11 May 2000 - The Origins of the
Age of Misrule
For anyone interested in how writers nurture ideas over
the years, here’s a short story which provided the
basis for my current fantasy trilogy, The Age of Misrule.
It was originally published a few years back in the now
hard-to-find anthology Cold Cuts 2.
THE CREAK OF HIDDEN DOORS
by Mark Chadbourn
FROM
his vantage point at the top of the cliffs, Martyn Chandler
looked out over the town that had haunted his thoughts for
25 years. The beach, so far beneath him, was wide and bright
in the early morning sun like a golden highway, but at that
time devoid of the travellers that would churn its virginal
sand and pack it from surf to cliff by mid-morning. Tenby
was still sleeping. The holidaymakers who had made their
traditional pilgrimage from the Midlands were tucked up
in their beds in the stately hotels that lined the front
or the pastel painted B&Bs that kept their secrets in
the twisty-turny streets of the old town, secure in Welsh
hospitality.
They
returned each year to rekindle the bedazzlement that sparkled
on the beach and in the picture postcard harbour where the
fishing boats looked more like fairground rides than workaday
floating factories. Martyn recognised that magic, as he
had done since he was a child, but he knew there was another
kind of magic there too, real magic, and it had dragged
him back repeatedly like a hook in a carp.
"Don't
go back there," his wife had said to him. "If
you want a holiday, there are plenty of other places we
can go to. Norfolk. Scotland. That place is on your mind
so much, I don't think it's healthy." He had ignored
her, as usual. The marriage was on its last legs anyway.
In fact, he hadn't been able to hold much of anything in
his life together. Relationships crumbled - he had only
married because he couldn't face more weeks of getting to
know someone - jobs came and went, friends drifted away.
Marianne had recognised the source of his inability to focus
on life long ago, but she didn't have to be that perceptive
to see it. "You're obsessed," she had snapped
before marching out of the room, slamming the door so hard
the pictures on the walls jumped.
He
had to go back. He had to find the door that would take
him away from the cold, bleak world his life had been for
the last 25 years and that would lead him into a new life
filled with colour and hope. And magic.
As
he made his way down the precipitous winding steps to the
beach on the first circuit of his daily round, he thought
back to that long, hot summer at the end of the sixties
when he first glimpsed the heaven and hell of Tenby's secret
world. He was eight years old, filled with dreams of Spider-Man
and The Fantastic Four and at that time, in some way, the
South Wales coastline seemed to give shape to the fantasies
that sprawled around his head. Across the ocean that crashed
on to the beach, a new age was dawning. Haight-Ashbury was
discovering its own brand of magic, fuelled by lysergic
acid and alchemical music, but in Tenby the old age had
never ended. The past lived on with the present.
Things
had happened then, luminous things, dark things, a staggering
new vista exploding in his face in one fateful moment, so
bright that his mind had only been able to hold on to the
merest glimmer while the rest burned its way through the
shadows of his memory. It had changed him forever.
Ten
years later he returned to solve the mysteries and heal
the scars of that traumatic summer, his first girlfriend
in tow, making a pretense of a holiday that retrod the footprints
of that family excursion of his childhood. The same hotel.
The same ice cream parlour. The same trip across the bay
to the monks of Caldey Island.
And
ten years after that he tried again, his career as a journalist
established, newly moved into his first proper home in London,
with his first brand new car, and his newfound maturity.
The
answers were never there, and the questions continued to
burn deeply into his soul, troubling his days and tormenting
his nights. He had to know. It was too much of a burden
to carry with him into old age, and he realised, as the
years passed, that it would wear him down little by little
until all hope of finding peace was totally eradicated.
He
had to know.
And
so he came back after only five years this time, older,
wearier, but with the reality of that sixties summer burning
as brightly as if he had lived it yesterday.
"Regular as clockwork, you are, boy." The man
selling tickets for the boat trips had a face that was lobster-red
and his pungent smell was of seaweed and lobster pots. Martyn
paused reluctantly at his kiosk. "Every day for the
past four days I've seen you walk past here at this time.
I could set my watch by you. What's the matter? Nothing
to do?"
Martyn
smiled politely. "Just taking the air."
The
ticketseller leaned forward through the opening conspiratorially.
"You don't fool me, boy. You're looking for somebody.
I've seen you staring into all the doorways and down the
alleys. What is it? Your woman come here for a dirty weekend
with the milkman?" He laughed at his own joke; the
inside of his mouth seemed as pink as his face.
"I
lost something 25 years ago and I'm still looking for it."
"You're
optimistic."
"It's
all I've got."
Martyn
walked away from him, towards the gates where the path wound
up past the museum. He rose at six every morning and walked
along the beach before the crowds came. During the heat
of the day he trawled the streets, completing circuit after
circuit like a wind-up toy. At night he drank in the pubs,
carrying out another circuit of the old town, before retiring
at midnight, exhausted. The routine never changed. The sights
remained the same. Constantly seeking, never finding.
He
rested at the gates and took off his jacket. The cloth was
winter wear, charcoal wool, and it was making the sweat
run uncomfortably down his back. It was 11am. The sun had
bleached the colours out of everything and the heat was
oven-strong and rising. He would follow the winding path
around the grassy seafront and return to the harbour before
making his way to a restaurant for lunch.
Ahead
of him there seemed to be a bundle of dirty rags dumped
on a seat in the sun. It was an old man, staring blankly
out to sea, his long, straggly hair and unkempt beard grey,
but so dirty they had taken on the brown sheen of weeks-old
grease. His skin, what Martyn could see of it, was wooden-brown
from too long in the sun and wind.
Martyn
noted him then blanked him out as he did with everyone else
he encountered. But suddenly something triggered a response
within him. It might have been a gleam in the old man's
eye, or the strange way he held his head, or a fleeting
expression, but in that instant all the memories and sensations
of summers past came rushing into his mind.
Here
it was. Finally.
He
tried to think of the right words to say, the prickly sweat
of excitement hot on his back, but his thoughts were a mad
tumble and the only thing that would come out was a throaty,
"Hello."
The
old man didn't reply. Instead he seemed to retreat into
his rags a little more.
Martyn
squared up to him. There was no doubt about it. He was older,
filthier, but he was the one.
His
nose wrinkled at the odour of sweat, urine and dirt as he
sat next to him. "I was there too," he said quietly,
following the old man's gaze out to sea. "August 21,
1968." The date had power; he felt a rush of apprehension
and excitement when he spoke it. "On that street running
down towards the front in the old town. It was midday, but
there was no one else on it - just you, me and the girl.
You remember."
The
old man continued to ignore him. He seemed to be rolling
something around in his mouth.
"There's
no use pretending. I know it's you," Martyn snapped.
He wanted an instant response, answers; after all these
years he could not let it slip away. "You were much
younger then, but to me, a kid, you seemed old. You were
wearing a business suit, grey pin-stripe, and glasses. Your
hair was short and it had streaks of grey and white in it.
So did your beard. That was trimmed close. We heard the
sound, all three of us, at the same time."
He
watched the old man for a response. There seemed to be a
faint smile growing beneath the filthy grey hairs.
"Okay,"
Martyn said defiantly. He pulled up the sleeve of his jacket,
undid the cuff of his shirt and rolled it back. "Look."
The
remnants of that day were there, burned into the soft flesh
of his forearm. There were four black strips, charred at
the edges, still red raw in the centre, after all those
years. Martyn turned his arm over and there was a fifth
stripe on the other side.
The
old man ignored the sight and looked Martyn in the face.
A small giggle rolled out of his mouth, but then he seemed
to control himself and his voice was serious when he spoke,
the words carefully enunciated; an educated man. "Is
this real?" He looked around him suddenly, at the pastel-coloured
hotels, the gulls cawing and swooping in the clear blue
sky, the snake of people queueing for the boat to Caldy,
as if he had not seen any of them before.
"I've
got to know," Martyn asked, trying to control his anxiety.
"What happened that day?" It was only the first
question, and not the most important. He wanted to grab
him and shake him and get to the root of the thing that
had dominated his life almost for as long as he could remember.
He wanted to ask the two big questions: where was the door?
And how could he open it? The details of what lay beyond
did not matter. Heaven was heaven whichever way it was described.
The
old man smiled. There was a glimmer in his eyes that did
not come from sanity. "Worlds," he replied enigmatically.
"Worlds upon worlds upon worlds, stretching out to
infinity."
"When
the door opened, I looked through it. I saw something..."
He
nodded a little too quickly. "Beautiful, yes. A terrible
beauty. The Garden of Eden. The Elysian Fields. All there,
all there."
Martyn
was shaking as the memories rushed back into him with startling
clarity. The wonder had washed over him in waves, radiating
out from the other side of the doorway. It had blinded him,
mentally, like looking on the face of God. Later, there
were only fragments to draw on.
But
he still remembered the man and the girl and the doorway
in the air like some Christmas tableaux. He recalled it
all his life, every waking day.
"Where
did you go to?" The old man's attention was drifting
again. "The three of us were standing in the street.
We heard the sound and looked around. You looked at me.
I remember your eyes. Surprised at first, then frightened.
The door opened. Tenby on both sides of it, but when you
looked through it... You crossed over, didn't you?"
The
old man nodded.
"Where
did you go?"
"Cigarette?"
His mouth seemed full of cotton wool.
Martyn
dipped his hand into his inside pocket and pulled out the
Camels. The old man took one and looked at it as if he had
just been given a long-lost childhood toy. Martyn went to
light it, but the old man took the lighter from him and
rested it on the palm of his hand.
"How
long has it been?" His voice was like old leather.
"25
years."
Disbelief
flashed on to his face and was then replaced by a cynical
acceptance. "25 years? I would have said a hundred.
At least a hundred." He glanced back at his hands and
threw the cigarette away. "They filled me with spiders."
Martyn
had the sudden crashing awareness that his mind had gone;
his age eating away at the vibrancy of his experiences.
It was too bitterly ironic when he was so close. "What
do you mean?" he replied because it was expected of
him.
The
old man leant forward, his breath reeking of vinegar, and
with one hand he pulled down the wrinkled skin under his
left eye. For a second there was nothing and then David
saw what appeared to be a hair, long and black. It wriggled
in the breeze. Another eased out next to it, and then another,
and finally, to David's horror, a small black body squeezed
out between the skin and the eyeball and skittered down
the old man's cheek.
"Christ!"
Martyn slithered back to the other end of the seat.
The
old man merely smiled. Then he opened his mouth. One corpulent,
leathery body crawled over his cracked lips and dropped
into his lap. Another followed from the dark recesses, and
the onslaught of writhing, wriggling and scurrying began,
through the filthy hair of his beard, over his clothes,
until his whole body seemed to be creeping. The tiny forms
vomitted out in their hundreds on to the pavement where
they ran for the shadows.
Martyn
leapt from the seat and backed across the path until he
felt the security of the iron railings behind him. The old
man closed his mouth, his cheeks bulging. "There's
plenty more where they came from," he mumbled.
"What
has happened to you?" He couldn't hide the disgust
in his voice.
Fear
suddenly rose to the old man's face, triggered by some fleeting
memory, and he shook his head. "No more."
He
flicked the lighter and touched it to his sleeve.
Flames
surged up his arm as if he was made of straw, licking at
his beard, his greasy hair, engulfing him in a ball of fire
in seconds. It was unnatural; no one could have burned so
quickly. The flames glowed as hot and bright as a furnace
and in no time at all they had reduced the old man to nothing,
crackling out suddenly when all that was left was a charred
black mark across the path. No blackened bones, no human
remains at all.
Through
the paralysis of his fear, Martyn glanced around for help.
No one had seen it. He was alone. He looked back at the
path, the air heavy with the stench of burned flesh, and
tried to make some sense of it. There wasn't any. The old
man had burned like there was nothing in him. Like he was
a shell.
A
shell filled with spiders.
In the night, his arm started itching and it persisted with
a nagging irritation that he had not felt since he was a
child. When the dawn sun filtered through the half-drawn
curtains he saw it was even more raw and oozing pus. With
it came the memories, flashes like the lights of cars through
a bedroom window.
"Where
the hell have you been? If you wander off like that again..."
"Graham,
look at his face. Something's happened to him. Martyn, tell
your mother what happened."
TWO
MISSING: HOLIDAY TOWN ON ALERT
"Police have given up their search for Dr Arthur Reeves
and seven-year-old Mandy Foster who went missing in Tenby
on..."
Why
had he been left behind?
He rose, dressed quickly and slipped out of the hotel into
the chill, empty streets towards the beach. It was a routine,
but this day it seemed different, and it was not just the
hangover of the old man's death or his troubled night. His
subconscious had picked up signals through the aether, calling
to him, signals which had their origins 25 years earlier.
By
the time his shoes ground into the soft sand, he was filled
with excitement. He had picked the right time to return
to Tenby, whether by accident or by another coded message
from his subconscious.
It
was coming back. It was all coming back.
He spotted the object in the surf long before he realised
it was a body. At first it appeared to be a large piece
of driftwood wrapped in seaweed, but as he drew closer he
could see an arm and then a leg protruding from the bladderwrack.
The
waves filled his shoes and drenched his trousers as he ran
into the water to the prostrate figure, but he was oblivious
to the discomfort. Dropping to his knees, as the water sucked
and surged around him, he began to rip at the clinging seaweed,
revealing lithe brown limbs, shapely hips and breasts, naked,
and long black hair. She was in her early 30s. It was the
right age; he guessed that time moved the same over there.
Martyn
fumbled for her wrist to check for a pulse, but as he did
so she convulsed and spat a mouthful of seawater over him.
Carefully, he helped her into a sitting position as she
heaved and retched the water from her lungs.
Eventually
she had calmed enough to breathe regularly, and then she
looked around herself for the first time.
"You're
back," Martyn said, before she could ask any questions.
Her
eyes roved questioningly across his features. It was unmistakably
her. The last time he had seen her she had been a child,
sweet, innocent seven, dressed in a short hippie dress emblazoned
with garish flowers. Back then she had been just another
girl, but over the years, as he examined and re-examined
her features in his mind, he had recognised a natural beauty
which he knew would blossom with time. He had been right.
Her
gaze never left his; she made no attempt to cover herself.
"You were the little boy, weren't you? You stayed behind."
He
nodded. She looked at him for a second more, and then draped
her arms around his neck before leaning forward and kissing
him on the lips. Her actions shocked him, but he soon responded,
moving his mouth in time with hers as it turned from softly
exploring to passionate. He slipped his arms around her
and felt the slick sensation of seaweed beneath his fingertips.
Her
kiss fired things within him that were not directly linked
to his growing excitement: memories, sensations, long-hidden
but vibrant in his subconscious. His thoughts were disrupted
by the feel of her tongue pushing between his lips, exploring,
into his mouth. It took a second for him to realise it did
not feel quite right. It was too cold, too smoothly textured.
It wriggled.
Martyn
yanked his head back as the small silver fish slipped from
her lips and fell into the surf.
"Don't
pull away," she said. "It's been so long since
I've touched someone." She stretched out her long,
thin fingers to stroke his arm, but he recoiled, remembering
the old man and what lay within him.
"What's
on the other side?"
She
smiled and closed her eyes blissfully. "All the wonders
you ever dreamed of when you were a boy. Fairies and elves
and unicorns and dragons. Magical, magical creatures. That's
where they all come from, you know? Just a step away, through
a door. The fairytales are all true."
The
cadence of her voice rose and fell in such a way that Martyn
recognised a tightly-held nugget of madness at the core
of her being, and he knew, regretfully, that he couldn't
trust what she said, even though it was just how he had
imagined it.
"I've
spent so long living in the past, I can't see the present
any more." She wasn't listening, but he knew he was
speaking to himself anyway. "Nothing else matters,
but this. What happened. What I missed. There's almost no
point in me going home. My wife doesn't love me, and I don't
care about her much. My job...well, that's just dull. It
fills the time between my memories. Everything is just flat
and grey compared to that day. If I hadn't been so driven
to remember I probably would have killed myself." He
paused, the thought flaring in his mind. He had considered
it on several occasions. Only the possibility that he might
leave the grey world behind for a life of wonder had kept
him going. "You've got to show me how to get to it."
"You
can't go to them. You have to wait till they come to you.
They choose the people they want to play with. They can
come at any time, anywhere in the world." She laughed
as if his request was the most absurd thing in the world.
His heart sank. "They take whoever they find."
"So
it wasn't just the two of you?"
She
shook her head dreamily, droplets of seawater splashing
on his shirt. "Children, old men, women, any time,
any place. They like to play games." She sighed. "Wonderful,
wonderful games. They come when you least expect it."
"What's
it like, you know, being with them?" He closed his
eyes and imagined the best of all possible worlds.
"The
last time I spoke to someone, I think it was my mother,
she was trying to get me to eat carrots. I told her I didn't
like them, but she said it was an acquired taste and I had
to work at it. That's what it was like. You have to learn
how to love things."
"What
kind of things?"
"Pain."
"Pain?"
"They
are so far beyond us. Their games are so..." A shadow
crossed her face, a memory returning from the dark land
of 1968. "I used to think they didn't like us...humans.
They hurt me. They did things to me. But I learned to love
them." She gripped his lapels and pulled herself up
until her salt-streaked face was inches from his. "It
hurts at first. You have to get over that. But you know
that already, don't you? I keep forgetting."
"What
do you mean?" For the first time, there was a hollow
feeling in the pit of his stomach. This didn't sound like
heaven, not the wondrous, magical place he had imagined
from his brief glimpse through the door.
"Don't
you remember? They held your arm. They wanted you to join
them. They were laughing." She giggled at the memory.
"You screamed and pulled away. You silly boy. Just
think what you missed."
Martyn
looked down at his wet sleeve. Under the cloth, his flesh
was raw and painful. He thought of those four black marks
and the fifth on the other side, the imprint of fingers
so alien they burnt into his skin.
Martyn felt suddenly cold. In the depths of his mind he
saw a dark shape, so awful and glorious its image had been
cauterised by his human brain, his memory folding and folding
around the scar tissue. The memories shifted, the things
he had blanked out, remembering only the goodness, the light
without the shade. That dark shape had a face. He felt the
urge to be sick and fought the memory back.
"Why
have you come back?" The chill grew stronger, and he
didn't want to hear the answer.
"They've
played with me a long time, but now I've got nothing left
to give them. Nothing at all." She coughed and another
fish came up into her mouth and slid out between her lips
to flap and jump as it dropped into the foam.
"The
fish...?"
"They
sucked everything out of me. But it was just a game. They
were laughing and I had to laugh too. It hurt, too, for
a little while, but I knew it was just a game." For
an instant, her eyes glazed over as her madness obscured
the pain.
Martyn
stared past her into the churning water and let the long-hidden
memories surface naturally. Minutes passed as they came
up, like bubbles bursting on a dark lake, and slowly he
began to realise how wrong he had been. Black thoughts skittered
around his head like spiders, threatening to destroy him.
Everything he had believed in was a lie, wasn't it? He remembered
the face. He heard the alien, whispered words that still
seemed to speak to him of unspeakable things. And he knew
why he had forgotten it all. He had wasted his life dreaming
of a fantasy world that never existed, creating his own
little patch of heaven when what it really had been was
hell. Romance, friendship, ambition, all lost for the sake
of an illusion.
Martyn
let her go and she flopped limply. The eddies flowed into
her mouth and up her nostrils before retreating, but if
it caused her discomfort she showed no sign.
He
half-turned on his haunches, preparing to leave, when her
eyes suddenly flashed open. "They'll come and get you
soon. There are so many things they can show you. You'll
love it when they play with you." She was looking at
him, and for the first time there was something black and
squirming behind her childlike love. "They don't like
loose ends. They remember you. They told me."
"It
looked such a wonderful place," he said flatly.
"And
it is wonderful, Martyn. Wonderful, strange and terrible."
He
stood up, feeling suddenly giddy. He wanted to escape from
her, from that town where things could cross over from a
place that shouldn't be to the harsh here and now, but what
was the point in running? He had spent so long in the past,
the present had no place in his life; there was nowhere
to run to.
He
looked along the golden beach now dotted with joggers and
people walking dogs, out over the grey waves to the horizon,
and for a moment almost welcomed what would happen when
he heard the creak of the opening door. His own life seemed
a pathetic shadow compared to the world that lay beyond.
What
would they do to him? What games would they play?
The
woman at his feet was melting. Each wave that washed over
her seemed to take some essential part of her with it. He
could no longer distinguish where her legs ended and the
water began.
Leaving
her there, he followed his footsteps back across the sand.
Martyn's breathing was ragged and his heart pounding as
he jogged up the mountain of steps to the town. As he shouldered
his way through the crowds he saw the faces in a new light.
Among the beaming children and the blankly beatific parents,
there were others, their eyes a little too wide and staring,
glancing around as if continuously looking for something,
their smiles fixed or simply not there at all, on cold faces
that flickered with nervousness. Did they know? Had they
seen someone sucked through a gap into nothing?
An
old man was slammed into a wall as Martyn passed, his lined
face as startled as a fawn in the forest, but then the bed
and breakfast was there, and Martyn was through the reception
and taking the steps two at a time. His key was out by the
time he had reached the third floor. There was his room,
18; it wouldn't take him long to pack his suitcase and get
to his car.
He
slipped his key in the lock and started to turn it, but
as he did so he heard the sound. In his mind he characterised
it as a creak, but it was more like a rending of metal as
reality tore. He couldn't stop himself - it was as if he
was being pulled by some powerful force - and as he swung
open the door, the light blasted him blind. Their alien
humour had picked the right time to tie up the loose ends.
The world of unicorns and fairies and elves beckoned; no
longer light, no longer glorious.
He saw the hand and felt his skin smoulder.
All those eagerly awaiting news of my brand new novel, The Queen of Sinister will be delighted to learn that an extract is now available on the site.