Simon Says
by Garry Stanton
Genre: Horror/Supernatural
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: Simon is into Justice, and has a thing against cold-callers...
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His house is semi-detached, an Edwardian house of the type estate agents like to call an ‘upper villa’. Perhaps, back in 1910, this was a desirable area, but no longer. These days, the slates are moss-covered, the low walls graffitied. Some of the house-ends, at the end of the streets, have colourful do-it-yourself murals proclaiming such messages as ‘Police is gay’; ‘Janice is a slaper cunt’; and ‘Hendo Rules Ya Bass’. Only a few yards away an urban canal, now redundant and with little prospect of future regeneration, sits stagnantly, sulkily, under an indifferent sky. A few swans drift soundlessly. There are rats here, but you would be lucky to see one. Overnight, a light snow has fallen. By noon the streets will be in slush, by evening covered by treacherous sheets of ice. An evil wind stalks these streets, where regiments of satellite dishes gather signals from distant ciphers. The bitter breeze searches patiently for vulnerability, for loopholes where cruelty can cause grief: perhaps in a badly heated pensioner’s house; a damp basement flat inhabited by a young mother and her toddler; a freezing squat where the lost indulge their desperate habits, fiddling dexterously, with their spoons and tiny stoves, with cut-off gloves and anaemic countenances.
He stands at the window, which shakes in its fragile frames. His view is good from here. He can see for about ten miles and on a clear day can see the castle, perched on its eternal rock. However, it is with the immediate area where his thoughts, and concerns, lie. Below, in the street, two young men walk, erect but somehow bowed over, the peaks of their baseball caps divining in the direction of the pavement upon which they walk. Roll-ups rest at the corners of their mouths. What bends these young men, the man wonders? Expectation? Hardly! Societal burden? No! The old man finds himself, despite himself, wishing to do these boys good, to offer them help as nobody had ever offered him any help.
He walks from the window to his wood-fuelled fire. His living room is a self-indulgence of idiosyncrasy. Throughout his fairly long, though one might say, uneventful life by the standards of some, he has undertaken tasks that might be said to hint at certain hidden depths. His eyes glaze over in a fit of far nostalgia at memories recalled. If he could, he might even produce a tear. But it has been many a long year since he had last cried, maybe sixty. He heats his hands and dusts off some trophies - a boar’s head, a baby gavial’s snout, a jar containing a two-headed human foetus, a black panther’s head on an oak mount, its ears moth-eaten, the stuffing beginning to leak from the beast’s nose. He breathes deeply of charred wood and burning resin, and puts on his coat.
As darkness falls, two men, smart, young, enter the street. They scan the houses as they walk, slowly, deliberately. They know what they are looking for. They have the look of two Jehovah’s or such, their freshly starched shirt collars clean and bright under the street lights, small rucksacks between their strong shoulders. Here, one of them whispers. The other nods, yes, here. They stop at the gate. The path to the front door is under ice, not salted, not cleared. The door itself is in the original, utilitarian dark-green, now sadly peeling. The small front window is dressed in grubby lace curtains. Two cheap ornaments sit on the windowsill, a Clydesdale horse, a collie dog. Perfect. One young man smiles, as the other knocks, gently.
………………………………………
He has an appointment. He has appointments, important ones, every day of his life. He has to make a telephone call. He has no telephone at home. He likes it that way, and likes public phones, a different one every day. Purpose out of the chaos.
As darkness falls upon the city, he walks into an old-fashioned red phone box. They are his favourites. He presses some numbers, inserts his pound coin in the slot. As the telephone rings at the other end, he blows on his hands. Then, a voice, full of food, answers.
-Hello.
He does not speak. He just listens.
-Hello…who’s there?
He says ‘Simon’.
-Simon who?
He does not speak.
-Hello! Listen, who is this…I...
He says, again, ‘Simon’.
-Right. You’ve got the wrong number mate. This is 539-2121, and I’m eating my…
Not wrong number. Right. And Simon says die.
-What? Die. Simon said it. You die.
In the background, he hears someone else speaking, asking who it is. The man, apparently covering the receiver, says some nutter. Then the line goes dead. He calls the number a second time.
-Hello.
He does not speak, but his breathing is audible.
-Hello. Who’s there?
It is Simon.
-Fuck off, Simon. I’ll get the police. Freak!
The voice sounds strangely amused, now. Simon, but that is not his name, hangs up. He leaves the call box, and remembers he must go to the food hall at Marks and Spencer. He is low on mulled wine and grapes, and plans to have company this Christmas. It has been some time since company has come calling.
…………………………………
The same evening, at about seven-thirty, the two young Jehovah’s witnesses (though they are not of course, messengers of Jehovah or anyone else) call on number nine in the street. They observe the crumbling sandstone around the windows, the weeds in the guttering, the lichen-lined slates and the dim light inside: the illumination of an old person, of a prospective victim. They climb the worn stone stairs, and knock on the old green door. Deep inside the house, he hears them. He knows them well, these young Turks. Well, he doesn’t know them, of course, but he knows them all right. And he has been expecting a visit. Nothing much gets past him, all told. He keeps his coat on, having just got home himself. Before answering the door, he puts the vol-au-vents in the fridge alongside the other goodies he has already got in. As he turns to go to the door, upon which there has been a further knock, one of the young men is becoming impatient. He knows there someone in, some old duffer hiding in there in the cold.
-Be patient, you, says his colleague. It’ll be worth it, no?
-Better be. I’m freezing my balls off here.
A hall light flickers on weakly within, as the front door opens. The men, smiling and representing a reputable firm by the name of Vigilant Alarms, Inc, are aware of a strange, indefinable smell from far within the house. But they choose to ignore it, instead imagining the rich pickings that could well be on offer. This one looks like old money all right. He probably wouldn't even miss it. They are invited in, and are soon sitting in the living room.
I’ve just made tea. Anyone?
They both nod, while the taller one opens his briefcase. This is going to be so easy. He calls from the kitchen, so, security is it? Alarms?
-Yes, sir, the short one shouts. Always a good idea nowadays....
He comes back through, with a plastic tray full of cups and biscuits, Garibaldis, on a cracked blue plate.
-Never seen Garibaldis for years, says the tall one, very pleasantly.
-Can I use your toilet, sir? asks the short one.
Expecting just such a move, but disappointed in its quick predictability, the old man smiles sweetly and says down the hall, second left. The short man leaves the room. Simon, but that is not his real name, fiddles in his coat pocket. The tall one admires the stuffed trophies.
-So, he smiles, as he opens his black briefcase, did you kill them yourself, sir? Ha ha. Some nice specimens there.....
Simon closes his eyes momentarily and replies no, most of these specimens were taken in the field, as it were, some in the nineteenth century. But, he adds, I have been known to claim my own specimens, from time to time. You know, like roadkill ha ha. They're not always dead when I find them....
He rises, and tells the tall one to wait a minute. Help yourself to another biscuit. He walks down the hall to find the short smart man, predictably enough, in his, Simon's bedroom, rummaging. He walks in, and without speaking delves into his coat, removing a syringe. The short man hears him coming, but it is too late. There is already a needle stuck in his neck. Just under the ear. He squeals in pain, not to mention hurt pride, surprise in his eyes. His brain feels as if it will explode and he almost instantly blacks out, toppling among the underwear he has removed from a drawer in his quest for the old man’s money. The tall man hears the cry of his friend.
-Stuart! Stuarty, what is it?
He looks nervous, and starts for the hall, looking for the bedroom where he knows he will find him. Simon is behind the bedroom door, of course, and jabs the tall one as he enters. He too, topples, but soundlessly, as the drug courses instantly through his system. Tut, tut, lads, sharing needles. You should know better at your age. He chuckles, and wanders off to finish his tea and take off his coat. An unfinished Garibaldi sits on the cracked plate, on a bed of crumbs.
……………………………………
The night is his favourite time. The dark brings out his real essence and allows him to indulge himself in his interests. He has obsessions, this is true, but who doesn’t? he muses, as he wanders along Princes Street. The world is a sick place. Wars, self-interest, scandal. And is consumerism not the abiding obsession of the urbanite? Is this an healthy obsession? Every year, we must spend more, get into greater debt while half of the population of the planet is starving and quite without the essentials: computers, second and third cars, Mediterranean cruises, health spas, five foot televisions, HD, all-singing, all-dancing. It's a sick, sick place, the human mind. It is late, now, and all the shoppers have taken their leave, to sit at home wringing their hands and worrying if they have got the right present, enough presents for the kids, whether that scarf for auntie Myra is expensive enough, whether those gloves for some ungrateful cousin are just right.
Stuart regains consciousness. He is groggy, naturally, but is aware of that smell again, the one that he and Davie both noticed, and chose to disregard, on entering that house. That house? This house. Shit, I’m still here. He is seated at the table, his hands in front of him. His hands refuse to move as they have been nailed to the table. Congealing blood creaks between his knuckles. A teacup sits in the centre of the table, full of whitening, cold tea. His mouth feels funny. He would like to scream. As he comes to, he wonders where Davie is. He tries to speak, to say, Davie, where are you? but is unable. He grunts, and coughs through dense gouts of blood and screams silently as he realizes that his tongue is no longer in his mouth.
……………………………………
It is three minutes after midnight. He makes another call, this time attempting to assume, unsuccessfully (and comically) the voice of a child.
-Hello.
The female voice sounds irritated, perhaps because of the late hour.
He does not speak, just breathes softly.
-Hello, who is this?
Stuart, where is he?
-What? He’s not here.
Stuart. Not dead. Not speak. Ha ha.
-What? Who is this?
Simon says, bad man is Stuart.
The voice is now awake, and becoming more aware. She sounds concerned now.
-Where is my Stuart? Is he all right?
Stoo-art not well. Bad man, Simon says.
-If you’ve laid a finger…
Good byes.
He hangs up, smiles inwardly, and heads towards his favourite place in the whole world. The town is full of Christmas revellers, drunk people in party hats, office workers, some of whom do not drink alcohol from one end of the year to the other. No-one notices him, an elderly man walking up the Mound after midnight. Those who do notice him think it’s a bit late for granddad to be out. As he reaches George IV Bridge, snow begins to fall, light at first but quickly growing heavier. His hat, a wax fedora lying at a jaunty angle, is white by the time he reaches Greyfriars Kirkyard.
It is, in many ways, a spectacular churchyard, with an interesting history. There are an estimated three hundred thousand people, many plague victims, buried under the ground in Greyfriars. As only the wealthy could afford headstones (and there are many magnificent examples) the paupers and the common hordes were simply dumped in the quicklime pits and covered over. To this day, during wet periods, bones from the seventeenth century still rise to the surface and are placed by the kirk caretaker in a designated spot he calls The Larder. The neighbouring hundred acres of urban green called The Meadows similarly covers a multitude of bones, perhaps half a million in total. Greyfriars contains, famously, the bones of the faithful dog Bobby as well his master John Gray, who died a full fourteen years before his loyal pet. The dog rarely left his gravestone until his own death in 1872, although the truth and purity of the tale has recently been challenged. Walter Scott’s father lies here, as do many of Edinburgh’s notables of the past. Burke and Hare, the most prolific serial killers in British history more than likely attempted to violate a crypt or two there, perhaps when living victims were short in supply, but would have been thwarted by iron bars placed over the newly-interred by their wealthy survivors. Simon (if that is his name) loves this place. Especially in the dark. At night, he knows he will have to share it with winos, druggies and other ne’er do wells, but he does not mind. They are mainly harmless, having neither the energy nor the inclination to do anybody any harm. But, though the kirkyard interests him greatly, there is one corner that holds a particular fascination: the Covenanter’s Prison. But, time being perhaps his greatest obsession, his visits to the prison have to be timed precisely, as well as his actions there. There is a ‘window’ into the spirit world that occurs as an opportunity at precisely 1:03 am each night. Do not ask him how he came to know this, suffice to simply know that he does know. He just knows. His father told him, he thinks, many years before. The details are foggy, now. His father has been dead for a long time now, and even the details of that are vague.
It is said that the angry spirit of William McKenzie inhabits a crypt in the prison, which has been a burial ground since the Covenanter’s Crisis in the 1690s. Simon, on as many a night as he can, takes a tube of toothpaste to the crypt of ‘Bloody McKenzie’, a man responsible for the torture and death of many who dared to challenge the supremacy of the monarchy. He draws, upon McKenzie’s crypt-wall, a pentangle of a highly secret sort, passed down since the days of the Templars or even before. He uses toothpaste because of ease of use, though he has on occasion used cat blood. He has been tempted to utilize the blood of one of his human victims, but felt it too risky. Even I’m not that mad, he jokes to himself. So tonight, in his eternal efforts to contact his long-deceased forebear McKenzie, he draws the sign, the symbol that would smell of paganism were it not for the smell of Colgate.
………………………………………
Stuart, who blacked out following the discovery that his tongue was missing, not to mention the uncomfortable discovery that he was joined to the table by six inch nails, wakes again as he hears a key opening the front door. He hears the old guy whistling ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ as he enters the living room. Stuart tries to talk, with negligible success. Simon tells him to save his words, and that it was his words that got him into the trouble he was now in.
Leave the Strand and Piccadilly, or you'll be to blame,
For love has fairly drove me silly - hoping you're the same!"
It's a long way to Tipperary,
It's a long way to go,
It's a long way to Tipperary,
To the sweetest girl I know....
-‘eez! ‘eez!
Simon says, are you saying ‘please’, Stuart?
-esss!, essss!
I take it that was yes. He asks if he is wondering where his friend is.
-ess!
He escaped, Stuart. His name was David, yes? Davie?
-ess!
With that, the old man, very able and strong for his age, turns Stuart, strapped and taped into his chair, to face the fridge. Quite without ceremony, and deadpan, he opens the fridge door, revealing Davie’s head, eyes staring, and with a small bunch of grapes in his gaping mouth.
Simon tells Stuart that Davie, too, had said some things that had got him into bother. He tells him that they were ‘Bad Boys’, but that Stuart, in fact, had turned out to be the unlucky one. Very unlucky indeed.
…………………………………
After he leaves the squirming corpse of Stuart, together with the head of that other bad one upon the table (did I shut the blinds?) Simon pops off to bed. He is not left alone by his dreams, nightmares in fact that he had been tormented by for well over sixty years. He hates to sleep, so merciless are the nightmares. Dreaming in colour and in High Definition Widescreen and Technicolor and in digital quality, he sees, first of all tonight, his sister. She sits in a fountain of chocolate, a trident in one little hand, a grenade in the other. As she explodes in a whoosh of whirling cocoa beans, her image is replaced by that of his mother, dangling by her neck from the attic rafters by a piece of electric cable. He hears himself, inside and outside the dream, screaming ‘Mummy’!, and pissing himself in fear and emotional pain. It is then that he wakes, always. At four twenty he ambles through to the kitchen, removing the sharpest knife from the drawer.
It is Christmas Day. The streets are almost dead, as tradition dictates. Simon walks briskly from his street into the city centre. It is a fresh, invigorating morning. He feels good, having helped himself to a nutritious breakfast of eggs, tomatoes, toast and spiced meat. The meat, in particular, was fine. Game but tasty. He feels that he can take on the world and win. He checks his watch, an expensive timepiece that loses barely two seconds per millennium.
It is the kind of day, crisp and cold and with that gloriously even azure sky smudged at the edges with orange, just where the planet curves as the sunset gathers strength, that makes Simon, for that is indeed his name, a happy man indeed. As he walks briskly up the High Street, with the Tron kirk now in sight, a family of Muslims is walking towards him, in an odd little vacuum, surrounded by Christmas but taking no part in it. It is cold, there is ice on the pavements, there are a few revellers still out from the night before, wearing Santa hats, ostentatious decorations, Christmas trees. Still, Simon doffs his wax fedora to the lady of the family. He stops, too, and says Merry Christmas. They look slightly surprised and continue on their way. As Simon watches them go, turning as they leave and in turn watch him, he smiles a big festive smile.
The Tron clock strikes three. Simon stops and looks up. He loves time. It is one of his strange obsessions. He always spells it with a capital T. He feels somehow at one with Time. As he moves through Time, he feels it, its very essence, its essential all-ness. Time - all and nothing. Meaningless and non-existent but the most compelling aspect of every person’s existence. He feels that not enough people give Time the respect it deserves, and its henchmen, the Birth angels and the Grim Reaper.
Ever since that far-off afternoon when he had returned home to discover his beloved mother hanging from the light cable in the kitchen. She was very light, with lovely blond hair and a rictus smile from which her swollen purple tongue dangled. Though his father had left by that time, Simon knew that his father had been responsible. Time itself, its dominion and force, had propelled Simon in his life to do the things he did. He lives by Time, and he will die by it. He has many clocks in his house.
………………………………………
Some days later, as he enters the Museum in Chambers Street, he feels the thrill he felt when he worked there. No one recognizes him now, it has been so long. He walks, as he always does on his numerous visits here, to the left into the Great Hall, past the Huron totem pole and up the sweeping spiral stairs. He loves the ancient planetarium which for many years used to light up but is now broken, more than likely by thousands of little hands. But it is the newest major addition to the museum that really fascinates him. The huge Millennium Clock Tower, a thirty feet monstrosity of wood, glass and iron. A macabre, post-, ante-modern mystery, a cryptic commentary on human suffering during the twentieth century. In there are Stalin, Hitler and the Reaper himself, as well as representations of the masses - the Jews, the famine-stricken, those mutilated by human cruelty down the millennia. Simon loves and hates this monument. He loves it because of its embracing of Time, hates it because of the lack of Justice therein. The criminals therein have achieved fame, infamy without being visited by Justice, by truth and destiny which ultimately holds all humans accountable. He climbs to the top floor and looks down from the railings. Below, a gathering of visitors is awaiting the clock’s hourly performance - a whirring of cogs and wheels and ratchets and the carillon bells of existential misery. There is even a huge mirror placed strategically so the visitor can view himself within the existential miasma.
Simon’s own time has come. As he prepares to jump, he thinks of his mother, blonde, lovely, and hanging from the light flex, of his father, whom he had finally tracked down and killed with a curling stone. He thinks of the needy people to whom he had for so long, and so selflessly, offered salvation and justice. As he sits on the metal railing, he exclaims to the throng below, and to the ungrateful world in general: Receive me, oh please receive me generously. I know what I have done. A woman shouts:
- Oh! What are you doing? Don’t jump. Please, no....
A young man races up the spiral stairs, to no avail. It will never be known if Simon’s outburst amounts to a confession. But it is at that moment that he falls, in slow motion as so many of these actions seem to be, to become impaled on the top of the jagged spire, and through the oak Pieta. He is delighted that Time, after decades of his meaningless and aimless wandering, he can finally say that Time, ultimately, will come through each and every one of us. It could be that that was the entire point of his unusual existence.
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: Simon is into Justice, and has a thing against cold-callers...
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His house is semi-detached, an Edwardian house of the type estate agents like to call an ‘upper villa’. Perhaps, back in 1910, this was a desirable area, but no longer. These days, the slates are moss-covered, the low walls graffitied. Some of the house-ends, at the end of the streets, have colourful do-it-yourself murals proclaiming such messages as ‘Police is gay’; ‘Janice is a slaper cunt’; and ‘Hendo Rules Ya Bass’. Only a few yards away an urban canal, now redundant and with little prospect of future regeneration, sits stagnantly, sulkily, under an indifferent sky. A few swans drift soundlessly. There are rats here, but you would be lucky to see one. Overnight, a light snow has fallen. By noon the streets will be in slush, by evening covered by treacherous sheets of ice. An evil wind stalks these streets, where regiments of satellite dishes gather signals from distant ciphers. The bitter breeze searches patiently for vulnerability, for loopholes where cruelty can cause grief: perhaps in a badly heated pensioner’s house; a damp basement flat inhabited by a young mother and her toddler; a freezing squat where the lost indulge their desperate habits, fiddling dexterously, with their spoons and tiny stoves, with cut-off gloves and anaemic countenances.
He stands at the window, which shakes in its fragile frames. His view is good from here. He can see for about ten miles and on a clear day can see the castle, perched on its eternal rock. However, it is with the immediate area where his thoughts, and concerns, lie. Below, in the street, two young men walk, erect but somehow bowed over, the peaks of their baseball caps divining in the direction of the pavement upon which they walk. Roll-ups rest at the corners of their mouths. What bends these young men, the man wonders? Expectation? Hardly! Societal burden? No! The old man finds himself, despite himself, wishing to do these boys good, to offer them help as nobody had ever offered him any help.
He walks from the window to his wood-fuelled fire. His living room is a self-indulgence of idiosyncrasy. Throughout his fairly long, though one might say, uneventful life by the standards of some, he has undertaken tasks that might be said to hint at certain hidden depths. His eyes glaze over in a fit of far nostalgia at memories recalled. If he could, he might even produce a tear. But it has been many a long year since he had last cried, maybe sixty. He heats his hands and dusts off some trophies - a boar’s head, a baby gavial’s snout, a jar containing a two-headed human foetus, a black panther’s head on an oak mount, its ears moth-eaten, the stuffing beginning to leak from the beast’s nose. He breathes deeply of charred wood and burning resin, and puts on his coat.
As darkness falls, two men, smart, young, enter the street. They scan the houses as they walk, slowly, deliberately. They know what they are looking for. They have the look of two Jehovah’s or such, their freshly starched shirt collars clean and bright under the street lights, small rucksacks between their strong shoulders. Here, one of them whispers. The other nods, yes, here. They stop at the gate. The path to the front door is under ice, not salted, not cleared. The door itself is in the original, utilitarian dark-green, now sadly peeling. The small front window is dressed in grubby lace curtains. Two cheap ornaments sit on the windowsill, a Clydesdale horse, a collie dog. Perfect. One young man smiles, as the other knocks, gently.
………………………………………
He has an appointment. He has appointments, important ones, every day of his life. He has to make a telephone call. He has no telephone at home. He likes it that way, and likes public phones, a different one every day. Purpose out of the chaos.
As darkness falls upon the city, he walks into an old-fashioned red phone box. They are his favourites. He presses some numbers, inserts his pound coin in the slot. As the telephone rings at the other end, he blows on his hands. Then, a voice, full of food, answers.
-Hello.
He does not speak. He just listens.
-Hello…who’s there?
He says ‘Simon’.
-Simon who?
He does not speak.
-Hello! Listen, who is this…I...
He says, again, ‘Simon’.
-Right. You’ve got the wrong number mate. This is 539-2121, and I’m eating my…
Not wrong number. Right. And Simon says die.
-What? Die. Simon said it. You die.
In the background, he hears someone else speaking, asking who it is. The man, apparently covering the receiver, says some nutter. Then the line goes dead. He calls the number a second time.
-Hello.
He does not speak, but his breathing is audible.
-Hello. Who’s there?
It is Simon.
-Fuck off, Simon. I’ll get the police. Freak!
The voice sounds strangely amused, now. Simon, but that is not his name, hangs up. He leaves the call box, and remembers he must go to the food hall at Marks and Spencer. He is low on mulled wine and grapes, and plans to have company this Christmas. It has been some time since company has come calling.
…………………………………
The same evening, at about seven-thirty, the two young Jehovah’s witnesses (though they are not of course, messengers of Jehovah or anyone else) call on number nine in the street. They observe the crumbling sandstone around the windows, the weeds in the guttering, the lichen-lined slates and the dim light inside: the illumination of an old person, of a prospective victim. They climb the worn stone stairs, and knock on the old green door. Deep inside the house, he hears them. He knows them well, these young Turks. Well, he doesn’t know them, of course, but he knows them all right. And he has been expecting a visit. Nothing much gets past him, all told. He keeps his coat on, having just got home himself. Before answering the door, he puts the vol-au-vents in the fridge alongside the other goodies he has already got in. As he turns to go to the door, upon which there has been a further knock, one of the young men is becoming impatient. He knows there someone in, some old duffer hiding in there in the cold.
-Be patient, you, says his colleague. It’ll be worth it, no?
-Better be. I’m freezing my balls off here.
A hall light flickers on weakly within, as the front door opens. The men, smiling and representing a reputable firm by the name of Vigilant Alarms, Inc, are aware of a strange, indefinable smell from far within the house. But they choose to ignore it, instead imagining the rich pickings that could well be on offer. This one looks like old money all right. He probably wouldn't even miss it. They are invited in, and are soon sitting in the living room.
I’ve just made tea. Anyone?
They both nod, while the taller one opens his briefcase. This is going to be so easy. He calls from the kitchen, so, security is it? Alarms?
-Yes, sir, the short one shouts. Always a good idea nowadays....
He comes back through, with a plastic tray full of cups and biscuits, Garibaldis, on a cracked blue plate.
-Never seen Garibaldis for years, says the tall one, very pleasantly.
-Can I use your toilet, sir? asks the short one.
Expecting just such a move, but disappointed in its quick predictability, the old man smiles sweetly and says down the hall, second left. The short man leaves the room. Simon, but that is not his real name, fiddles in his coat pocket. The tall one admires the stuffed trophies.
-So, he smiles, as he opens his black briefcase, did you kill them yourself, sir? Ha ha. Some nice specimens there.....
Simon closes his eyes momentarily and replies no, most of these specimens were taken in the field, as it were, some in the nineteenth century. But, he adds, I have been known to claim my own specimens, from time to time. You know, like roadkill ha ha. They're not always dead when I find them....
He rises, and tells the tall one to wait a minute. Help yourself to another biscuit. He walks down the hall to find the short smart man, predictably enough, in his, Simon's bedroom, rummaging. He walks in, and without speaking delves into his coat, removing a syringe. The short man hears him coming, but it is too late. There is already a needle stuck in his neck. Just under the ear. He squeals in pain, not to mention hurt pride, surprise in his eyes. His brain feels as if it will explode and he almost instantly blacks out, toppling among the underwear he has removed from a drawer in his quest for the old man’s money. The tall man hears the cry of his friend.
-Stuart! Stuarty, what is it?
He looks nervous, and starts for the hall, looking for the bedroom where he knows he will find him. Simon is behind the bedroom door, of course, and jabs the tall one as he enters. He too, topples, but soundlessly, as the drug courses instantly through his system. Tut, tut, lads, sharing needles. You should know better at your age. He chuckles, and wanders off to finish his tea and take off his coat. An unfinished Garibaldi sits on the cracked plate, on a bed of crumbs.
……………………………………
The night is his favourite time. The dark brings out his real essence and allows him to indulge himself in his interests. He has obsessions, this is true, but who doesn’t? he muses, as he wanders along Princes Street. The world is a sick place. Wars, self-interest, scandal. And is consumerism not the abiding obsession of the urbanite? Is this an healthy obsession? Every year, we must spend more, get into greater debt while half of the population of the planet is starving and quite without the essentials: computers, second and third cars, Mediterranean cruises, health spas, five foot televisions, HD, all-singing, all-dancing. It's a sick, sick place, the human mind. It is late, now, and all the shoppers have taken their leave, to sit at home wringing their hands and worrying if they have got the right present, enough presents for the kids, whether that scarf for auntie Myra is expensive enough, whether those gloves for some ungrateful cousin are just right.
Stuart regains consciousness. He is groggy, naturally, but is aware of that smell again, the one that he and Davie both noticed, and chose to disregard, on entering that house. That house? This house. Shit, I’m still here. He is seated at the table, his hands in front of him. His hands refuse to move as they have been nailed to the table. Congealing blood creaks between his knuckles. A teacup sits in the centre of the table, full of whitening, cold tea. His mouth feels funny. He would like to scream. As he comes to, he wonders where Davie is. He tries to speak, to say, Davie, where are you? but is unable. He grunts, and coughs through dense gouts of blood and screams silently as he realizes that his tongue is no longer in his mouth.
……………………………………
It is three minutes after midnight. He makes another call, this time attempting to assume, unsuccessfully (and comically) the voice of a child.
-Hello.
The female voice sounds irritated, perhaps because of the late hour.
He does not speak, just breathes softly.
-Hello, who is this?
Stuart, where is he?
-What? He’s not here.
Stuart. Not dead. Not speak. Ha ha.
-What? Who is this?
Simon says, bad man is Stuart.
The voice is now awake, and becoming more aware. She sounds concerned now.
-Where is my Stuart? Is he all right?
Stoo-art not well. Bad man, Simon says.
-If you’ve laid a finger…
Good byes.
He hangs up, smiles inwardly, and heads towards his favourite place in the whole world. The town is full of Christmas revellers, drunk people in party hats, office workers, some of whom do not drink alcohol from one end of the year to the other. No-one notices him, an elderly man walking up the Mound after midnight. Those who do notice him think it’s a bit late for granddad to be out. As he reaches George IV Bridge, snow begins to fall, light at first but quickly growing heavier. His hat, a wax fedora lying at a jaunty angle, is white by the time he reaches Greyfriars Kirkyard.
It is, in many ways, a spectacular churchyard, with an interesting history. There are an estimated three hundred thousand people, many plague victims, buried under the ground in Greyfriars. As only the wealthy could afford headstones (and there are many magnificent examples) the paupers and the common hordes were simply dumped in the quicklime pits and covered over. To this day, during wet periods, bones from the seventeenth century still rise to the surface and are placed by the kirk caretaker in a designated spot he calls The Larder. The neighbouring hundred acres of urban green called The Meadows similarly covers a multitude of bones, perhaps half a million in total. Greyfriars contains, famously, the bones of the faithful dog Bobby as well his master John Gray, who died a full fourteen years before his loyal pet. The dog rarely left his gravestone until his own death in 1872, although the truth and purity of the tale has recently been challenged. Walter Scott’s father lies here, as do many of Edinburgh’s notables of the past. Burke and Hare, the most prolific serial killers in British history more than likely attempted to violate a crypt or two there, perhaps when living victims were short in supply, but would have been thwarted by iron bars placed over the newly-interred by their wealthy survivors. Simon (if that is his name) loves this place. Especially in the dark. At night, he knows he will have to share it with winos, druggies and other ne’er do wells, but he does not mind. They are mainly harmless, having neither the energy nor the inclination to do anybody any harm. But, though the kirkyard interests him greatly, there is one corner that holds a particular fascination: the Covenanter’s Prison. But, time being perhaps his greatest obsession, his visits to the prison have to be timed precisely, as well as his actions there. There is a ‘window’ into the spirit world that occurs as an opportunity at precisely 1:03 am each night. Do not ask him how he came to know this, suffice to simply know that he does know. He just knows. His father told him, he thinks, many years before. The details are foggy, now. His father has been dead for a long time now, and even the details of that are vague.
It is said that the angry spirit of William McKenzie inhabits a crypt in the prison, which has been a burial ground since the Covenanter’s Crisis in the 1690s. Simon, on as many a night as he can, takes a tube of toothpaste to the crypt of ‘Bloody McKenzie’, a man responsible for the torture and death of many who dared to challenge the supremacy of the monarchy. He draws, upon McKenzie’s crypt-wall, a pentangle of a highly secret sort, passed down since the days of the Templars or even before. He uses toothpaste because of ease of use, though he has on occasion used cat blood. He has been tempted to utilize the blood of one of his human victims, but felt it too risky. Even I’m not that mad, he jokes to himself. So tonight, in his eternal efforts to contact his long-deceased forebear McKenzie, he draws the sign, the symbol that would smell of paganism were it not for the smell of Colgate.
………………………………………
Stuart, who blacked out following the discovery that his tongue was missing, not to mention the uncomfortable discovery that he was joined to the table by six inch nails, wakes again as he hears a key opening the front door. He hears the old guy whistling ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ as he enters the living room. Stuart tries to talk, with negligible success. Simon tells him to save his words, and that it was his words that got him into the trouble he was now in.
Leave the Strand and Piccadilly, or you'll be to blame,
For love has fairly drove me silly - hoping you're the same!"
It's a long way to Tipperary,
It's a long way to go,
It's a long way to Tipperary,
To the sweetest girl I know....
-‘eez! ‘eez!
Simon says, are you saying ‘please’, Stuart?
-esss!, essss!
I take it that was yes. He asks if he is wondering where his friend is.
-ess!
He escaped, Stuart. His name was David, yes? Davie?
-ess!
With that, the old man, very able and strong for his age, turns Stuart, strapped and taped into his chair, to face the fridge. Quite without ceremony, and deadpan, he opens the fridge door, revealing Davie’s head, eyes staring, and with a small bunch of grapes in his gaping mouth.
Simon tells Stuart that Davie, too, had said some things that had got him into bother. He tells him that they were ‘Bad Boys’, but that Stuart, in fact, had turned out to be the unlucky one. Very unlucky indeed.
…………………………………
After he leaves the squirming corpse of Stuart, together with the head of that other bad one upon the table (did I shut the blinds?) Simon pops off to bed. He is not left alone by his dreams, nightmares in fact that he had been tormented by for well over sixty years. He hates to sleep, so merciless are the nightmares. Dreaming in colour and in High Definition Widescreen and Technicolor and in digital quality, he sees, first of all tonight, his sister. She sits in a fountain of chocolate, a trident in one little hand, a grenade in the other. As she explodes in a whoosh of whirling cocoa beans, her image is replaced by that of his mother, dangling by her neck from the attic rafters by a piece of electric cable. He hears himself, inside and outside the dream, screaming ‘Mummy’!, and pissing himself in fear and emotional pain. It is then that he wakes, always. At four twenty he ambles through to the kitchen, removing the sharpest knife from the drawer.
It is Christmas Day. The streets are almost dead, as tradition dictates. Simon walks briskly from his street into the city centre. It is a fresh, invigorating morning. He feels good, having helped himself to a nutritious breakfast of eggs, tomatoes, toast and spiced meat. The meat, in particular, was fine. Game but tasty. He feels that he can take on the world and win. He checks his watch, an expensive timepiece that loses barely two seconds per millennium.
It is the kind of day, crisp and cold and with that gloriously even azure sky smudged at the edges with orange, just where the planet curves as the sunset gathers strength, that makes Simon, for that is indeed his name, a happy man indeed. As he walks briskly up the High Street, with the Tron kirk now in sight, a family of Muslims is walking towards him, in an odd little vacuum, surrounded by Christmas but taking no part in it. It is cold, there is ice on the pavements, there are a few revellers still out from the night before, wearing Santa hats, ostentatious decorations, Christmas trees. Still, Simon doffs his wax fedora to the lady of the family. He stops, too, and says Merry Christmas. They look slightly surprised and continue on their way. As Simon watches them go, turning as they leave and in turn watch him, he smiles a big festive smile.
The Tron clock strikes three. Simon stops and looks up. He loves time. It is one of his strange obsessions. He always spells it with a capital T. He feels somehow at one with Time. As he moves through Time, he feels it, its very essence, its essential all-ness. Time - all and nothing. Meaningless and non-existent but the most compelling aspect of every person’s existence. He feels that not enough people give Time the respect it deserves, and its henchmen, the Birth angels and the Grim Reaper.
Ever since that far-off afternoon when he had returned home to discover his beloved mother hanging from the light cable in the kitchen. She was very light, with lovely blond hair and a rictus smile from which her swollen purple tongue dangled. Though his father had left by that time, Simon knew that his father had been responsible. Time itself, its dominion and force, had propelled Simon in his life to do the things he did. He lives by Time, and he will die by it. He has many clocks in his house.
………………………………………
Some days later, as he enters the Museum in Chambers Street, he feels the thrill he felt when he worked there. No one recognizes him now, it has been so long. He walks, as he always does on his numerous visits here, to the left into the Great Hall, past the Huron totem pole and up the sweeping spiral stairs. He loves the ancient planetarium which for many years used to light up but is now broken, more than likely by thousands of little hands. But it is the newest major addition to the museum that really fascinates him. The huge Millennium Clock Tower, a thirty feet monstrosity of wood, glass and iron. A macabre, post-, ante-modern mystery, a cryptic commentary on human suffering during the twentieth century. In there are Stalin, Hitler and the Reaper himself, as well as representations of the masses - the Jews, the famine-stricken, those mutilated by human cruelty down the millennia. Simon loves and hates this monument. He loves it because of its embracing of Time, hates it because of the lack of Justice therein. The criminals therein have achieved fame, infamy without being visited by Justice, by truth and destiny which ultimately holds all humans accountable. He climbs to the top floor and looks down from the railings. Below, a gathering of visitors is awaiting the clock’s hourly performance - a whirring of cogs and wheels and ratchets and the carillon bells of existential misery. There is even a huge mirror placed strategically so the visitor can view himself within the existential miasma.
Simon’s own time has come. As he prepares to jump, he thinks of his mother, blonde, lovely, and hanging from the light flex, of his father, whom he had finally tracked down and killed with a curling stone. He thinks of the needy people to whom he had for so long, and so selflessly, offered salvation and justice. As he sits on the metal railing, he exclaims to the throng below, and to the ungrateful world in general: Receive me, oh please receive me generously. I know what I have done. A woman shouts:
- Oh! What are you doing? Don’t jump. Please, no....
A young man races up the spiral stairs, to no avail. It will never be known if Simon’s outburst amounts to a confession. But it is at that moment that he falls, in slow motion as so many of these actions seem to be, to become impaled on the top of the jagged spire, and through the oak Pieta. He is delighted that Time, after decades of his meaningless and aimless wandering, he can finally say that Time, ultimately, will come through each and every one of us. It could be that that was the entire point of his unusual existence.
About the Author
Born in Edinburgh and now living in Fife, Garry Stanton is a musician to trade, as well as a teacher in training. His debut album, Indigo Flats, was released online in 2010.
Garry also writes, having completed a couple of novels, several short stories and a lot of poetry. Some of his poems have been published in the Edinburgh-based poetry magazine, Harlequin. And his novel, The Heights, was published by McStorytellers in 2013.
Garry also writes, having completed a couple of novels, several short stories and a lot of poetry. Some of his poems have been published in the Edinburgh-based poetry magazine, Harlequin. And his novel, The Heights, was published by McStorytellers in 2013.