The Hungry Cuts

Mortin Brass leafed through last year's Christmas Radio Days, slowly licking his thumb with each turn of the page, trying to imagine what this year's would be like.

It would be the bumper December edition and jam-packed with tasty festive morsels on both TV and the radio. 

An annual rite, Mortin only ever bought the December issue, on account of one special thing: the beautiful black and white 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 it was. He knew his ancestors were newsagents, but that was so long ago. He craved the woodcuts now and was ravenous for more.

The older the Radio Days Christmas issue the better for Mortin, especially those grails capturing the actual birth of Marconi's wireless miracle and he had every Christmas copy going back to the turn of the century, save for the very first one, which had been cancelled before publication, on account of the young woodcut artist's terrible death, his face broken and body crushed beneath the iron wheels of a runaway hand-drawn newsstand off the town centre. It was the first of November 1899. He died in agony, starvation and bitterness in the hospice, mangled and penniless, knowing his short life's greatest work had all been for nothing and would never be seen.  He was buried a pauper, the vellum epitaph he scrawled himself:

"My Life's Art may be Diminished but The Bloody End remains Unfinished!"

In homage to that glorious but utterly tragic unpublished debut a century before, modern artists continued with ruritanian scenes of ailing robins, snow-draped fences, bare trees,  winter flowers, snowmen, long icicles, cozy homes, smoking chimneys, herds of 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 spectral embers in Scrooge's parlour grate, no-one could ever touch.

The woodcuts were the best next thing to actually being there and though the public appetite for nostalgia was strong, Mortin's was insatiable. 

But it wasn't the country scenes and rural lanes that he idolised. It was the ghosts: those illustrations depicting phantoms, spirits, spectres and hauntings were the reason Mortin bought the festive edition of Radio Days and those alone. His enormous library of ninety eight back issues was a monument to his infatuation. 

He would stare at the illustrations 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 desperate for life. Yet he knew he would never be fully satisfied, because he could never own that first unseen edition from the turn of the century and feast on the birth of the cuts.

This particular winter Mortin had sought out the magazine early. It seemed to be unusually popular this year and despite his diligence all the normal city newsagents had sold out. 

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

After searching for hours on that freezing Saturday two months before the Millennium, certain he had visited all newsagents in the city of Wakefield, Mortin couldn't believe his eyes and approached the old-fashioned wheeled news cart in the darkness with some trepidation. The ancient proprietor greeted him zealously.

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

Mortin 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 grubby tweed jacket was thoroughly threadbare and his stained trousers were held up with thick yellowing string. He appeared to be malformed around his middle and his face was awkwardly tilted. The unpleasant, antiquarian appearance was completed by a tarnished but split monocle and slick blackened teeth turned at an angle. There was an unsavoury reek about the man too, like meat gone off.

Yet, miracle of miracles, there on the stand of this decrepit geriatric, Mortin thought he saw what was a single solitary copy of the Christmas Radio Days in the darkness.

Ecstatic to say the least, but somewhat startled by the old codger, Mortin shakily pointed in the murk to the magazine, to which the seller, in a very raspy voice, whispered:

"Ah, a wise choice Sir, it's a rare tome indeed, straight from the desk, almost hot off the local press and craving an eager soul 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 portrait of wintry wrath I believe it would have been, if you take my meaning."

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

Mortin, greedily clutching his prize, watched with fascination as the crumpled fellow picked up the stand's grip and began to drag it awkwardly up the jittery cobbles of the slight but nevertheless tiresome incline, which was virtually unlit apart from the sickly whiteness offered by the moon. The deformed pensioner turned and smiled as he saw his customer engrossed, before hobbling away and struggling with his cumbersome cart.

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

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

November 1st, 1899. 

"W - What? H- How?"

Mortin quickly leafed to the last page, where there was indeed a blank panel for the New Year ghost story. His heart pounded with excitement at the thought that he had found perhaps the only copy of the lost and unpublished 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 from an old duffer who simply didn't have a clue!

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

He looked up to see the scene had completely changed. The incline was the same but the lamp was now an eerie 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 whilst bedraggled urchins held onto the rear racks howling. If he hadn't thought it wholly insane Mortin would 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. He was waving to him. In front was his magazine cart careening down the slope, the journals and papers flying off like bats, as it shuddered over the stones and increased dreadfully in speed.

Mortin was transfixed by the spectacle. 

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

When he woke from his trance it was too late. The flat edge of the thing pole-axed Mortin, knocking him to the ground. The first massive wheel rode mercilessly over his head, cracking his brittle cheeks like a chestnut. The second drove over his waist, completely flattening his tender abdomen onto the road's surface.

In Mortin's final moments he caught sight of the name on the newspaper cart as it careered to a stop. 

It was his own family's!

"Oh dear God, it says Brass's News Stand!" He gargled, blood rising in his collapsed throat.

Of course! As he lay dying it became clear now to Mortin! The cart had been his Great Grandfather's, the same one which had ..... Dear God in Heaven,  killed that artist a century earlier on that very day!

The ancient crippled seller limped up to the squashed form of Mortin, smiled and grew younger, as young as he was when he drew the woodcuts for Radio Days' debut one hundred years before.

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

The young hungry artist walked off and staring through the butcher's window, his Radio Days dripping red in his hand, he faded away whispering.

"At last the bloody End is finished!"