The Flickering Tilly

I purchased the tilly lamp from the old chandler on the quayside. A black cage shackling a kerosene flame, it lit my way that night as the fret rolled over the port like a mad posse.

After four gruelling weeks, from the western shore on a merciless sea, the harbour was strewn with the detritus of branded cowboys.

Like many others I had come in search of a destiny, a glorious claim to the dark hills, where the horses ran in herds of gold waiting to be tamed. 

But driving me on was a secret shame. I had run out from my past like blood from a bullet hole. I had shunned my God-given responsibilities and fled the devil feeding on my soul.

I kicked a dented water can out of the way. It spun across the dirt, a dervish in the dust, eventually pointing to a trail I'd not considered, where a hooker preened beneath a candle-lit window like a broken bird.

"Hi Mister, wanna show a gal a good time?"

"Thanks but no thanks Sister, I'm good tonight but here's a nickel for a light."

The haggard, ageing brunette held out her cigarette. I placed my lamp on the ground and I cupped my hand gently around it, touching her fingers. As my tobacco flared the red glow gave her face a saintly appearance like Mary Magdalene and I was overcome with remorse.

I tipped my Stetson.

"Night Sister."

I strode on with my lamp, my spurs clicking in the emptiness, as the night embraced the smoke from my nose and mouth like the endless sable sea I'd endured to reach this point. Here the Fates would decide if my demon would follow me.

The rigging of the spice sloops clinked in the distance, a wet sound in the dry mouth of darkness. I needed a drink and soon a saloon emerged from the gloom, where I downed a sour mash whisky, splashed my sweating neck and ate a soft tangerine.

As I exited through the swinging gate, picked up my lantern and crunched the grit with my boots, I heard the gate swing again. 

Turning I saw no-one. 

I stared a while longer.

"So that's the way its gonna be!" I whispered.

I clasped my colt and heard the ancient leather creak beneath my grip. I flipped the stud and resumed my walk to the far side of town, where I was to meet up with an old gaucho at his camp.

The wooden structures of the main street faded. A pack of black dogs loped past and with them the comfort of my fellow man. Even the saints receded into the safety of the town and I craved another whisky dampening my brittled lips.

The parched brush bade me in. I held my lamp high and measured up the dirt path's length to the site of the camp at the foot of the pitch-black hills.

A gigantic, scraggy turkey vulture flapped its wings as it roosted low in a withered dwarf, its face and neck red with the blood of the land. My tilly stammered and went out in its sordid gust.

"Damn death-rat, scram you old ghastly bastard!"

I kicked a cloud of dirt into the thing's face and it squawked like a sick child before rising into the air and leaving me be.

My cigarette had just enough left in it to relight my lamp and the safe yellow flame lit once more. As the scene returned I saw a horse pelting by the arroyo. On its back was a silhouetted figure bent low on the mane, charging the mare as if devil-bent on some vengeful errand in that skinless place.

I shivered, discarded my stub and trudged on along the arid crunching path between the mesquite scrub.

By my reckoning it was the dead of night when I reached the camp of the gaucho. It was silent for a horse tethered to a thorn shrub.  

There was a decent fire with a coffee pot dangling over it. It smelt good in the lifeless air. 

"Help yourself."

I heard the voice but couldn't see its owner. 

"Thankyou."

I took a tin cup from the chattels by the fire and poured the steaming brew into it. I sipped with gratitude, the steam rising round my hat.

"Sit," said the voice.

I sat on a flat rock and drank.

"Your arrival is timely."

"I have travelled many, many days to get here," I replied.

"My apologies, it was not you I was addressing."

I stopped drinking.

"It is the man sat next to you with whom I speak."

Without warning the fire was extinguished and the blackness of forever enveloped me.

I hefted my colt, turned my head and raised my lantern.

It flickered and sputtered as if being blown but before it could die I saw the face of the figure beside me.

"Son of a bitch!"

The demon had followed me across the sea! Across the desert! To this very arroyo. 

It had been with me the whole while!

"Damn you Demon!" I yelled in its dreadful countenance.

Smoke, sulphur and steam began to billow from it's gaping mouth, from where I heard the wounded cry of frightened child within its ghastly chamber.

At turns the demon's contorted face was Mary Magdalene's imploring me to stay the night, then that blood-drenched turkey vulture pecking at my gut-filled bullets and worst of all, the desperate wife and daughter I had cruelly discarded, staggering like dissolving phantoms in the unforgiving mountains of my cowardly past.

I pointed my gun, pulled the trigger and blew its fucking brains out.

Falling into a reddening hell, where burning horses bolted over slopes of bones, it was then and only then that I saw whom the demon really was.

It was I.

It had been all along.

And as the devils of eternity prized apart my dripping skull in the flickering glow of my tilly, it was upon that arroyo I slowly died.

The Bipedal Seed

I was born a corm. A rhizome. A child root in the humus. Slowly I xylemed. Surged, I rose on hyphae beyond the soil. I could feel the sun. Swimming the sap I emerged a stamens, then a sepal. Pulsating I fuelled on sweetness wherein I formed a fat seed, too fat to hang. I fell and spiralled to virgin land. There I lay. Anchoring. I split. I stood and walked towards the world. The bipedal seed. The sugars of humans fed me and my roots cabled. Engorged on humanity I towered, a sequoia of blood. My canopy hid the extinction. When nothing was left I was sated and spored and darkened the sky for eternity.

The Bonfire by the Forest

Harold strutted round the corridors like he owned the joint.

An ex-rock star with one foot in the Styx, Harold demanded adulation.

"Get out of my fucking way you peasant" he bellowed at Ada.

"Yes, get out of his fucking way Ada!" echoed Cedric from behind Harold. 

Cedric was always behind Harold, a dweller of his shadow, a stunted brown-nose caressing his arse.

Ada moved out of the way, chess pieces dropping onto the lino.

"I'm sick to fuck of these munchkins! Me, a man with a plan, a man with a mission, a man in his prime!"

Harold almost beat his chest like a Silverback as he sat down for a game of Snakes and Ladders in the sun room.

Cedric always let him win. Somehow his beloved mentor never noticed how he rigged the play so that Harold never lost. 

His ego couldn't take losing and Cedric knew from bad experience what happened if he did. He had the scars to prove it, scars he fondled at night in bed, the striations of his love and endurance. 

But, that was years ago, when Harald had first arrived and Cedric had been madly in love with him.

"Once again you lose you gnarly runt Cedric! How I adore to see you climb those ladders every day. It reminds me of a vampire fleeing the sun. Are you a vampire Cedric? A parasite? A lowly worm?"

"No Harold, I am your friend, ready to serve you at any moment. You know that".

'Do I? I've seen you playing Cluedo with Ethel, clucking together like fucking hens in the shed. I've seen you this morning! What are you doing out there you dirty scumbag?"

"Playing Cluedo. We like to play Cluedo."

"What, Mrs. Plum did it with a chainsaw in the celler! You clowns! You're no detective Cedric, you're nothing, a nobody, you've no plan, no mission, you're going out on a gurney because you're thick as pigshit!"

"Whatever you say Harold, whatever you say."

"Besides, I went into the shed this morning after you left. She's a fine figure of a woman is Ethel. I can see why you like her Cedric. And I have to say I saw a lot of her this morning in that shed. That's why I bolted the door and fucked her brains out. You could say, I did it with my big lead pipe in the out-house you fuckwit!"

Cedric stared at Harold and stood up.

"I'll get lunch. Do you want water?"

Cedric shuffled away before Harold could answer. Had Cedric turned he would have seen Harold smiling widely, a hyena sat in his chair.

The Bi-Annual Committee of the Bonfire had it's office on the west wing. A small run-down shoebox with flaking plaster, it nevertheless housed the two staff who's job it was to oversee the event every two years on behalf of the committee. The key to it's success were suitable pairs coming forward to participate. Pairs with a strong sort of bond.

Cedric went into the office and nominated himself and Harold. 

"Is the absent party unaware of his nomination, as required by the rules?"

"Yes."

"Have you yourself reached the required level?"

"Yes"

"How would you summarise it for the record?"

"Oh, I absolutely and vehemently detest him with all my heart!"

Cedric filled out the form.

ENTERED!

The rubber stamp thumped the paper in red ink.

And so their names went forward and should Cedric and Harold be drawn then Cedric would find out the result the day before the event. Only one pair would be chosen by the committee.

Spring passed by  in the sprawling mansion and the skies grew warmer. Large glass doors were flung open and long white curtains billowed gently like dancers in the summer breeze.

Cedric continued to be Harold's familiar in the myriad halls. Harold continued to belittle him at every turn. The plague and it's victim entwined in a waltz of degradation.

Harold now sometimes asked Cedric to watch him as he met with Ethel and Ada in the shed on long hot afternoons, when the institution's guard dogs slept in the shade of the growing mound of brash.

Cedric's rancour enveloped him like a second skin. A cracked, scarred carapace; it's crusted cuts the ladders of loathing, it's red slits the snakes of hate. He stroked them constantly.

And so August came to the corridors and the event was here. The fire was the following day. A frisson of sheer excitement ran through the sprawling wings of the building.

Official word was passed to Cedric that he and Harold were indeed the chosen pair. Excited as he'd never been before Cedric nevertheless kept this secret to himself as instructed.

Cedric I need you to scrub my back!

Cedric I want you to make my bed!

Cedric I need you to chew my food!

Cedric I want you to wipe my arse!

The demands continued from Harold, who was so swept up in Cedric's humiliation that he didn't notice the huge bonfire being completed in the garden.

The night came and everyone in the asylum were asked to go outside, get a cup of hot tea and stand around the fire, which was now a burning tower of wood and timber thirty feet wide and fifty feet high. 

You could see it for miles just as it had been seen each year right back to a time a thousand years ago when Men had first believed in the god of the Forest and it's need for sacrifice.

All the thousand or so inmates shuffled round the fire in their off-white pyjamas holding chipped cups. The steam rose and swirled in the rising heat like a whisper.

Standing in the circle, Cedric and Harold were there too, shoulder to shoulder with everyone else. 

Harold passed his cup to Cedric and rolled a cigarette. Whilst he was engrossed in lighting up Cedric whispered something to the man next to him on his opposite shoulder.

Harald drew deeply on his rollie.

"I wonder who the poor fucker is this time!" Said Harald smiling and puffing out rings of smoke into Cedric's face.

Cedric, still holding both cups, looked at him and smiled back.

"It's you!" whispered the man next to Harold.

Harold looked at him stunned and dropped his cigarette. He stared at Cedric who was still smiling.

"You little bastard!"

Harold turned and attempted to run but scores of hands grabbed him and dragged him to the fire.

With Cedric leading and without any fuss the assembly threw Harald high into the flames.

"Noooooooooooo!" He wailed as the seething fire consumed him.

The inmates turned and began to shamble towards the doors back into the common room, where hot chocolate and digestives were waiting.

Cedric picked up Harold's fallen cigarette and took a final drag before stubbing it out.

As he closed the doors and looked out onto the garden he could just make out a tall grizzled hazy figure behind the smoke, watching from the edge of the black forest before it turned and re-entered it's dark kingdom.