Tales Of The Gurrier

Clear evidence of a witch infestation in the garden. Witches hibernate underground for the Winter and this Witchjelly or ‘Witchseed’ as it was once called bubbles to the surface. The only thing to do is burn and scourge the affected area and sow it with salt so nothing may ever again take root in the poisoned earth.

“‘Jesus H. Christ, would you look at them,” said Kesey, “just look at them!”

A throng of twenty or more gathered in the pool of light dribbling from an open doorway. They stood some six feet, six inches tall, in five inch heels and crotchless nurses outfits. The Alpha Female, clad in a grim covering of plastic tubing and string which struggled to contain the mighty cargo of flesh within. Gargantuan breasts heaving with an unnatural pneumaticism, eyes the colour of melon Bacardi Breezers and a pair of bruised lips the colour of smashed arseholes. Across her head were strapped a full set of deer antlers and from the wicked bone points were festooned the night’s booty. A woman’s brassier, torn and useless waved at half mast from the top most antler, prophylactics and queerly shaped marital aids hung like like offerings to ancient fertililty Gods. Here and there a pair of gentleman’s undergarments clung in shredded, bloody rags.

Around her neck The Bride sported a splintered wooden board bearing a single sigil splashed in red by a careless hand, “L”. Teeth marks gnawed a jagged tattoo along it’s edge and down one side numerous “X’s” were carved into the rude wood. In her right hand she gripped a spiked Cat o’ Nine tails. And from each spike dripped a deadly poison. In her left, a pale white handbag the size and colour of a cows belly. The Gurrier was sure he could see teats upon the lower side of the bellybag.

A phlanx of heaving, steaming wrecks of cackling womanflesh flanked the The Bride, far gone into the drink and the endgame of liver cirrhosis and kidney failure. The bodyguard sported a trio of hags chained to one another with ropy lengths of slimy entrails and catgut. At each turn in the road one would shriek out to her fearful sisters and they would bite the head off another bottle of carbonated alcohol, guzzling it loudly as the others micturated with abandon into the public highway. The steam from their outflow enshrouded the gathering in an ammonium cloud.

“FEE-FI-FO-FUM, I SMELL THE BALLS OF AN IRISHMAN!” Bellowed The Bride, her large, wet nostrils twitching in the night air.

‘Oh, Jesus we’re fucked,’ said The Gurrier, from his place of concealment.

‘Shut up, I’m trying to think,’ said Kesey, and The Bastard rummaged in his bag of Deadly Things as The Gurrier looked on in mortal terror.

Out on the street a terrible scene was unfolding. The Barbari-Hens had cornered a pair of gentlemen out for their evening perambulations.

“IRISHMAN!” rumbled The Bride, “IRISHMAN, COME TOUCH THE MIMSY!”

She reached out a long, clawed hand and fastened it, vicelike, around one of the gentleman’s ankles.

“Jaysus! Help! HELP ME MAMMY! HELP ME!” screamed the poor unfortunate as he was dragged bodily around the corner. The pitiful  screams rose into a frenzy of high pitched wailing before abruptly falling silent. “DIS ONE BROKEN, GET MORE IRISHMANMEATS!” came the rumbling voice, like a bandsaw cutting metal.

The second gentleman needed no more encouragement and attempted to flee his captors as they squabbled over the last of the bottles of green carbonated horse alcohol. But the wretched creature did not venture twelve steps before he let out a piercing scream and fell to the ground in a spasming frenzy.

Kesey elbowed The Gurrier in the ribs, “Lookit that! Poison,” he sniffed the air, “Peruvian Fat-Frog, I’ll wager. Neurotoxin, causes the bloody flux and paralytic priapism in the male of the species followed by death from brain embolism. Still, what a way to go eh!”

The Fat-Frog venom did it’s evil work and The Gurrier turned away in horror as the figure of the man disappeared beneath the frenzied mob lust of the Barbari-Hen women.

The Gurrier was noisily sick into his bag and turned a pale face to Kesey.

“We’re doomed Kesey, doomed and it’s all your fault! I never wanted to come here, but oh no, you insisted. More Beer and Loathing you said. One more time onto the merry-go-round. A ten year anniversary trawl through the fleshpots. Well what do you think of this eh, you brute? We’ve been away too long Kesey, I have no idea what’s going on anymore. Christ almighty what the hell are those things?”

Kesey leaned back against the wall and grinned. “You’re right Murphy, you’re always right about these things, but where’s your sense of adventure man? Look at these magnificent beasts. Just look at them, why each one must weigh at least two hundred pounds and three quarters of that is raw muscle. Ten years we’ve been away, yes, but my God man, think of the possibilities!”

“Possibilities? Fuck the possibilities! The probabilities are we’re going to get raped to death by gargantuan beast women or maybe they’ll simply flay off our nads and eat them!”

Kesey chuckled to himself and lit one of his filthy cigars. “Nobody sees the big picture anymore,” he said ruefully. “Really Murphy, by now you should always be looking for the bigger picture. Now, when you get to the end of the street remember to signal to Ingoldsby to drop the net after you pass through, unless of course, you want to get tangled up with our friends out there.”

The Gurrier stared at The Bastard with a slowly comprehending horror. “No, Kesey no, not them, not those out there, not again, for Gods sake man, have you no mercy!”

Then The Bastard sprayed him in the face with Lynx.

“Better get moving Murphy, that stuff really gets them going. Desperate stuff so it is, made from boiled sheep arses and rotten cheese. I think it does things to their limbic systems, pheremones and all that. Off you go,” he took a long pull on the cigar and booted The Gurrier out of the alley.

The Gurrier stumbled into the street and stood transfixed as the stench of Lynx Arsfrica Extra Horny overwhelmed his senses. The Bride caught the scent first. Nostrils flared as the metallic tang of the deodorant entered the nasal passages and chugged it’s way upwards towards the brainstem, shouldering aside the fug of alcohol and Red Bull to ignite the mating instincts.

The effect was startling. The Bride stood bolt upright, a half gnawed limb fell, forgotten, from hairy palms. She unfurled a long, crimson tipped claw,  eyes rolled back in their sockets showing pale white in the sodium streetlights.

“MANMEEEAAT STINK GOOD!!” came the strangled cry of lust and rage.

“Ah Jaysus, not again,” said The Gurrier and began to run.

“Ke, ke, ke, ke….Ke, ke, ke, ke.” The Turnip baby’s yellowed body thumped against the wooden planks of the cabin. It’s wizened face curled into a frown. “Ke, ke, ke, ke” it said, in it’s thin, reedy, vegetable voice. The Turnip baby did not have much of a brain, it was out of the ground at least two weeks and by now most of it’s brain had withered away. What it had in the first place was little more than a highly developed set of reproductive instructions, hardwired into a pulpy mass of vegetable matter.

The instructions were simple.

Get up. Stagger. Fall down. Die.

The Turnip Babies arrived on clear spring morning in the the third year after the accident. Piotr had been digging in the turnip field, turning over the brown earth with the rusted metal tongue of his spade. He worked methodically, attacking the sods of frozen earth until they broke and crumbled into a clumpy loam. The downstroke of his spade connected with something hard and fibrous. Piotr cursed, the turnips were not due for another two months. He tugged the spade free and gaped with horror as the disturbed earth pulsed with a spasmic rhythm. The Turnip baby crawled from it’s dirtwomb and climbed to it’s feet on yellowed stumps of legs. It stood around one foot in height, a horrid, lumpy, purple torso with long fibrous limbs tapering into hairy roots. It had no neck and the head was an uneven tumourous globule from which various stray roots clung like lank hair from the lumpy dome of it’s skull and vestigial limbs and nodules sprouted at random. But it was the eyes that made Piotr scream; milk white, blank, pupil-less orbs bulged from it’s wizened yellow face. Piotr’s spade had sheared thorugh the top of it’s skull and a greenish fluid, stinking of turnip blight, dribbled down the blank face and into the black hole of it’s mouth. “Ke, ke, ke, ke.” it called, in a thin, coughing voice.

Piotr screamed and brought the spade down on the hideous thing again and again until there was nothing left but a mess of turnip guts steaming gently in the morning air. Piotr never returned to the top field and he swore to never again grow root vegetables. The land here was poisonous and treacherous. He would grow corn, only corn. Healthy corn, which thrived and grew in the light of day.

—–

Granny Yakovleva sat on the porch in her rocking chair watching the night slip over the hills. She took a long draw from her clay pipe and adjusted the Kalashnikov resting across her knees. Her good eye, bright as a wet stone, scoured the lengthening shadows of the twilight. The other was blind and milky with cataracts, yet beneath the white film the blind eye roved ceaselessly, like it’s healthy twin. She took a handful of black tobacco from a pouch around her neck and curled a finger into the densely packed weed. Curling it between thumb and forefinger she tucked the baccy into the hollow her cheek. It was a special blend of her own devising, a mix of Oblast black and the stringy Greenplant that grew along the banks of the Yaga where the Toadfish mate in Spring. It was dark and bitter and the juices burned her tongue, but Granny Yakovleva grinned to herself as the smoky taste of the Oblast gave way to the acrid fluids of the Greenplant. She felt a mild itch at the base of her skull, like spiders feet and the milky cataracts of her blind eye began to glow softly in the half light. She sluiced the bitter juice and spat. The shadows she saw in her left eye, the remnants of her vision, sharpened and cohered into a photo-negative world of black and white. She spat again and grinned, her blind eye now glowing with infra-red vision.

She patted the baccy pouch with a wizened hand and chuckled.

“Would that I had some of this in the war, eh Boney.”

The ancient hound by her side raised his shaggy head at the sound of his name. Granny Yakovleva reached out to scratch the brown fur of his head.

“I could have done with it back then, eh. Some of this and one of these,” she patted the Kalashnikov, “Yes, a fuck sight better than the shit they gave us to kill the Germans with.”

From the forest a long mournful howl drifted above the trees.

Granny Yakovleva scanned the edges of the forest, her not-blind eye a winking glow-worm of light. She wiped the brown tobacco juice from her mouth with a ragged sleeve and raised the machine gun to her shoulder. The hound by her side whimpered.

“You old coward Boney. Afraid of a few Wolves.”

From the edges of the forest Granny Yakovleva spotted a flash of movement. A hot, grey furred body, melting through the dim shadows and then swallowed up by the cold night.

The hound looked at his mistress and whimpered again. Granny Yakovleva sighed, “You are right little puppy. Would that it was a wolf, a whole pack of them. What fun we would have. Poor bastard wolves. Come, Piotr is still in the fields, the foolish boy. We must warn him.”

‘W’ The Mark of The Bush

Dubya has made his mark on Tony.

I’m temporarily disabling the Twitter feed as it was causing some weird issues.

The capsule tumbled through the silent depths of space, carrying it’s precious cargo homeward bound. The gentle tug of gravity became an insistent pull as it drew closer to the Earth’s embrace. Lower and lower with each passing orbit. Finally, it skipped through the upper ionosphere, spinning end over end, shimmering and flashing in the morning sun like the silvery scales of a fish darting in clear blue pool.

++++++++++BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

Report 14-DVA-ED-000971
Soviet Research Station G72, Ploshadka Region, Kazahkstahn.
Commandant Capt. Golubev

Subject fed quantity of serum XNA-12 mixed with grade B rum and placed in capsule. Cpl. Volkov reported subject’s vital signs as normal. Cpl. Volkov and Pvt. Zugarin instructed to secure subject in acceleration couch. Subject reported as docile and obedient. Professor Zipsin on hand to oversee launch. Thrusters 1 and 2 report complete success on test firing. Professor Zipsin ordered launch at 1400 hours.

END TRANSCRIPT+++++++++

I remember the day we sent the pig into space. Captain Golubev gathered us on the parade ground to make the announcement. It would, he said, ‘be a glorious day for the Soviet Union’. Today we would strike a blow against the Western, Imperialist Capitalist fools that would ring out across the globe. Today, we would send a pig into space.

Kraptchin laughed into his beard when he heard this. ‘Fucking pigs are fed better than us,’ he spat a long gob of phlegm onto the frozen earth. ‘Fucking look at this little porker, he’s fatter than Fat Polotov and happier too I’ll wager.’

I looked at the pig hanging in the slatted wooden cage suspended between our shoulders.

‘Yes, but Fat Polatov isn’t being shot into space’

Kraptchin shrugged and spat again, ‘If they fed me as good as they feed that pig they could shoot me into space bollock naked for all I care. See here,’ he said, waving a bottle in my face, ‘Rum! Rum for the fucking pig! When was the last time you had rum?’

I had to admit, he was right, the last rum ration had been distributed in December. A thin, sorry mixture of rum and distilled potato juice Fat Polatov made with his illegal still behind the motor pool. It smelled strongly of diesel and I wondered aloud if Fat Polatov had been adding more than potatoes to the mixture. Everybody had laughed except Fat Polatov. Then everybody stopped laughing and threw their cups at him. Nobody spoke to Fat Polatov anymore and he sat alone in his bunk most nights, crying himself to sleep.

‘Here, taste some pigrum.’ said Kraptchin, working loose the cork with his yellowed teeth.

‘No, I hear they add things to it, stuff for the pigs.’

Kraptchin grimaced and spat the cork  onto the ground. ‘You worry too much Piotr. If it doesn’t kill the pigs, it won’t kill us. Besides, look at this little fellow, he’s in fine health,’ he rattled the bottle against the cage and the pig began to squeal loudly.

‘Looking for your pigrum are you?’ and he took a slug from the black bottle. Smacking his lips he gazed at it in wonder. ‘Lenin’s balls! That’s damn fine rum. They really do keep the good stuff for the pigs.’ He took another long swig, and a dark brown rill of liquid dribbled from his bearded chin to stain his uniform.

‘Stop Kraptchin, you’ll get us into trouble! Leave some for the pig.’

‘Listen to yourself Piotr, you sound like one of those mewling party crawlers. ‘Leave some for the pig! Leave some for the pig!’

Kraptchin tossed the bottle aside and unshouldered the long poles suspending the cage. He gave me an evil look and stalked away in disgust.

Retrieving the discarded bottle I sat in the snow beside the cage. The pig gazed out with it’s strange liquid eyes and poked a pink snout through the bars. I reached out and fed it the remaining drops from the bottle. This seemed to cheer it up, and it made little grunts of joy as it sucked down the brown liquid. I wondered what else they added to the rum.

—————————————–

(This piece is a misplaced fragment of Flicker Fiction from sometime in 2008)

It was kind of like a Topic. Nougat and caramel all the way from South Africa. How a box of them ended up in the local shop, I have no idea.

Nosh is Yiddish for snack and Australian for blowjob. So there you go.

I bought it in a Mace which over here is is a chain of convenience stores and not a great big steel club for stoving in your head nor a can of aerosolized tear gas.

I have a problem, well several problems, but in this case my problem is I buy books, lots of books. I do not get around to reading each and every one, but I sure like to buy the little bastards. Nothing fills me with more sweaty palmed, dry mouthed glee then finding a bookshop full of treasures unmolested by my rampant book lust.

The South of England is just such a place. The South coast is a second hand bookshop addicts dream, and I’ll tell you why for nothing. It’s the old people. The South coast is where the English come to die and they bring their books with them. Great grey droves of them pepper the beaches and downs, tottering about in their little electric go karts, on and on they go for years, voting Conservative, reading the Telegraph and eating scones. But when they die, their books are set free. Free to fly onto the shelves of every quaint little second hand bookstore in every tiny little village town with names like Dorking, Pease Pottage, Burpham and Cowfold. Here they fetch up, the collected book buying proclivities of a generation. Everything possible can be found here, from the madly esoteric and the mundanely quotidian to the deeply weird and dreadfully un-pc.

My favourite second hand bookshop in this feast of musty tomes is Kim’s Bookshop in the town of Arundel. Arundel is home to Arundel Castle, Arundel Cathedral and the Duke of Norfolk (long story, read the wiki).

You can’t see it from here, but In the front window there is a first edition collection of the Chronicles of Narnia in their original dust jackets. On another occasion, an edition of Hans Christian Anderson Fairytales, illustrated by Heath Robinson. Just inside the door a reprint of a 1912 edition of the Arabian Nights complete with illustrations and plates. Further in I happened upon the Railways section, whereupon I discovered a book dedicated to ‘Narrow Gauge Steam Railways in South Wales’. Upstairs in the travel section I came upon a book on Norway written in 1962. Upon opening the cover a black and white photograph slipped out and fell to the floor. Eight elderly men were pictured in a harbour. In the background a passenger ship sat icebound and silent. Above one of the men an X had been marked in biro. Opposite the frontispiece were eight signatures and a dedication from ‘The Arctic Society’. Under each name was a date; 1888, 1889, 1885. The birth dates of the men in the photograph perhaps?

The book had a story, a tale to tell. Who were the men in the photograph? Why did they both sign and give their birthdates? The curators of Kim’s Bookshop respect a book’s history. When this slim volume emerged from whatever box it arrived in, they carefully sorted and priced it and then just as carefully tucked the photograph back into the slipcover to ensure it was waiting for the next owner.

I carefully replaced the photograph and put the book back on the shelf. I had other treasures to seek out that day, but next time I wander in I shall see if the men of the Norwegian Arctic Society still rest in their frozen anchorage.

(This post was originally written in July 2008)