11/12/2022
A Ghost Story for Christmas?
His Diapause: The Horologist & the Arc of the Projectile.
In the arc of a climax, he dropped to his knees besides her photograph, and found that each pearl like pulse flew into the hearth. Each one splashed into the flames of the tiny fire and he heard them sizzle, until down the flue came a moan, like a rush of molten lead. His throat slid through his stomach and pressed on his bowels, and the all-consuming melancholy of the hour pushed opened his alimentary canal like an extension of the flue. So he dropped his head between his knees and formed an imperfect nautilus, while a pomegranate on the table rolled to the edge and fell. It fell very slowly.
For a long, long time it fell. It fell like a crimson ribbon through the air, like a vermilion brush stroke down bare canvas, like a droplet of bright red blood crawling across his skin. In that sudden, intense moment of awareness, he felt his vulnerability. Although the mannequin standing in the corner, the framed pinned butterflies, the photographs and walls were blind to his predicament, he instinctively drew his hand behind him, to cover his backside. It was then, to his astonishment, he found that it was drawn inside. His hand vanished, and was quickly followed by his arm; his whole body began the extraordinary process of inverting. It peeled over itself, like the removal of a latex glove from the hand.
Very soon he lost cognition: quite how he was entirely inverted, how he passed through his own alimentary canal to be extruded between the bare chattering teeth of his skull, into the sooty darkness of the chimney flue, he could not tell. Nevertheless, he had deftly, inexplicably flowed into his own body, was swallowed whole, and had reappeared newly purposed, a pulsing, tumescent gland. Neither did he know how long his diapause might be, but he supposed this strange translucent gland, (or was it perhaps a pupa), would hang there in the dark until the following spring?
Far above, the little patch of light beyond the blackened chimney shaft, shifted with the transitory clouds. Occasional a refreshing raindrop found its way down the flue, but each one was repelled. They patted softly onto the delicate drift of soot nestling in the offset, or on the deep sooty cushion that had gathered atop the smoke shelf, but each one slid like quicksilver and fell to the grate. In his absence, the clock on the mantel shelf did continued to chime, although it was a mournful tone that sounded through the thickness of the wall.
“Was the wraith-like horologist who slipped silently through doors, to turn the key that wound the spring that made it so to chime, was he his own ghost? There is no one to say”.
In succession, neither did the door decline to clatter in its frame when the wind got up, or the sash cease to rattle at the passing of a train, but nor did the woodlice, silver fish or spiders abuse his hospitality, they simply came and went, as they are wont to do. From the kitchen there came the faintest, distant ringing as the tap slowly dripped a single drop of water, and so struck the side of a metal bowl below. Day in, day out it rang, imperceptibly changing pitch, until the volume of water deadened the resonance and a new sound was born; the drip of water into water, which on reaching the limit of the bowl, flowed over the rim to trickle endlessly into the sink and down the plughole, like a whispering.
Before he awoke, before his rebirth, when he shed the skin of his desires, he slowly trod the ascending spiral stairway of a dream: towers that were at once a lighthouse and the castle keep, a campanile and a cathedral spire. But only when in a molten metal deluge he fell, did he discover the secret of the Shot Maker. In the falling and the cooling came the forming, and solidifying, so the tiny lead spheres plunged with a thunderous voice, like grains of rice on the skin of a drum into to great watery basin at the base. Only then did he open an eye to the sound of rain, as it beat on his window, while the grey slates of the roof opposite glistened and were washed clean.
