sent chairs spinning across the room. They raced in and out through the windows, sometimes catching on the broken, jagged glass and leaving streaks of themselves behind like material caught on barbed wire where – separated from whatever force gave it motion and life – it was reduced to liquid that streamed to the floor and melted away into vapour. Whatever sense they use to ‘see’, though, was useless when it came to the cowering boy who lay terrified and paralysed beneath them.

I do not know for certain, but the memory that comes is of the Shades I saw when Dennis and I drove into the town centre. They were gathered as I often see them gathered, an image that has always made me think of them as creatures that roamed and hunted in packs. But they seemed blind to each other, callously colliding as though unaware that their own kind were so close at hand. If what they see is light and warmth, then perhaps darkness and cold don’t register at all, except as a respite from the Lanterns, the one thing they seem to avoid. I have been thinking about this ever since the reality of dawn made the lights of the bar impotent and the Shades began to thin in number as individuals and then groups slipped back out into the growing day. They come to light, but that which emanates from the Lanterns is too much. It leaves them confused and disoriented, drunk on that which they crave. Beneath the sun, I think, they go to places of relative darkness, hiding perhaps in abandoned buildings or woods like this one. That would explain why Witches Path is so haunted, and why the day is so safe.

They do not have eyes or ears or noses. They do not react to the same things we do. Whatever senses they have strike me as very black and white and restricted. Light and dark, hot and cold; these are the extremes by which they are guided. Somehow, I am now sure, the fact that I have been Touched either dulls those senses or eliminates them altogether. In the Curfew Bar, I was invisible. Had I not been, my fate would have been as assured as Shelley’s. Mine is not a unique affliction, but it is rare. As far as I am aware, though, I am the only one who knows of this potential immunity. I have that knowledge, I have a shoe, and I have a prayer that JD was fast enough last night. Everything else seems vague and distant.

I draw my legs up beneath me, and the scrape of my shoes on the gravel seems too loud. I rest one hand on the tree and haul myself unsteadily to my feet. My body feels cramped and stiff, and it is only now that I think about the time and realise how many hours have passed since I fled the Curfew Bar and plunged headlong into the woods. The bare branches whipped and wounded me, but at the time I was propelled by the adrenaline of terror, and I barely noticed. Now those cuts feel dirty and sore, and I want nothing more than to settle into a hot bath and then sleep. The thought of nightmares no longer bothers me. I have seen worse now. I have felt and heard worse. The fears and insecurities that live in my head have been challenged and surpassed.

It is when I move to set off that I realise there is something wrapped around my ankle. I look down and see red, shiny material. I bend to retrieve it and find myself holding a satin bra. Frowning, I step away from the tree and turn to look back at the broken branches and trampled grass that mark the path of destruction I have wrought. A few feet along it lie a pair of faded jeans. Further away, a striped shirt. Beyond that, what looks like an old brown sandal.

I do not have to follow this bizarre trail very far to discover its source. Away from Witches Path, hidden deep in the trees, there is a small clearing. Piled in its centre are clothes of every style and description. For my tired mind, it is a moment both of understanding and incomprehension. I must have run straight through the huge mound of clothing, kicking the sandal and dragging the other items with me. I had noticed this no more than I had noticed the injuries I was inflicting on myself. But the very presence of this bizarre sight goes against every belief I have come to hold about the Shades. They have no intelligence, and they've certainly never bothered with ritualistic behaviour like this before. What is the pile of clothes if not a graveyard of a sort? These are the jumbled remains of all those Shaded on Witches Path. If you had the time and were of a suitably macabre leaning, you could sort them by size and taste and get some idea of just how many had died to create this mountain of damp and faded colours.

So many dead. This is clothing no longer required because the former owners now live in darkness. I feel breathless and dizzy. I let myself fall back against a tree and rest there a while, almost grateful for the release of tears. I will remember this, but I will not think of it now. I haven’t the energy. All I want is to fall into blissful oblivion. Summoning what little strength I have left, I turn away from the graveyard and pick my way back to the path.

I walk slowly up the hill feeling leaden and exhausted. I will never run here again. On the far side, I pause to stare at the main road, to remember all those frantic nights when the last leg of our frantic sprint took us to the safety of the Lantern Truck. In hindsight it seems a foolish and hollow activity, something we did because our lives had no real meaning and because we needed to feel alive and afraid. At the time, though, it all made sense. There is no handheld equivalent of a Lantern that we could have carried through the woods, and there is no way that Dennis’s truck could ever have traversed the disused and broken road that passes the front of the Curfew Bar. We could have run the roads, but in the end, there was just as strong a likelihood of being attacked by Shades there as on Witches Path. The Path was more dangerous, but it was also the fastest route to a place where we could be picked up. If I look hard enough, then maybe there are holes in the logic that led us to take those jobs at the Curfew Bar. But in the end, we needed the money and we needed something that removed us from the Daylight World. It may be that all close friends think themselves different from the rest, special in some indefinable way. JD and I have always felt that way, I think. It’s unspoken, but it’s there. There is us, and then there is everyone else.

Shelley’s God is a cruel one. If he was to exist, then his past record indicates that there is a price I would have to pay for gaining knowledge that may help us in what are starting to feel like our final days, for holding onto my life while so many others are losing theirs. In a biblical tale, I would lead the victims of the Daylight World against the Shades, but the price God would exact would be terrible. In a biblical tale, JD’s revelation that a world filled only with Shades was inevitable could lead only to her own death. Those are the rules when every story has a moral and every action must be answered for. I refuse to believe that. In a way, Witches Path belongs to JD. It is here that she shines the brightest, drawing the ire and pursuit of shadowy enemies that just never seem to be fast enough. She can’t be gone. If she is, then I suppose I will deliver the shoe and the information and then walk away. Being close to Lanterns isn’t the necessity it once was.

The eyes of Community B are wide and stunned. They watch me as they might watch a Shade drifting aimlessly through the neighbourhood in broad daylight. It’s funny, but not so as you’d laugh. I am aware of the way they freeze, of the way their heads turn, whispered conversations carrying on the soft breeze. I am aware of the picture I must present; a young man they have seen around before, battered and bedraggled and walking with the slow, awkward shuffle of a Romero zombie; face bruised and misshapen, shirt torn and bloody, a girl’s shoe dangling limply from his right hand.

I turn the corner of Abbot Street and begin what seems like an endless walk home. Curtains twitch, activity ceases, sound falls away. My neighbours watch me like the scattered audience to some nightmare parade.

“My God,” someone says. “Are you…are you okay?”

The voice is not familiar, but something in the part of my memory that now seems so dislocated and far away makes me stop and turn. I am standing outside number thirty-eight, and a brunette from a boy’s fantasies is staring at me, concern creasing her brow and glistening in her bright blue eyes.

“I’m…alive,” I hear a thin, harsh voice reply. I have screamed my vocal chords raw.

“What happened to you? It’s Ken, isn’t it? You live up the road.”

A derisive little snort of amusement comes from my nostrils. I feel my lungs hitch, and for a moment, I am absolutely sure I am going to fall into hysterical laughter that I will be powerless to prevent.

“You know my name,” I say. “I used to watch you sunbathing. I used to dream about you all the time.”

She colours and stares at me, her mouth moving as though trying on different words and finding nothing appropriate. You could imagine kissing her, tasting her lipstick and feeling her soft warmth. She’s beautiful in a way JD can only dream about, but she isn’t real. This is the DW, The Daylight World, Disneyland. It is populated by dolls and puppets and bad actors. If the Shades are the drifting dead of the night, then we are the sunlit equivalent.

“I’m alive,” I tell her, and walk on.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 5: After Curfew

2006-09-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

"You're just looking for a boy bathed in infrared and sunlight. I'm all polish and reward. When I'm confident, I'm hopeless, just like everybody else right before they fall apart."

“Lanterns are out,” Shelley says.

The Curfew Bar is empty. It never gets particularly busy, but Sunday nights are the quietest of all, and for there to be nobody here at ten-to-midnight but Shelley, JD, and I is hardly unusual.

“What?” says JD. There is a faint smile on her face. “They can’t be.”

“They’re out,” Shelley says. She is standing at the window with her back to us, and because I can clearly see her reflection in the glass, I know there is no light in the car park.

JD is still smiling that little smile, like it’s ridiculous to even suggest such a thing. She is wide-eyed and breathing hard. The glance she gives me is fearful, almost accusing, and she moves quickly around the bar to join Shelley at the window.

“Just ours?” I ask, trying to keep the hope out of my voice.

Shelley shakes her head, but it is JD who answers me. “No,” she says. “It’s dark out there. I can see the old ones on Witches Path, but that’s it.”

“They’re on a different circuit,” I say, remembering a conversation with my father. “There must be a…”

And then JD screams and jumps away from the window, losing her balance and falling back. I see a Shade pressed against the glass, drifting in that slow and apathetic way of theirs, whatever substance it has making soft whispering sounds of contact and friction that carry in the silence of the bar.

“Kennedy,” Shelley says, utterly calm, “you’d best close the doors and check the windows. All of them. Janey, I need you to switch on the lights. I’ll close the drapes.”

JD hasn’t moved since she fell. Her mouth opens and closes, but no sound emerges. She’s starting to cry.

“Janey Dolores, I asked you to switch on the main lights, not sit there blubbing,” Shelley says. Her voice is raised, and there is something in the way she is so calm and still that makes her seem larger, more commanding.

JD gets slowly to her feet. Without looking at Shelley or I, without looking back at the window, she walks stiffly behind the bar and through the door to the staff room. Though something in me wants nothing more than to watch the languorous progress of the Shade at the window, I force myself to look away, to move. I take the keys from the bar, pass Shelley’s motionless figure, then lock and bolt the main doors. The night is cold, and I’m fairly sure all of the windows are closed. Nonetheless, I do a circuit of the bar, methodically checking each and every one. It is as I complete this task that the room is suddenly flooded with powerful light from the strips above us. I have never actually seen them switched on before, and it makes the place look dirty and unfamiliar.

“All secure, I think,” I tell Shelley.

“Check the trapdoor in the cellar and the fire exit in the staff room,” she replies. “Then you’d both best come back in here.”

I nod. I am trying to think, but my mind keeps catching on the image of the Shade pressed up against the window. There is something almost soothing in the way it moved, the sigh of its body against the glass like the tide pushing slowly up a beach. Its darkness makes me think of sunlight, its coldness warmth. I wonder, distantly, if I am in shock.

The trapdoor hasn’t been opened in years, and though it is secured only by a bolt that is more rust than metal, I am sure that it would take three or four powerful men to pull it open from the outside. The Shades are many things, but strong is not one of them. Satisfied that the cellar is secure, I go up to the staff room, where I find the fire exit closed and JD standing motionless against the wall.

“JD?” I say.

Silence. She stares straight ahead, breathing deeply and slowly.

“Janey?”

A flicker of recognition in her face. Her eyes move to mine, and my stomach turns over at the unhappiness and fear I see there. She blinks rapidly and the tears finally come. Her mouth trembles and she comes to me, anxious to bury her face in my chest, perhaps to feel small and helpless in my embrace. She presses herself against me and grabs at my arms when I wrap them around her, as though willing me to hug her more tightly.

“Hey,” I say, barely whispering. “Hey, it’s okay. They can’t get in here, JD. We’re locked up tight. We’re safe.”

She mutters something into the front of my shirt. I feel her chest hitching. She draws her head back and her eyes are red-rimmed and without focus.

“It’s okay,” I repeat, and it sounds as pointless as it feels.

“It’s not okay.” Her words are thick and slurred with grief. “It’s not ever gonna be okay. It’s just time. They’ll get everyone.”

“They won’t…it doesn’t…fuck, JD. It’s not written.”

She kisses me. I don’t expect it and don’t respond. I am aware of her open mouth against mine and her tongue pushing between my slack, surprised lips. I am aware of the way her breasts are squashed into my chest and of the way she seems to lift her hips, almost grinding herself against me. She tastes like chewing gum and smells like shampoo. There is a feverish desperation about her, and in those fleeting moments when her mouth is on mine, I know that in another time and another more private place, this could and would have been a precursor to everything else.

She breaks the kiss and steps backward out of my embrace. She stares at me for a few seconds. I stare back. I can’t think of anything I could possibly say. She brings her hands to her face and wipes quickly and aggressively at the tear-tracks. She offers an embarrassed grin, though whether it’s for her fear or her sadness or the kiss I have no idea. She turns and walks out of the room.

“Too fast,” I say, into the vacuum she leaves behind. “Slow down. Think.”

It’s an effort of will to push it all down, to clear my head of everything but the situation at hand. My mouth wants only to think of how she tasted and how her tongue pushed at mine. My ears hear only the sound of the Shade sliding along the window. I find myself staring at the panel of switches JD’s hand was resting on when I entered the room. Light, Lanterns, Old Dennis staring through the windscreen of the truck and telling me about the Dead Quarters. Strikes, Lanternmen, Shades, screaming. Where were the back-ups? Where are the back-ups?

Back in the bar, JD is sitting at a table and Shelley is pouring three glasses of whiskey. The drapes are closed now, and all is silent.

“Where are the back-ups?” I ask.

Shelley looks up and smiles. It’s not an expression I’ve often seen and I feel favoured and almost happy, like a boy in class asking the right question.

“There are only so many working generators,” she says. “Residential areas have priority. I doubt we’ll get the Lanterns back tonight, but the people at home are almost certainly safe.”

“Are we?” JD asks.

“Honey, everything’s locked. Shades don’t smash windows or charge through walls. If they can't get in, we don’t need to worry about Lanterns for now. We’ll just hang on for sunrise. No doubt your parents’ll be up here as soon as it’s light.”

“You’re so calm,” I say. I can’t help but smile.

“Lanterns don’t last forever and our friends out there can’t get to us. That old Lantern was bound to go sooner or later. They’re only lightbulbs in the end. Sit down, Kennedy,” she waves a hand at the glasses, “get that down you.”

I take a whiskey and she nods approval. We sit at JD’s table in silence, the three of us concentrating mainly on our drinks. JD glances up only once, and that’s to show me the expression of disgust on her face when she takes a sip. Neither of us are drinkers, and the whiskey is strong and sour in the mouth and throat, making me want to gag. Drinking it is an effort, but once it’s down in my belly, I understand why people do. It makes me feel warm and pleasantly dizzy, suddenly comfortable and safe sitting here in the bar with JD and Shelley, even though they are probably the two people in the world I’d least wanted to be close to tonight.

JD had barely spoken to me all day. By the time we’d met to take our afternoon walk up Witches Path to the Curfew Bar, we’d both heard that Judy Nicholls was missing. News, especially bad news, travels fast between the various tiny communities that make up Quarter B, and the disappearance of a local was always cause for concern and gossip. JD was waiting for me when I came out of the house, but she refused to meet my gaze and spoke only in monosyllabic answers to direct questions. On Witches Path, I stopped and picked up the shoe I was sure belonged to the unfortunate girl while JD walked on without looking back. The atmosphere between us had continued in the same vein right up to the point where she’d suddenly wanted to be held and kissed. Now everything was up in the air, and I had no idea what I could say to her, especially with Shelley sat at the third point of such an awkward triangle.

As for our employer, she had emptied her glass before JD and I had even tasted the contents of ours, showing no sign of enjoying or even being affected by the heat and flavour of the whiskey. She then refilled her glass at the bar and brought the bottle back to the table.

Shelley is the only person I can think of who could actually run an establishment like the Curfew Bar. She is old, yes, but that age shows itself in a kind of weary experience much more powerful than any apparent frailty. She is a large woman, though not in the sense of being fat. Shelley is both tall and wide, with a face that is unfeminine yet handsome. Her hair is a steely grey, forever tied back in a tight bun. Her hands are huge. The locals speak of her with awe and respect, though never within her earshot. I have never seen any of the customers, all of whom she knows by name, either argue with or question anything she says. I am not so much scared of Shelley as simply overwhelmed. Her very presence makes me feel young and stupid.

“So,” she says, lifting the bottle to refill her glass and top up ours. “What’s all this then?”

JD’s face goes an alarming shade of crimson and I feel my own face burning, even though I can’t help but laugh. Shelley is like the grandmother I never had. She is the only person who ever calls me by a full name even my father is ashamed to use. She always calls JD Janey. When angry, she calls her Janey Dolores, which JD absolutely hates. The only time I have failed to laugh at this was tonight.

“All what?” I say, looking straight at her and realising that I am a little drunk and that this is making me bold.

“You two,” she says.

I shrug. “It’s nothing, really. It’s been a strange few days.”

She smiles again. “We have a long night ahead of us, and I shouldn’t think we’ll be sleeping much.”

I take another sip of the whiskey, gulping down a cough and letting it slide down my throat and into my stomach before I speak.

“I went to the Dead Quarters last night, with Dennis McCluskey.”

JD looks up, startled.

“And what did you see?” Shelley asks.

“Shades. Just Shades, really. Dennis was talking about the Lanternmen.”

“Never had much truck with them, myself,” Shelley says. She drains her second glass. “Though I’ll need that Lantern fixed.”

“They’re thinking of charging for it,” JD says. “For repairs and maintenance, I mean. My dad says it’ll be a Lantern Tax.”

“No different from what the council used to do,” Shelley replies. “We need the Lanterns. Anything people need has a price.”

“Was it always that way?” I ask.

She nods. “One way or another. You don’t remember the times before the Lanterns, but there were always taxes. If the government didn’t tax for it, you could be damn sure you wouldn’t get it free. It’s always about money.”

“But I thought money didn’t really matter anymore,” I say. “I thought people were happy with the communal way of living. I don’t really know that much about it, but things were different when the towns had names, right?”

“Some things never change, Kennedy. Some are written in stone. Some will be passed down forever. If it wasn’t Lanterns, it’d be something else.”

That slow and somehow peaceful whispering at the window again. We all look up.

“They come to the light,” Shelley says.

“What for?” JD says. She sounds both terrified and curious. “Why?”

Shelley looks at her for a long moment before replying. “Nobody knows, pet. Back in the day, they tried to figure out why. I think they even caught a few for experiments. But they never could say why or how they do what they do.”

“What do you think?” I ask her. I can feel my heart beating hard and fast.

“You’ve talked to that old drunk McCluskey, Kennedy. He’s seen more than anyone, though no doubt he pissed most of what he knows up the wall. They’re not alive, are they? Not like us. They just float around out there until they sense light and warmth.”

“But why?” JD suddenly blurts. Her voice is rising, bordering on hysteria. Beneath the table, I slide my foot between hers, hook it around her calf and pull gently at her leg.

“I believe in a creator,” Shelley says. “I believe in heaven and I believe in an afterlife. Always have. These days, not so many have those faiths, and those that do have them as a retreat and an excuse. If you want to know what I think, then I’ll tell you. We’ve been abandoned, and the Shades are a symbol of that abandonment. In the past, God took in our dead with willing abandon. He understood that we were lost and alone and waiting only for His love. He understood that we did such terrible things because we were lonely and sad and frustrated. Somewhere alone the line, that changed. God has closed the gates of heaven because we are no longer worthy. We have gone too far. When we pass on now, we become shadows of our former selves, Shades if you like. We drift in the night and when we see light, any light, we rush toward it just as fast as we can, hoping – in our tired, dead way – that this time it will be the light that means we can finally come home.”

Sometime during the course of this speech, JD’s ankles had come together to hold my foot with the same desperation as she had hugged and kissed me. We’re both staring at Shelley.

I take another drink of the whiskey, a bolder drink. I let it offend my tongue and burn my throat and explode in my belly. I stare at Shelley and she stares right back, our eyes locked in what suddenly feels like a battle of faith. I feel somehow betrayed. I hear my glass slam down on the table, though I’m barely aware of the angry movement I have made to cause such a sound. My anger is hotter than the alcohol in my stomach, pushing adrenaline into my system until I feel as though I might stand and throw the table over, bend down to scream my rebuke in Shelley’s face.

“Bullshit,” I say. My voice is quiet, trembling with the sheer size of my anger. “Your God was Shaded a long time ago, Shelley, if He ever existed at all. Fuck, even if He did, it’s not like it matters now. According to you, we’re on our own, right? So fuck it. No point looking up for inspiration. No point at all.”

JD looks horrified, but Shelley’s face is as infuriatingly placid as it has been all along.

“That may well be,” she says. “But there is nowhere else to look anymore.”

I have a reply. The thoughts and words are building inside me, all the arguments that have been dancing inside my head since the day I was Touched finally falling into wonderful coherence. I’m actually smiling. I open my mouth to speak, and then something hits the main doors with such violence that the breath rushes out of my body in a gasp of shock. JD and Shelley both stand so suddenly that either the bottle or one of the glasses falls and shatters on the floor. The doors creak as though a great weight is being forced against them, and that sibilant sigh of insubstantial flesh against glass is suddenly all around us, filling the air and making me want to clap my hands over my ears.

“They can’t,” Shelley mutters. She is shaking her head, denying the evidence of her eyes and her ears.

“Ken?” JD gasps. “Ken?”

“The back door,” I say. I feel hollow and strangely calm. “Run, JD.”

“It’s dark,” she says. “Please…”

I turn and see that her face is a mask of utter terror, eyes and mouth open, all colour drained from her skin. I grab her shoulders and kiss her fiercely. Then I push her away. Behind me, I can hear Shelley muttering incoherently, hear the thuds and cracks of the doors giving way. JD stumbles but doesn’t fall, still staring helplessly back at me.

“Run!” I scream.

JD blinks at me. She reaches out and I wave her away with such anger that she finally relents, turning on her heels and doing what she does better than any of us. In the blink of an eye, she is through the door to the staff room and gone. I turn back to Shelley, and in the split-second before the doors finally give way, she plants those huge hands on my shoulders and shoves me to the floor.

I hear wood splintering and glass breaking. Stunned and breathless, I look up and see Shelley standing stoic and still beneath the harsh lighting. I see glittering slivers of flying glass. I hear the crash of a door hitting the floor. I see dark shapes dancing and twisting and blacking out the world. I scream.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 4: The Dead Quarters

2006-09-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

"We're not begging for too much, I don't think. Just need a goodbye kiss before we sink."

“I hate this,” I say. “I’ve never liked it, you know? But now I hate it. I can’t stand to do this.”

JD nods. She’s not really listening. Her face is blank, and she stares straight ahead into the darkness, bouncing nervously on the balls of her feet.

“Thirty seconds,” I say.

She assumes the position like a sprinter waiting for the starting pistol, right leg bent before her, left stretched out behind. I can see her trembling.

“Five, four, three, two…”

And she is gone, racing into the darkness. In seconds, I can no longer see her. I take off at a jog. With JD so far ahead of me, the risk is much lower than it could be. As long as I don’t arrive at the hill to find the path crowded with Shades, I am comparatively safe. Even if that situation did arise, I would have the option of returning to the Curfew Bar.

Along the path at the same leisurely pace, turning right and taking it easy down the hill, feeling my muscles loosen and the tension rising up through my belly and making my heart beat faster. The second right turn is in the dip that marks the halfway point, and this is where I am slowest, more than prepared to stop in my tracks and turn back. The hill is clear though, the moon shining like a beacon. No Shades, No JD, no nothing. I could be out for an evening run.

Nonetheless, I accelerate. I put my head down and release the energy that’s been building inside me, relax and let it flow, let it carry me up the steep gradient to safety. The fear is there, but in extremity it recedes. Unless a Shade were actually waiting for me with its arms open, I am going to make it. They are quick, but as yet there is no sign of them. With a running start like this one, the chances of my being caught tonight are getting lower all the time.

It’s an easy night, the kind of peaceful run you dream about. The kind of peaceful run I needed. It is as I am silently thanking JD and the Gods of chance and fate that I spot the shoe by the side of the path. I don’t stop. I don’t even slow down. But above my burning lungs, my heart is ice. There are probably a million reasons why a lone shoe would be lying there, but the only one I think of is the one that makes me find the strength to accelerate still further as I crest the hill and sprint down to the Lantern Truck that awaits, JD and Old Dennis waving and cheering me on.

“See? Nothing to worry about. Last night was a blip.” JD is smiling at me, her words barely carrying over the growl of the engine as we pull away.

I let her statement hang a few moments, getting my breath back.

“There was a shoe. A girl’s shoe,” I say.

“So?”

“It wasn’t there last night and it wasn’t there on our way to work.”

“How do you know?”

“You’d notice. Where it was, you’d notice. I’d notice. I know I would.”

“Ken…”

“I’m not shitting you, JD. I think they got someone.”

She stares at me, smile fading, and I feel like the worst kind of bastard. I am forever the cynic and the pessimist, forever the bearer of bad news.

“Well it wasn’t us,” she says, with surprising vehemence. “There isn’t anyone else that has any business being out there after dark.”

I shake my head, let it fall back against the cab, feeling the sweat drying on my skin, my lungs shrinking, my heart slowing. We pass the rest of the journey in silence.

On Abbot street, JD hops out of the truck and says goodbye only by throwing an angry wave over her shoulder. I watch her disappear into her house and climb slowly out myself, feeling old and tired. Every night seems like a drama now.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Ken,” Old Dennis calls.

“No doubt,” I reply, my thoughts elsewhere.

I walk down the driveway and hear the sound of the Lantern Truck’s engine expressing its enthusiasm for a run at wherever Old Dennis goes after he drops us off. I turn and call his name, and he leans out of the window, that roar dropping to a low growl. Aware of the late hour and the fact that my father and the rest of Abbot street are probably sleeping, I walk back to the Truck.

“Did you speak to my dad?”

“For a minute or two,” he replies. “He’s worried about you, that’s all.”

I nod, trying to find the words to frame the ideas and questions in my head. Dennis watches me expectantly, wearing a smile that conveys a kind of weary amusement. I’d guess he’s a little younger than Shelley, but that’s based on the timeframes of stories I’ve heard. If you were to take it on appearance, you would say Dennis was ten or even fifteen years the elder. His face is lined and damaged, and though he was probably once a large and powerful man, a manual labourer with an education that was all physical, he is now a bent and broken specimen. I rarely see him walk, and even sat in the cab of his Lantern Truck, he seems withered and ancient, a shadow of the man you can see behind his eyes if you look hard enough.

“It’s getting really dangerous,” I say, looking for a way to start a conversation. “I’m worried about JD.”

“Don’t need to worry about that one, son. She could outrun this truck if she was of a mind.”

“It doesn’t always matter how fast you are.”

Now he really does smile. It takes years off him. I know that’s a cliché, but it really does. Suddenly I understand why my dad says that he always kept my mum away from Old Dennis, who wasn’t so old back then, and was known mostly for his incredible feats of drinking and for the amount of times he was rumoured to have crept out of some young lady’s window in the dead of night.

“Your dad’s always telling me you’re the curious type. Waiting up for you, is he?”

“No. He goes to bed early. Doesn’t like the dark, you know?”

“Then hop in, I won’t keep you too long.”

This is one of the opportunities I’ve been waiting for, and I can’t believe it was as simple as mentioning my concerns about Witches Path. As I make my way around the truck and jump into the passenger seat, I’m wondering if talking to Shelley would ever be so easy.

“Where are we going?” I ask him.

“Town centre,” he says. “Then I’ll take you to the outskirts of the Dead Quarters. Won’t take you in, mind, even with the Lanterns.”

I look at him. “It’s that bad?”

“It’s that bad. If we had the newer Lanterns, the ones old Cartwright goes on about, then maybe. With these old things, not a chance. There’s a lot of ‘em down that way.”

“Shades?”

“Shades.”

Dennis drives to the end of Abbot Street and takes a left, down onto a different main road and past the library, the furthest I have been from my house since I was a child. The scenery after that is only vaguely familiar, like a landscape I might have once dreamed. There are no houses here, and therefore no Lanterns. Only once do I see a Shade, hanging in the moonlight in such a way that I’m reminded of a black dress my brunette sometimes hangs on her washing line. It seems to turn and follow our progress, but it makes no move to follow.

“They tend not to chase you if you’re moving fast enough,” he says, as if reading my mind.

“Why?”

He glances across at me, amused. “I’m no expert, Ken. I only know what I see. That’s why your friend back there is safer than you are. Back in the day, I reckon she’d have made a fine runner.”

“It must seem like a big difference to you. You were around before this happened, right?”

“I was.”

Frustrating silence in the truck as we come up onto a roundabout and head right, past a sign that tells me we’re heading for the town centre. Several abandoned cars sit by the side of the road, and a lone Lantern spits out a quick burst of light before dying again.

“So…what was it like?”

“It’s useless to ask, son. Especially me. We’ll not be going back to that, and I don’t remember much of it anyway.”

“You drank a lot,” I say, a statement, not a question.

“I drank a lot,” he agrees.

As in most places, the town centre’s Lanterns seem to work periodically and without much spirit. Some are on, some are dead, and some flicker in the last throes of life. It is not the apocalyptic scene I sometimes paint it as in my mind. It is deserted and silent, but most of the cars have been left parked neatly, and most of the shops have shutters pulled down, as if they’d simply closed one night and then never re-opened.

“What happened, Dennis? Why did we retreat? I don’t know anyone that even comes here in the daytime anymore.”

“They come here sometimes, for supplies and what-not. The Lanternmen take parts.”

“But it’s safe in the day.”

“So are the Dead Quarters. People aren’t sure, though. There are always rumours and no facts. Night may be the problem, but that doesn’t mean people don’t try to stay where it’s brightest. Even on cloudy days, we don’t go out. Sometimes people just disappear, and sometimes it was light when those people went out.”

We pass the cinema and I can’t help but shudder, remembering the screams of my recurring nightmare.

“Have you ever seen one in the day?”

“I sleep in the day. I’m up when they’re up.”

Dennis nods at one of the dead Lanterns and I see a group of Shades beneath it. Again, they seem curiously lifeless, drifting aimlessly, occasionally bumping into one another. I am used to seeing them in flight, in pursuit, and the contrast is stark. Still, I shiver to look at them. I hate them.

“What do you think they are?” I ask him.

“Our dead. That’s why there are always more. Every time someone gets The Touch, they turn into one, don’t they?”

“I had The Touch.”

“But not the way it is when you don’t get away. Nobody dies if they get away. After a few days or a few weeks, it goes. Where it stays is in your head. That’s why your dad worries, Ken. He’s seen what’s happened to others.”

“So if you get Shaded, terminally Shaded, you become a Shade?”

“If you don’t, then what happens to you? They’re ghosts.”

We’re leaving the town centre behind now, negotiating another roundabout and heading south towards the Dead Quarters. I’m thinking about what he’s just said. It isn’t a controversial opinion, though it’s not exactly popular. The theory that has been in vogue for as long as I can remember is that the Shades are living creatures of some kind, a new species that we will eventually find the weapons to confront. Still, I remember the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen, horror tales about zombies and ghosts and the various other kinds of creeping undead that are so prevalent in fiction. I remember watching Dawn Of The Dead with JD one night, remember how the phrase, “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth” had left me frightened and thoughtful. Maybe the Shades are our shambling, mindless zombies, the remnants of our dead come to drag us into the forever sleep that is our destiny.

The Lantern truck stops, jerking me out of my reverie. I look up and see that we have pulled over in front of a sign that proclaims this place Quarter D.

“See them?” asks Dennis.

How could I not? They are at the edge of the truck’s Lanternlight, almost motionless in the same way as their brethren in the town centre. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. You can only see so far in the dark.

“God,” I whisper. “I’ve never seen so many.”

We are both breathing hard, both staring.

“The Lanterns went out,” Dennis says, in a low voice. “All at once. There was a failure in one of the generators. It was only just dark.”

“They didn’t have back-ups?” I ask. I know we have back-ups. I’m trying not to think of hundreds of people running screaming through the dark streets or cowering in their homes, unsure as to whether every window is tightly closed, every door secured.

“There was a dispute. The Lanternmen had threatened a strike. It almost always seems to happen when the government fails an area. There’s community, alright, but someone always wants to be in charge. The Lanternmen have skills that would have been worth a hell of a lot of money in the right climate. A hell of a lot of money.”

“You’re saying it was deliberate?”

“I’m saying there’s no obvious reason for all the Lanterns to fail at the same time. I’m saying that there are only so many Lanterns, and nobody’s manufacturing those parts anymore, so far as I know. I’m saying that after the Dead Quarters went down, there were a lot of Lanternmen in our neck of the woods that hadn’t been there before.”

We watch a Shade dare the Lanterns. It suddenly charges at the truck with the speed and intent I am familiar with, getting maybe a quarter of the way into the Lanternlight before it seems to become confused and directionless. It veers off course and misses the truck by twenty or thirty feet, disappearing into the tangled limbs of its kin beyond the far edge of the luminescence that protects us. For a moment or two, I had stopped breathing. I know the Lanterns protect us, but the way they rush at you is just a horror. It's awful.

“Dennis, that would be murder,” I say.

He nods and starts the engine, throws us into reverse gear and turns around to head back up the road and away from the Dead Quarters.

“Those things have no motive, Ken. They’re just things. They’re not smart like you or I.”

“Or the Lanternmen,” I say. It’s cold in the truck.

“No,” Dennis says.

Conversation turns away from Shades and Lanternmen and the Dead Quarters on the way back to Abbot Street. Dennis asks me about the Curfew Bar and about my father and my friends. I ask him about his work driving the Lantern Truck. We’re just filling the silence, really. He drops me at home with a customary goodbye and heads off up the street before I can offer anything more in return than a wave.

I let myself back into the house and sit down in the kitchen. I’m hungry, but too preoccupied to concentrate. At the centre, JD and me and the Curfew Bar and Witches Path. Beyond that, our families and friends and community. Inside and outside and twisting through all of those things, the Lanternmen and the mystery of what happened in the Dead Quarters, a mystery that may well contain the answers to all of my questions.

I have to talk to Shelley now, to explore the knowledge that she has. I have to talk to Cartwright and understand a little more about the Lanternmen. I have questions that demand answers, possible conspiracies that make my head hurt, and an intense feeling of loneliness that makes me wonder if anybody else ever thinks about these things at all.

I know my dad would turn me away. He is a part of the Daylight World. Only people like JD and Dennis and I really understand the night. We might not talk about it too often, and we might find it terrifying, but we are the only ones that ever confront it. I must also talk to JD. I need to tell her all that I am thinking and all that I have discovered. I need to make her listen and understand. She is, in the end, perhaps my only partner in this, and she needs to know.

These thoughts, they’re haunted by those dark spectres. I see the Shade we passed on the main road, the group in the town centre, the army of twisted shapes that surrounded the Lantern Truck outside Quarter D. There are more of them than I had ever really believed, more than I thought possible. If Dennis is right, then every shoe I see lying by the side of Witches Path, every mysterious disappearance and unexplained absence means one more. How long before the situation becomes impossible? How long before we are caught between the blank, silent inevitability of the Shades, and the power-hungry conspiracies of our own kind?

I go to my room and pick up a book, hoping to lose myself in some other story. I know I won’t be sleeping tonight.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 3: The Scream Of Silence

2006-09-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

"I'm a searchlight soul, they say, but I can't see it in the night. I'm only faking when I get it right. 'Cause I fell on black days. How would I know that this could be my fate?"

The breeze pushes through the branches of trees divided and bordered by Witches Path. They have long since shed their leaves, and where a summer wind would result in the soft and almost musical sound of rustling foliage, winter’s breath is harsher. The only sounds are the creak and groan of arthritic branches and the dry, hollow impacts that occasionally ring through this tiny forest when the wind gathers enough strength to slam one wooden limb into another. Behind this senseless, rhythmless percussion, there is nothing. The loudest sound of all is the unbroken howl of utter silence.

Judy Nicholls is on her way home from Quarter A, where she has spent the day visiting with her father. She is aware that she is running late and that night is falling, but for Judy these are distant, relatively unimportant thoughts. As she walks quickly and quietly down Witches Path, she thinks not of fear or darkness or her distance from the safety of Lanterns. Instead, Judy thinks of her mother.

Samantha Nicholls suffers from what the local newspapers call The Touch. It is a disease of a kind, Judy knows, but more psychological than physical. Her mother has told her the story perhaps two or three hundred times over the years; how she was out on a date with Judy’s father, how they’d gone walking after a quiet dinner in a Quarter A restaurant, losing track of time in conversation and the rhythm of footsteps until Samantha realised with a start that they had gone beyond the range of the Lanterns.

Samantha was forever explaining to Judy how a fear of the dark was not ingrained in her generation, how when she was a child it was still safe to be out after the sun had gone down. Young Samantha knew of Shades, but they were not a constant reality back then. Not until that night.

Henry, Judy’s father, hadn’t really seen the thing that floated out of the shadows and settled over his wife’s shoulders like a blanket. Judy had asked him about it once, and he had shrugged, claiming he’d seen a shape and nothing more. She had screamed, he remembered, reaching to grab at the thing and then snatching her hands away as if burnt. He had also tried to grab it, but it had slipped through his fingers. It had substance, he said, but it wasn’t something you could hold in your hand, especially when touching it numbed your fingers and sent this awful cold crawling up your arms, slowing your muscles and freezing your blood until you moved like you were underwater.

They had clung to each other, the three of them, and Judy’s parents had staggered and stumbled two or three hundred metres back down the road, her wild screams mingling with his hoarse, braying cries for help. Samantha remembered little after that. A screech of tyres, the road suddenly flooded with Lanternlight, then unconsciousness.

Over time, they had both recovered from the physical effects of The Touch. Henry regained the feeling in his hands and was able to go back to work, while Samantha was released from hospital after only a few weeks. It was her mind that had never recovered, her memory of what happened doomed to play on a loop in the theatre of her mind until the day she dies. It‘s all she talks about, probably all she thinks about, and Judy understands exactly why her father left them, even if she still occasionally resents him for it. She is eighteen in three months, and if she can find a job, she too will leave. She loves her mother, but in living forever in a moment where she was touched by death, her mother is cold and empty and possibly insane.

It isn’t a sound or a smell that makes Judy look over her shoulder as she crests the hill that marks the end of Witches Path. It is something deeper than that, something like a sixth sense. She stops walking and turns to face the trees, narrowing her eyes and leaning forward. She’s thinking that it’s like one of those pictures that changes into something else if you look at it a certain way. At a glance, it is the small wood, the fractured concrete of the path, moonlight falling on skeletal branches while an old council Lantern flickers intermittently in the distance. At first, the movement of the shadows seems to be a result of that, a trick of the light and the wind. But then she makes out a figure, misshapen and somehow wrong. Once she sees one, she realises that there are many, that the darkness in the belly of Witches Path is literally teeming with odd, warped shadows that creep between slivers of light with a smooth, easy grace that is strangely beautiful.

Judy is shivering, but she’s more fascinated than afraid. There is distance between the creatures and her, and they seem ponderous and apathetic. What she is seeing is like a parade or a dance without purpose or reason. There is no pattern to their movements, no goal or destination. They seem charged somehow, full of an energy they must constantly move to dispel.

It is only when one of the creatures, one of the Shades, drifts out onto the path that Judy’s breath catches in her throat and she has to hold back a scream. It is humanoid in shape, like a shadow in three-dimensions, but that is where the similarities end. The Shade’s feet hang a few feet above the ground, and it seems to move without any physical effort, floating aimlessly, as though controlled by some scientific or supernatural force Judy does not understand. The breeze seems to pull at its body, subtly warping its shape and pushing it gently around as though at play. The most horrifying thing, though, is the way it seems stretched somehow. The creature is tall and impossibly thin in the torso. Its arms are too long and end in hands that hang limply at its sides, hands that are little more than five long, spidery fingers that she can suddenly imagine caressing her warm skin and freezing her where she stands, making her its kin. They are not fingers for grabbing. They are for reaching, for touching and stroking, for painting flesh with its icy black intent.

As if hearing this thought, the Shade stops moving. It is as a statue. Its brethren in the trees are also still. Judy becomes aware of the darkness, of the cold, of being alone. She remembers a night many years ago; her mother screaming and thrashing in the throes of a nightmare, eleven year-old Judy waking her and holding her and listening to her babble about how they have no eyes, how they don’t see. The Shades, her mother had said, the words garbled with sleep and tears, absorb changes in light and dark. They know where you are, even in what seems like pitch darkness. Where light touches your skin, your hair, your jewellery, they feel it. Like bats, her mother had said, they are blind. Yet they see everything.

Only now does it occur to Judy that she must run. Only now, when it is already too late.

The Shade on the path turns and moves towards her, races towards her. It does not seem to accelerate at all. One moment it is still, the next it is flying up the path, travelling at a speed that is terrifying to behold. Others come from the trees at the foot of the hill, and still more from the shadows around her, where they must have been lurking all along. Judy turns and runs straight into a Shade. Its long arms embrace her, fingers linking at the back of her neck, their touch on her skin somehow liquid, like smears of thick jelly. She looks up into its face and there is nothing there. No features, no emotions, no nothing. It is blank. Judy tries to scream and what comes out of her mouth is little more than a sigh.

It is not a violent death. It is not even a painful death. The Shades surround Judy Nicholls and simply touch her, their fingers finding every inch of exposed skin, never returning to the same place twice. The cold hurts a little at first, and Judy struggles as best she can. Her attackers are weak and insubstantial, and in those first few moments, she finds she can literally tear them apart. But her hands and her arms are freezing. In moments they are numb. In less than a minute she can no longer move them. Judy’s breathing becomes laboured and her struggles weaken by degrees. She can no longer feel her legs, and when they buckle beneath her and she falls to the ground, there is no pain at all. In the silence, she hears her own heartbeat inside her head. It is slowing. Her body is entirely numb. She is no longer breathing. Death, in these moments, is inevitable, and Judy feels a kind of peace. She is drowning, and she will not break the surface again.

The cluster of Shades remain at the spot where Judy fell for perhaps three or four minutes, covering her body like a shroud. Presently, they begin to drift away. They are apathetic and aimless again; twisted, elongated forms without rhythm or destination. They seem to gravitate to the shadows, to the darkness, to the places where they are invisible. The path itself is empty. There is no body and no sign of struggle. Once again, Witches Path is undisturbed. The breeze, an errant child, resumes pulling at the elderly limbs of the trees, their creaking complaints lost beneath the scream of silence.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 2: The Daylight World

2006-09-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

"In my eyes, indisposed, in disguise as no one knows. Hides the face, lies the snake, in the sun, in my disgrace."

I don’t scream when sunlight jolts me from my nightmare, but only because I’m getting used to it. When I was sick, suffering from what my dad calls The Touch and what JD and I refer to as being Shaded, I had it all the time. Goodbye consciousness, hello nightmare. Back then, I screamed a lot, and I didn’t always know why.

The sunlight makes it better. Even though there is a Lantern above every occupied residence on my street, even though I know for a fact that Shades can’t pass through Lanternlight (or through solid walls, for that matter), waking to darkness fills me with a horror so deep I can barely breathe. I think darkness, I think silence, I think Shade. It’s a natural, instinctive process; anytime I can’t see, I’m immediately terrified. This, more than anything else, is the legacy they have given us.

In my dream, I am walking through what used to be the town centre. I am going to the cinema to meet a girl, probably JD. We’re going on a date. I am dressed smartly. My hair is short and neatly styled. The dream smells of the kind of aftershave my parents might buy me for Christmas, the kind I might have worn to impress a girl when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. Everything is normal, the way I imagine everything was before. There are Lanterns, though, running the length of the high street and holding everything in the safety of their luminescent arms. They link my dream to my reality. It is always when I see the Lanterns that I realise I’m dreaming, and it is always just as I realise that they go out.

When the Lanterns die, the Shades come. I hear people yelling in the darkness. Somehow I am able to pick out my own voice. I am begging them to leave me alone. I am crying.

And then I wake up, biting back a scream and telling myself over and over that the lingering scent of aftershave is in my head.

But it’s a bright, cloudless day, a sight that quickly burns away the remaining cobwebs of nightmare. The sky is a perfect blue, and the sun – though small and distant – glares with fierce intensity. I roll out of bed and go to the window, delighting in such simple sights as my neighbour’s children playing in the garden, Mr. Cartwright from three doors down making his daily journey up and down the street to check everybody’s Lanterns, and the brunette from number thirty-eight hanging out her washing. This latter sight is the most delightful of all. I don’t know her name, but she moved in around the time I started working at the Curfew Bar. In the summer, whenever the day was warm, I would come to the window exactly as I have today and hope that she was out on her sunbed, tanning herself in a white bikini that haunted my daydreams just as the Shades haunt my nightmares.

JD rolls her eyes and occasionally hits me when I mention the brunette. She would refer to the scene I’m looking at now as just ‘another symptom of The DW’. JD is as quick in her speech as she is when running Witches Path, and she has acronyms for so many different things that I lose track sometimes. The DW is The Daylight World, and JD always invests in those two letters a disdain that genuinely puzzles me. While she seems largely uninterested and untouched by the night and the things that lurk in the shadows, she’s fascinated by the behaviour of our families and neighbours when the Lanterns are switched off and the Shades are something only to be remembered and anticipated.

“It’s not real,” she told me once. “It’s like they’re in shock. They just go through the motions of the things they used to do. Sometimes I wonder if you and I aren’t the only ones who even realise what’s going on.”

I didn’t question that at the time, because I know from bitter experience that arguing with JD is almost always a fruitless endeavour. Truth is, she herself is as much a reflection of The DW as anyone around her. She doesn’t talk about the Shades except in passing, and she does everything as if there’s a countdown going on inside her head. We all know what happens at zero, but nobody really acknowledges it.

In a lot of ways, that sums up life on Abbot Street and in Quarter B generally. JD was right when she said it wasn’t real. It isn’t. It’s like a movie. It’s more than real. Uber-real or hyper-real or whatever you might call it in a sci-fi flick, maybe Invasion Of The Body Snatchers or The Stepford Wives.

It was Shelley that told me the town used to be called Oakfield, but I found the information about Quartering at the library. It was something the government did in the early days of the Shades, dividing communities and councils in an attempt to bring focus to a crisis situation. The idea, I think, was that smaller councils controlling a smaller area would be more efficient and more able to keep our utilities and – crucially – the Lanterns running with as close to one-hundred percent reliability as possible. My dad told me he remembered people using the name Oakfield quite often as a child, but that it had gradually slipped out of use as he grew older and the divides between these new communities became permanent. Now we live in Quarter B, one of hundreds of Quarter Bs across the country. The name has no real meaning in terms of community, so people tend to stick to their own streets, huddling together beneath the Lanterns that remain.

Quarter A of what used to be Oakfield is to the northeast of the old town centre. B is to the northwest. C and D used to be in the equivalent positions to the south, except nobody lives there anymore. The town centre itself was to be used by members of all Quarters. It was where the shops and various entertainments were. There are no books in the library about the local area. Most of my knowledge comes from more generic texts about the old-style government and the rise of privatisation. This is one of the reasons I like to listen to Shelley talk. I’m a little too intimidated by her to come right out and ask about Quarters C and D and what happened to leave us alone here, but I think she knows I’m curious, and I think she’ll eventually tell. Keeping me on tenterhooks is just one more way of making me stay at the Curfew Bar. If JD and I leave, it’ll probably close.

I stretch in my room, working the stiffness out of my muscles and easing gradually into my daily exercises. I began working out after recovering from being Shaded. That was when I stopped seeing Witches Path as a challenge and started being genuinely afraid. I exercise to keep myself in good shape. I eat well. I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. Being quick and alert has become one of my obsessions. Staying alive has become my chief motivation.

I shower and head downstairs, where dad is making lunch in the kitchen.

“Janey dropped by,” he says, without turning from the stove.

“Yeah?” I can smell baked beans and coffee and his cigarettes; the mingled scents of comfort and safety.

“Sounded like you two had quite an adventure last night.”

“We got through.”

He doesn’t reply for a while. I sit at the table and watch his broad back, listen to him buttering the toast and turning a spoon in the saucepan. Eventually he turns and puts a plate in front of me. He isn’t smiling.

“How are you doing?” he asks.

I feel like crying. His scrutiny always makes a child of me.

“I don’t know. Witches Path…it’s pretty bad. Some nights it’s okay, but the bad ones are worse than they used to be. It was close last night.”

“Janey seemed worried about you.”

“She hates it when you call her that.”

Now he smiles. “I know.”

“What do you want me to say, dad?” I say, around a mouthful of beans. “If we’re careful, I think it’s still okay. What happened last night was that JD got caught by surprise and she fucked up. We made it, and I think she learned a lesson. Ask Dennis.”

“I will, when I see him.” He chews, swallows. “Some of the Lanterns on that truck need renewing.”

“You want me to quit.”

“No. I want you to quit but I understand why you don’t. We need the money. If things go the way I think they’re going to go, we’ll need the money even more. But I don’t want Dennis at my door instead of you some dark night.”

“If it gets that bad, I promise you I’ll quit, okay?”

He nods. We finish the rest of the meal in silence.

I’d planned to go straight round to JD’s, but the day is too good to waste inside. I walk past her house and on up the street. Mr. Cartwright waves to me from his ladder and I wave back as I turn off Abbot Street and slip down the short alley that opens out into Oak Park, ever-mindful of a rumour I heard a few weeks ago that somebody’s sister’s friend had seen a Shade in the daytime, still and semi-opaque in the shadows. I didn’t really believe it, but you can never be too careful. I stick to the sunlight.

The park is even busier than I expected. There are two games of football going on and several groups of spectators, some picnicking as if it’s summer. I recognise a few faces, but there’s nobody I’m really friendly with, and I’m more than happy to walk a couple of circuits of the park by myself, enjoying the sun and the light, winter breeze. It’s surprisingly warm for the time of year, probably the last day of its kind before next spring. The thought makes me shudder. December is almost upon us, and there are a lot of short days and long nights between now and Easter.

I’m thinking about the conversation I’ve just had with dad. I’m thinking about JD and the Curfew Bar and why it is I don’t quit. There are too many reasons and it’s hard to separate them. Quarter B has no real council anymore, and nobody I know has paid taxes and utilities in some time. The Lanterns, by and large, have been run by the various communities. Everybody has an equivalent of Mr. Cartwright on their street, a man or woman who knows how the Lanterns work and need to be maintained. Problem is, many of them are realising how much their services might be worth. As the light from the old council Lanterns becomes less prevalent and we rely increasingly on the likes of Mr. Cartwright and Old Dennis, they acquire a kind of power. According to my dad, many of the Lanternmen and women of Quarters A and B have formed a kind of union. He thinks it’s only a matter of time before they vote to charge fees for their services. That, he says, would be the equivalent of a Lantern Tax, and something of a return to the old ways. I see what he’s driving at, but I can’t say I entirely understand it. My idea of the ‘old ways’ is fuzzy at best.

The other thing is JD. Her family will need money every bit as much as mine if any kind of ‘Lantern Tax’ is enforced. If I quit my job at the Curfew Bar, there’s really no guarantee that she’ll follow suit. She’s hard-headed, and she’ll happily argue for the sake of arguing. I don’t know how I can raise the subject without it turning into a game of one-upmanship.

“Ken.” Her voice startles me, and I’m sure I must look guilty as I turn around, as if caught in thoughts I shouldn’t have been having.

“Hey, JD,” I say, hitting what I consider to be a nice combination of nonchalance and pleasure.

“You…okay?” she asks.

“I’m good.” I wave a hand at nothing in particular. “In my own world. I was just heading up to your place.”

She looks good; tall and slim, almost statuesque. Her face is scrubbed clean, her dark hair tied tightly back, her skin looking even paler than usual against the dark materials of bra-top and jogging bottoms. If I had to describe JD, I’d dress her like this, give her face a layer of sweat and colour from running or swimming or cycling, have her wearing the kind of smile she displays when you offer her a challenge or a dare. In my mind, she almost always looks that way.

“I saw you go past and I was going for a run anyway. I thought you’d be here, you and your DW friends.”

I shoot her a look and she grins. Same old JD.

“Dad said you dropped by this morning.”

“Checking on you. Last night was…my fault. I wanted to make sure you were alright about it.”

“I’m fine about it. I don’t have to wag my finger at you and tell you not to do it again, do I?”

“No,” she says, “you don’t.”

I shrug. “Same time, same place tonight?”

“You want to quit the CB, don’t you?” she says, apropos of nothing.

I turn away and start walking, not wanting her to be able to read my thoughts on my face. JD and I have been friends since we were kids, and we’re pretty good at knowing what the other is thinking about. She falls into step beside me, waiting quietly, looking over my shoulder as a crowd of children comes thundering and shouting past us, eagerly pursuing a bouncing ball.

“I think you do, too,” I say. “But it’s not the best time, is it?”

“It’s just that I don’t know what I’d do if you did, Ken. If some other job comes up, then great, but it isn’t likely. You know that. I can’t afford to quit.”

“Neither can I. But better unemployed than Shaded.”

“If we have to pay for Lanterns, unemployed and Shaded may end up being the same thing.”

We’re quiet for a while after that, making our way through the alley and back onto Abbot Street. I look up at the Lanterns on each roof, and for a moment I wonder if any of it makes any difference. Cities became towns, became Quarters, became streets. You can only be backed so far into a corner before you’ve nowhere left to go. That’s the thought that no-one voices or admits to having. Regardless of all the talk about taxes and unions, the Shades are taking over. They may already be a silent majority.

“What?” JD asks. We’re facing each other outside her house.

“I’m scared,” I say, and here, standing in winter sunlight, it sounds childish and ridiculous.

She hugs me, reminds me with her body and her scent of soap and fresh sweat that she’s a woman and not a girl anymore. The brunette and her white bikini flit briefly through my mind, and I wonder what it might be like to kiss JD, to hold her and tell her that she has to quit the Curfew Bar while there’s still time for us to live a life that doesn’t revolve around running through and from shadows.

I don’t. Of course I don’t. I hug her back and then let her go. She winks at me and walks away.

“We’ll be more careful tonight,” I say.

“We’ll be fine,” she calls back over her shoulder.

She slams the front door behind her and I stand there for a while, trying to think of anything but Lanterns and Shades.

Dirty Cynicism (or Not A 9/11 Post)

2006-09-11T18:36:00.001-07:00

"I've been watching while you've been coughing. I've been drinking life while you've been nauseous. And so I drink to health while you kill yourself, and I've got just one thing that I can offer..."

The Target Powers That Be have taken me off the sales floor. My new assignment is as a part of the group known as Presentation. If today is any indication, Presentation involves getting up at five in the morning and then sharing a shift with the frightening malcontents they don't allow on the regular day shift because...well...they're too frightening and malcontenty. At the moment, Target are switching from summer to fall lines, which for the moment means getting rid of all the Back To School junk and replacing it with Halloween stuff.

Regular readers may recall that I once worked the night shift at Tesco. They may even recall me once saying that I finished the best part of a novel whilst on my lunch and coffee breaks there. I started work at ten, had a fifteen minute break at eleven thirty, half an hour for lunch at two thirty, and a further fifteen minutes at five-ish before heading home at seven thirty in the morning. And though the three months I was there damn near killed me, they were also probably the most productive three months of my life.

Which might be why I felt a strange thrill when I arrived at the store to find a band of tired looking strangers sitting outside having a cigarette break.

"What are you smiling about?" A tall Mexican with a permanent slouch and dark circles around his eyes asked me. "Don't you work at Target?" He offered a weary grin and a grimy hand, tilting his head to acknowledge my nod of recognition.

You see, no matter how good I may be at the customer service thing, and no matter what store and district and even regional managers may see in me, these will always be the folk I relate to most, and their places - places most people don't give a second thought to - will be the ones almost shining with inspiration. There's a certain mixture of desperation, resignation, and dirty cynicism that appeals to me, a sense of realism that would be lost on the cheery students and second-jobbers that inhabit the day shift. The difference is only a few hours, but it may as well be another world.

But back to Halloween, and back to this certainty I had - after about ten minutes of hanging up the kiddie costumes - that this generation is both the most and least fortunate to have come along in a while.

Most fortunate because some of these outfits fucking ruled. Seriously, any fool can wrap a scarf around his head and call himself a ninja. But how many can turn on those that have spurned their innocent requests for treats by whipping out a pair of suprisingly heavy nunchuku, or even twin daggers attached to their wrists by way of a bracelet and chain? Those whose parents shop at Target, that's who. Some might say that such weapons are dangerous, but if you ask me, the only real threat inherent in these elaborate, kick-ass costumes is that they may cause your kids to roleplay themselves right over the high side. Nobody needs little Billy to suddenly decide that he is, in fact, Gargan The Mountain Warrior. And recapturing the demented child could prove difficult, especially when he's equipped with a double-headed spear and a four foot broadsword, even if they are made of plastic.

There are headlines waiting to be written this Halloween, and some of them will be fantastic.

Least fortunate because even Gargan The Mountain Warrior is a less fortunate child for never having made his own Halloween costume. If you don't know the dichotomy of thrill and disappointment that comes with throwing your first white sheet with eyeholes cut in it over your head, then you don't know Halloween. Not really. Because the best part of that particular festival is not the pumpkins or the candy or even the awful tricks the creative and mischevious can play on their unsuspecting neighbours. No, it's having the idea, the materials, and the determination to make an absolutely terrifying costume.

We'll see who scares who come October 31st, Gargan.

But I digress. My point, before we got sidetracked into that weird Halloween rant, is that being shunted onto the Presentation shift isn't the curse it initially seemed when I was crawling mole-eyed into the bathroom at five this morning. In fact, it inspired me to pause on my way out of the store this afternoon and pick up a bundle of super-cheap notebooks from the now irrelevant Back To School section. I'll slip one into my bag tomorrow, and instead of staring at the walls during my breaks, I'll jot a few thoughts down, maybe sketch out a character or two. You really never know where these things'll lead. After all, my Green Card came in the mail today, and that's such a weight off my mind, that for the first time in a while, I actually feel like writing.

In case you missed that...MY FUCKING GREEN CARD CAME IN THE FUCKING MAIL FUCKING TODAY.

Lanterns And Shades - Part 1: Witches Path

2006-09-10T16:40:00.000-07:00

"Devils surround me, anger astounds me, tearing apart my soul. About to go outside, but it was then I seemed to have lost control."

It's now almost exactly two years since I first began to post the eleven part NFADR-exclusive novella Lanterns And Shades. I've decided to repost it now for several reasons.

1. It didn't survive the transition from the old NFADR to the new, and it seems wasteful to pass up an opportunity to post it again.

2. I'm working myself up into a writing frenzy, and one of the ways I like to prepare for an extended trip into creativity is by revisiting and even editing older pieces of work. So this repost will also be a remix.

3. I'm about to embark on another blog-only novella using the same episodic format. As with Lanterns And Shades, I plan on keeping the details to myself until the first part is actually up, but I can tell you that it's very much a traditional sci-fi tale in the same way that L&S was a traditional horror tale.

Anyway, I hope those that didn't catch this on the first pass will enjoy it. Those that did, well, I hope you liked it enough to enjoy it again. And remember, new fiction is coming your way, and this is the only place you'll be able to read it.

“It never used to be this way,” Shelley says.

“What didn’t?” I ask.

I’ve just rung the bell. In ten minutes, the Lanterns will be switched off. Hardly the time for listening to a landlady reminisce, but Shelley talks to me so rarely that these occasions have acquired a certain sombre gravity, and not just in the sense that they seem pregnant with meaning. I am drawn to her little speeches.

“We used to ring the bell twice; once for last orders and once to close the bar. These old fuckers, they noticed the first one right enough, but the second…” She shakes her head. “We could have rung Big Ben and they’d have been just as deaf.”

“Before,” I say.

She nods, then steps up to the bar and begins to clean it with what seems like an agonising lack of urgency. To my eyes, everything Shelley does is in slow-motion.

“Ken.”

I turn and see JD crouched in the entrance to the staff room, pulling the laces of her trainers tight with quick, aggressive motions. “Sleeping here tonight?” she asks, smiling.

“Fuck you,” I reply, with a little grin of my own. I’m already undoing my tie.

JD and me, we wear our Witches Path clothes under our uniforms. It’s quicker that way. Every shift at the Curfew Bar ends with the bell and the strip and the stuffing of shirts and trousers and smart shoes into light backpacks long since adjusted to fit our shoulders as snugly as possible. A weight on your back will always slow you down, but a bouncing, slipping weight could be the difference between making it home and getting Shaded. That’s one of many lessons we’ve picked up over the last six months or so, and the only one I had to learn the hard way. The rest of it’s just experience. You live and you learn.

“How long?” JD asks.

We’re out in the car park now, standing in the safety of Lantern-glare. My eyes are searching the darkness beyond. Butterflies flap and twist in my stomach. I glance at my watch.

“Seven minutes.”

“You feeling limber?”

I look at her sideways and she laughs, slim and tensed and ready in tracksuit bottoms and a black tank-top. If JD worries about Witches Path, she does a good job of hiding it. If I’m honest, I don’t think it bothers her anywhere near as much as it does me. JD is Shelley’s opposite, young and svelte and attractive and fast, so fucking fast that it still catches me by surprise. On Witches Path, that speed makes her a goddess.

“We’ll make it, Ken,” she says, knowing I’m worried, easing a little of that good humour out of her voice. “We always do.”

“Five minutes,” I say. It’s November and I’m sweating.

“Let’s do it.”

This is the part I hate most, walking carefully up to the very edge of the Lantern’s influence, feeling my muscles tremble with tension. Five nights a week for a little over six months, and it never gets any easier. For JD, it’s a competition, a test we always pass. Me, I read too much, see too much, spend all my spare time trying to talk to people who were around before all this happened. I know things she doesn’t, and I’m sure that there will come a time when quick feet and quick wits are no longer enough.

I think about the night when I was too slow, remember the icy fingers that brushed the small of my back where my pumping arms had pulled my T-shirt free of my trousers. My skin, the blood beneath, my spine, everything froze and was numb. Then a ripple, an echo of that feeling spreading through my body, dimpling my skin and making me shiver, stealing my strength so that I stumbled and almost fell. My breath came in harsh, ragged gasps, and even in the depths of terror, I noticed a horrifying thing: Though the night was cold, I could see no condensation as I exhaled; the breath from my body was no longer warm.

What saved me that night was looking back. Convinced I had already been terminally Shaded, I wanted to see the apparitions that had claimed my life. I wanted an understanding that had evaded the experts, an understanding that belonged only to the dead. There were five or six of them, coming hard like predators swooping on wounded prey. They had definition – two arms, two legs, one head – but no features. They were shadows, faceless and without identity, without emotion. They were killers without reason.

It was that blankness that terrified me more than anything else. I grew up in a world of emotions and motives, of victims and villains. To die so senselessly, for reasons that would probably never be understood, it just seemed so wrong. I felt a kind of hysterical outrage, and the sudden anger that rushed through me was enough to get my legs moving again, to centre my dimming vision on JD’s screaming, jumping figure. Behind her, glowing the way you imagine heaven might, was the Lantern Truck, Old Dennis leaning out of the window, adding a tenor accompaniment to JD’s falsetto cries.

I made it that night, I really did. But I’ve never felt the same since.

JD claps her hands, startling me. “How long?” she asks.

I make a show of looking at my watch, as if calculating. In my peripheral vision, I see her relax a little. I rock back on my heels and launch straight into a run that quickly becomes a sprint, accelerating into the darkness.

“Bastard,” I hear her say, then laughter and her quick, light footfalls behind me.

You live and you learn, and survival has taught me a lot about Witches Path. It leaves the main road as a thin strip of fractured tarmac, enclosed on one side by a chain-link fence and on the other by a brick wall. You need to be fast here, but you also need to be quiet. At the end of that first stretch, the path divides and splits, twin forks encircling densely packed trees and foliage. Most nights, this is where they come from, and if you’re quick and quiet, you can be well into the long downhill stretch before they even know you’re there. That part of the journey is relatively safe, as a couple of the old council Lanterns are still in operation. Dim, flickering, occasionally dying altogether, but there. The Shades have dared those Lanterns in the past, but only tentatively.

I usually conserve my energy on the downhill run. I let momentum carry me and relax my muscles. I gather my breath and check my surroundings, preparing for the last leg, where it’s all uphill and there is nothing but the path winding between the trees. It was at the crest of this hill I was Shaded, mere metres from breaking what JD and I think of as the tape, that place where the trees fall away and it’s a straight run to the main road, where Old Dennis and the Lantern Truck will be waiting. That final uphill sprint is the fabric of my nightmares. If they get you before you reach the top, you’re dead. Five nights a week, this is where I take myself to the absolute extremes of my physical capability, feet flying, arms pistoning, heart racing. It’s no-man’s land. It’s the road that leads out of hell, and the demons that inhabit the surrounding blackness will do anything to stop you escaping.

JD knows better than to yell at me once we’re on Witches Path. She also knows better than to overtake me and risk one or both of us stumbling or even falling. She’s up behind me by the time I’m three-quarters of the way towards the fork in the path, and I hear her footsteps slow, hanging back until I veer to the right and she goes straight on, planning on outrunning me down the hill, which she will. As usual, I slow a little, taking in the last remnants of light from the Lanterns above, seeing no sign of the Shades and beginning to relax a little, safe in the knowledge that I have breath and energy to spare, and that tonight is looking like a safe night.

My heart almost stops when I hear her trainers scrape on the gravel. Silence for a split-second, and then the impact of her feet on the path, the sound of her accelerating to an all-out sprint.

“Come on!” she yells. “Is that the best you can do?”

No. Please, no. Why doesn’t she think? If they’re hot on JD’s heels, encouraged by her screaming, and if her victory in this downhill race is inevitable, then there’s a chance I’m going to come out behind them or even amongst them. Stupid bitch. Stupid fucking idiot.

I run faster than I’ve ever run down the hill, my eyes on the point where the two paths meet again. JD goes past so quickly that I barely see her, but I’m close enough behind that I have to stagger a step to avoid treading on her heels. In my peripheral vision, I momentarily see the pack that was pursuing her, the pack that’s now pursuing me. There are more than there’s ever been before, as many as fifteen or twenty, their shapes disfigured by the way they’re crowded together, united in their silent, blank pursuit.

“Move!” I yell, still checking my steps to stop myself tripping over her.

She glances back and I see her eyes widen. She hadn’t realised how many, how many and how close. Even in the midst of this frantic, insane run, I’m amazed at how casual she can be. Now, aware of the danger, she ups her pace, those slim but powerful legs pushing hard, widening the gap between us so that I can concentrate on beating the hill, my head down and my mouth open, gulping at precious oxygen and doing everything I can not to think about what’s behind me.

The worst thing is the silence. They don’t growl or howl or even breathe. Their footsteps make no sound. In the wild, disconnected thoughts that rush through my head, I see them closing in, those misshapen hands reaching out for my bare skin as the pack rises over me like a wave, hanging in the air for the briefest of moments before they crash down and Shade me from existence.

In terror I am fleet, and when we crest the hill and leave the trees behind, I pull alongside JD, the path widening to accommodate us both. She looks so astonished to see me there that laughter tries to bubble up from my lungs. We can see the road now. We can see Old Dennis and the Lantern Truck. He’s leaning out of the window, and I see quite clearly the look of fear that crosses his face just before he disappears back into the cab, just before the truck starts moving slowly away.

“Home free,” JD mutters between breaths.

We catch the accelerating Lantern Truck and I grab JD around the waist, throwing her bodily into the back. I grab onto the side with what feels like the last of my strength and punch the back of the cab, three solid blows that have been the signal in situations like this since day one. The engine roars and I scramble over the side as we pull away from the kerb, stealing one last backward glance at the pack of Shades that flirt with the edges of the Lanternlight like animals at an electric fence. I let myself fall onto my back and sigh, staring up at the sky and wondering how it all came to this.

“You almost killed me,” I say, when I have the breath. “You almost fucking killed me.”

“I’m sorry, Ken,” JD says, in a small voice. “I wasn’t thinking.”

I squeeze my eyes closed. Suddenly I feel like crying.

“What happened?”

“There was one on the path,” she says, “It just…it just came out of the trees. I almost ran straight into it.”

“And?”

“I jumped it.” She laughs, but there’s no spirit in it. “I couldn’t stop, so I jumped it. Then…I don’t know…I just lost it. For a second, I guess I thought they’d got me. I’m sorry.”

I turn my head and she’s looking at me, eyes glistening in the glow from the Lanterns.

“Scary, isn’t it?” I say.

She nods.

“You two okay back there?” Old Dennis is leaning out of the window.

“Five-by-five,” I say.

“More of them tonight,” JD says.

“More all the time,” Dennis replies, and then pulls his head back inside.

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” she says, fixing me with those eyes again, eyes wet with the realisation that we’ve just cheated death.

“Yeah, JD,” I say, looking away. “It’s getting worse.”

A Thrilling Post

2006-09-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

"And it rained all night and then all day; the drops were the size of your hands and face. The worms come out to see what's up. We pull the cars up from the river."

One nice thing about being back in full time employment: I have rediscovered the value of days off. It's easy to lose when you spend six months doing nothing, let me tell you.

So today was the Big Day as far as my future at Target goes. As usual when it comes to these interview situations, I'm pretty sure I acquitted myself admirably. Jenn drove me to the monstrous Target in La Habra, where I met with the District Team Leader to discuss my past and future exploits before she packed me off to my 'A' interview ('B' interview to follow at some point in the future, apparently) with Kevin, the store manager. He seemed a personable enough chap, and we got along well, which left me free of worry and able to elaborate on my answers with various amusing anecdotes from my customer service past. It went well. I liked him, and he clearly liked me, going so far as to say that if it was his decision, my promotion would be a done deal.

So it appears that my next step will be a slight revision of my current role to include more coaching designed to push me up into a supervisory position, at which point I will go and attend a 'Business College' (I'm pretty sure that's a euphemism for some kind of in-store theory training rather than a McDonalds University-esque shambles) for some six weeks before being launched into my new role. I don't know, at this point, what form this new role will take, but I'm not particularly worried about it. I get the impression there will be time and opportunity to shape my own destiny.

A thrilling post, I know.

Welcome To America

2006-09-02T22:37:00.000-07:00

"You might not be looking for the promised land, but you might find it anyway, under one of those old familiar names."

This week has turned into an important one as far as morale is concerned. Tuesday's semi-accidental meeting with the District Team Leader will almost certainly lead to an improvement in my position. We'll see what comes of it, but if I can get the kind of position I want with Target (and a nice little sidestep into Human Resources would make me a happy little Michael), I doubt I'll bother looking any further for work. On top of that, I picked up my first paycheck on Friday, opened up a checking account, and then had the opportunity to spend some dollars I'd actually earned in this country. It might not seem like much, but after six months of unemployment and despair that my financial situation was about to become untenable, it meant a lot.

Finally, I opened up the mailbox this afternoon and found my Welcome To America letter waiting for me. That means Ultimate Approval has been granted by the powers that be, and the arrival of my Green Card is now weeks or possibly even days away.

And still I don't really feel it. I mean, I feel better than I did a month ago, but I'm still worried that the ground I'm standing on is getting ready to shift again. In fact, I don't think I'll be entirely comfortable until both job and Green Card are safely in my possession.

Sibling Interviews ftw!

2006-08-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

"Millions of peaches, peaches for me. Millions of peaches, peaches for free."

Further to yesterday's post and the comments that followed, here, for your viewing pleasure, is an interview conducted by my elder sibling just a few short hours ago.

Cath: Hello Mikhail. An honour to meet you. You're taller in the flesh. And more ginger.

Michael: People are often shocked by my height. And gingerness, obviously.

Cath: Yes, I am still slightly recovering from that shock. Anyway, on with it...most artists, when interviewed, are promoting something. What are you promoting?

Michael: Myself. I have recently been scandalised by the sheer number of lesser artists being interviewed on the web, and I thought it was high time I had my say.

Cath: Can you name and shame any of the lesser artists?

Michael: Well, most of them, to be fair.

Cath: OK. No chance of this sparking a war of words to help your promotion then? It worked for Lily Allen and Peaches Geldof.

Michael: Prime examples. It wouldn't be fair on them, though. You can't really lose a war of words to somebody called Peaches Bumblefuck or whatever her name is.

Cath: So you are promoting yourself. Is this...
a) Michael O'Mahony, human being (just about)?

b) Michael O'Mahony, undiscovered mammoth of the literary world?

c) Michael O'Mahony, porn king?

or d) Michael O'Mahony [fill your own blank]?

Michael: It's absolutely b). I am promoting my future success.

Cath: Any literary works in particular you'd like to plug?

Michael: I'm working on an as yet untitled novel I believe is destined to relaunch my faltering career and finally rid me of that 'porn king' label.

Cath: Most men would be proud of the porn king label. Is that an indication of the ways in which married life has changed you?

Michael: Meh. It's an indication of my irritation at being lumped in with the erotica crowd.

Cath: Any crowds you'd like to be lumped with?

Michael: Not especially. The erotica thing...the standard is too low. Anytime you find yourself moving in those circles, it's pretty stifling. I had an idea I might somehow elevate the genre...

Cath: What has happened to that idea? And can you explain why the word "meh" has undergone a giant leap in internet popularity during the last fortnight?

Michael: It got exposed to a large dose of the reality, which is that even reputable erotic sites cannot escape the taint of both cheesy commercial interests (I don't really want an advert for that fucking Fleshlight thing sharing a page with my work) and, well, crap writing. As for 'meh', I've always used it, personally. If you want a tip on the next big internet thing, I suggest looking out for 'ftw'.

Cath: My guess - Fuck The World (or is that the hormones kicking in...)?

Michael: It means For The Win, and should be used to follow anything you think is better than something else or otherwise life improving. For example - "huge mountaineer-style beards ftw!"

Cath: Hmm. Can't see myself using that one. Tell us about your as yet untitled novel.

Michael: I've been describing it as a Sex, Drugs, and Action novel. Or at least, I was describing it as a Sex, Drugs, and Action novel. Then I saw the trailer for that new Jason Statham movie.

Cath: Any more about the novel? Being mysterious and aloof can be good for promotion, but I'd advise against taking it too far.

Michael: The novel is about Scratch, a character attempting to find himself after a less than glamorous youth. His shot at redemption comes in the form of a barmaid named Fitz, but in attempting to win her affections, he stumbles into an attempted murder. This sets off a chain of events that brings his violent, amoral past rushing back into the present.

Cath: Good blurb. Thank you. What first inspired you to write?

Michael: Fucking hell. Where did that come from? Er...a lot of things. I think there were a lot of things in my formative years, especially writers I admired whose words meant a lot to me when I was going through my teenage years. Orwell, certainly, but also people like Stephen King.

Cath: And why do you write?

Michael: I've been thinking about that a lot lately. It used to be to beat back the demons. I used to drink a lot and spend time feeling sorry for myself and basically try and get down what I was feeling on paper. Then I climbed out of my arse. Now...well, I'm re-evaluating.

Cath: OK, any excerpts you'd like to share from that re-evaluation so far...?

Michael: I write to be read, I think. To communicate. I've never understood those people who say they don't write for an audience. I can understand that in the sense of not writing for money, but surely any writer writes for the eyes of others.

Cath: Have you written anything you hate so much, you'd rather eat your own shit than show it to anyone?

Michael: Many things. Maybe not for a few years now, but yeah, I've written plenty of things that make me cringe.

Cath: What's the biggest thing you'd like to communicate through writing?

Michael: That's a really difficult question to answer. Anything that makes another person feel, even if that feeling is anger. When I mentioned Orwell, I was talking specifically about 1984, which I first read when I was fourteen. I didn't really get it then, but the ending really touched me in a major way. I suppose that was my first adult understanding of the fact that it isn't all fairytales and happy endings. Maybe I'd known that before, but I can remember feeling this really powerful sadness at Winston's capitulation, and anger towards Big Brother in all His many forms. I think the ability to do that with words is a very special talent to have.

Cath: OK, let's lighten the tone and maybe I'll whack you with another heavy one later...what song would you strip to?

Michael: Something deeply camp. Ring My Bell, by The Blood Sisters. Enough irony there to cover for my comedic dancing skills and pudgy physique.

Cath: I'd go for Ecstasy by PJ Harvey because I'm warped.

Michael: The Birdie Song.

Cath: Does having the surname O'Mahony automatically make you a genius?

Michael: No. I think there are many people in our family who refute that without trying very hard.

Cath: Ouch. How big an influence has your big sister been on your life and art?

Michael: Hahaha...she thinks she's been a HUGE influence, but to be honest, the greatest part of that came when I was in my early teens and stole the best part of her tape collection in order to form the soundtrack to my puberty. That's creatively speaking. As far as life goes...I'm just not close to the rest of my family, so obviously she's been a big influence in that respect because she's the only one I really talk to.

Cath: I have now compensated by stealing and/or selling huge chunks of the book and CD collection Mikhail left behind in his dirthole of a former bedroom in the UK. Name some weird things that only you do.

Michael: Only me? In the whole world?

Cath: Well, you may suspect that only do them, or think you are in a minority, at least...for e.g. I think I get up to piss more during the night than the majority of the human race. That kind of thing.

Michael: Oh, I piss more than anybody in the world, so maybe that's genetic.

Cath: Did you see the cartoon in Private Eye about blogging?

Michael: No.

Cath: It shows a man sitting at a computer saying something like 'I'm just writing my blog'. On the screen it says 'me me me me me me'. Comments?

Michael: I suppose that's true in a sense. But then 'Blog' has become a much wider term over the past couple of years. Blogging has become, to a lot of people, a very valid form of journalism.

Cath: Write your own epitaph.

Michael: He was a Cunt, but he was Our Cunt.

Cath: What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Michael: That's so hard to answer, because many of the things that make me happy aren't really compatible. I think sitting down on a Saturday night in a place where I'm comfortable, with my wife and a bottle of Jack and a fucking good movie and a wonky coffee table propped up by copies of a critically acclaimed novel with my name on the spine.

Cath: How good would a big fat greasy donor kebab taste right now?

Michael: Like the food of the Gods. I keep telling Jennifer that the next time we're in England, we're going to go down the pub, get shitfaced on watered-down lager, get into a fight, stagger down the high street yelling insults, then pop into the nearest filthy kebab shop and buy a pair of large doners with so much chili sauce that we'll wake up screaming the next morning.

Cath: Excellent. What would you say to George Bush if he appeared at your front door tomorrow?

Michael: "I think you've got the wrong house."

Cath: That's it?

Michael: If I'm being honest, I don't bear much in the way of animosity towards GWB as a person. Even if I came to the door with a Black And Decker and put a hole in his head, it wouldn't change anything. It's the elements and structures that put him in power that are the problem.

Cath: Do they have Black & Deckers in the US?

Michael: They do. Big ones.

Cath: You learn something new every day. Final question: What question would you like to be asked? And what would be your answer?

Michael: I'd like to be asked what I want my legacy to be, what I'd like to leave behind when I'm gone. In short, what the point is of what I do. And I think the answer, in its bluntest form is: Be remembered.

Cath: Well, thank you, Michael Peter O'Mahony.

Michael: That 'Peter' is getting edited out.

Cath: Cunt.

Powers Of Charm And Persuasion

2006-08-29T20:25:00.000-07:00

"Now I know your heart, I know your mind. You don't even know you're being unkind. So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways. Just use me up and then you walk away."

I was working in the Health & Beauty section of the store today, when I came upon a young lady standing halfway down one of the aisles looking perplexed. With nothing on my mind but assisting this damsel in distress with a smile and a "Can I Help You Find Something?" (copyright Target Corp. 2006 -) I walked straight up to her...and then past her and on my merry way.

Clue: She was looking at the shelves where they keep the Monistat.

Note: Sometimes the best kind of customer service is no customer service at all.

I joked to Jennifer when I took this job that it would be less than two weeks before I was promoted. It's been less than that since I started, and today saw an illuminating conversation with the District Team Leader result in my acquiring her business card and an invitation to come and interview at District Headquarters sometime next week. I am lazy and I lack motivation, but I don't need to remind anybody that knows me at all about my propensity for landing on my feet. Also, the powers of charm and persuasion I inherited at least partially from my dear old dad. Also, my accent, which - while it's the very definition of bland back home - appears to make the ladies prick up their ears at distances of up to twenty feet here in SoCal. The District Team Leader is a lady.

So it looks as though the boy is going up in the world once again. I shouldn't think I'll be going too far, but it's bound to be an improvement on seven bucks an hour, and that will do me just fine for the time being.

What else, what else, what else?

Very little, to be honest. The Curve Ball Conspiracy is on another mini hiatus. I hope to get something new up there in a few days. Not sure how much longer it'll last, though. I have five or six very enthusiastic contributors, a few more who might contribute at some unspecified point in the future, and more flakes than I could possibly hint at in one blog post. When you add to that the fact that my time will be at a premium again as of next week, maintaining NFADR and the CBC while staying on top of my own faltering creativity looks a bit of a tall order. If I have to drop something, it'll be a blog, and it won't be this one.

Of course, if I end the CBC or hand the reins over to somebody else, I may well push on with the mysterious and little-mentioned Salty Dog Project. I've only ever alluded to it in the vaguest of terms here on NFADR, but when I created a sample site at Blogspot and forgot it could be accessed from my profile, there were several enquiries as to the nature of the beast, all of which were swatted aside with promises that it would someday rear its ugly head in public.

Which it might. But we shall see. There may yet be a Curve Ball resurgence.

That's all for now. Tomorrow, I'll be bemoaning the fact that - despite my status as a writer of some standing - nobody has ever wanted to interview me, not even for some crap online fiction 'zine. Of course, I will then interview myself for your cutting and pasting pleasure.

You're welcome.

You're Twisting My Melon, Man

2006-08-17T14:43:00.000-07:00

"A night that's so blue feed the aching in you, and the background birds take a flight from the earth, where the bonfire burns, and the night current turns on a lifeboat floating down a river of sleep."

I didn't even notice that yesterday's post was #200, possibly because in reality, I'm closer to 300, but I killed many of the smaller, irrelevant entries from the old blog when I brought the archives here. Happy Pseudo-200th Post, NFADR, I guess.

Yesterday was bittersweet for me. On the one hand, I finally got out of the house, I'm finally making some money, and my job is ridiculously easy. On the other, I spent an evening stocking shelves, helping people who didn't appear to understand my accent, and being patronised by spotty students ten years my junior. I think I need to try a little harder to not make a career of this kind of mediocrity.

Christ, what an awful sentence. Where the fuck did that come from?

Anyway, I'm done with the diary stuff for today. Let's do a playlist instead - this one's a mixture of old and new from my iPod.

1. Heaven Hammer - Beck (Fantastic remix of Missing from Guerolito. I've been listening to this non-stop).

2. Patent Pending - Heavens (Heavens is the side project of Alkaline Trio frontman Matt Skiba. This is the title track of their first album, due out Sept. 12th).

3. Dear Scene, I Wish I Were Deaf - Nightmare Of You (I don't know anything about NOY. I just got hold of the album after hearing this on the radio. They sound worryingly like The Housemartins sometimes).

4. Caribou - Pixies (Classic Pixies track. One of my all-time favourites).

5. L.S.F. - Kasabian (I'm not a big Kasabian fan, but this track's catchiness is undeniable. Great for the gym).

6. Gardening At Night - REM (Debut single from Stipe and company. It's been a while since they were anything like this good).

7. This Is Such A Pity - Weezer (I have a love/hate relationship with Weezer. This, however, is a great song).

8. Step On - Happy Mondays ("You're twisting my melon, man!")

9. Mandy Goes To Med School - Dresden Dolls (Prime example of the awesomeness that is the Dresden Dolls. If you've not heard of them, you should have).

10. Into The Void - Nine Inch Nails (With Teeth got me back into NIN after not listening to them in a while. This is industrial fun over a bassline that just won't quit).

11. Turnaround - Nirvana (I downlo...er...bought Incesticide yesterday because I hadn't heard it in such a long time. This is probably my favourite track).

12. It's a Beutiful Day - Reagan Youth (The typo is theirs, not mine. If there's anybody out there still in any doubt as to what punk rock sounds like, try this).

13. The Comeback - Shout Out Louds (Oddly catchy number from little-known Swedes. Only song of theirs I like).

14. You Only Live Once - The Strokes (I know, I hate The Strokes. I'm as disturbed as you are that I appear to be developing a liking for their most recent effort).

15. Diane - Therapy? (The mighty Therapy? break out the strings for this cover of an old Husker Du anomaly. Wonderfulness results).

Monstrously Demeaning

2006-08-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

"There's the pitch, slow and straight, all I have to do is swing and I'm a hero. But I'm a zero."

Six months of sloth come to an end tomorrow. Thank Christ. Or thank Target, if you'd prefer a more commercial deity. Actually, just scratch all of that. Having thought about it, Jesus is actually a hell of a lot more commercial than Target will ever be.

All of which is to say that I have officially broken the vow I made to forever forswear the monstrously demeaning world of customer service. As you can probably imagine, I am not best pleased with this state of affairs, but then not having any choice in such matters is fast becoming the norm in my brave new world. Fuck it, right? Someday I'll write a bestseller, and someday pigs will sprout golden wings. Until then, my commitment to underachievement and utter lack of motivation will conspire to build vicious circles for me to scamper around in.

It's six months since I last worked, by the way. I could have written two or even three novels in six fucking months. Perversely, I didn't even write one. In fact, I finished nothing at all, unless you count the flash fiction I penned for The Curve Ball Conspiracy and Flashing In The Gutters. The 'flash' form suits me, I suppose, requiring as it does little in the way of deep thought or long-term commitment, both of which appear to trouble my creative self.

But enough bitching. At least being back in some kind of social environment will give me things to write about, and maybe that will help me out of this apparently endless slump.

Here's hoping.

Good Weekend

2006-08-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

"Once I thought I had Mono for a whole year. Turns out I was just really bored."

This week's lack of postage is due to incurable laziness. The passing of the Mandamus frenzy left me exhausted and in a general malaise as regards the blog. I think I may have Mono.

Jammie came down from Oklahoma to visit us last weekend. I was going to write about what we did each day, but I've left it too long now, and it's all congealed into one big, mad blur. We definitely picked her up from the airport on Friday, and I'm sure we took her back on Monday. Between the two trips were a baseball game, The Cheesecake Factory, a job interview, a drug test, the world's weakest bladder, Richard Jeni, The Rockin' Taco, Santa Monica, Jenn's birthday, and the cat peeing on the phone. I forget the order they came in.

1. Richard Jeni - This was Friday night, I think. Or maybe it was Saturday. We had dinner...uh...somewhere (all I remember is a tower of onion rings) and then it was on to the Brea Improv. This was the first time I'd ever been to a live comedy show, but I'd never actually heard of Richard Jeni and had no idea if he was any good. Turns out he's actually quite a funny guy, though I personally thought the MC was funnier. The Brea Improv is pretty swank, though, and the drinks were good.

2. The Interview - This was definitely Saturday. Target had called on Friday and invited me to come in for another interview (I say 'another', but I've never actually had an interview there, even though I've gone for one twice). So I drive over there with Jenn, she goes to pick up Jammie from the hotel, and I tell them to meet me in half an hour. Only that's not how it goes. This fat Ben Affleck-looking motherfucker is interviewing me, and he keeps getting up and going off to do things. In addition to this, I gave them Jenn's Social Security Number when I first applied, and according to the guy, this means I have to fill out the electronic application all over again, including the sixty-odd 'personality' questions at the end. I duly comply, and then he has trouble printing out my application. When we finally get around to the interview, it takes about ten minutes and they offer me a job on the spot. At this point, I have been in Target for two hours, and we're late for...Richard Jeni. Shit, Richard Jeni was Saturday night, not Friday. Anyway, the job offer is conditional on my passing both a background check and a drug test...

3. The Drug Test - The drug test has to be completed within 24 hours of the job offer. What with our date at the Brea Improv, we didn't have time to do it on Saturday night. This was how we ended up stopping off at the clinic on Sunday morning, on our way to Hollywood and then the Dodgers/Nationals game. Except...yes...it didn't turn out that way. See, I'm turning into one of those people that never leaves the house and is always sick, and it seems as though anything above a small amount of food and drink makes me ill these days. Sunday morning found me spending a scary amount of time in the bathroom, so when I got to the clinic and took my little plastic cup into the cubicle, I had nothing in my bladder to fill it with.

Embarrassing, but we're just getting started here. We ended up being stuck at the clinic for over an hour while I consumed vast quantities of liquid and thought about waterfalls. Of course, once my swollen bladder had finally delivered a sample and we'd gotten back on the road, I immediately - having drunk some ten pints of water - needed to piss like a racehorse. So we missed out on going to Hollywood, we were ten minutes late for the ball game, and we had to stop so I could relieve myself six times, two of them by the side of the freeway.

4. The Dodgers - Jammie had purchased some rather awesome tickets for the Dodgers game. We were literally sitting about twenty feet behind home plate. Now, those of you that know me will know that I am not a fan of baseball, but I knew we were going to the game and so I spent the previous week attempting to educate myself by watching the Dodgers get whipped by the Padres on TV. By the time Sunday rolled around, I knew a few of the players and had a better feel for the rules than I'd ever had before. The live atmosphere certainly made it better than watching on TV, and watching the Dodgers (ostensibly 'my' team) come back from two down to win 4-3 was a good time. I'm still not a baseball fan, but I'd definitely go and watch a game again.

5. Santa Monica - By the time we left the baseball game, I was feeling drained and sick. It was turning into a very long day, and when we drove into Santa Monica and found it heaving with people, many of them deeply strange, I felt my temper getting away from me. Man, it was awful. I've honestly never loathed a place so much on first acquaintance. It's a town full of whores, fat tourists, and beggars. The horror.

I knew Jammie wanted to do some touristy stuff (she was, after all, a tourist) and I knew Jenn had wanted Jammie to see the shops and the beach, so I did my best to tag along and tried not to open my mouth too much lest I start screaming insults. My black mood must have been more obvious than I'd realised, though. After asking me several times if I was okay, the two Js clearly had some kind of Michael-less conference while I waited outside a shop, emerging determined to get food and then go home. We duly ate a seriously mood-improving meal at Bubba Gump's before fleeing the area.

6. Jenn's birthday - My lady wife got a year older on Monday, and - in a testament to her youthful hotness - still managed to get carded pretty much every time we tried to buy alcohol. My main present still hadn't (and still hasn't) arrived due to an address mix-up, but Jammie had already bought us both COWBOY BOOTS from Oklahoma, and the cat had contributed in his own inimitable fashion by weeing all over the phone. Actually, one of the best presents I think Jammie got Jenn (and me, to be honest) was having us stay in her hotel room while she was here. The apartment is hot and uncomfortable, and we share it with a furry little motherfucker who wakes me at around 4am most mornings. So getting a couple of awesome nights of sleep in a room with a comfortable bed, a kick-ass shower, and arctic air conditioning did us both more good than I can say.

Jammie contributed more presents on Monday morning, and Jenn had a chance to be delighted with some new clothes before we headed off to the Cheesecake Factory for a massive lunch we weren't even close to finishing. Jammie's final present was season one of Scrubs, and I gave Jenn a book (I Am Legend), a DVD (Party Monster), and a T-shirt (reading 'Bears: #1 Threat To America). Hopefully, my main present will arrive at some point this week.

And that was essentially the end of the weekend. We drove to the airport and left Jammie smoking one final cigarette before her flight home. Next time, the kids are headed to Oklahoma, and they're bringing their cowboy boots.

The Mandamus Project

2006-07-26T14:33:00.000-07:00

"Well, there's only so much drama I can stand, and this is just about as far as I will bend. So get your hands off my lapel, because I think it's time to go."

From the AP wire:

Literary World Stunned As Controversial Blogger Announces 'Punk Rock Space-Opera'

Reclusive blogger Michael O'Mahony called a brief press conference in downtown Los Angeles this afternoon, announcing his intention to bring the world its first Punk Rock Space Opera. O'Mahony, who arrived at the gathering on a rickshaw driven by his man-servant, Chico, told reporters that the "book, or series of books, will chronicle the adventures of General Mandamus, a grizzled veteran of many complex and pointless wars."

O'Mahony's announcement comes on the heels of a lengthy and well publicised battle with the USCIS. This has led many commentators to speculate that the author may well be preparing himself to go head-to-head with the federal government. "Michael is a great believer in massive retaliation," said his mother, speaking to reporters on the doorstep of her home in the suburbs of London. "He clearly intends to take matters into his own hands with this Mandamus thing."

Manadamus, meaning "we command" in Latin, has its most common use in legal terminology, with a Writ Of Mandamus being issued by a complainant to a government, corporation, or public authority in order to remedy defects of justice. It is more commonly known in California law as the Writ Of Mandate.

"Really? I had no idea," O'Mahony told reporters. "My intention was merely to write the kind of romance novel Barbara Cartland would have written if you'd filled her with Black Acid, chained her to a typewriter, and told her that at least one alien shitbag had to have his ass handed to him every other paragraph."

"This is not about a personal vendetta," he continued, signalling to Chico as he climbed down from a specially erected platform. "This is about justice. The story of General Mandamus must and shall be heard. I have been in touch with many publishers, and they have offered me money and favours for my words, no Green Card required. I have proved that not even the most powerful nation on the face of the planet can stop art."

A USCIS spokesman refused to comment on The Mandamus Project or O'Mahony's quest to destroy all they hold dear and true, stating that: "We do not talk about individual cases."

"Of course they don't," laughed O'Mahony. "Give them the question in writing, they may get back to you in a year or two." With that, the heroic young artist leapt into his rickshaw, turning to briefly acknowledge the applause of the crowd before officially ending the press conference by cracking a bullwhip across Chico's bare back and screaming "Avante!" as they made a rapid departure.

O'Mahony Vs The United States Of America

2006-07-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

"Smeared black ink; your palms are sweaty, and I'm barely listening to last demands. I'm staring at the asphalt, wondering what's buried underneath where I am."

"When a naturalization application takes longer than 120 days to adjudicate from the date of the naturalization examination, an applicant is permitted to bring a lawsuit in federal court and a judge can determine the outcome of the application (INA Section 336). Applicants have recently been filing claims under this section of law where they have completed their naturalization interview, more than 120 days have passed since the interview, and where the application is still pending due to a delay with the FBI name check."

Woo! The countdown starts today, kids! 118 days until I file a WRIT OF MANDAMUS (how fucking awesome does that sound?) on their asses. O'Mahony Vs The United States Of America? Oh, it's on.

Weeping And Screaming And Shaking Their Fists

2006-07-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

"Hey, you are me, not so pretty. All the world I've seen before me passing by. Silent, my voice. I've got no choice. All the world I've seen before me passing by."

Even the longest and most dramatic of stories can end with a whimper rather than a bang. For two years, the main thread of this particular story has been a strange and romantic quest to cross the world and get the girl without being dragged away by swarthy men in uniforms.

But then, just after eleven this morning, the girl in question and I emerged blinking into the strange, bright silence of Civic Center Plaza. We'd accidentally deviated from the prescribed route, and this had somehow led us to a square of semi-developed land that was empty save for a few lost-looking strangers and a woman with a hot dog cart. We were hemmed in on all sides by faceless buildings with no identifying names or numbers. Finding the federal building looked to be a tall order.

Fortunately, we stumbled upon a helpful sign with a key that showed us where we were and which building was which. Not so fortunately, the next helpful sign we came to after five minutes of walking told us that we were in the exact same place. Clearly, this had been some fiendish sign-maker's idea of a joke.

Or maybe not. It occured to me a short while later, when the girl in question and I were sat in yet another of the clean and brightly-lit rooms full of chairs that have dogged my life for the last two years, that these waiting areas had, over that period of time, been getting smaller and smaller. As recently as last November, I'd been sat in a room at the American Embassy in London that might have better been described as a hall. As is always the case with these things, many were called but few were chosen. Since last winter, the people from the Embassy have been pared down and scattered, denied their dreams or simply sent to other cities in other states. Still others, I'm sure, have been defeated by the steep financial requirements, or become lost in the reams of complex paperwork, much of which has to be submitted three, four, even five times. The same forms, over and over.

And maybe, when all was said and done, some of the immigrants that had leapt every hurdle, hit every curve ball, and ducked every sucker punch...maybe some of those immigrants found themselves wandering around what appeared to be a half-finished industrial estate on the hottest day in the history of everything, trying to find an umarked building amongst a sea of same. And maybe one or two of those immigrants, upon realising that the sign they were reading was lying to them, well, maybe they just lost it. Maybe they are, even now, staggering around in downtown Santa Ana, weeping and screaming and shaking their fists at passers-by.

We were taken from the clean and brightly-lit room to a small office, where the USCIS woman engaged us in what appeared, on the surface, to be a pleasant conversation. But I am a veteran of their schemes now, and I understood exactly what was going on when she began asking when Jenn and I had met, what my parents names were, when and where we got married, what my date of birth was...she was checking we were telling the truth.

A year-and-a-half of these forms, remember, many of them in double triplicate. A year-and-a-half of interviews and inoculations, medicals and official documents. A year-and-a-half of the most comprehensive and infuriating background check you could possibly carry out on a person...and they needed another interview. You know, just to be sure.

Of course, everything was ship-shape and squared away and whatever other stupid fucking terms you might care to apply to paperwork we could now almost certainly organise in our sleep, and at the end of the interview I was essentially granted my Green Card. I say 'essentially' because, well...I'm being investigated by the FBI.

Sadly, that's nowhere near as cool as it sounds. It's a check they run on your name and your fingerprints, and according to the USCIS, the check on my name hasn't come back yet. Which is silly. I've seen CSI, and I know these background checks are comprised only of several seconds of speed-typing followed by some bleeps. Then again, with the USCIS involved, it'll probably be several years before we hear anything.

So that's it. I mean, I don't have the Green Card yet, but as soon as the name check comes back it'll be in the mail. I'm done. I'm a resident. It's all over bar the shouting.

But you know what? I don't believe it. Not for a second. Until I have possession of that card, until I'm actually holding the little sucker in my hand, I'm going to be sitting here waiting. You see, the way the immigration system works, and the way it's treated us these last eighteen months, I figure there's about a 50/50 chance of the other shoe dropping in the form of sixteen heavily-armed federal agents kicking down the apartment door and dragging me off to Guantanamo Bay for crimes unknown.

Whores Truly

2006-07-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

I have a small request to make of you, regular reader. As you may or may not be aware, the financial aspect of my recent move to the United States has always been somewhat precarious. Unfortunately, it now borders on a crisis. This is largely due to the pathetic performance of the USCIS as regards enabling me to find work in this country.

But blame is not the issue. The issue is that I have decided to whore myself. My talents, I mean. No, not those talents. My writing. SO...if you know anybody that requires the PAID services of a creative and talented boy such as myself, be it for press releases, reviews, blog posts, or anything else related to my preternatural skills, I'd be honoured if you could let either them or me know at the earliest possible juncture. Speed is of the essence.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Michael

PS: Any offers of charity will be aggressively rejected.

You've Got Red On You

2006-07-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion."

Woo! It's the return of five-word movie reviews:

Transamerica: This was overrated but heartwarming.

Underworld Evolution: Vampire, werewolves, effects, mild amusement.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Robert Downey Jr., my hero.

16 Blocks: Just a wee bit shit.

The Hills Have Eyes: Enjoyably disturbing, but crap nonetheless.

Night Watch: It's better than Underworld Evolution.

Syriana: Found to be thoroughly enjoyable.

Find Me Guilty: Diesel in 'not shit' shocker.

The Matador: Great little movie. Thumbs up.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: Good, but not that good.

Having watched both Underworld Evolution and the new Pirates Of The Caribbean this month, I've discovered that I can no longer see Bill Nighy onscreen without turning to whoever is beside me and announcing: "You've got red on you."

Some Kind Of Mutant Blood Leech

2006-07-18T15:14:00.000-07:00

"It's all out of context. There's nothing I'm into. Call it a complex, it's really quite simple. I'm tired of these hang ups. I wish someone would call me back. How about it?"

Long days in Orange County. The heat comes heavy and early, and even the fan can't keep me in bed once the sun comes up. Most of the time it's just about bearable, but every now and then the little things tip it over the edge of intolerable; a little extra humidity in the air, or the occasional death of the almost-constant breeze that makes going outside okay. I never understood what people meant when they described this period as the dog days of summer. Not until now.

The USCIS continues to be the villain of this lethargic pantomine. I am ready, willing, and able to work, but my details have yet to be entered into whatever system requires them so that the Social Security folks can issue me a number and make my life that much easier. At the moment, the Great Job Hunt is working around this near-crippling handicap by calling upon its protagonist's lengthy history of charm, evasiveness, and pathological lying.

The fantastic thing about the USCIS, in this instance, is this: you cannot contact them. There are no numbers to call, no addresses to write. The people processing this part of my application are, to all intents and purposes, invisible. This is beginning to bother me. I am storing up unhealthy amounts of apopleptic rage. It is giving me nervous tics. These will likely continue until some fucker finds themselves on the receiving end of my frustration.

The Great Job Hunt is, as we speak, in a state of mild anticipation. I have somehow reached deep enough into the barrel to scrape a possible job at Target off its bottom. This was the result of Jennifer's attempts to motivate me yesterday afternoon. I was feeling despondent and not a little bit annoyed, and she seized the opportunity to drag me out into the world. She was right to do so, of course, but I am weary and bored and much too hot, and every action is taken reluctantly. Target was actually yesterday's second choice, behind an opening in a sandwich shop that turned out to be run by more weird Asian people.

Maybe there's some obscure Asian nation out there that just bundled all of its mental patients onto a boat bound for the west coast of America one day. Now they sell books and sandwiches and always have job vacancies because any potential applicants run screaming from their doors.

So I filled out the super-patronising electronic application at Target, and then picked up the big red phone they keep by the computer so you can call them up and go, "Finished!" They decided they wanted to interview me immediately, and I was ordered to the Food Court to await my inquisition. There I stayed until a girl who must have been about twelve came to explain that there was nobody available to interview me. Could I come back tomorrow at nine?

Of course I could.

Cue this morning, and a bizarre allergic reaction to substances unknown that left me with an unnaturally bloated upper lip. I wasn't aware of anything more than a tingling sensation and a strange swelling when I walked into Target, but when I got home and saw myself in the mirror, I realised just what a fine job the people I had interacted with had done of concealing their utter terror at my appearing to have some kind of Mutant Blood Leech pulsating on my face.

The comedy continued when the girl at customer services called upstairs to tell my interviewer I was here. "Michael has arrived for his interview," she said, and listened to the reply before glancing back at me. "Your second name?" she asked.

"O'Mahony," I replied.

"Michael Armani," the girl told the phone.

I was once again directed to the food court, where I sat playing with my lip until a guy whose name badge announced that he was Mathew came over. "You're Michael?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Armani?"

"O'Mahony," I said, and spelled it for him.

"And your Social Security Number?"

"Uh...I don't have it with me," I said, exaggerating my accent.

"Can you remember any of the digits?"

"It starts with a five," I said. It might.

Somehow, Mathew used this information to find my application, and he returned with news. "You might want to go for a higher position," he said, and in retrospect, he may have been holding my eyes to avoid looking at The Leech. "You have, like, six years of managerial experience."

I nodded, almost smug in my confirmation of lie #1.

"And you've graduated college?"

"Yes," I said, with a modest smile, behind which lurked the savage reality of lie #2.

So somebody called Albert is supposed to be calling me at some point this afternoon, hopefully to offer me a shot at something slightly less demeaning than stacking shelves.

Fingers crossed. It may not be what I want, but it's something.

The Perils Inherent

2006-07-08T14:51:00.000-07:00

"Chase down an empty street, blindly snap the broken beats. Said it's gone with the dirty trick. It's taken all these days to find you."

Lack of updates is due to time spent job hunting and sloth brought on by the heat. It was over a hundred degrees here yesterday, which is just silly.

Anyway, The Great Job Hunt is now well under way, despite my lack of a Social Security Number. I don't actually need an SSN to work, but most of the bigger companies out here only accept online applications now, and online applications tend to have many disclaimers and warnings around that place where you'd enter your SSN. Considering my status as a resident is on a probationary basis, this makes me a little nervous. I could enter Jenn's number or make one up or whatever, but I've been doing really well at walking on eggshells since I've been here, and I'd hate to fuck that up by doing something as small as messing about with a job application.

I was going to go for a job at Borders, as their online application stated that one could also apply instore. But I walked the four miles or so to Brea on Thursday (muttering "water, water," all the while) only to be told that they "don't do that anymore." Fortunately, my journey wasn't completely wasted. I stumbled on a Gamestop in the same area, and was overjoyed to discover that they're sufficiently behind the times to still be using paper applications. Woo!

All well and good, but by Thursday afternoon, I had covered all the big company bases I could without a Social Security Number. It was time to investigate some more obscure options.

Earlier in the week, Jennifer and I had gone out for burgers at a little cafe not far from where we live. On our way back to the car, I'd noticed a couple of shops I thought might be worth checking out in terms of The Great Job Hunt. One sold soccer goods and sportwear, the other second-hand books. Jenn drove me out there yesterday, and I had a quick chat with the folks in the soccer shop, grabbed an application, then headed next door to the book shop.

This isn't the first time I've posted on the subject of the perils inherent in blindly stumbling into places you've never been before, and I doubt it'll be the last. I seem to have a knack for accidentally discovering many of the world's oddest and/or most unpleasant locations. In this case, I was inclined more toward laughter than terror as I pushed open the door of the second-hand bookshop and immediately inhaled the musty scent that only ever comes from many ancient things gathered together in one location. I coughed and turned my head away from the dust-heavy air I'd disturbed by opening the door. I found myself looking at a large counter, behind which sat this man:

Okay, he wasn't actually the old man from Gremlins, but he looked enough like him that I was suppressing laughter, and when he smiled and said "hello," in a voice that had a timbre and pitch roughly equivalent to a seven-year-old girl on helium, I simply smiled and made my way into the depths of the store, where I didn't dare laugh for fear of getting a lethal lungful of the thick, dirty air. I browsed for perhaps two minutes, long enough to realise that most of the books had probably been sitting there for a very long time, and then I hurried from the store, coughing a goodbye to the old man as I went.

I'll be continuing the job search on Monday, and probably taking a good look through the window before I barge into any odd-looking stores.

Climate Control

2006-06-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

"Catch the sun before it's gone. Here it comes, up in smoke and gone."

It's quite warm in Southern California. Google reckons it's ninety-two degrees, but I'd be inclined to guess a little higher. After all, I doubt anybody from Google was down in a gym that has air conditioning as lame as the one I was in this morning. Even the pool was warm. I also doubt anybody from Google had to walk to Target and back, carrying nine litres worth of soda on the return journey. It sure felt like a little more than ninety-two degrees then, I assure you.

This is probably my one bitch about SoCal. I'm sure I'll become accustomed to it, but you can never be comfortable in this kind of heat, no matter who you are. On the aforementioned trip to the supermarket earlier, I was cotton-mouthed and soaked with sweat five minutes after leaving the house. That's silly hot, and - as it's not even July yet - I think it's safe to say that it's going to get hotter.

If I had any doubts about going north at some point in the near future, I've a feeling my first SoCal summer is going to lay them to rest.

Bliss

2006-06-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

"This is what it's all about, take me in and eat me out. Pins and needles in my arms. Lucky eyes and lucky charms."

We're halfway through another lazy weekend out here in SoCal, gleefully spending Jenn's new-found wealth (a recent payrise just showed up in her wages) on food, alcohol, and movies. I have my EAD card now, but my social security number has yet to show up, meaning still more time spent stuck in the apartment with only the cat for company. The annoying thing is that, legally speaking, I can work without the SS number, but in practice, almost any job application I could possibly fill out is useless without one. So once again we're waiting. With any luck, though, the thing will turn up by the end of next week, meaning I should just about be able to catch the end of the World Cup before I have to start working.

A surplus of free time has, naturally, led to my becoming more immersed than I normally would in the World Cup. Since the tournament started, I've watched about 90% of the games, and even found myself writing in-depth analyses on various messageboards. My presence in front of the television during the football (and it is football. I will not call it soccer) has led directly to Jenn becoming involved, initially as a disinterested observer, but latterly as a partisan supporter, usually of the underdogs.

So this morning began with the first half of the Germany/Sweden match. I then left Jennifer to the second half while I made my now-customary trip to the gym, where I burned my current daily rate of 1100 calories or so before indulging in the newest part of my workout: hurling my sweating, exhausted self into the swimming pool at the conclusion of my excursions. Seriously, it's awesome. I'll grab a picture on Monday so you can see it for yourselves, but the way the gym is set out is so the exercise bike and the treadmill - my two morning nemeses - are positioned to each side of a pair of swing doors that open directly out onto the pool. So I can slide off the bike, ditch my iPod, pull off shoes, socks, and t-shirt, and run straight out through those double doors and into the cool, clear water beyond.

Bliss.

Today I came back from the gym/pool, grabbed a quick shower, and then accompanied Jenn on an expedition for lunch and ice cream. With that mission duly accomplished, we came home and did us some eating in front of a rather thrilling confrontation between Mexico and Argentina. We then got drunk while watching Johnny Depp in The Libertine (Critically overrated, I thought, but Depp was as awesome as always and there were some absolutely killer lines) and the much-lauded Russian sci-fi thriller, Night Watch (pretty good, actually. My only problem with it was checking the sound options for the original Russian dub so we could watch that with English subtitles, being unable to find any options except for English, Spanish, and French, then sitting through some appalling voice acting that spoiled an otherwise enjoyable movie only to discover afterward that the original Russian language soundtrack was available as an option...in the fucking special features. Honestly, who hides the original dub of their film in the special features without including it in the audio options? That's just about the dumbest thing I've ever encountered).

Then we ate an Enormous Bastard Ultimeat Pizza (they should totally call it that) from Round Table.

That concludes today's ramble, the point of which was simply to make my meagre readership understand that I love Saturdays.

Thank you for your time.

Without A Whisper Of Protest

2006-06-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

To Whom It May Concern,

Seeing as there is no e-mail address listed on your site under the heading of 'ethical concerns', I thought I'd just use this one. I hope you are able to forward this message on to Ian Preece or whomever else is relevant.

I was interested to read today that Orion will be publishing the diaries of Pete Doherty. While I've never had much time for the antics of Mr. Doherty and have always been slightly dubious of his talents, I understand that there is a market for this kind of thing and that the book, when it is released, will almost certainly be a bestseller. It's good to know then, that Orion Publishing Group is honest enough to come right out and admit that it is the moral equal of such great British institutions as The Sun newspaper, which, as I'm sure you know, adopted young Doherty mostly due to his ability to generate the requisite 'bad boy' headlines they need to fill the space between photos of celebrities falling out of their dresses.

You see, the point isn't that Doherty has a story to tell, that he's a bright and talented kid from a difficult background who has achieved fame against the odds. The point is that Pete Doherty is slowly killing himself in public, and Orion Publishing Group seems more than happy to lend a helping hand in this endeavour by giving him money he will, of course, use to buy drugs. And it isn't just Pete. What about all those kids you see turning up to support him at his court appearances? What sort of message do you think it sends them when a guy like Doherty is given money for his story? Orion, it seems, is more than comfortable with glamourising Heroin addiction and its victims in order to turn a profit.

I'm amused to find myself writing a letter like this one. It's not as though I'm some ultra-moral, church-going conservative outraged at the behaviour of the youth today. I just can't believe a successful publishing company can joyfully announce that it's putting money in the hands of an addict - thereby lending validation not only to his behaviour, but to the behaviour of all those who will follow - without a whisper of protest.

Still, that's the world we live in, eh? I guess it would have been too simple to ask the boy to perhaps complete a proper spell in rehab as a condition of the book contract. No, that would be ridiculous. After all, if he goes and dies between now and next March, those hardcovers will be flying off the shelves, right?

Right.

How do you sleep?

Curiously,
Michael O'Mahony

Inimitable Vocal Stylings

2006-06-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

"There goes my baby, She knows how to rock and roll. She drives me crazy; she gives me hot and cold fever then she leaves me in a cool cool sweat."

Jenn and I finally got some kind of a social life on Saturday. Which was nice. Tight purse strings have kept us from doing much but renting movies and getting drunk at home since I've been here, but now that Jenn's monster payrise is in and the possibility of your hero actually having a job looms large on the horizon, we're preparing to become the next big thing in Hollywood.

Or not.

Saturday's excuse for a piss-up was Jenn meeting up with an old friend of hers, Kelly, for the first time in about a decade. I was designated husband for the evening, and Shannon (Kelly's other half) was designated girlfriend. Or at least, that's how it went in my head. The reality was quite different, and we were all getting along famously before we even reached the expensive French restaurant where we dined. One reasonably impressive meal and a couple of drinks later, we hit the road and ended up at a seedy karaoke bar/bowling alley, where we took advantage of all the facilities and eventually staggered out at sometime after one in the morning. Actually, I say staggered, but I think I was the only one who managed to get a decent drunk on. This may explain why it was I decided to butcher several songs with my own, inimitable vocal stylings.

Okay, I had a decent singing voice in me once upon a time. It just didn't show itself until after I'd butchered The Joker. I chased this with Wichita Lineman, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, and Semi-Charmed Life with, I think, varying degrees of success. If you ask me, I think I did a pretty mean Freddie Mercury. But I was drunk, so you may be better off asking someone else. Like Shannon or Kelly, who were much better, or Jenn, who was nothing like drunk enough to show off her skills.

Anyway, here's a few pics:

Michael, en route to another Strike (please ignore the ball that's clearly heading for the gutter, it's a photographic aberration).

Jenn and Kelly feeling particularly cheesy.

Kelly And Shannon rockin' the suburbs.

Modified lyrics: "Some people call me the space cowboy. Some call me the gangster of love. Some people call me Michael, and I'm wearing an unflattering shirt."

Jenn practically begged me to include this. So here, for your viewing pleasure, is the award-winning image, 'Recovering Alcoholic At Karaoke'.

This one was actually taken on my birthday last week, but I like it too much to keep it to myself.

Qualifying Clichés

2006-06-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

"I wanted to walk through the empty streets and feel something constant under my feet, but all the news reports recommended that I stay indoors."

At this point, a deep, dark birthday post is usually called for. After all, this blog more or less shares its anniversaries with those of my birth, and it's about this time of year I start thinking about what I've done in the last twelve months and what I hope to do in the next.

But you know, things are a little different this time. I look back now and the only thing I can really be sure of is that I've accomplished things in the last year or so that most people never even get close to. Yeah, the motivation problems that have plagued my creativity since time immemorial are still around, but they don't worry me as much as they did. This period of my life has been more about prioritising than scrambling after the dreams that have dogged me since I was old enough to understand what it was I wanted to do with my life. In a sense, that burning ambition to say something and be heard was holding me back. In finally realising that and thinking about myself as somebody other than an emotional cripple and long suffering artist, I finally accomplished something that means more to me than anything I'll ever write.

I'll never be a spiritual person. My lack of belief in all things supernatural forever precludes that. I've always felt that the responsibility for failure, success, tragedy, and the ever elusive glory lies exclusively in the hearts and minds of people. As a culture, I believe we're in perhaps the most exhausting and difficult era in history. I wonder if evolution isn't somehow on hold, if we'll ever get over this tiresome and ridiculous phase of relying on fairytales, conspiracies, and obvious lies to somehow show us truth. I wonder and I doubt and sometimes I despair.

Still, I live for the times that exist despite my cynicism, and the last couple of years have held more than their share. Driving Interate 15 through the Mojave Desert twice and sensing on both occasions that destiny was riding shotgun, falling asleep in a Las Vegas hotel room feeling nothing but love for the girl beside me and satisfaction at the thing we'd done, stumbling and mumbling my way through customs at LAX on my way to meet the very same girl at what the end of a long, strange journey I couldn't even have guessed at back in the days when all I did was sit in my bedroom with cigarettes and alcohol, darkly plotting my own bleak future.

Make no mistake, friends, that's the handle. The ability to change the world doesn't lie in grand gestures and theories of bloody revolution. It's in the little things. For a while there, back when this journal was in its infancy, I wasn't sure where I was going. Since then, I guess I've realised that it isn't really the destination that's important. It's how you get there.

I'll always feel the same way about the world, I think. Neither of us is looking like changing any time soon. As for the little things, I've managed to overcome the bad ones while learning to appreciate the good ones. I've put enough distance between myself and my addictions that I can appreciate cigarettes and alcohol as occasional treats instead of needs, and when she smiles at me a certain way or we go walking just as night falls gently over Southern California, I can appreciate just how good life is without qualifying my clichés.

So maybe that quote sitting below the title isn't as accurate as I once thought. Maybe flying isn't so much about hurling yourself at the ground as it is those sublime moments when you forget the ground is there at all.

And maybe turning twenty-seven isn't so bad. I married the girl I love, moved to a place that already feels more like home than home ever did, and finally found a big enough stick to beat back my demons. I have a novel on the go and a head full of ideas. At this time in this place, I'm starting to feel as though I can do anything at all. I'm starting to feel as though even I wouldn't bet against me chasing down that last dream.

Would you?

Best Laid Plans

2006-06-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

"If I get old, I will not give in. But if I do, remind me of this."

Well, fuck. Best laid plans and all that. My EAD (That's Employment Authorisation Document) came in the mail yesterday. The Interview date for my AOS (That's Adjustment Of Status) came on Saturday. This means we are now into my final week of sloth. Yes, four months of doing pretty much nothing are about to come to an end.

Christ, I thought this was never going to happen. As much fun as it is to sit home lazily browsing the interweb or watching crap daytime TV or even writing, our financial situation and the lack of freedom that not being a proper resident brings have resulted in this awful claustrophobic feeling I'll be glad to see the back of. I can get a social security number now, and a social security number means I can get pretty much everything else.

The only thing worrying me now is that final interview. It should be fine, but this is the toughest interview of all, the one we both have to attend, bringing with us as much proof of our relationship as we can possibly find. The one where they ask all the awkward questions. Yup, this is the make or break interview. Once we get through it (and I can't see any reason why we wouldn't), I'll have my green card, and this whole saga will be over for a couple of years.

Second Hand Propaganda

2006-06-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

"I thought I was a fool for no-one. Oh, baby, I'm a fool for you. You're the queen of the superficial. How long before you tell the truth?"

I was struck by the strangest memory this morning. I was lying in bed, listening to the sickeningly addictive new Muse single and not thinking about much of anything, when I suddenly remembered Sinn Féin figurehead Gerry Adams, specifically the way they used to dub his interviews on English TV when I was young. As far as I'm aware, this practice left the wording of what he was saying exactly as it was, its purpose - apparently - not to change his message, but to dilute it by placing a buffer between the not-especially-charismatic Adams and us, the gullible viewers. This buffer was usually a well-spoken Englishman, which made being exposed to Adams's second hand propaganda an experience akin to hearing a Bin Laden speech read in a Texan accent.

I'm not sure I could handle having that level of control over someone's words. I mean, they could be saying something very serious and important, and you could just go crazy with it.

Gerry: "More than that, when elements within the British and Irish establishments and rejectionist unionism delayed progress, it was the IRA leadership which authorised a number of significant initiatives to enhance the peace process."

You: "Bombs. Hahahahahaha. There are bombs everywhere. Everywhere! Ireland's ours, all ours!"

Gerry: "If republicans are to prevail, if the peace process is to be successfully concluded and Irish sovereignty and re-unification secured, then we have to set the agenda - no-one else is going to do that."

You: "The queen's a cunt."

And so on.

The Scarlet Pimpernel Of Bloggers

2006-06-09T14:47:00.000-07:00

"Smiling in their faces, while filling up the hole. So many dirty little places in your filthy little worn out, broken down, see-through soul."

I'm done with the archives now. All the major posts since June 2004 are back up. I've ditched the fluff and done some editing, and I'll definitely need to go back at some point to tidy up links and things, but the main job is done. I'm sure that almost nobody will ever go digging through two years of my gibberish except me, but I like having it there. Two years is a decent lifespan for a blog, and it always seemed a bit of a shame to me that any new folks coming along for the ride would be denied a chance at reading some of my my earlier stuff. Honestly, I think the best posts are all in late 2004/early 2005.

I closed the first incarnation of this blog on my birthday last year, feeling at the time that the story NFADR was created to tell was done, and that I'd become too friendly with my small but perfectly formed (mostly) readership. I'm much happier writing at strangers than people I know. I think familiarity dulls my edge a little bit.

So I quit NFADR, took a break, and returned with an all-new blog, The Souljacker Diaries, writing as (surprise!) Souljacker. It didn't take me long to get bored. Having closed out the tale of my quarter-life crisis, I found I didn't have much to say. Also, no-one was reading the fucking thing. Anonymity is only fun if there are people to wonder who that masked man is.

So being the Scarlet Pimpernel of bloggers didn't quite work out, and it was only a few short months before I decided to resurrect the far more inspiring NFADR you see before you.

I bring this up now because I'm thinking very seriously about a new direction for this page o' mine. The daily diary stuff is all well and good, but reading through the archives has made me pine for the days of righteous anger, dirty stories, and hideously egocentric proclamations. There's nothing inherently wrong with personal blogs, but there isn't very much you can do with one when you spend most of your days doing the same things. I'd like to do politics, but I'm right and you're wrong and that only ever ends in bitterness and recrimination. I'd like to do more fiction, but most of my efforts are going into the novel at the moment, and I'm considering retiring from erotica because I'm getting slightly tired of seeing my name pop up alongside some really shitty writers at places like Clean Sheets. Don't get me wrong, they've been great to me and there is plenty there to recommend, it's just that the bar in this particular genre gets disturbingly close to the ground at times, and - yes - I don't like feeling I'm competing with writers I was better than ten years ago, never mind now. But I'm certainly not in the business of choosing a genre to write in. I'm sure there's an erotic novel in me somewhere, just as I'm sure I'd like to write something sci-fi someday. For now, though, I think I'll just ignore genre.

So...I don't know, and that's where you come in. What do you think? I'm not just talking to the usual suspects, either. I know there's a bunch of people that come here and never comment, so why not break the silence and have an opinion for once? I want to make the blog feel a little fresher, give it the direction and purpose it had back in the day. Any suggestions?

The Pattern Of These Dead Days

2006-06-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

"I haven't slept a single night in over a month, and not even once did you start to make sense to me. Well, maybe I'm a little bit slow, or just consistently inconsistent."

I'm trying not to be the one-post-a-week guy, but Blogger's been an absolute whore to me these last few days, and I haven't the patience to keep trying for hours. I did get a lot more in the way of archives up in the early part of the week, so that little project should hopefully be finished soon, giving anybody that feels like reading it a slightly revisionist version of my little blog's history. Unfortunately, I didn't keep the posts from the short-lived Souljacker Diaries, so there will forever be a gap between July and December '05.

On the subject, NFADR will be two years old on the 20th of this month, just six short days after I turn twenty-fucking-seven. No-one's saying you should send presents or anything, but...okay, they are. Send presents. I like presents, and I get really maudlin on my birthday. That said, I really have no right this year, and I may actually be able to guilt myself out of it. Yes, I'm bored as fuck at the moment, and yes, every day my employment authorisation is not in the mailbox leads to further frustration. But on the other hand, I'm in California, I'm with the woman I love, and I'm actually writing.

That's another reason the blog posts have become a little infrequent. This last week or so, I've finally graduated from writing hundreds of words a day to writing thousands. It's not every day, and I'm still getting that feeling of frustration that makes me edit while I'm writing (a habit I'm slowly training myself out of), but there has been a very large leap towards being somebody who doesn't sit there thinking about how much easier this whole business was when I had cigarettes and alcohol and dark thoughts to see me through to sunrise. So I've stopped thinking about how I'm writing a really bad novel and started concentrating on getting it out and seeing what it looks like when I'm done.

Boredom and this sudden return to creativity have changed the pattern of these dead days in pleasing fashion. The new routine is getting up at around seven and surfing the interweb for new music before I go to the gym. I'm doing six hours a week between bike and treadmill (and weighing 202lbs. Woo!), and even with six-hundred and fifty songs on my iPod, it gets old. This has had the interesting result of turning me into an absolute master at finding free mp3s and even entire albums without resorting to BitTorrent or any peer-to-peer stuff, which is great. So I hit the gym, come home and shower, then settle down to write. I rest when Jenn comes home for lunch, but the plan from here on in is to make that the little break in a daily session that runs from 10:30 to 3:30. That time will be dedicated entirely to writing, focussing mainly but not entirely on the novel (I want to hammer out some longer posts here and continue working on The Curve Ball Conspiracy). Jenn's arrival home makes it dinner time, and from then on the rest of the night is ours.

If the visa people are going to continue being evil, then chances are I have a month before my EAD turns up. I've decided I really need to use it. I'd started taking this dead time for granted when what I should have been doing was using it like a luxury. No matter. There is time to make amends.

Promises, Promises

2006-05-31T07:46:00.000-07:00

"My baby's pretty as a car crash, subtle as a splinter. Yeah, my baby's smooth as sandpaper, warm just like the winter."

I've fulfilled last week's fiction promise with a new story, The Reassuring Weight Of Closure, now playing at Flashing In The Gutters. It's not erotica, but it's not for the kids, either. Go read, it's the first new thing I've written in a while.

And just so this isn't the shortest post ever, I thought I might share some of the music that's currently keeping me sane. Some of it's recent, some of it's not. Any track that's a link can be listened to/downloaded.

1. Good Weekend - Art Brut
2. Sabotage - Beastie Boys
3. Suffer Well - Depeche Mode
4. Wooden Nickels - Eels
5. Lolita - Elefant
6. Saturday - Go Betty Go
7. Are You Gonna Be My Girl? - Jet
8. Club Foot - Kasabian
9. London Beckoned Songs About Money Written By Machines - Panic! At The Disco
10. Little Razorblade - The Pink Spiders
11. Modern Swinger - The Pink Spiders
12. Ghostwriter - RJD2
13. Much Against Everyone's Advice - Soulwax
14. Paranoia Cha-Cha-Cha - The Soviettes
15. MakeDamnSure - Taking Back Sunday
16. Nowhere - Therapy
17. Anti - The Vandals

New Rule

2006-05-30T09:09:00.000-07:00

"Everybody join in the magnificence. Yes, everything is absolutely making sense. Every time you turn around your soul gets sold to the highest bidder."

In the absence of Bill Maher, I feel it's important that - at this particular juncture - somebody proposes a New Rule. It is as follows.

New Rule: The next baby born to a celebrity couple must be named Dave. Or Sarah. Or Jack. Anything really, so long as it's a name that you, annoying celebrity parents, would be happy to have written on your birth certificate. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm sick and tired of hearing about the Gwavins and Brangelinas of this world naming their offspring the way they might name an exotic kitten they'd just had delivered. If you love your kids, for God's sake give them a fighting chance. Imagine trying to get through life with the name Shiloh. Christ, imagine trying to get through the first day of school with the name Shiloh. You may as well paint a target on that kid's forehead and line her up alongside such ludicrously-named rugrats as Apple, Moses, Jet, Speck, Heavenly Hirrani, Fifi Trixibelle, Rumer, Sailor, Salome, Denim, and - of course - Kingston, the kind of name you want to punch in the face.

Now, I'm not one of these people that gets all gooey over children. I hate the little fuckers. But they're people, not fucking accessories. The only way those names aren't going to come back and haunt those poor little bastards is if they're raised in a home-schooled, insta-celebrity bubble, thereby ensuring that they become inadequate mutants with a future that will so clearly require lengthy spells of rehab, you may as well start making the payments now.

Celebrities and this whole celebrity-worshipping culture we're living in have gone so far now that it's beyond any kind of humour. I have, however, long since come to terms with the fact that society is composed largely of humourless teenagers who care only for fairytales, conspiracies, and their idiot idols. I accept this. But if I'm going to have to live in a world where every screen and every magazine cover is a grinning, dead-eyed vision of all that is foul and forsaken, can I at least get a show of hands for stopping these whores from breeding?

Won't you think of the children?

NFADR In Cute Cat Pictures Scandal

2006-05-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

"Just for the record, the weather today is slightly sarcastic with a good chance of (a) indifference or, (b) disinterest in what the critics say."

Trying To Be Not-Fat

2006-05-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

"Have you ever been struck by lightning? It hurts."

Saturday is weigh-in day. I mean, I weigh myself every morning anyway, but Saturday is the one that counts. Those Monday to Friday moments on the scales are my way of giving myself a little pat on the back and a rub of the shoulders. "Go get 'em, champ."

The past three Saturdays have been a bitch, mainly because I seemed to have hit a plateau as far as the regime I've been following was concerned. It fluctuated a pound or two, but by and large, I've been stuck on 208lbs since the beginning of the month. How it works is you come back from your Monday workout, step onto the scales, and you're around 211. Not bad. You eat what you like on Saturdays, stay as far as possible from the gym on Sundays. But you can drop 3lbs in two days, leaving you a further three to play with. By Wednesday, you're a healthy 208. But then something happens. Maybe it's a motivation thing, but on Thursday, you step onto the scales and you're some bullshit weight like 207.7. Friday, you're 207.9. You half-arse it on Saturday because you always half-arse it on Saturday, and by the time you hit the scales, you know you're going to be somewhere in the late 207s, and you are.

Three weeks of that left me in a state approaching despair. Despite Jennifer's insistence that I was disappearing, not being able to see the weight coming off both in the mirror and on the scales stole a large amount of my motivation. There were still awesome moments like doing up my jeans or suddenly realising that I could wear a certain t-shirt, but the momentum I had for the first couple of months of my attempt to lose however many pounds it takes was falling away.

This week, I cranked my exercise regime up a rather large notch and discovered that the weight lost and the hours put in at the gym have left me considerably fitter than I'd realised. It's not easy running for half an hour instead of hiking with the occasional bit of jogging, and it's certainly not easy keeping the exercise bike going for the same amount of time on a setting one-and-a-half times more difficult than the one I started with. But then back in March, those original settings used to leave me wanting to crawl away and die.

Forgive me for sounding like a twat for a moment, but if you don't feel the exercise you're doing, it probably isn't doing a lot for you.

I was an inspiring 205lbs today. 205 is the official "I've lost twenty pounds, motherfuckers!" weight, and I fully expect to maintain that until Saturday, even if I slack off until then (which is possible). For the record, that'll be twenty pounds, just over two inches off my waist, and four notches on my belt.

Honestly, you don't realise how fat you are until you start trying to be not-fat.

The Pop Idol Syndrome

2006-05-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

"I bet that you look good on the dance floor. I don't know if you're looking for romance or what, don't know what you're looking for. Well, I bet that you look good on the dance floor, dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984."

The Arctic Monkeys are a mildly amusing novelty act. No more, no less. They are not the saviours of British rock, they do not write working class poetry, and they should not be compared to the likes of The Jam, Blur, or even The Smiths. I loathe Morrissey and the whole Smiths phenomenon, but they clearly captured something that spoke to a lot of people in a time when such a thing was still possible. Now? It's all marketing exercises. The Arctic Monkeys are so clearly and obviously the creation of somebody far smarter than the four gobshites who make up the band that it's almost embarrassing to have to sit and watch transparent hype translate into sales. Here's the formula: Take one ready-to-explode scene revival, add media hype, made-to-measure indie swagger, and an audience so gullible they'd listen to three fat blokes having a farting contest if you told them it was the next big thing, stir, and serve to a nation so starved of good music that a twat shouting about robots to less chords than Sid Vicious ever learned can find himself doing that shouting on the CD holding the record for the largest first week sales of a debut album in UK history.

"In terms of sheer impact," said a spokesdrone for HMV, "we haven't seen anything quite like this since The Beatles."

Come now, there have been hundreds of overhyped, overrated pop bands since The Beatles (Sorry, Jammie). That's not what's important here. What's important is that The Arctic Monkeys somehow rode that wave higher and further than anybody has in a long time. Why is that?

I like to think of it as the Pop Idol syndrome. The music industry, like anybody else in the business of selling us culture, runs in cycles. Fashion is all important. Now, I'd argue that we're not currently in that part of the cycle that celebrates all that is plastic, squeaky, and immaculately-coiffed. Britney married a bum and squeezed out a psychiatrist's dream baby, Christina's making a jazz album, Justin's acting, and the the rest of them have vanished the way they usually do when we all get a wee bit cynical and fed up. They will, of course, be back with new names and new faces when we've had enough of being cynical and want fat singalong choruses and stupid dancing back in our lives.

I think finding out it's all a big marketing scam, that the boy bands and girl bands and teen idols are tools big corporations use to sell you shit you'll hardly use and don't need is getting a bit like finding out there's no Santa. Being the bearer of such knowledge no longer means you are possessed with searing insight. No, all it means now is that you watch TV and use the internet. In theory, this should promote a healthy level of cynicism as regards what we watch/listen to/surf, yet for a dizzying variety of reasons, it doesn't.

As I pointed out a long time before American Dreamz (Jesus Christ, is there actually anything out there with a worse title?) bombed, more people vote for the contestants on shows like Pop Idol than in most elections. These shows are, of course, an offshoot of the explosion in reality TV, a phenomenon that is (sadly) proving to have some serious legs. It makes sense, when you think about it. We've become cynical enough that we'll no longer put up with plastic primadonnas being forced down our throats, and this has instilled in us a sort of cultural affinity with underdogs. Thus the original heroes of reality TV, back when the boom was just beginning, were the antithesis of the pop stars we were just getting tired of at the time. They were not especially beautiful or glamorous or mysterious. They were not owned by faceless record and film companies. No, we watched them on TV every day. We saw their triumphs and their tragedies, their laughter and their tears. They were ours.

Fast forward a few years and of course that formula has been watered down and bastardised about a million times over. It's still popular, though, and it's still immensely marketable. Popular shows like Lost owe a lot to the reality TV model, and some of the most intelligent and perceptive people I know are absolutely riveted by the current series of American Idol. Everyody has a favourite, the one they want to win. Everybody adopts a contestant. And once you have an investment, no matter how trivial, you've been hooked. Simon Cowell is, as we speak, reeling you in.

But that adoption aspect intrigues me and reminds me of my teenage years, specifically that point where my tastes crossed over from pop into alternative. One of the great things about being into the independent scene is that you can discover new acts your friends have never heard. Catch them early enough (as I did bands like Radiohead and Ash), and you can watch their careers blossom from those first demos and EPs and gigs in dingy basement clubs all the way to platinum selling albums and worldwide success. The sense of adoption is the same, to the point where fame for the 'adopted' act can become a source of resentment for the fan. I can still clearly remember a girl at school being absolutely horrified that I owned both Suede and Manic Street Preachers cassettes.

"I can't believe people like you are getting into them," she whined. People like me, in this case, being everybody that wasn't her. I know this because I have since had occasion to feel the same way. I think a lot of people have. If you've ever had occasion to say, "It's not their first album," in an exasperated tone of voice, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Which brings me nicely back to The Arctic Monkeys, the DIY revival, and the internet revolution. The Monkeys, it's safe to say, would not have happened without the rapid and continued growth in cable internet use. They would not have happened without the advent of MP3 and the plummeting prices of the technology used to record and upload digital music files. They would not have happened if a buzz had never sprung up around a scene that has already dissolved due to oversaturation. And they sure as fuck wouldn't have happened without a massive assist from the media and particularly a British music press far more concerned with turning profits than promoting quality music (shame on you, NME). Above and beyond all that, though, They would not have happened without the sense of ownership that comes with feeling you're one of the first to discover band x, to nurture them and watch them grow like some kind of hairy northern pokemon with dubious personal hygiene.

In the end, it's not viva la revolution and let's bring down the record companies, It's just the same marketing tool that sells Pop Idol, the celebrity magazines, and all those daytime chat shows. Strip away all the marketing bullshit and the hype, and The Arctic Monkeys are a mildly amusing novelty act. No more, no less.

A little perspective, please.

Oh

2006-05-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

"I think you should strangle it quickly before it starts trying to make friends with us."

Posts unfinished, promises unkept, photo unaltered. Words soon.

Book Review: Saturday's Child - Ray Banks

2006-05-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

"Your mind will find another, and that's where the days have gone, and all you can hear is a stereo somewhere playing a pig of a song."

Before we go any further, you should know that I'm not, generally speaking, a big fan of crime fiction. James Lee Burke? Sure. Anyone that knows me will tell you I'll read anything with the kind of loping, lyrical prose that Burke trades in. Elmore Leonard? Naturally. I'm more confused by people who don't enjoy a writer with that kind of gift for character and dialogue. But these are exceptions where a reader like me is concerned, popular talents that transcend the genre. When I look at crime fiction from my ignorant point of view, I see an awful lot of mediocre writers churning out formulaic dross I wouldn't dream of wasting my time on. I'm well aware that this is almost certainly not the case. My point is that I don't have the necessary love of the genre to go digging for diamonds in a pile of shit.

And so to noir. Brit-noir, if you want to whip out the labels and get specific. We could, I'm sure, initiate an endless discussion as to what noir is and what it entails, but for the purposes of this review, 'Brit-noir' is the black coffee to the traditional British crime novel's milky tea, and a genre defined by cynical characters, bleak settings, and all manner of unpleasantness. It doesn't deal in heroes and happy endings, instead inhabiting a world where morals come in shades of grey and the best choice is sometimes the lesser of two evils.

Which brings us nicely to Cal Innes, the protagonist of Saturday's Child. Innes is an ex-con with a murky past working as a self-styled PI in some of the more sordid parts of Manchester. When local gangster 'Uncle' Morris Tiernan asks Innes to track down an errant casino employee on the run with a hefty chunk of money, he has little choice but to take the job. The trail leads to Newcastle, where Cal learns some unpleasant truths about the Tiernans when he comes into conflict with Morris's pill-popping psycho of a son, Mo. With a case wrapped in moral dilemmas to resolve, everyone involved apparently after his blood, and more than enough problems of his own, Innes has his hands full, and a date with some unpleasant truths about himself never seems far away.

Let's not fuck around here, Saturday's Child is one bleak bastard of a novel. If you're looking for redemption, resolution, and a world where you're ultimately sure the sun's going to come up in the morning, there's not much here for you. From first to last, this particular chapter of the Cal Innes story is relentlessly downbeat, the darkness punctuated only by some neatly timed bursts of black humour. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and Banks never makes a big deal out of it. Cal's voice and view are dark, yes, but never to the point of parody. There's a dry wit and a matter-of-fact boredom with it all at work in Cal's part of the narrative, and that's enough, I think, to carry the less cynical reader through.

The addition of the semi-coherent, borderline psychotic Mo as a second narrator is a bold step on the author's part, and one I wasn't sure he was going to get away with in the early going. But, while there are still a few moments where I felt Mo was making synaptic leaps he probably shouldn't have been capable of making, and at least one rather suave metaphor I couldn't begin to imagine the lad coming up with, it does work. This is mostly because, in narrative terms, the inside of Mo's head is an almost comically obscene and violent counterpoint to Cal's more considered thoughts. That said, Banks does eventually elicit a degree of pity from the reader for the younger Tiernan, and you never feel that his viewpoint is unnecessary or contrived.

The same can be said for Saturday's Child as a whole. There's a good bit more meat on this than there was on Banks's debut, The Big Blind, but very little in the way of fat. The cover blurb from Russel McLean describes it as 'dirty, hard and fast', and that's about as accurate a description as you're going to find.

Criticisms? Just a couple. Firstly, I've already noted that Banks is most comfortable when he's in the well-worn shoes of Callum Innes. With that in mind, it's worth pointing out that the women in this man's world come off sketchy and underwritten. Even the flimsiest of the male characters comes complete with motive, mood, and colour. The ladies are not so fortunate. Whether some of that is deliberate (Banks is, at times, clearly poking fun at the noir cliche) isn't for me to say, but it's certainly noticeable. Secondly, it does all get a bit much at times. We've come far enough for you to be sure I'm going to tell you that Saturday's Child is an entertaining and well-written book, but there are times when you find yourself really wishing that Banks would ease up on Innes for just a minute and give him a chance to win one. It seems that everything the protagonist does, no matter how noble his intention, gets turned around on the poor fucker. I'm not the kind of reader who thinks everything is clear cut and the hero should be a hero and always win, but Innes never seems to catch a break. Ever. In those terms, I think this may well be the harshest thing I've read in years.

But lastly, and perhaps most importantly for a word-junkie like me, you should read this book for the wonderful things Banks does with prose and dialect. Whether it's playing off hard-boiled PI cliches or climbing inside the drug-addled heads of scally scum looking for trouble, Saturday's Child is never more than a few paragraphs from a sentence or a turn of phrase that'll leave you smiling, grimacing, or just watching in awe as Banks paints graphic pictures with so few words it's occasionally startling. It isn't always graceful - sometimes it's downright brutal - but it's clearly a labour of love and, perhaps most importantly, no little talent.

As I said at the start, I don't know a whole hell of a lot about the crime genre, and I'm at a loss when it comes to any in-depth discussion of what constitutes noir. I do know a thing or two about writing, though, and I do know that Saturday's Child now comes with an official NFADR recommendation for anybody that thinks they're hard enough. Anyone who doesn't is free to go and sip their milky tea over a Ruth Rendell. Wankers.

Tales Of Woe

2006-05-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

"Oh, now I do recall, we were just getting to the part where the shock sets in and the stomach acid finds a new way to make you get sick. I hope you didn't expect that you'd get all of the attention."

Some of you may be wondering where the hell I've been. Some of you may not give a fuck. Either way, I come bearing tales of woe. Okay, not exactly. I was too lazy to post all last week, then Jenn and I had our Saturday off with the usual accompanying avalanche of alcohol and fast food. I overdid it slightly and woke up on Sunday morning with a mighty urge to paint the bathroom with projectile vomit.

So I did.

Needless to say, I spent the best part of Sunday in bed, silently lamenting the fact that - since I quit drinking six days out of seven - my tolerance for the hard stuff has plummeted. Six months and twenty pounds ago I could have consumed all the booze I had on Saturday in one hit and then staggered back to the bar for more. But I am smaller now, and less of an alcoholic. I'd do well to remember this.

So I stumbled through Sunday and woke up this morning feeling much better. I got up, did some writing and some reading, and then, to my horror, began to feel sick again. This is now the second consecutive day I've spent a large portion of in bed.

Still, at least I'm not as much of a pussy as I thought. I hardly ever puke from alcohol consumption (those readers who have been in my presence during a JD inspired barfing session are hereby banned from the comments box).

There are posts coming this week. I'm planning on finishing up a monologue on the DIY music scene and why the internet is sucking the world's creativity into its maw of mediocrity. It's called Quality Not Quantity, Or How The Arctic Monkeys Broke My Train Set. I'll also be reviewing Saturday's Child, the latest novel from my link-buddy Mr. Raymond Banks. So if you like your book reviews sprinkled with a hint of awkwardness and a pinch of barely-suppressed jealous rage, check back here tomorrow, or possibly Wednesday. And hey, it's been way too long since this writer threw up anything that wasn't yesterday's whiskey-soaked pizza crusts, so maybe, maybe you'll get a little fiction out of me before the week is through.

Oh, and a little bird told me there were interesting things going over at The Curve Ball Conspiracy. Dunno what, though. That fucker never updates.

Stephen Colbert: American Hero

2006-04-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

"If anybody needs anything at their tables, speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers and somebody from the N.S.A. will be right over with a cocktail."

There's about twenty five minutes worth of video here, but I assure you it's worth it. This is Stephen Colbert addressing the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, and making a large number of people - including President Bush - look really awkward and uncomfortable. I said this a couple of weeks back, but I truly believe Colbert is making some of the most relevant, fantastic comedy I've seen in a good few years. Don't believe me? Check it out...

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Five-Word Reviews

2006-04-29T20:25:00.000-07:00

"Gentlemen, if you're going to preach, for God's sake preach with conviction."

I'm planning a rather large post, but it needs a little more time to gestate. Thursday was our wedding anniversary, so Jenn and I are in the middle of a four day weekend which I will not interrupt with serious thoughts. We went to the Cheesecake Factory Thursday night, where I ate the fattest burger the world has ever seen (seriously, that motherfucker was like two inches thick, and it screamed when I bit into it) and still had room for a white chocolate, peanut butter, and truffle cheesecake. I'm not normally so enthused by food, but the diet and the gym-time has taken its toll, and now anything with fat and/or sugar makes me bounce with joy.

Anyway, today is Saturday, and Saturday is the day that Jenn and I say fuck you to our various attempts to quit various things. We get a bottle of bourbon and a bunch of movies, order take-out, and veg. This means that I have seen just about all the interesting new DVD releases that have come out in the past few months. SO...it's five-word review time. Let us rumble...

The Ice Harvest: Nothing to write home about.

Walk The Line: Not as great as promised.

Jarhead: Quite underrated, would you believe?

Goodnight, And Good Luck: Sadly, a little lacking in feeling.

A History Of Violence: Critically acclaimed why? This sucked.

Capote: Hoffman great, film above average.

Brokeback Mountain: Unremarkable, except for the cinematography.

Broken Flowers: Slow moving, but not bad.

King Kong: Why the fuss? It's shit.

Serenity: Best sci-fi flick in forever.

Wallace And Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit: This was actually really funny.

The Family Stone: Sarah Jessica Parker is Satan.

Match Point: Oh, my God. Woody, why?

The Aristocrats: Patchy but fun, I guess.

Everything Is Illuminated: This was absolutely the shit.

And there you have it.

In The Event Of A Collision

2006-04-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

"Black palm trees sway, they whisper to the purple sky. Close your eyes and feel the ghosts of Hollywood gone by. Still the dreamers come, still the dreams are left to die. Behind the lights, a necropolis lies."

The last time I'd looked at the clock, it had been quarter to midnight. Since then, I'd been tossing and turning, trying to find a place where the mattress fit my body. Outside were voices and a repetitive tapping just loud enough to creep into my ears and knock on the part of my brain that makes me grind my teeth and clench my jaw. When I opened my eyes, I could see the rhythmic flash of someone's blinkers cutting through the blinds, leaving an intermittent orange stain on the wall. They'd either broken down or they couldn't get through the elctronic gate to the student parking opposite. Either way, it was something mechanical. I closed my eyes.

The flash of light came first, electric blue lighting up the world outside so that Jenn and I jerked upright just in time for the explosion.

"What the fuck was that?" I murmured, blinking sleep out of my eyes, wondering if I was dreaming.

"I don't know, lightning?" Jenn replied. She was already out of bed, grabbing clothes and heading for the door.

I looked at the clock. "The power's out. I thought maybe someone was working on the gate across the road..."

We went to the window. The street outside was peaceful enough, but a crowd was already gathering on the corner of Yorba Linda, pointing up the street towards the freeway exit. From the excited burble of the rubberneckers below, we gathered a car accident of some kind. Of course, everybody had a different story, and even when we went downstairs, the only things we could say for sure were those we could see with our own eyes. The electricity was out because the power lines hung limp and dead about halfway to the ground. The reason why was lost in a crowd of flashing lights. If it was a car accident, it was a pretty major one.

There was nothing more to see or say, so we returned to bed and lay listening to the voyeurs until they too began to drift away. By the time I fell asleep, all was quiet.

Jenn got ready for work by candle light, and when I rolled out of bed a couple of hours later, there was still no electricity. That meant no shower, no PC, and no TV. It also meant no oven, microwave, fridge, or freezer. I lay in bed listening to my iPod for a while, then decided this was a good opportunity to take my running experience out onto the streets of Orange County. After all, no electricity also meant no treadmill.

It was a cool, clear morning, despite the storms the television had predicted before it died. I jogged out onto Associated feeling almost absurdly upbeat, the muscles in my legs stretching for a workout instead of screaming blue murder, my lungs working quickly and easily, still close enough to the memories of cigarette static that being able to breathe was like gaining some kind of super power. I'm almost two months into this regime now, and the differences are no longer a matter of degree. I'm fitter than I've been in years, noticeably slimmer. I have stamina to remind me that I ran middle distance in my teens and was pretty fucking good at it. I'm still a long way from an athlete, but I'm starting to feel an impressive distance from what I was at the turn of the year, too.

In the spirit of exploration, I crossed the street and took a left onto Bastanchury, where I found myself confronted by a positively evil hill that stretched, as far as I could tell, about half a mile into the distance. I doubted I was up to running such a vicious gradient for that long, but I gave it a shot anyway, slowing to a walk just past halfway and feeling I'd done enough to work up a sweat and earn myself a little respite. Besides that, I wasn't sure where I was running to. My intent had been to jog around the block and see how I felt, but as well as being a steep hill, that particular part of Bastanchury curved sharply inward towards the centre of my mental lap, leaving me wondering if getting home without backtracking was going to get complicated.

I needn't have worried. The top of the hill was marked by an intersection I recognised. Just as I turned onto the street that would take me back towards the college, though, I noticed something I'd never seen before. On the opposite side of the intersection there was a park. Not such a big deal in and of itself, but one of the reasons I kill myself on the treadmill every morning is that there really isn't any local car-free place to run. A park as close as this one would be perfect.

But first, an aside regarding the pedestrian right of way law and jaywalking: You see, in California (and some other places) the pedestrian has right of way on crosswalks. Essentially, that means if there is a pedestrian crossing the street, on a crosswalk, whenever, all is right with the world. At the same time, there is also the charge of jaywalking, which can be brought against any pedestrian who isn't crossing the street in the proper manner, that being at a crosswalk, and when the little green sign says it's cool. So if you cross the street at a crosswalk when there is no little green sign, you're guilty of jaywalking despite the fact that you have the legal right of way. Interestingly, this would mean that if a pedestrian was to be hit by a car, on a crosswalk, while the sign said 'don't walk', you'd have a victimless crime, since both driver and pedestrian would be criminals.

I may be entirely wrong about all of that, so if anyone wants to correct me, feel free. All I know is that in England, you can cross the street whenever and wherever the hell you want, with right of way generally being dictated by whomever would be left intact in the event of a collision.

All of the above is by way of explaining why I was so perturbed when I realised that the 'walk'/'don't walk' signs at the intersection of Bastanchury and State College are fucked. I have yet to fully understand how intersections actually function in this corner of the world, and without electronic guidance, I have no idea. This is how I found myself running across two busy streets in what I hoped was a fashion that just screamed Right Of Way.

In the end, the traffic-dodging was worth it. Mountain View park doesn't offer much in the way of running space (though if running in a tiny circle around a couple of rose bushes is your thing, it's the shit), but it does offer a tremendous view. Yes, of mountains, but there was more than that. In the distance, barely visible, I could just make out the rigid grey fingers of downtown Los Angeles where they rose through the haze like a last gesture for mercy. In a sense, it was a similar feeling to that I often experience when I fly, that sudden shift in perspective that makes you realise just how much world is out there, and just how little of it you'll ever experience.

I walked slowly home, suddenly more aware of how affluent the area around me had become. The hills around my new home are filled with gated communities inhabited by middle-aged white folks. When I stood still and listened, I could hear the chattering of sprinklers and the polite baritones of upmarket SUVs. Making my way down State College Boulevard, I could literally see that point where there was litter again, where nobody had been out to trim the hedges. Shortly after that, I reached the first frat house, and it occurred to me that we wouldn't be able to live here if it wasn't a college town. For whatever reason, I'd never thought of it that way before.

Gone

2006-04-25T08:02:00.000-07:00

"I needed strength to change my mind, but those ghosts stick to me like glue."

Almost two months now. Can you believe that? Two months since I said awkward goodbyes to my family and took off into the wild blue yonder, bound for a new life. It's been a funny time. The first few weeks were a holiday, but once Jenn went back to work, reality set in and I realised that this California lark was probably going to be harder than it looked. Till I get a job, I'm dividing the days between gym and keyboard, chewing gum until my jaw hurts and creeping ever closer to a point where the cat gets punted out of a window. Anything repetitive is tiring, and how this makes me feel is like I'm falling from one period of preparation to another, never quite making it into the lives I'm preparing for.

Understand that sitting in the apartment all day gives me a lot of time to romanticise these things.

The more I think about it, the less I feel like putting down roots in SoCal. Jenn's been here too long to see it with anything other than jaded eyes, and Orange County is a little too hot and sterile for my tastes and my physiology. There's a reason why you don't see redheads out here. Jenn likes the idea of New York, of returning to England someday. I've never even seen New York, so it's as good a destination as any, a destination that leads me to thoughts of maybe doing a crappy job here for six months or a year, then taking a scenic route north. I want to see Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Illinois, and Michigan en route to New York city. I want to take a month or two to do it, sitting in the passenger seat with a notebook on my lap and then spending nights in all these nowhere motels. I want to be a tourist of the things you don't find in the guidebook.

Of course, all this is in the future. For now, it's the torture of beautiful weather and the lazy days of enforced unemployment.

Woe is me, readers, woe is me.

Since I Quit Sleeping

2006-04-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

"Hey there, sleepy smile. I see you've brought your bedroom eyes."

I've found it hard to sleep since I've been in California, my insomnia only too happy to let jetlag become habit, to keep me wide-eyed well into the Pacific night. I've been trying to set my clock to Jenn's schedule, to get up and write when she gets up to work. I'm getting there, but I don't function well at five am in any timezone, especially if I've been tossing and turning since three.

It's lying in what is still an unfamiliar bed and an unfamiliar place, some disconnected part of my mind still holding on to a belief that it's early afternoon, another listening to the cat's claws tugging at the carpet with every pawstep of his late night wanderings. I hear every car that drones by on the boulevard. Jenn's been here four years, and all she hears is background. Jenn sleeps.

Last Sunday was one of those nights where the problem was comfort. I'd spend two minutes laying on my left and then two minutes on my right. I'd flip the pillow over and try the cool side. I'd kick off the blankets only to reach for them five minutes later. Eventually, I found myself looking up at the ceiling, on my back with my hands resting on my chest, fingers interlaced. I glanced across at Jenn for no other reason than it being something I do now and again, and found that she was resting in this exact same position, the pair of us lying there like vampires. I smiled in the dark, remembering that I was justified in all the things I've spent the last eighteen months doing, that this was the other side of the world. I remembered the Alkaline Trio lyrics that graced the foot of this blog from the time I first began speaking to Jenn until I did the redesign last Friday:

I don't dream since I quit sleeping,
and I haven't slept since I met you
And you can't breathe without coughing in daytime,
and neither can I
So what do you say,
your coffin or mine?

Sometimes I wonder if I'm an insomniac because I'm terrified of missing something.

Facelift

2006-04-14T22:22:00.000-07:00

"I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma."

Regular visitors might notice a teeny tiny difference in the layout of the site. I'd been ignoring comments about the old colour scheme for a good few months, and laughing at people who expressed a dislike of white writing on a black background for almost two years. Besides that, I'm easily bored and it was way past time for a change.

Horror, outrage, and indifference in the usual place, please. I'll likely be back with something new on Sunday.

Waiting For A Highway Kiss

2006-04-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

"Whiplash caught the silver son, took the film to number one, crashed the car and left us here. Broken glass for teenage boys, trapped in steel and celluloid, crashed the car and left us here."

This post comes courtesy of the fact I'm too distracted to pay the blog much attention at the moment. I'm not much of an art person, but I've been struck recently by the work of a couple of painters, and I thought I'd share them with you. The first picture is 'Waiting', by California artist William Wray, one of a series of quite awesome urban landscapes you can find on his site. The second is 'Highway Kiss', by Andrew Valko, who doesn't seem to have his own site. If you like that one, though, Googling his name will yield results aplenty.

In Which Boredom Begets Banners

2006-04-10T19:54:00.000-07:00

"It isn't a bargain or deal or anything like that. It's just that fragile boys don't jump unless they're sure someone's going to catch them."

Twisted Deities

2006-04-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

"Anyone can see my every flaw, it isn't hard. Anyone can say they're above this all. It takes my pain away."

There are days when I begin to believe in Karma. Hell, there are even days when I want to believe in some kind of God, if only so I can believe that He/She/It hates me and has singled me out in order to set an example for the rest of humankind. My sin yesterday was nothing to do with my ranting against the USCIS - those fuckers have their own twisted deities - and everything to do with my mentioning that my attempts to take better care of myself, to work off a few pounds, quit smoking, and maybe eat just a little better, were finally bearing abdominal fruit.

Heh. 'Bearing abdominal fruit'. I think I just invented a new euphemism for taking a dump.

Anyway, as you might expect, the hour I've been spending on the bike and the treadmill every morning has, more often than not, left my legs in various forms of pain. We're not talking anything major, just the usual aches of exertion, of muscles that aren't used to that kind of treatment. By yesterday afternoon, though, I realised that the pain I was experiencing following my earlier workout was not usual. It was, in fact, so bad that I was having trouble walking.

Using the above diagram, we can quite clearly see that I am suffering because I have stretched my Calcaneal-Fibular Ligament. This means no gym for a few days, which in turn means I can't burn off like 800 calories every morning for a few days, which in turn means only prescription amphetamines can keep me on the fast-track to weight loss.

And that wasn't even the end of Karma's revenge on your plucky young hero. You see, Saturday is my day off. On Saturdays, Jenn and I tend to get lunch compliments of Carl's Jr., dinner compliments of Pizza Hut, and beverages compliments of Mr. Jack Daniel. Yup, Saturday is guilty pleasure day, so imagine my horror when - upon our return home from our lunchtime trip out for alcohol and junk food - we were confronted by...by this:

Yes, at the end of the corridor that leads to our apartment, just lying on the ground like such a thing was entirely normal, was an unsmoked cigarette. Imagine the horror, dear readers, of being on the thirty-third day of a Cold Turkey detox from an addiction you suffered for twelve long years only to be confronted by the ultimate temptation. All I had to do was reach down and pick it up. All I had to do was put it in my mouth. All I had to do was walk the ten yards to the apartment, pick up a lighter, and touch flame to tip. I was thirteen steps from heaven...

...and twenty-six steps from grabbing the camera and taking a picture of my former addiction before heading back to the apartment, leaving the Virgin Cigarette to be deflowered by some other poor sucker with lung cancer in his future.

And Karma? I've got your Karma right here.

Vin Diesel, Pool Cleaner

2006-04-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

"I may be soft in your palm, but I'll soon grow hungry for a fight, and I will not let you win."

It's always awesome when the day starts with good news. I crawled out of bed at seven this morning to find the TV dominated by talk of Bush and CIA leaks. But that wasn't the good news. No, I am immune to politics these days, and I simply switched it off and went to do some work on the novel until it came time to drag my sorry carcass down to the gym for another round of Michael vs. The Treadmill. When I got there, though, a man who looked worryingly like Vin Diesel was draining the swimming pool, and the gym was locked.

But that wasn't the good news, either. The folks that run this apartment complex can be tardy, whereas I, as anyone that knows me will tell you, am terrifyingly punctual. So, rather than waiting for someone to come and unlock the door, I decided to go and collect the mail. And there, sitting in our box, were Notices Of Action for the EAD (Employment Authorisation...uh...Document, I think) and the AOS (Adjustment Of Status). The NOAs don't mean a huge amount, but they do confirm that we filled out the relevant application forms correctly, and mean the USCIS are now back to processing my case. The next thing I should receive is my biometrics appointment, where they'll take my fingerprints, photograph, and signature, and shortly after that, I should be allowed to work.

Emphasise should. No way in hell am I getting my hopes up about anything that depends on the USCIS.

Anyway, that was the first piece of good news. The second came about an hour and twenty minutes later when, stripping off my soaking clothes after another bout of breathless swearing and shrieks of pain in the gym, I spied myself in the mirror. A double-take later, I was taking a closer look, muttering, "My God, is that muscle?"

There's something under the flab after all. Who knew?

Screaming For Higher Ground

2006-04-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

"You're all potential anarchy burgers. If you want to be free, order yourself an anarchy burger (hold the government, please)."

Is it just me, or did the standards drop in here? I think NFADR might be suffering from my attentions being focussed elsewhere. The fitness regime is leaving me in varying states of physical collapse, so the only time I come to the computer to do any real writing is when I'm feeling creative. At the moment, that means The Novel (hovering at 3k. Believe me, that's progress) or The Curve Ball Conspiracy (pet project of the hour). What it doesn't mean is wandering over here and banging out an essay about whatever's on my mind. For the moment, there isn't a whole hell of a lot I can do to change that. Once I get permission to work and start getting out a bit more, I'll have a lot more to write about. For now, I have this feeling we'll be seeing a fair few more memes. Or who knows, maybe a Secrets Of Working Out...Revealed.

While we're on the subject of what's going in this little corner of the interweb, some of you may have noticed the reappearance of posts from June and July of 2004, when I first started the original incarnation of the blog. While I won't be adding the archives in their entirety, it's my intention to restore a reasonably representative history (that being the posts I like) of Notes From A Darkened Room.

I really should do a big fat post about life in California. Living here is a massive and drastic difference, it really is. Looking into the archives has reminded me of times when I'd think nothing of hammering out two or three thousand word posts for fun. I'll think about something along those lines for Sunday, when Jenn watches her crime shows and I run screaming for higher ground.

Immediacy

2006-04-01T21:23:00.000-08:00

"So you’re super-connected now, all the freaks gather around, and the crowd in your bedroom waits for a piece of your personal space."

I think I have blogging guilt. I feel compelled to post. The problem with this is that I have absolutely nothing of any substance to write about. Here, have some vagueness:

- Day 26 of my latest attempt to quit smoking. It's getting easier every day. I only really struggle when I'm watching someone enjoy a cigarette, even if it's on TV. Drinking isn't half as much fun as it used to be, either.

- On the subject, I've only been allowing myself to drink one night a week for the past month. I don't miss it at all. Though that might be because I'm too busy missing cigarettes.

- I lost another four pounds this week. All hail me.

- We watched Brokeback Mountain today. Not sure what all the fuss was about. It was a decent film, but - other than considering Heath Ledger for Best Actor - I wouldn't have given it any Oscars. Cinematography, maybe. Do they give an Oscar for cinematography? I don't watch them, so I'm really not sure.

- We're currently watching Ghostbusters. I once saw a T-shirt with a little picture of Slimer on it and the quote "He's right here, Ray. He's looking at me," and I didn't buy it. That was a really bad decision.

- Does all this immigration stuff strike anyone else as a little bit like a lot of rich white folks arguing with themselves? Jenn's workmates tell her the illegal immigrants should make her mad because of the time and money we've spent bringing me here legally. I don't quite get that. It's the laws and the enforcement of them that's wrong here. How could you blame somebody for taking advantage of that? Oh, and for the record, building a big fence from California to Texas is the stupidest idea I've heard in at least two days.

- Is anybody actually reading The Curve Ball Conspiracy? I'm having a great time with it, and I think it should have a readership of millions.

- I have just now decided that I'm adding The Colbert Nation to my list of links. Don't get me wrong, I love The Daily Show, but it's slowly becoming something I watch while waiting for The Colbert Report to start. Genius.

- Being unemployed is only actually fun for about three weeks.

- I restarted the novel this week, switching from third person to first and past tense to present. The writing is still a slow process, but I'm feeling a lot more comfortable. The change brings an immediacy that was missing from what is supposed to be a fast moving story.

That's about all I have. Expect more linear blogging in the very near future.

Five Terrible Things About Doing Forty Minutes On The Treadmill Every Bastard Morning

2006-03-28T13:30:00.000-08:00

"Nothing’s ever gonna happen ‘round here if we don’t make it happen. Sleep away the day if you want to, but I got something that I gotta do."

1. I have to turn my iPod up to ear-splitting volume because really, nothing says "you fat bastard," like the sound of two-hundred and twenty pounds bouncing up and down on a treadmill. They can probably hear me in the next state.

2.There's nothing fun about being fairly sure one or both of your lungs just imploded.

3. They may not show it, but those Mexican gardeners are laughing at me.

4. The only way I can feel good about myself is by imagining sports experts on some mythical show wondering if somebody will one day run an eleven minute mile.

5. It fucking hurts.

Burn Him

2006-03-25T21:30:00.000-08:00

"I know you gentlemen have been through a lot, but when you find the time, I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking couch!"

When you're sitting watching the first half an hour or so of The Thing in the dark, the last thing you need to happen is for your cat to start coughing and spasming.

For the record, it was probably a hairball or something, and he was fine. I mean, I shit my pants, but the cat was just peachy.

Blah Blah Blah Apocryphal Tale

2006-03-24T18:37:00.000-08:00

"Revenge, I'm screaming revenge again. Wrong, I've been wrong for far too long. Been constantly so frustrated; I've moved mountains with less. When I channel my hate to productive, I don't find it hard to impress."

One of the things about not smoking, about trying to watch what I eat, about putting myself through the torture of the bike and the gym every day, about being unable to extricate myself from the clutches of the USCIS without first giving them still more money, tracking down more forms I've never been given, answering questions I don't understand, and being made to wait and wait and wait and fucking wait...one of the things about this state of affairs is that it tends to make one irritable.

Yesterday, for example, we added up the cost of this latest round of forms and found that it was in the region of $600. This, by the way, is if I don't leave the country while my Status is being Adjusted. That costs an additional $170. That's right, even though we were made to pay an extortionate amount of money to get me here in the first place, even though the USA still actually regards me as a visitor, I'm not allowed to leave unless I pay them for the privilege. That is, unless I do something illegal, in which case I'll be deported at the taxpayer's expense.

All of which makes about as much sense as anything else related to this whole Visa process. For example, I had a medical and enough different injections to constitute attempted murder as a part of the process I went through to get a visa in the first place. Now, however, I'm expected to go through it again as part of the Adjustment Of Status. But that's okay, because they know I've had the medical and the injections, otherwise I wouldn't be here, right? Wrong. You see, nothing's ever that simple and logical. What I have to do is present proof of my inoculations to a civil surgeon. This information should be in my medical records. But get this, my GP in the UK lost my medical records when they switched over to a New And Improved system of keeping said records. I know this because four months ago I had to have four inoculations I knew for a fact I'd had before simply because I couldn't prove I'd had them. This cost me eighty pounds or approximately $130. Amazingly, my current situation of having nothing to prove I've had those inoculations twice except a receipt for the aforementioned payment, might mean going through the needle thing a third time. At my own expense.

You know, heaven forbid somebody from the Nuffield hospital in Birmingham send an e-mail to somebody at the Chicago office of the USCIS saying "Dear Bureaucratic Fucker, Michael is more immune than anybody I have ever met. Yours sincerely, Money-Grubbing Bastard."

In about two years time, I'll be a permanent resident of the United States. I'll probably also be destitute. And I'll have had so many injections that I will, in fact, be immortal.

Oh, and while we're here, and while I'm angry, let's get back to a pet hate of mine from some time ago. Remember Lynne Truss? She wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves, the oh-so-hilarious-and-relevant ramble about declining standards in grammar and punctuation. It was a big hit at the time, mainly because of the terrifying decline in the standard of written and spoken English in both the UK and the United States. Of course, rather than going out and actually doing something about a very real problem - like, say, spending a little money on certain woeful education systems - people went out and bought a twee and trendy book instead. Nice work, Lynne.

So it's come to my attention that Lynne Truss has just bought out a new book entitled Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. I'm not going to link it, because that might encourage some of you to go and buy the thing. Just so you don't, I shall, without reading any of it, summarise for you:

"People are rude. They don't say 'please' and 'thank you' and 'excuse me' anymore. They talk on mobile phones in situations where it's rude to do so. Blah blah blah apocryphal tale. Blah blah blah historical aside. Blah Blah Blah witty riposte. People are rude. The End."

Earth-shattering. Truly. The scales have fallen from my fucking eyes, Lynne. Feel free to take your place alongside JK Rowling as one of the voices of the civilised world, a world that now appears to be made up entirely of children who need to be told how to behave and read fairytales before bed.

I'm done.

Sixteen Days

2006-03-22T13:17:00.000-08:00

"I don’t know what it is they think I’m gonna try, they don’t know what they need to fear. The surest sign that the end is coming soon is right there in the bathroom mirror."

New Depths

2006-03-21T06:34:00.000-08:00

"What the hell is your name, and can you explain this mess? It seems you're playing a game, where you only know how to take out the best. 'Cause if assholes could fly, this place would be busier than O'Hare. There's proof in the sky. It's as thick as our skulls yet it's thinner than air."

I see they're referring to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes as 'Tomkat' now. I have to tell you, dear readers, that makes my teeth itch. To be fair, this celebrity-couples-with-one-name thing has been bothering me for a while, but I think I'm about to go over the high side.

'Cause here's the thing: I hate celebrity. I hate celebrity couples. I thought 'Bennifer' was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard when they coined it to describe the horror of Ben 'Two Facial Expressions' Affleck's ten second engagement to a woman whose chief contribution to society is having a fat arse. I thought 'Brangelina' was the name of a new charity where disadvantaged kids get adopted by the kind of mother that likes knives, blood, kissing her siblings, and Billy Bob Thornton, and the kind of father that could be in Meet Joe Black. And now, as if the diminutive Mr. Scientology and the oddly-mouthed talent-void we call Katie Holmes weren't bad enough separately, they have - like some kind of twisted Power Rangers baddie - combined to create...Tomkat.

And people will care, and people will use the term to describe them, and my disdain for the human race will plumb new depths. Because if there's one thing I hate more than celebrity couples and celebrity magazines, it's people who buy into them. That right there is a religion even Scientology could look at and go, "Wow, that's damaging to society."

There's No "I" In "Meme"

2006-03-18T22:51:00.000-08:00

"Just look at the face; vacant, with a hint of sadness. Like a drunk who's lost a bet."

I happened upon this particular meme over at Chris's Blog, From A Whisper To A Scream. Been a while since I've done anything like this, so why the hell not, eh?

1) What would you do if you could be a member of the opposite sex for one day?
Answer some questions that have bugged me for many years.

2) What animal do you most identify with?
I always find it hardest to answer the simplest questions. No idea. I don't really notice animals.

3) If you could wipe out one group of people off the face of the earth, no repercussions, who would the group be and why?
I wouldn't. I could answer if you were talking individuals, but you can't judge a group.

4) OK, you get to have any magical power you want. What do you pick?
The ability to change my appearance, to look like anyone I want to.

5) Would you pick the boat, or the mystery box? (a boat is just a boat, but the mystery box..that could be anything. It could even be a boat!)
The box. What the fuck would I do with a boat?

6) How do you want do die?
I wanna be the guy that says, "Go on, I'll only slow you down," and is then heard screaming "COME ON, YOU UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS!" over automatic gunfire and alien shrieks of pain. Seriously.

7) How do you want to live?
Like it's a movie about me.

8) Is there any character trait, action, or belief in another person that would make you lose all interest in them immediately?
No.

9) If you had the power to legalize one illegal thing, what would it be?
That's a tough choice to have to make, but I think I'd choose drugs. It's my belief that, in the long-term, such a move would be of the most benefit to society as a whole. There are a lot of reasons why I think that. Maybe I'll go into them in a later post.

10) Do you eat any foods in an odd way?
Nothing in particular, although I eat every meal in order of preference, leaving my favourite part of it until last.

11) Have you ever had a supernatural experience?
I don't believe in the supernatural.

12) Have you ever thought about something and had it come true?
Yes, but it wasn't because I thought about it.

13) What was the worst experience you've ever had in a relationship?
When my girlfriend cheated on me by attending an orgy.

14) Ever switch your religion?
If you count switching from agnostic to atheist at the age of thirteen, yes.

15) What comes first: your lover or your family?
I'm married.

16) What do you want done with your body once you die?
You can play football with my head for all I care.

17) Are you attracted to a particular sign of the zodiac?
No. I don't believe in astrology.

18) Were you ever really good at something you really didn't like doing?
Not that I can think of offhand.

19) Is there a word or phrase you used to use that you would feel really embarrassed using now? (Ex. Phat; as if, etc.)
I recycle crap phrases on a regular basis. In fact, I pride myself on horrifying people by suddenly dredging up things from the early nineties.

20) You have 5 hours left to live. What do you do?
Everything.

21) If you had to, would you eat another human to survive?
Yes.

22) You're walking down the street with your best friend, when all of a sudden two people come out of nowhere. One grabs your friend and starts beating them up, bad. The other tells you you'd better not help, because their friend has a knife, and they will use it. But you don't see a knife. They don't even have their hands in their pockets. What do you do?
Wade on in.

23) Do you have a victory dance?
I do. I even have a name for it: The Wounded Cow Dance, known in some circles as The Horny Buffalo Shuffle.

24) Have you started using any phrases that you heard someone use on TV, in the movies, or in a book?
Too many times. I'm a culture junkie.

25) Did you ever have to wear a uniform for anything in your life?
School.

26) Is there a situation that you still look back on, going over it in your head again and again, thinking of ways you could have handled it better?
If so, what? Or if there are a lot, pick one.
When I was twelve or thirteen, I got into a fight with some gypsy kids. I really let them bully me before I finally responded. I felt weak and ashamed about that for years afterward.

27) What's your favorite object that serves no real purpose?
Everything serves a purpose.

28) Pro-life or pro-choice? Why?
Pro-choice. Have you seen the pro-lifers?

29) For or against the death penalty? Why?
Against. I lack faith in our system of criminal justice.

30) For or against gay marriage? Why?
For. You can't legislate love.

31) Your first born child just told you they're gay. How do you feel?
I don't see how I would feel anything. I guess I'd feel I'd raised them right if they could be honest about who they were and what they felt.

32) Is there anyone in your life worth going to jail for?
Yup.

33) Have you ever said something really clever to one of those annoying telemarketers? If so, what?
I wasted all my best lines on the Jehovah's Witnesses.

34) What's your favorite weapon?
Against what?

35) Were you ever a victim of abuse?
No.

36) Which celebrity can't you stand that everyone seems to love?
I loathe celebrity in general. Just pick a reality TV star.

37) Is there any food that is almost guaranteed to make you sick?
Peppers.

38) Do you screen your calls when you don't recognize the number, or does your curiosity get the better of you?
I never answer the phone if I don't know who it is.

39) How's your self-esteem?
I'm a little fatter than I'd like to be, otherwise I'm the same egocentric bastard I've been for as long as I can remember.

Run, Habit, Run

2006-03-18T18:25:00.000-08:00

"Sitting on the bed, or lying wide awake, there's demons in my head and it's more than I can take. I think I'm on a roll, but I think it's kinda weak. Saying all I know is I gotta get away from me."

Before we begin, I'd like you all to go and read this.

Done? All good. Now you too know how to break a habit.

Or maybe not. I'm in a good position to be able to take issue with this what's written in that WikiHow, so - true to form - that's exactly what I'm going to do. Let us rock:

Your brain does not process negative thoughts.

What? WHAT? That makes no sense. How can your brain not process negative thoughts? If that was the case, nobody, when given the choice between doing and not doing something, would ever choose the latter. If somebody put a gun in your hand and then pointed it at somebody's head, you'd shoot them every time.

Habits are learned mental reflexes to specific stimuli in the environment. It’s reflex because you’ve done it so long that your mind no longer thinks about doing the habit, you just do it (like breathing.)

No, it's not like breathing. Breathing is not a habit, it's a biological imperative. Either you're very stupid, or you really need to think about your sentence construction. Possibly both.

It takes 30 days to form a pattern and 90 days to form a habit.

I loathe statements like this. Who says it takes 30 days to form a pattern and 90 days to form a habit? On what basis do they say it? Where's the evidence? And even if you can produce it, there are massive generalisations here that need qualifying.

1. You should know what triggers your habit. You approach a situation where your habit will be triggered, watch what you do every step. When you get the urge to perform your habit, don’t! And don’t think about not doing the habit either, just continue on.
2. Do not think about the habit, move on to something else. Do not tell yourself that “you’re not going to do the habit�? that translates into “your going to do the habit�?! Watch what you think, make sure you don’t start having negative self talk.

This is just babble. It's impossible to think about not thinking about something. Think about it. Or don't think about it. Or don't think about not thinking about it. The end result is the same in all three cases. And don't even get me started on 'negative self talk'.

At first you’ll have problems catching yourself, but as time goes on (and you avoid the negative self talk) it’ll get easer. By 90days you’ll have forgotten that you even used to have the habit. If you set a reminder in 90days you’ll look back and think “Oh yea I used to do that didn’t I?�?

As in: "Oh yeah, I used to talk utter bollocks and overpunctuate to an alarming extent, but ever since I taught myself to not think about not thinking about something and learned to avoid the horrors of negative self talk..."

You break a habit by consistently and deliberately not indulging that habit until such time as it is no longer a habit. End of story.

Public Service Announcement

2006-03-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

"Time and time again, translation seems to sabotage the words. You know, what is said is not what is heard. Damn this mean device, it makes a whispering man sound as if he cries. It's the pinnacle of what is typical."

I just wanted you all to know that, while working on the novel today, I typed the following sentence:

"So while he had given up drugs, and he did see today as the first day of the rest of his life, he didn’t want it to come out like it was a cry for help, like he was one of those celebrity fuckbags who’d do whatever came their way, whine about their five minute marriages, and then miraculously find a God they’d already disproved the existence of by not drowning in their own vomit."

Thing is, I'm working on Jenn's computer and in Works Word Processor, a program I'm not entirely familiar with. So, while I thought I'd nailed the spellcheck settings before I got started, WWP begged to differ, and - while I was busy finishing the paragraph - switched 'fuckbags' for 'buckbeans'.

Obviously.

Anyway, just so we're clear on this:

Buckbean - A perennial herb (Menyanthes trifoliata) native to the Northern Hemisphere and having trifoliate leaves and clusters of white, pink, or purplish flowers.

Fuckbag - e.g. Ben Affleck.

Visa Brainteasers

2006-03-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

"This could be your lucky day in hell. Never know who it might be at your doorbell."

Today, I thought I might provide you with some sample questions from form I-485, which is one of several I have to fill out as a part of the Adjustment Of Status process. These particular questions are from Part 3, and may only be answered by checking a box marked 'yes' or 'no'.

Have you ever, in or outside the United States, knowingly committed any crime of moral turpitude or a drug-related offense for which you have not been arrested?

Whoa. Hold up there just one second, Mr. Question. You appear to be asking me to admit to crimes I've successfully pulled off without arrest. Uh...just to clarify, those would be crimes the authorities don't know about...

Hahahahaha...you must be out of your fucking mind.

Do you intent to engage in the United States in espionage?

Yes. I am a spy. Oh, shit. That was a trick question, wasn't it? You devious bastards.

Have you ever engaged in genocide, or otherwise ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in the killing of any person because of race, religion, nationality, ethnic origin or political opinion?

Several years ago, I beat a Welshman to death with a sturdy oak beam because I couldn't understand what he was saying.

Do you plan to practice polygamy in the United States?

I need permission?

I hate these fucking forms.

The Curve Ball Conspiracy

2006-03-11T21:36:00.000-08:00

"Stop sending letters; letters always get burned. It's not like the movies. They fed us on little white lies"

Jenn and I have been threatening to collaborate on something for months, pretty much ever since I discovered Jenn had ambitions in a photographic direction and bought her a digital camera for Christmas. I'm pleased to announce that our first project has just gotten underway.

The idea behind The Curve Ball Conspiracy is simple. Jenn will take a photo of some description, and then I will write a short piece to accompany that photo. It's supposed to be fun as opposed to spectacularly arty and meaningful, but if it takes us into deeper waters, I won't be complaining. And hell, if it takes off, maybe other people can take photos or write accompanying fiction/poetry/whatever.

It's an interesting idea, regardless of where it goes, so head on over and check out the first post.

Brief Babble

2006-03-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."

Believe it or not, I'm experiencing some dull days this week. The suck of it is that Jenn's at work from six until two weekdays and at class from four until seven on Thursdays, so I've spent every day since Tuesday amusing myself on the computer. This might sound like a big bundle of fun, but it's kind of frustrating because what I really want to do is write, and as long-time readers will know, that becomes an issue when you combine it with the cigarette thing. Right now, it's three days since I quit, and I'm through the worst of the withdrawal. What's causing me a problem now is the psychological aspect of quitting, which makes it really hard at times when I would ordinarily have a cigarette. I smoke most when sat at the PC writing. In fact, it's fair to say I smoke like a fucking chimney when sat at the PC writing.

I will get started on the novel...I will get started on the novel...I will get started on the novel.

I'm really struggling for shit to say here, and there's this mirage of a pack of Marlboro and an ashtray in my peripheral vision. And my teeth hurt.

Stick a fork in me.

It'll Make An Awesome T-Shirt

2006-03-08T13:09:00.000-08:00

"Fill in the shadows of a certain corner; you used to sit there. Got me a brand new lamp, plugged it in, and now the dark don't fit there."

Things are back to something approaching stability here in The Darkened Room. I am fully recovered from jetlag, engaged in recovering from cultural lag, and just about ready to start spending my days buried in many creative projects, a couple of which will eventually be blogs of a kind. Of which more...some other time. I'm a ways away from actually debuting these projects, so we'll leave the speculation until then.

I'm such a tease.

Okay, okay...provided Jennifer's cat doesn't kill me first, I'll be working on Scratch (the long long long long long awaited novel) from now through until May/June. That'll be my main concern. In addition to that, I'll be working on a couple of other things which I'll be testing in blog form with a view to maybe giving them their own pages if they prove interesting and/or popular. One of those is a collaboration with Jenn, something we've been wanting to do for a while. The other will be...well...it'll make an awesome T-shirt.

That's it for now. I'm on day two of yet another attempt to quit smoking, and I'm in no mood to sit at the computer. More tomorrow.

Queer Eye For The Straight Lie

2006-02-26T20:21:00.000-08:00

"Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality, against which they are dashed to pieces."

Several days of loafing and several minutes of amateurish DIY later, here I am. The former because Jenn and I are officially on vacation for another nine days or so, the latter because the computer desk in my new residence has been having some issues which I, the man of the house, have now repaired.

Heh. Man of the house. I'm killing me.

Anyway, I'm not yet up for trying to sort through jetlag and euphoria in order to bring you the nuts and bolts psychology of transatlantic relocation, so let's sidestep all that for a moment and talk about...yes...man-on-man action.

Ah, it's these curveball moments that make blogging fun.

We're going to step into something of a politicised subject here, so before we do, I'd like to throw out a few bullet points by way of a disclaimer:

1. I am, if you want to stick a label on me for the purposes of this particular debate, a straight male.
2. I don't much care for that sort of label. Never have. But some folks like a box to fit people into before they start arguing with them.
3. I have no particular political affiliation, certainly not in the partisan sense of the term.

So let's go.

I haven't seen Brokeback Mountain yet, but I've been amused and somewhat amazed at the media reaction to the movie. Here in the States, the backlash has been pretty similar to that I was reading just before I left the UK, that being a certain sense that, while Ang Lee's little cowboy love story might be a thought-provoking and even insightful piece of work, nobody actually needed to see two guys swapping spit. I mean, gross, right?

Which is fascinating to me. After all, don't we live in increasingly gay-friendly times? I'm talking outside of the circles where homosexuality is EVIL and WRONG here. I'm talking about the kind of people who are gay-friendly in the sense that they enjoy Will And Grace, the kind of people who are cool with Anne Heche and Ellen Degeneres because it's, like, totally admirable that they're comfortable with their sexuality and in a position to campaign for their rights.

Gay-friendly. But not really. Because when you look at it, we're talking about homosexuality as a cultural movement here, not as a sexual preference and an identity. What's 'gay' about Sean Hayes on Will And Grace? Well, he has a high-pitched voice, feminine body language, an interest in things ordinarily considered girly (fashion, for example), and he's almost completely asexual in every definable way. He's your friendly neighbourhood queer, free of any but the vaguest suggestion that he might, say, enjoy another man's cock in his mouth.

Because we don't want to think about that. Just like we don't want to see two men kissing.

Two women, though? Two women is good. Girl-on-girl action? Fuck, yeah. Oh...So long as it's Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair, Calista Flockhart and Lucy Liu, Denise Richards and Neve Campbell. So long, in point of fact, as it's something that fits a distinctly male perception of lesbianism that a lot of women are also guilty of perpetuating with what I like to think of as an I'd-SO-do-Angelina mentality that caters to male fantasies steeped in the kind of thought we tell ourselves we've long since left behind. That kind of girl-on-girl action? Two words: straight porn.

Forget the love story aspect of Brokeback Mountain for a minute. Nobody is too worried about that. Two people already in committed relationships share a forbidden love. It's an old story, no big deal, and as a society we seem able to deal with that in terms of the two protagonists being male. That's not the problem here. The problem is that we have this idea of what homosexuality is that's so horribly devoid of passion, desire, lust, and all the things we take for granted in hetero relationships, that when we see two actual men - and we're talking idealised, Hollywood men here - kissing with tongues, our immediate reaction is disgust.

So here's your homework question: How gay-friendly are we really?

Sweet Conspiracies

2006-02-24T10:18:00.001-08:00

"Clarity just confuses me; the lines drawn on a map a strange assembly when there's northerners in southerners and westenders in eastenders, and sunny days in January left spaces in my diary."

I know, I know...far too long since I last updated. Relocation is both exhausting and time-consuming. As of last night, however, I'm officially on a three month vacation I have more than earned.

In case you were wondering, I'm typing this from California.

Where I live.

More...well...when things settle down.