| What's Lost Beneath the Roses |
[06 Dec 2006|01:05pm] |
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mood |
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 Busy with the old Writing. |
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music |
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Nobody - Monsters Are Waiting |
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| On Seeing Faustus at the Rose | In this concrete covered cavern
Cast in shadow tempered flame,
The Rose has long since vanished,
But its spectre still remains
Sunk two dozen feet in mortar
And five centuries disuse,
With its players long forgotten
To slow aging or the noose.
But, still one phantom lingers
(Who once lingered here too late),
Watching his own doctor Faustus
Play the ruin’s stagnant lake.
The living cannot see him,
And the dead have ceased to seach
For what’s been lost beneath the roses
And the rain at St. Nick’s church.
The Rose has long since crumbled,
Passed into the static void
That waits for what soul may exist
When all structure is destroyed,
And he knows he can’t avoid it,
Though he’s hidden for so long
In clogged and cloying clay and earth
Where he knows he must belong.
Mephistopheles is coming
Through the silence of cement,
Filled with just the water’s weeping
And the dream of days long spent.
The clock still launches aching seconds,
And the hour’s getting late.
“It strikes! It strikes!” It’s time to go.
“Come now, Kit. Sleep awaits.” |
| My goodness it’s been a while again. I should really learn to update more often. I shall try and sum everything up as quickly as I can. I have a new job working at Costa Coffee, which would be an alright job were it not for the manager that runs the place being one of the most unpleasant people that I’ve ever met. Made a new friend, or rather, I’ve made friends with one of Tez’s friends, a lovely boy called James. Just as well I know him given that even before I did he was part of the ‘Let’s get a house when you finish Uni’ plan.
Working on the novel that I wrote for Nano this year, it’s called ‘The Storm Warden’, and hopefully it’ll be the first book in a series of books that are going to make me famous. It details the trials and tribulations facing an alchemical magician in 1814 who is forced to ingratiate himself into the high society of rural Wales when a werewolf begins attacking people. Over the course of the story he gets himself a new companion, solves the problem and disappears off into the sunset with her. I’m hoping to intersperse the novels with various books of random crap: short stories; entries in a Georgian supernatural bestiary; letters the main character’s companion writes home to her family. Things like that. |
It’s my sister’s wedding on Saturday. She’s marrying some guy she met in March and that I’ve never heard of, so that should be an interesting one. Means I have to see the family, some of whom I haven’t seen in well over two years, a lot of whom now live somewhere I have no idea about. Still, I’m not dreading it too much.
Life is good, if cold. The winter’s setting in and yet again we don’t really have enough coal to keep us warm, still, I’m more or less happy and that’s what’s important.
Been doing a little writing over the past few days, keeping the old gears turning, which is no bad thing. You can see the evidence of it dotted around this entry. A few nights ago we had Tez and James around, and we were getting drunk as per normal, and I won’t go into details but one thing led to another and they both ended up half-naked and out in the fucking hurricane that was coming up the mountain outside. Something about the way it looked really struck me, and given that I didn’t have a camera at that exact moment (and they weren’t really eager to go out in it again) I started thinking about what else I could do with the idea, and pretty much out of the blue I sat down and wrote this. I may use the idea for my Screenplay in June. Anyway, this is it:
| Gideon & Isaac | Outside the house, the night was coming down in gusts of wild, mountain-borne wind and shaves of late November rain. Gideon and Isaac were inside, but they couldn’t quite feel removed from the world beyond the rough-hewn stone walls. It was true that they were protected from the more immediate ravages of the wind and rain, but they couldn’t help but shiver as they heard it blasting against the frail glass and guttering in the barren, heatless chimney.
They drew closer together to avoid the ravages of the oncoming winter, and drank more wine, swigged straight from the bottle to avoid the need for glasses. To be honest, they weren’t even sure that they had any glasses left, Gideon did seem to have a terrible habit of smashing them when he was horribly drunk and in fits of impassioned rage or triumph.
“Listen to that weather,” Gideon said blackly, taking another swing from the half-finished bottle. “We’re in the middle of a fucking hurricane.”
“Yeah,” said Isaac without much conviction as though the conversation was only slowly catching up with him, the cogs twisting and turning in his head, taking his thoughts in new and uncharted directions as his subconscious gradually processed what was going on around him.
Suddenly, everything made perfect sense, the world slipped perfectly into place, his breathe caught at the back of his throat. “We should go out in it.”
Gideon frowned. “Go out in it? Out there? Are you mad?”
“Possibly,” Isaac muttered disjointedly. “Possibly.” His eyes flashed a sudden, fervent blue in the guttering shadows of the candlelight. “Come on, let’s go.”
“You are mad,” Gideon sighed. “You go out there and you’ll catch a chill and die.”
“Me?” Isaac asked. “No, not me: Us. You’re coming with me, Gideon.”
And with that, Isaac got to his feet and headed for the door. Gideon sighed, then he picked up the half-finished bottle of wine, and he followed him.
As the door swung open, it was as though someone had replaced bits of the world outside with the darkest reaches of some distant frontier perched right on the very precipice of the world between what was sane and safely understood and the utter, roiling chaos that lurked beyond the verges of human influence and knowledge. It was true, the physical hallmarks of the landscape they were used to were still there: The road that spread out immediately on either side of the door with its bus stop and its balding tarmac; The amber-coloured streetlights pushing the darkness back inch by painful inch for all the unfortunate souls that drove or walked through the wilderness after dark; the dry stone walls and tiny houses that dotted the side of the mountain stretching up towards the brooding sky, clinging desperately to the thin ribbon of the road as though it were the only thing holding them up there. But, the rain was coming down in thick, grainy drifts: as fine and cold as snow, but without any of its poise or delicacy, and the wind gusted and tore up the side of the mountain in harsh, powerful lungfuls of arctic air. The streetlight played with the drifted banks of dusty rain, turning them into a falling haze of sodium orange embers that swirled and bustled in the wind as they chased themselves towards the ground.
For a moment, anyone that didn’t know Gideon could have been mistaken for thinking that he was quite taken with the violent kind of beauty of it all, so much so, in fact, that he didn’t notice Isaac beginning to unfasten the buttons of his shirt until he pulled it off over his shoulders and began to wrestle with his socks. Only then did Gideon turn to look at him with an expression of vexed confusion on his face.
“Isaac, what the hell are you doing?”
Isaac paused halfway through pulling his left sock off and swayed in a drunken, one-legged attempt to stay upright. He blinked at Gideon vacantly as though he had just asked the stupidest question ever documented to man, and said simply:
“They’ll get wet if I don’t take them off.”
Then he finished removing his sock, and stepped out into the rain. Gideon sighed and rubbed his forehead absently with his fingers. Isaac staggered out, half naked, into the road, and spread his arms to the heavens.
“Are you quite cold enough yet?” Gideon asked impatiently from the doorway, leaning warily against the frame and lighting a cigarette.
Isaac spun around a few times on the tarmac, the water and streetlight turning his skin to slickened amber glass and plastering his straw-coloured hair to his face in thick, wet curls. He laughed, and there was a kind of insanity in that laugh that Gideon found profoundly unsettling, the kind of utter, boundless abandon that didn’t know when to stop. Isaac turned around to face him, and after a moment of regarding him with his perfectly vacant eyes, he stumbled a few paces closer to the house and away from the ravages of the winter rain. He plucked the cigarette from between Gideon’s lips with long, cold fingers, and took a deep, indulgent drag on it before casting it, half-smoked, into the gutter.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Gideon demanded, but already Isaac had hold of his hand and was dragging him outside. Out into the storm.
As the rain struck Gideon’s skin, it was like being pushed into a bath full of ice water. In a second, the cold cut through the reassuring warmth of the alcohol and rendered him utterly, painfully sober. In that same instant, however, the sharp, sudden shock of it released a heavy dose of adrenaline into his blood and began to make him feel reckless and light-headed. Perhaps it was that, or perhaps it was the shock itself, that meant that when Isaac began to tug at the buttons of his shirt, Gideon didn’t argue. Despite that, the fabric was already growing wet and heavy as he wrestled his way out of his shirt and cast it back in the direction of the open doorway.
Isaac smiled broadly and began to half walk, half dance down the empty road in the dark and the pouring rain. He laughed again with the same kind of insanity and volume as before. In one of the nearby houses, a light flicked on, and the face of some terrible Welsh washerwoman pressed against the glass – all rollers and sagging skin. Gideon took a swig from the bottle of wine and rainwater in his hand, gave her the finger, and walked down the road after Isaac.
He found him standing on the tarmac with his back towards the house, gazing towards the distant mountains that had long been swallowed by cloud and rain and darkness. Gideon stopped beside him and offered the bottle to Isaac, who was happy to oblige his hospitality.
“Do you know who we are?” Isaac asked abstractly as he handed the bottle back and wiped the mixture of red win and rain from his chin.
“Tell me.”
“We’re Byron and Shelley. In eighteen sixteen. The year the summer never came.”
“They should have come to Wales,” Gideon remarked sardonically. “Then they could have enjoyed that particular little privilege every single year.”
Isaac laughed, and Gideon smiled a little at his own joke. Isaac’s laughter had a habit of making him do that.
“Out in the cold and the rain,” Isaac went on dramatically, throwing his arms wide open and narrowly missing hitting Gideon in the face. “Out of their minds on laudanum and driving each other slowly mad in the storm. Utterly lost in some strange mixture of ecstasy and despair. Knowing that they were losing control, that they were on some fast-track road towards insanity, but unable to stop themselves because that feeling: that loss of control, was even more addictive than all those drugs they were doing. Because, deep down, they knew – They knew they couldn’t stop even if they wanted to. So they just kept shooting up on the sheer, awesome size of everything until it pulled them apart on the inside. Until it chewed up their minds and just spat them out on the other side of it all.”
“What an utterly charming thought,” Gideon said.
The rain was beginning to sink its icy fingers beneath his skin, between his bones. Isaac was beginning to shiver: His skin starting to pucker and pale with the cold. Then, just as everything was beginning to seem dark and desperate and unsalvageable, Isaac laughed again, flung his arms open wide, then threw them around Gideon and hugged him tightly.
“You’re starting to look miserable again, Gideon,” he said softly. “Come on, let’s go inside. We can crack open another bottle.”
Gideon patted him on the shoulder and smiled.
“That,” he said. “Is the best idea you’ve had all day.” |
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cranky
blank
busy
sad
exhausted
hopeful
distressed
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