The Hungry Cuts

Mortin Brass leafed through his Radio Days, licking his thumb with each new page. 

It was the bumper December edition and jam-packed with tasty morsels on both TV and the radio. An annual treat, Mortin only ever bought the December issue on account of one special thing: the woodcuts.

Once drawn, and only once, here in his native Wakefield, Mortin loved the woodcuts that illustrated each page. No, he didn't just love them, he adored them, worshipped them and the black and white motifs gave his otherwise empty existence meaning. He had no idea why he did.

The older the Radio Days mag the better and he had every copy going back to the turn of the century, save for the very first one, which was cancelled before publication, on account of the young artist's terrible death, his neck broken and body crushed beneath the iron wheels of a runaway horse-drawn newsstand off the town centre. It was the first of November 1899. He died in agony and bitterness in a poor hospice, mangled and penniless, knowing his life's work had all been for nothing.  He was buried a pauper, his temporary epitaph reading,

"My Life's Art's Diminished, The Blood Part's Unfinished!"

In homage to that glorious but utterly tragic unpublished debut a century before, nowadays modern artists continued the ruritanian scenes of  blackbirds, fences, trees, flowers, snowmen, icicles, homes, smoking chimneys, reindeer and blazing hearths, all harking back to that golden age, a Victorian idyll of a sumptuous Dickensian Christmas to which everyone aspired, but like the pulsating embers in parlour grate, no-one could ever touch.

The woodcuts were the best next thing to actually being there. 

But it wasn't the country scenes and rural lanes that Morten idolised. It was the ghosts: those cuts depicting phantoms, spirits, spectres and hauntings were the reason Morten bought the festive edition of Radio Days and those alone. His enormous library of back issues was a monument to his infatuation and despite not ever being able to own that first unseen edition from the turn of the century

He would stare at them for hours, mesmerized by their simplicity, their starkness and monochrome charm. They would appear to come alive as he gazed into their hidden depths behind the dark strokes and become lost in their skeletal worlds, their inky bones.

That particular Christmas Morten had sought out the magazine in early December. It seemed to be unusually popular this year and all the normal newsagents had sold out. 

It was towards the late afternoon, November 1st, 1999, as a fingernail moon lit up the town square, that Morten, in the pitch shadows of Cheapside, came across a tumbledown vendor he'd never noticed before.

After searching for hours on that freezing Saturday a month before the Millennium, certain he had visited all newsagents in the city of Wakefield, Morten couldn't believe his eyes and approached the somewhat old-fashioned wheeled kiosk in the darkness with some trepidation. The ancient proprietor greeted him heartily.

"Good day to you fine Sir on this freezing winter's day. How may I be of service?"

Morten looked the news seller up and down and concluded he, hoary with age, must have been at least 100 years old, his paper skin literally sliding off his crooked primeval frame. The man's tweed jacket was thoroughly threadbare and his trousers were held up with thick yellowing string. His neck was awkwardly tilted and his unpleasant, antiquarian appearance was completed by a tarnished but split monocle and slick blackened teeth. There was an unsavoury reek about him too, like off meat.

Yet, miracle of miracles, there on the stand of this decrepit old man, Morton thought he saw what was a single solitary copy of the Christmas Radio Days. 

Ecstatic to say the least but somewhat startled by the old codger, Morten shakily pointed in the murk to the only copy of Radio Days, to which the seller, in a very raspy, croaky voice whispered:

"Ah, a wise choice Sir, it's a rare tome indeed, hot off the local presses and hungry for eager souls such as yours to appreciate the finery of the cuts. As I understand it, the poor artist died in the midst of his work, killed by a scoundrel and never able to complete the final panel, a terrible but fulsome apparition of the season I believe, if you take my meaning."

With gnarled, mittened hands, the seller handed Morten the magazine and took his coin, biting the edge and pocketing it, before lowering a large, wide, curtain to close his mobile stand for the day.

Morten, heartily clutching his annual prize, watched with fascination as the crumpled fellow picked up the stand's grip and began to drag it over awkwardly up the jittery cobbles of the slight but tiresome incline, which was virtually unlit apart from the sickly whiteness proffered by the moon hung out like washing to dry. The old twisted man turned and smiled as he saw his customer so engrossed before hobbling away struggling with his cumbersome cart.

With a spring in his step, Morten followed the seller's direction and headed for the nearest street lamp on the corner at the foot of the hill beside the family butchers, where he hastily unrolled the magazine.

His eyes bulged out of his skull as he looked at the cover and read the date on it. 

November 1st 1889. 

"W - What? H- How?"

As Morten browsed through the magazine he got to the final page, where there was indeed a blank panel for the New Year's ghost story. His heart pounded with excitement at the thought that he had found perhaps the only copy of the lost first issue of Radio Days in existence. It must be worth an absolute fortune and he'd picked it up for for a paltry £2!

It was during this reverie by the light near the shop window full of kidneys and liver that Morton first heard the loud clattering of heavy wheels on the cobbled slope.

He looked up to see the scene had changed. The cobbles were the same but the lamp was now gas, the streets beyond were packed with finely dressed men sporting top hats and canes and women wearing wide pleated dresses and petite fascinators. Horse-drawn carriages clip-clopped along the gas-lit causeway with bedraggled urchins holding onto the rears howling. If he hadn't thought it wholly insane he could have sworn he was staring at Victorian Wakefield!

It was within this meleé out of time that Mortin once again saw the crooked old man waving. In front of him was his magazine cart careening down the incline, the journals and papers flying off like bats as it shuddered over the stones and increasing in speed.

Morton was transfixed by the spectacle. The cart, now an unstoppable iron-wheeled missile, was bouncing straight towards him, the sound of the iron ferrules like the hammering of Hell itself. 

When he woke from his reverie it was too late. The flat edge of the thing pole-axed Morton, knocking him to the ground. The first massive wheel rode mercilessly over his head, cracking his skull like a nut. The second drove over his waist completely flattening his tender abdomen like paper.

In Morten's final seconds of life he caught sight of the name on the newspaper cart as it careered to a stop. It was his own family's.

Brass!

If course, the stand had been his Great Grandfather's. The stand which had ..... killed the artist a century earlier to the day!

The ancient twisted gent limped up to the squashed corpse of Morten, smiled and grew younger, as young as he was when he drew the woodcuts for Radio Days.

He stooped and removed the old magazine from Morten's grip and watched as his missing final panel was completed, a screaming mutilated figure done in bright red ink, by far the best woodcut he'd ever done.

"The Blood Part's finished!" whispered the young artist before walking off and fading away, his Radio Days dripping red in his hand.