X Marks the Spot

Gerhard Richter-Grey House

It hadn’t stopped raining for a moment since his arrival in Eden Falls. The days (if the pale pearl grey light could be classified as day) and the white, starless nights were considerably longer than in most standard regions, clocking in around 36 hours, undoubtedly controlled by decanates and/or Janus-faced daemons. Looking out from one of the innumerable windows, the Melancholy  Lieutenant automatically defined the constant drizzle and mizzle as culchie soft rain, however in his attempts at surveying the territory he soon realised that the very sky looked to deceive. Drenched to the skin and bone he would beat a hasty retreat long before reaching the end of the drive that appeared to lead nowhere, crazy zig-zagging across the arsenic green fields to suddenly stop against a lone oak, a lookout for the massed ranks of its brethren in the faraway forest.

So the Melancholy Lieutenant would while away the time investigating Eden Falls. Up stairs and through corridors he walked, opening doors that led to rooms of angled mirrors or vast chandeliered ballrooms empty apart from a solitary upright piano, past endless colonnades interrupted by the regular statuary procession of mounted tyrants, down steps that finished in mid-air. Somewhere in this maze there must be a clue to the exit, he thought doggedly, determined to be re-united with the Ingénue.

He discovered a room full of globes and atlases, a Map Room of a Victorian gentleman. However the maps were just diagrams and architectural plans with a scale of 1:1, of no longer existing wings and hastily abandoned extensions of Eden Falls. The library seemed to contain a hint of promise, but most of the books were written in Chaldean or Etruscan or Babylonian, or even Agarthaen or Enochian or Lemurian.  The pop-up books contained only cleverly designed miniature 3D versions of rooms he had already trudged through.

That left the jigsaw puzzles that every drawer in the building (be it palace or sanatorium or mental asylum or hotel) seemed to contain. The picture on the outside of the box was always misleading, unsurprisingly enough, he thought.  It was never a street or circus scene, never a Cezanne or a Monet, it was forever the labyrinth of Eden Falls. He had almost given up hope when he found a puzzle that appeared to have a pattern on both sides, though the backside was just two-tone black & white. At least it won’t be another illustration of a prison, he thought, as he began to pierce the ten thousand and one pieces together.

With mounting excitement and dread he realised, as the pieces fall into place, that this was the message he had been waiting for. But what if he didn’t like what it had to say? Perhaps it was a trap set by Le Bateleur? No matter, he had to carry on.

As soon as the Melancholy Lieutenant triumphantly slotted the last tile into place and began to scan the writing, he heard a phone ring out. He hadn’t seen or heard a phone during the entire duration of his time in Eden Falls. Trying to quell his panic he decided to concentrate on the message contained in the puzzle, because something was definitely now happening and what other options did he have?

X marks the spot

You are here

X

But where you should be

Is the other side

Don’t pick up                                                                          Run run double quick

Abra-Xas

\\\\\3-6-5/////

That is that then, he decided, though he never had any intention of picking up the incessantly ringing phone anyway. The warning of the message posed further disturbing questions, but those could wait. It was time to go. He located and grabbed his kit-bag (always packed in case of emergencies and sudden departures) and ran out into the rain.

He kept on running until he had reached the oak that marked the end of the pointless driveway. Pausing for a moment he couldn’t resist a look back at the building, which flickered briefly out of focus, before fading away totally. That gig was up, the nixer nixed, Eden Falls was 86’ed.

The Melancholy Lieutenant, turning his collar to the cold and damned, headed towards the forest, searching for the deepest cover.

Oblique Angle

Agent Lee, provided with the best cover, tailed the trade and talent in Agartha on the look-out for the word on Al the Angle. What was on the agenda today? Everyone has an agenda, naturally enough, and the Angle had the poise to exploit any number of situations to his advantage. The various reports circulating of the Angle moving his operations to Agartha was of the gravest concern to the controlling authorities and the forces they in turn answered to.

If the intelligence was to be believed somewhere in this twilight territory where reality itself appeared porous, the Angle had set up base, undoubtedly co-ordinating and triangulating, in an calculated effort to bisect previously untouched zones and sectors, to expand his sphere of influence. Agent Lee was the obvious choice to go under in this underworld, fading to grey to the point of invisibility. Besides he was the kind of talker that got others to talk while never giving anything away himself. He had that talent, though he had other gifts even more highly prized by the controlling authorities.

But where in this city, with its warren of streets and rapidly changing intersections, which no map could ever capture or even begin to convey the complexity of, was the Angle hiding? Traditional enquiries only lead to suburban cul-de-sacs or dangerous dead-ends. However Agent Lee had other methods at his disposal, methods only to be in the event of extreme emergency. After rolling the dice and shuffling the pack Agent Lee was persuaded that now was such a time. He set off to the Cafe Rouge et Noir on the corner of Fascination and Oblivion Streets where he was going to meet, by chance of course, a women with a violetly vivid aura. She would have the skinny on the Angle, now going under Alabama Al, though he wasn’t American. He would have to approach obliquely.

Uneasy City

Paul Delvaux-La Ville Inquiete 1941

Every nerve ending in her body told the Ingénue that she had to get the hell out of dodge. Time. To. Leave. Right quick in fact right now if not sooner like yesterday preferably. The vague anxiety that was the hallmark of life in Uneasy City had deepened into nothing less than sharply defined dread and terror. Terror and dread.
The clocks, never the fastest in Uneasy City, had slowed down to a crawl during the blistering summer of the Fourth Decadency. Although resistant to change the City couldn’t deny that something wicked was coming this way, the very air was charged with potent change. In the streets the horse’s hooves would shatter and grind down the already splintered bones and skulls that lined the cobblestones. Several virulent viruses had taken hold of the panicking populace, but even with the rampant mortality overcrowding was severe, as a constant swell from the war-torn provinces and drought stricken territories filled the Uneasy City to bursting point.
The sense of imminent catastrophe generated a sinister erotic tension that was evident everywhere. One of the few jobs the Ingénue had been offered lately was a bit part in a dubious movie about the orgies that were so fashionable during the period of the Black Death. Billed as a certain kind of historical fiction it could have been shot as a straightforward documentary during these uncertain times. She could this feel eroticising current coursing all throughout the City; in the hesitant country girls with their jaunty hats embracing each other in doorways, in the fleshy middle aged divorcees reclining naked in the lobbies of faded hotels, in the society ladies somnambulating at night through the arcades and alcoves of the station where the train never stops; but most of all in the calculating glances of be-suited men who could no longer be bothered to conceal their predatory inner selves.
Through a contact of a contact the Ingénue had heard about a train that would almost connect to a boat that could take her away from this whole benighted region of Centralia. She packed in a hurry, barely pausing to rifle through the medicine cabinets. Along with four days worth of outfits she concealed a little heat, just in case she had to put someone on ice to get where she was going.

Eden Falls

Joseph Cornell-Rose Castle

Different day a different stage set, yet another illusion conjured up by Le Bateleur. Yet the Melancholy Lieutenant had to admit that there was something beguiling about the ersatz realm of Eden Falls, this vast pile comprised of the elements and detritus of his unconscious mind; dim memories, vague recollections, submerged dreams and hopeless longings.
Well maybe to others there was nothing to see hear there and would move on right away but as he lay in bed listening to the incessant rain beat against the windows and the gables or wandered through corridors that sometimes veered and forked unexpectedly, leading to previously undiscovered and undisturbed rooms that somehow seemed caught in flagrante before hastily re-assuming an innocent expression he would be soothed and think that this was maybe the home he had searched for so long, it seemed that it was what we dream of. But no, this couldn’t be the case, for where in the world was the Ingénue? At best this was a luxurious rest stop for the weary soul of the inter-dimensional adventurer, but more probably than not a trap, a monumental fur-lined prison to facilitate an eased institutionalisation.
The Melancholy Lieutenant knew he had to be on guard, always on the look-out for clues, searching for the way out of Eden Falls. Maybe he would find the key to escape in the jigsaw puzzles, pop-up books and illustrations in the volumes lining the infinite shelves?

Showtime

Sammy Slabbinck

Al the Angle, poised, (as always, naturellement), high stylin’ but low ballin’, to strike, spiels his riff,
“Up, down, turn-around, edgeways or sidelined; every fucker has an angle to get the juices flowing until they flood. Do you feel me…?
“Yes? … I thought so. Very, very” (very is slowed to a hypnotic dragged down drawl, then a lull, an insinuating pause… …), “very good baby.
‘You know if you handle the cards that I deal right I might just let you, only might, mind you, I haven’t quite yet decided, come for me. Soooooo tell me my love, is it now time for that cunt to get eaten? I want to watch in the mirror every motion, absolution and devotion.”
SHOWTIME…the ever eager, devouring mouths merge momentarily before separating again, revolving and hovering in the absolute stillness until the lips shape the same word…SHOWTIME.
The Ingenue blinks on the stage trying to remember her lines. The audience can barely contain their restlessness. The words fail to form in the Ingenue’s mind and even worse she can’t for the life of her recall the part she is meant to play. Earlier in the dressing room mirror she had stared long and hard at her reflection before saying, “I know who I am, but who the fuck are you?”
The Melancholy Lieutenant, after travelling through a multidimensional shit-storm and worn down by horror zonal conflicts finds he is infra dig, even in Interzone, resorts to disembodiment; becomes the ghost in the machine, the flickering shadow at the intersection of alleys, the image fleetingly glimpsed in the corner of mirrors.