Hidden Leaves (The Fourth Object)
The man couldn't remember his name.
He lived in a garden of hidden leaves with a large black dog who talked.
He had but one friend in the world, but he wasn't a true ally, but in fact a spectral interloper who sought to steal his secrets.
At night, when the moon bloodied, he left the garden to walk through the tendrils of fog-light. During this time he was never sure if he truly left the garden. Or if every movement took place in a dream,
Once upon a time he found himself on a particularly dark path of brown. As the buildings disappeared one by one, and the fog pushed in increasingly from both sides, the path turned to mud.
And there he found a velvety black box by the side of a pulpy puddle. He bent through a corrupt knee and tentatively placed his cold palms upon its surreal flesh.
The brass clasps and hinges opened silently, as he drew the oaken lid back, and revealed the mysterious, yet discarded contents.
A small, golden key; a gossamer bound diary; a collection of ivory tiles.
The gold key held weight which belied its size, the diary was inscribed in a feint hand, and the tiles seemed to bind in the formation of an oblique game.
Acquiescent between the book and the key was a gap that seemed built for a fourth object.
He ran his index finger carefully around its contours. He lifted the box and smelt it, but wasn’t sure why. He glanced all about himself furtively, tucked the box under his arm, and hurried back to the garden.
When he returned to the garden he instantly noticed a change in the dog. His dimensions, his movements, even the scent of his ancient breath.
His inverted friend stayed away for an entire week after the finding of the box. As if he knew, as if he were jealous. When he eventually showed himself he had a tale of his own to tell, but unfortunately, it was not a tale that could ever be told.
In the following weeks the tile game took over his mind, and he first suspected, and later knew, that he was the only person in the world to ever play the game. The game took over his life.
The only thing that ever broke him from his focused reverie was the question of the fourth object. His preoccupation with the omitted thing grew and grew, took on a life all its own, until it seemed the lacuna of his soul.
The dog grew tired.
His red eyes of fire dimmed a little with each passing day. Spittle appeared at the periphery of his muzzle and unnatural tears of mucus hung from his eyes. He spoke less and less, but in the twilight he whispered in his sleep about his victory over the sun.
Eventually, he crawled into the furthest corner of the garden and died.
The friend – a shadow to begin with – grew increasingly faint until he eventually vaporised into a cloud of pale smoke.
On a night when the moon was crescent, and the clouds around it nebulous, he drifted willingly once more into the mist.
A grainy white sign shimmered in the organic ephemeral light snaked through the skeletal trees. Upon the corner a latticed window displayed a sole bulb and a fat moth. He walked and walked and walked, and grew increasingly disorientated. The path appeared to twist around him and taunt his weakened mind. And the thought encroached upon his consciousness that he had made both his decisions and mistakes, and now, within the lunarscape, could never (ever) find his way back home.
Bull Shit
Everything was the usual when he’d come into work today. That was assuming that you didn’t count the dead bull hanging from the ceiling on the third floor.
He’d gone upstairs to hand over some papers to one of the managers, and there it was. At first he couldn’t make out what it was he was looking at. He thought it was some sort of mascot or charity promotion. Then he realised it was real. It’s eyes glazed, it’s hair rough. A lone fly buzzed around it, as though crying out for company. He was sure it wouldn’t be alone for long. He asked somebody about it, the person who happened to be nearest, but she just shrugged, and carried on typing.
He told himself that there had to be a reason; something simple, something logical. But he couldn’t think what. So he took the files over to Jean.
Back on his own floor he told a couple of his colleagues about it, but they didn’t seem to be surprised, or interested.
For a moment he forgot about the bull, but then he saw Jonny sticking his dick in the coffee machine, crying out as he pressed the buttons and unleashed steaming cheap beverage onto his manhood. Steaming torrent after steaming torrent, his eyes watering and rolling back in his skinny head. Everytime it happened it acted as though it were the first. As if he had no say in the matter.
He turned to John, but he was too busy driving staples into his fingers to concern himself with Jonny’s dick.
By late afternoon the walls were awash with blood and screams. As he walked down the corridors glass cracked behind him, as rape victims were thrown against walls, and chairs were were throw in hysteria.
***
Outside in the world everything was sticky orange and bruised purple and people walked with invisible limps.
On the way home, on the number 32 bus, a man stared at him, whilst a woman rummaged incessantly through her carrier bags. But he spoke to no one.
Macfarley was carving his skulls by candlelight. Removing layers as though he was peeling a milky white apple. He was striving for a very specific shape, but he couldn’t quite grasp it, the design floating somewhere on the edge of his mind.
It was snowing outside but all the window offered was black, soot that had gathered due to the smoke from his candles. He felt something against his foot as the old greying dog stirred. One day the dog would die, and Macfarley still hadn’t decided whether or not he would he would carve his skull. On the one hand it would be a fitting epitaph, a crafted tribute, but on the other he and the dog went back a long way. He was not just his oldest pet but his oldest friend. His longest stretching connection with the past.
Recently his work had been going well, the best it had for years, but today it just wasn’t coming. His tools didn’t feel right in his hands. He felt like some sort of amateur. Even though he has always carved skulls he didn’t feel as though he knew what he was doing. He felt like he was a child who had wondered into his workshop whilst he was out.
This was a special skull. It should be one of the finest examples of his work...if not the finest. He hadn’t made any mistakes as such but...
There was a tapping at the window, the old man barely had visitors during daylight and at this time of day he had none at all.
The dog stood alert, and for it’s age, taut. Who could possibly be here now, at this time? Macfarley went to the window and removed a thin film of black with his palm.
Outside the snow had ceased, and the two bare undead trees that stood either side of his property were as still as ever. There was no sign of anybody or thing.
The dog seemed unsettled and was sniffing around the closed oak door. MacFarley trusted the animal and decided to take a closer look.
He opened his study and the dog moved (as fast as it could in it aged state) towards the front door. It then looked the old man dead in the eye and let out a single yelp.
Macfarley approached it, kneeled down and petted his friend. But the dog appeared serious, not scared or angry, but grave. He got to his feet and opened the door. Cold air struck him like a sobering thought, and he was shocked by how truly cold it was. But outside there was nothing. He looked down at the animal, it was sniffing at something...a skull. Not one of his. Not that polished but never the less captivating. In fact, as he brought it closer to his eyes, he realised he had never seen a skull quite like it. The shape was beguiling and the texture like roughened silk.
The dog stared at the skull as though it was a piece of left over steak.
Macfarley closed the door and returned to the study, skull in hand. He moved the one he was working on and put the mystery in its place, so he could take a closer look under the candle light. Yes, there was no doubt, he had never seen a skull like this before, and the realisation gave the aging carver a fresh shot of inspiration. He picked up his curved, double edged knife, as the dog rested his head on his knee.
At that moment Macfarley decided that the dog’s skull would lie in the dirt of the garden, not on the polished wood of his display cabinet. He would rather it be consumed by the worms of the earth than the eyes of the living.
The mask hung on a hook, like all the others in her grandfather’s collection. Most of the masks she could recognise in some way. Some were skulls, some were demons, others originated from the theatre or depicted caricature. Yet this one was alien to her.
She wasn’t allowed to touch this mask. He didn’t even seem comfortable when she looked at it. He would always try and distract her at those moments, by asking her a question, or giving her a sweet.
The shape of the mask was vague, and if somebody was to ask her to describe it, she knew she would struggle to do so.
A mask shaped like a ghost stretched through a hole in the ground. That was the best she could muster.
One day when she was left alone with the mask, she stood on a shelf and removed it from the wall. It felt as strange as it looked. She ran her finger over its contours. She raised it to eye level and peered through the narrow eye slits. The room spooked her through that frame, everything seeming unnatural, warped and drained of colour.
Slowly, and with illogical fear, she placed the mask against her face. The room fell dark. She was surprised by how well the mask fit. It had a bizarre shape yet it felt as if it was moulded especially for her face.
She went to remove it and the mask didn’t budge. She began to trace the edges with her fingers and realised that she couldn’t find them. The mask had no end, and her skin no beginning.
Beneath the frail cobweb sky, and the rain of fan dust, she unveiled to the dubious Chinaman her long and complicated history. As a wall mounted candle cast an arc of broken light like the broken eye of a god.
How she had pursued the tall man with the gaunt features and the mummified hand, from Belize to Bosnia, from Playa del Carmen to Paris. How she had turned up nothing but conjecture, rumours, lies, and ultimately, the deadest of dead ends.
Turquoise smoke pushed its way around the room like shadow. Smoky moths drifted in from a small, high window. As she wove her tale he pushed the jade and ivory pieces, listlessly, around the board. A war between ectoplasm and spirits, minds and ghosts.
A street peddler had told her how to reach this place. To a building out of place. The one functional place left over from the colonial days. The gargoyle hadn’t belonged, grafted on from another era, a rift in time and space.
A lone dog had prowled the alley with liquid eyes of electric white. At the head of the street two little girls play some incomprehensible game with wooden poles and hoops.
She didn’t knock, just let herself in, just as the one eyed peddler had instructed. The tiles were cracked, and the dark glutinous, dripping from ceiling to floor.
As she progressed along the narrow hallway, she had smelt a scent, extinguished wax mixed with damp earth and spoilt mushrooms. She was about to give it up for a bad job when she heard a wet, sloppy, guttural cough. Unmistakeably male.
She had crossed paths with the street peddler before the witching hour had even bore down, before the street had worked up the nerve to come truly to life. The breakthrough coming swiftly, she had expected to search and bribe, and pick apart fact from fiction – like fibres from thread – for hours.
Hennessey Street was always simultaneously vibrant and virulent -
baby octopus bubbled in large pans like melting plastic; the night smelt of garbage and onions, copper and damp. Shadows licked the walls and dark eyed faces were momentarily revealed by the orange and red lights of passing cars. Fading Neon and open flame, troubled private lives of lost souls played out publicly like Grand Guignol theatre, a place so simultaneously dead and alive.
He had whispered to her from the shadow cocoon of a doorway. Told her of the large white acronym of a house, once populated by the bourgeoisie and actively despised by the old order.
The moth advanced upon her cheek. The china man slid a small ivory piece, shaped like a bust, diagonally across three octagons. She wondered what she was doing here, licked her dry lips.
“Do you reflect?” He asked cryptically, not bothering to raise his eyes from the antique board.
“On what?”
“Your personal history.” The words neutral to the point of synthesis.
Her ponderous thought was interrupted by a firework exploding damply in the damp streets. No doubts sending weak, bloody light bouncing against the night.
She swallowed hard, involuntarily, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Not how? Or why? But what. The fragments, the milestones, all those lost things.”
She looked at him. Trying to take his measure and find his meaning. His eyes never left the board. He didn’t seem to be posturing, but genuinely enraptured in the movement of inanimate objects – of unconscious algorithms. For a moment his tongue darted from his mouth and assassinated a tiny bead of spit. When it did, it appeared split, amphibian, lizard-like.
She could not see his eyes with his head in this downward slant, but she imagined them to be small, carmine, glowing. A chill dripped down her torso and she was reminded, without manners or warning, of a childhood nightmare. Of dogs, of loss, of primal fear.
“I guess I lost the way I feel,” she said without thinking about it. She took herself by surprise and didn’t know what she meant by this.
He looked up, grinned enigmatic.
“If I could shed light on your predicament, do you really believe that it could help you?”
“I don’t know, it depends what type of light.”
He smiled, seemed pleased by her.
Another fire work expired, laughter was born and then died, the moth froze against the wall.
He asked her how she could be so certain that the man with the mummified hand was the one responsible. Couldn’t he be just a coincidence, an innocent bystander, the dreaded maguffin.
She told him firmly and outright that he was none of these. That sometimes, occasionally, things in life WERE just black and white, and he was her man. No doubt about it.
“We don’t always want to uncover liars you know? I’m willing to assume from your intelligence level that you know this. Even though we should never really assume.”
A horn blared out on the street, slammed into the room uninvited.
Her heart tremored.
“I am ready,” detecting a lame note buried somewhere in her voice.
“Okay,” he replied, although this time his lips didn’t move.
He peeled away half of his face – the left side - a condom removed from a severed dick. A sinewy membrane. A prematurely butchered calf. One white eye like a ball of wax spasmed violently. His limbs twitched as if the body had been severed from the mind, but the voice is cool and smooth and clear. Bland yet familiar, soft yet strong. The voice of her brother. A sonic transfiguration that grounded her in the moment. Her journey shrinking behind her as her memories faded and the china man grew brighter.
He stood up and wove a story amongst moth and shadow, of mistakes repeated, of inevitable transgression, of an endless search…
Why did you do that?
I didn’t.
You must have.
I didn’t.
Well who did?
It must have been him.
Who?
Him, over there.
Shit…I didn’t see him.
Don’t stair.
Fuck, did he see us?
I don’t know.
Oh no!
What…what?
He’s coming over.
The Jungle’s Wayward Son (Terminal 32)
So here in the concrete jungle once more Samuel scans the terrain. Viddies the glass, the alloys, the endless sharp edges and the angles which seem to defy. The latter day saints had left him back at the church, alone with his cold coffee and antiquated magazine. Peta had caught his stony gaze as if she understood his doom. His fate. His burden.
So he flowed from city quadrant to city quadrant like a broken ghost. He dragged himself through the too bright shopping centers and the too dim subway tunnels.
He ate a hamburger – bought from a street vendor – but tasted nothing.
He browsed pornography - in one of the back street stores where the light never seemed to truly penetrated – as a form of meditation.
At around 2 o’clock he thought he caught site of a childhood sweetheart at the entrance to Terminal 32. But then when the light shifted about her, he realized that it was just another myth.
In the evening the sky darkened to wet coal as it began to rain softly. The traffic streamed by as he played whack-a-mole with a lonely little girl on the street. They pounded on the grinning heads of ex-presidents, her with glee, him with indifference. He left her his last two quarters and moved along.
And all the while in a foreign land the misty pink cloud vapour swirled.
His first victim was thinking about their washer dryer when Samuel pulled the modified Glock 32 from his innocuous sports jacket. He’d purchased it seven days earlier, at a steal, in china town.
The fat lady’s jaw shattered like imploding ice, a fragment was sent careening into the face of a pretty young girl, slicing open one of her pretty blue eyes, a little boy screamed like a little girl, the anguish filling the ears of a strong man who passed out and hit the concrete silently, blood and smoke and heat filled the torrid city air, people ran and panicked and screamed death.
Samuel continued on his path, calmly taking time out to reload. Sliding cold metal into cold metal as the rapture pleasingly curled up his spine.
He trod the beetles into the dirt. He soared with the angels. He died alone.
Margaret pulls the fork trough the frail and dry earth. Reaps up something darker and more moist. The smell of her garden is one of her few remaining pleasures. The sweat of the earth – worms and ashen stone. She looks at her wrinkled fingers and then at deep pink roses. She envies their youth and wishes that she was sixteen again.
The fork hits something hard. A few months ago she dug up an old clay plate. She cleaned it up and put it on a shelf in the kitchen. She tries to uproot this new find with the fork. A dome is pulled to the surface, and she wonders if this is the bowl to go with the plate. She thinks that soon she will have a full dinner set, and the thought makes her smile. She digs her hand into the damp earth and pulls out a skull. A human skull – minus the jaw.
She is nowhere near as unnerved by this as she knows she should be. She turns it to the sun and examines its shape. It is brown, as though it has been bleached by the dirt. She removes muck from the eye sockets, brushes it from the upper teeth. It is remarkably well preserved. How old can this be?
She holds it beneath her nose and breaths in deeply.
She wonders if there could be more and begins rooting around for the rest of the skeleton. Almost straight away she finds a long narrow bone, which she assumes must be a rib. She begins to dig deeper and wider and before long discovers a three fingered hand.
An hour later when the temperature has cooled, and the sky darkened a few degrees, Margaret has half the remains of a man.
She takes them inside and places them in her bath, then cleans them off with hot water and bleach. Dirt is sucked into the plug hole. The rest of the bone are as brown as the skull.
She arranges the collection on her coffee table. She thinks about adding the clay plate, but dismisses the idea as silly. The arrangement looks okay but doesn’t satisfy Margaret. She moves a few pieces, and then a few more. She tries dozens of different shapes and patterns, formations of bone, a paleontologist with a child’s sense of wonder. She wonders if she needs more pieces and thinks about going back into the garden. Then decides that she should only be working with what she has.
By the time she has an arrangement she is satisfied with it is dark and cool outside. The bones are stacked tall like a house of cards.
She stares at the construction for an indeterminate ammount of time. Unconsciously, her body begins to sway, and before she knows, is dancing around around them. She dances like she was sixteen again.
Somewhere in Tangiers there is a poacher with one arm. I know, because I had it removed and a flute carved from it. I gave it to my daughter. She loved music. She played it every night, blowing her gentle breath down its dead shaft. Whilst outside, in the world, men committed bad deeds.
Her mother died one rainy April night. Leaving me with bad memories and relief. And a house that was even emptier than I.
It was a hot, sweaty august when my daughter began to see her. She said she had been stood on the gazebo – arms crossed, dress billowing…mouth closed.
I went to the spot where Mary said she had been. There was something strange clinging to the grass – a transparent, green-grey gel like substance. Cautiously, I touched it. It felt very cold and smelt of sour breath. Although I knew it not possible, I began to look myself, expecting to see her in shadows, behind doors and on the edge of dreams.
Yet, she never appeared.
Mary, however, continued to see her, on an almost daily basis. And on those days in which she did not put in an appearance, tears seems to teeter on the tip of her eyes and threaten to spill onto her hollow cheeks. Then Patrick arrived. Patrick was young, good looking, quite, and walked around with a look on his face that suggested he knew something you didn’t.
His entrance into the home seemed to mark another shift in Mary’s behaviour. She stopped playing her flute, and furthermore, stopped looking for her mother. She started to do the things that other girls of her age did, and she seemed quite taken with the handsome young man. I was never sure as to the nature of their relationship, and I thought it best not to wonder. It didn't matter to me, as long as her happiness was raised above zero.
Then one day I saw her in the hallway, still as a statue, her amber eyes burrowing into her mother’s portrait, as though she were staring through it, at something written on the hidden wall. I asked her if she had a problem with Patrick, but she said everything was fine, and that it was nice to have some new company about the house. So, for a while, I simply let things lie.
Shortly after that I had new responsibilities in Libya, and I spent less and less time at our country residence. I came home, on a gaunt December night, to find the house empty and full of a loud silence. I moved from room to room with a bad feeling swelling in my gut. Something was wrong. I found Patrick in the bathroom. His bloodied body slumped over the bath. A trickle of blood had congealed into a thick vein, and hung from his neck like a discarded snake skin. Across the mirror and on his face was more of the translucent green gel I once saw in the garden. His face was twisted into a mask of anguish.
Then I remembered Mary and bolted. She was in her bedroom. I found her eating toast and watching an old movie on silent TV. Relief flowed through me.
That night I heard the flute, though I was sure that she was fast asleep. I tried to think of a better time, but could not. And the notes echoed through the house, like the ghosts of the notes, and seemed to have no end.
Verses
He studied the scriptures until his eyes bled and all he could see was perdition.
The stranger turned left onto Maple Drive and Michael followed. He had been tailing the driver now for two whole hours. Ever since he had witnessed the hit and run. Ever since he had seen the old woman sprawled out on the road.
Michael wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he finally confronted the stranger, but he knew that he couldn’t let him out of his sight. If he did he’d never forget it.
Eventually the stranger stopped outside a house, much larger than Michaels’. He was greeted at the door by an attractive woman, who seemed pleased to see him. This was probably his wife, Michael thought. She looked like the type of woman he would like to have married. As the happy couple disappeared into the house together, his dislike for the stranger grew.
Michael waited and waited. He drank the flask of coffee that he had taken to work but been too busy to open. As the coffee disappeared the minutes accumulated. Occasionally people passed by his car; teenagers, dog-walkers. People who had not had their day disturbed by the harshness of their fellow man.
Michael looked up, at a full, milky white moon, and remembered the victim.
He had left her to die alone.
The River of Regrets
As Michael floats away against his will – watched by sepulchral eyes – he wishes that he’d listened to his sisters’ ghost.
The Dog Story
The animal runs, leaps, misses, falls.
The man watches, laughs, spits, takes a drink.
The dog (a mutt crossed with a stray) has been trying to catch a bird, perched on the low fence for about half an hour now. It was as though the bird was taunting it, as it flew away and then resumed its position on the fence. The man takes one last drag on the cigarette and flicks it towards the dog. It looks shocked as tiny sparks bounce off its fur.
* * *
The dog is on auto pilot as he ascends the stairs, makes his way through darkness, to wear his master sleeps. It can hear the deep sounds that the man only makes when it is dark.
The dog pounces, grabs, pulls, rips. He has his master’s throat in his jaws now. Hot blood runs down his throat and it is the very first time he has tasted blood.
* * *
The vet has a tear in his eye. Too small to notice. He always feels this way, although in just half an hour he will be thinking about something else entirely. The needle is filled, checked, tapped, inserted.
As Malcolm walked across the orange wasteland he felt like killing something. Anything. But everything around him was dead. And you didn’t kill the dead, they killed you.
He hit his foot on something and almost fell. It was a pile of little yellow bones that had caused him to stumble.
Before the storm came he had been a killer of children, but now there were no children to kill and no adults to punish his sins.
It was as though the wasteland surrounding him was a sin. A transgression made physical, rock and earth and dust.
The tobacco smoke was stale as it ran across his tongue. Once upon a time he wouldn’t have been permitted to smoke where he stood, but the rules were gone now.
In the distance was a building he would once have feared. It was a place in which he was tortured. They’d punched, cut, and taunted him between it’s phlegm coloured walls. Now it was just a giant concrete shack. He could relieve himself on it’s stone if he wanted. He could dance around its perimeter with disregard.
The shiny rock. The jade green telephone. The Plastic table.
Everyday he spoke to someone different on this cryptic line. Apart from the days when he couldn’t bring himself to leave the dilapitated fast food restaurant. Yesterday he spoke to a man from Wisconsin about petrodollars, the day before a transsexual who was fixated on postage stamps, an old woman who was trying to reanimate her dog…
The phone rang. He answered on the third ring.He always answe