Invisible things and oth.., p.1
Invisible Things and other Weird Stories, page 1
For those who find it hard sometimes. Invisibility can be a cloak to ward off the world.
Invisible Things
and other
Weird Tales
Hauntologies Volume 4
David Rees-Thomas
Acid Publishing
Table of Contents
Introduction to Invisible Things and other Weird Tales
Introduction to Going Home
Going Home
Introduction to Cyhyraeth
Cyhyraeth
Introduction to Invisible Things
Invisible Things
Introduction to Grandmother’s Paintings
Grandmother’s Paintings
About the Author
Invisible Things
and other
Weird Tales
Hauntologies Volume 4
A short story collection
Copyright © 2021 David Rees-Thomas
Published by Acid Publishing
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Introduction to
Invisible Things and other Weird Tales
Well, volume 4 of my series of hauntological chapbooks.
A chapbook, for those of you who are not sure, is a small collection of stories or poems, usually in print, but, in this case, in ebook format first, and hopefully in print very soon. I shall probably gather these into larger collections also.
This collection definitely deals with invisible things, or more accurately, things that may only manifest for individuals or small groups, rather than being an essential and seen structure within the framework of our daily life.
Inside, we have grand narratives within paintings, the streets of Cardiff, a dead cinema, and the surrealist landscape where specters dwell, waiting to infuse their spirit into the vessels of the soon-to-be dead.
Invisible things, because this is the truth of so many of the aspects which fit together to create and sustain our experiences.
We are always stalked by the past. None of us can truly be said to have ever had a thought or idea which wasn't constrained by the conceptual frameworks put into place before we were even born. These could be overt concepts such as family, education, teenager, democracy etc.
And, these can be more slippery ideas such as the language we speak, how that language is often subverted by the users of the language, and how the language has less of a strict foundation for meaning than we may realize.
These examinations are nothing new, but the uncertainty which blossoms from them can be terrifying. The human mind, in order to navigate the apparent lunacy of the world, seeks certainty. This is why a film such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, is so fascinating.
Acceptance of the lack of certainty takes a rare mind, and perhaps no one is truly equal to the task. So, on we go, merrily trying to force order into chaos, common sense into absurdity, shoving rules into unrulable situations.
This way lies madness.
All these stories take place in South Wales again, and it's the same South Wales which really only lives in my mind, if I'm honest.
Some of it is memory, direct memory which has been molded by time into something which may, or may not, be accurate.
Some of it is mythology. Every place needs to believe itself to be something special, something distinct, something with a story that both speaks in a self-reflective voice, and also has the ability to speak to outsiders. It intrigues them with its sense of otherness. Sometimes, I wonder if I'm culturally appropriating my own culture, or even if I can truly call it my culture. Or, worse still, is it culture at all?
But, that's a different kind of tangent.
Some of it is real.
Real like fear. Real like doubt. Real like the overwhelming exhaustion of uncertainty.
These introductions are always interesting.
For me.
In these, I'm not necessarily focusing on reader expectations at all, unlike the short stories.
Often, these serve as a lens through which I can read the stories again, never with a critical eye, because that way lies a terrible wasteland of FUD, but with a chance to grow some more branches on the knowledge tree.
So, it's fine to skip the introductions (notice I mention this at the end of the intro) but I hope you get something out of reading them anyway.
You may disagree strongly with some of the stuff I have to say here, and that's great. As it should be.
Thank you for picking up this short collection of hauntologies. I'm thrilled that people are reading these things, these invisible things.
Perhaps, we can all start searching for the invisible things in the world a little more often. Hopefully, they'll be invisible things that bring some joy to people's lives.
David Rees-Thomas
Nishinomiya, Japan
July 2021
Introduction to Going Home
There was a cinema in Caerphilly when I was growing up. It was called the Castle Cinema, and seeing as it was opposite the large Norman castle in the middle of this strange Welsh town, that made sense.
There was also the Castle Hotel, as well as a few other castle related businesses.
Both the Castle Cinema and the Castle Hotel are gone now, though the actual castle still stands. Last time I was in Caerphilly, the building which once housed the cinema was still there, but I think it had become a real estate agents or a bank, or maybe a few businesses all within that space.
The Castle Hotel was demolished a while ago now, to make way for a modern development in the center of town, which just amounted to more shops, more cafes, more of the same.
And, here we come to memory again. Not nostalgia, though it has some of the same trappings. I can only visualize these places through the lens of my personal experience.
I know, objectively, that Stan Stennett was the owner of the Castle Cinema for a certain period of time. He even sold me the ticket the time when I went to the Saturday matinee showing of Doc Savage: Man of Bronze.
Stan was also an actor, or maybe, he was also a cinema owner. Either way, he was in various pantomimes and stage shows, and he was also in a TV soap in the seventies, called Crossroads.
The show was famous for its dodgy sets, dodgy story lines, and dodgy acting, which is perhaps unfair, as I'm sure everyone on the show did their level best within the limits imposed upon them.
Crossroads was set in a midlands motel, and now that I type this, I marvel that they were able to get so much mileage out of the basic premise.
I have other memories of the cinema, aside from Stan Stennett selling me a ticket.
I was supposed to watch Superman 3 there with my friend, but one of us got it wrong. He thought we were meeting inside, I thought we were meeting outside. I never got to see the film. He didn't think it was that good in the end, especially as he had to watch it by himself.
This was a time when kid's matinees were still a thing. So, when I saw Doc Savage in the ‘70s, I also got to see a bunch of other stuff; cartoons, short films, National Film Boards of Canada nature shows. All sorts. This was also still the time when 'b' movies were released, and would get a run in places like the Castle Cinema.
Objects shift. Time shifts, and drifts, and mutates. And, it's all gone.
The Castle Cinema becomes an estate agent, or a bank, or...
Something shiny.
Something new.
But, and here's the most important thing to remember, it will always be haunted by its past.
There is no escape from this.
None.
The traces of the cinema are still there.
Clear to me.
Perhaps, unseen by others.
David Rees-Thomas,
Nishinomiya, Japan
July 2021
Going Home
Travis watches the drizzle as it floats by the window, blurring the orange vapor-glow of the streetlights. The night is typical for South Wales in the early onset of winter, viciously chilly, damp like a cold sweat.
He strains to hear the traffic, as the estate agent office he works at is on the main road toward Cardiff, but he hears nothing now, just the faint hum of machinery, the settling sounds of the old building.
Travis sits back in his seat and closes his eyes, his sleep-deprived mind rousing fragmented memories.
The office building the estate agent shares with a few other companies used to be a cinema, and the developers took over the empty husk, they even went as far as pinning up old posters from the fifties and sixties on the wall in the lobby, Demons of the Mind, and Christopher Lee’s leering face in, To the Devil, a Daughter. They also framed a few kid’s films and put them near the entrance, but these just seem tacky now.
Travis checks his watch again, 6:45. He should be going home, should already be home really.
Instead, he looks back to the computer screen, and continues typing. About fifty reports that still need filing into the system.
Carol, his boss, had told him to just leave. The reports could wait, she’d said, then she'd headed out the door without waiting for his answer.
Everyone else had left an hour ago, eager to end the working day, to get home, to go out, to exi
For Travis, the office shifts to a solitary territory.
His wife and daughter will be at home, maybe waiting, maybe not. But they’re used to it, and though a sliver of guilt creeps into his thoughts, he lets it go.
He dredges up memories of when he was a kid, and how he and his friends used to pester the owner back in the day for the posters once the film had finished its run. Probably worth a bit now, not that anyone had actually kept hold of any. Thrown out as the kids evolved into adults.
Nothing moves in the office, and the air hangs like an invisible still life, the possibility of vitality either side of this moment. The desks and chairs and potted plants and everything else that has purpose in the hustle of the daytime, recedes into the shadows. Office fixtures loom like tired sentinels, awaiting the conjurer's wand to slip back into the world of movement, of life.
They used to tell stories as kids about how the place was haunted, as any good old building should be, and in the darkness that's only punctuated by the glare from his monitor it seems fitting.
Other fixtures also survive, light fittings that hold a flickering essence, wine-dark wainscoting, and a preserved film projector on display in the entrance to Greene and Sons Estate Agents, the office where Travis sits alone, tapping his pen on the notepad, wondering if he should just get up and leave.
"It's the right thing," he says to the air, and drops his pen on the desk. "Sod this."
He gets up, stretching, another reminder of his too sedentary work. He closes the article he’d been reading, still unresolved on what any of it means to him, then opens his email again.
It's still there, an email with a formal attachment from his daughter's school. He was surprised at first, when it arrived, not so much because of what it was about, though of course that shook him to the core, but more because the school hadn't sent an actual letter. There just seemed something a little lazy and impolite about it.
The email from the principal, and also signed by some administrative staff, whose names he doesn't recognize, is serious.
It’s about Katy, but not that Katy had done anything wrong. No, this was quite different. This was about the photos that had appeared on the net, photos of Katy's mother and a local celebrity, some kind of couture comedian and media guru, a man called, Pip Fashion.
Racy photos, secret photos.
##
Travis flushes the toilet, the sounds echoing louder in the dead air of the bathroom, a subtle reverb off the gray tiles. At night the room is neutral, none of the nasty sights and sounds and odors from the daytime accumulation of people.
He washes his hands, rubs his eyes with his sleeve, and heads back to the office.
The lobby walls in the spaces between the posters are even more washed out than in the daytime, and he glances at the darkness of the outside world beyond the frosted glass of the front doors. It would be so simple to just grab his bag and head outside, get in his car, go home. He could do it now, just leave his bag behind, he'd be back tomorrow anyway. Nothing useful inside but a half-eaten Twix, and a well thumbed Clive Cussler thriller he found on a shelf in the break room.
But he goes back to the office anyway.
As he opens the door, he hears a sound from inside, and senses something, or someone, near his desk. The blurred shapes of the room are diffuse and broken through the frosted glass.
A young woman stands next to his desk with a broom in her hand. She appears to be reading what's on his computer.
"Hey," says Travis, and raises his hand.
The young woman turns to him, smiling. "Oh, hello. I was wondering why this computer was on, must be yours then, is it?"
Travis walks over, and positions himself between the computer and this woman. "Yes, it's mine, and you really shouldn't be reading any of this."
She smiles at him, brushing away a lock of auburn hair, that springs back immediately. "Oh, no, don't worry about that." She plays with the broom as if she's about to start singing, and leans in toward Travis. "Must be hard for a young girl though."
Travis moves closer to obscure the computer from her line of vision even more. "What?"
The woman nods toward the computer. "That, on there. Must be hard. Mind you," she says, "always been the way, I reckon. And kids can be so nasty." Her accent is pure South Wales valleys, lifting and flowing within a huge range of rhythm and pitch.
"You read my email?"
She continues to smile. "Like I said, awful." She places an intensity of drama on the final word.
Travis watches her as she takes the broom and moves toward the door, then follows her. "Hey, hey, you can't just come in here and start reading other people's email. There's stuff in here that's private, confidential."
"Like the letter from the school?"
Travis nods, hands spread out before him, a rising frustration tensing his body. "Yes, like that, but other stuff, and…"
He drops his arms to his side as the rain lashes against the windows on the far end of the office. They are on a raised mezzanine floor, which circles around to where the cinema screen used to be, and where the refurbisher installed wide windows that extend to the floor. From here they have a good view of the old castle smack bang in the town center, green and eerie in the shifting mist.
"What's your name anyway?" he asks, running out of both patience and righteous anger.
"Suzie."
Travis stares at the broom, realizing she hasn't actually used it yet.
"Well, Suzie, please don't read my email, and please don't read any other email either. I don't want to have to report you."
"No," she says. "That wouldn't be good. Would I get into trouble?"
Travis frowns. "Well, yeas, I suppose." And he considers that he doesn't even really know who he would report her to anyway. He nods toward her as if signaling their conversation is over, then heads back to his desk, ready to return to the family conundrum set deep in his mind.
He scrolls through the email contents, the salacious details of his wife's conduct alluded to throughout, but nothing so vulgar as to mention anything in particular. But Katy, oh Katy.
He senses a sudden change in the air, as if it’s been slightly churned, and it cools a little. Suzie is close to him, but this time she is not smiling, and the broom is gone.
She shifts and stares into his eyes, her breath like a fine whisper of fur against his cheek.
"We conjure up all that we dwell upon, Travis."
She turns away to the door with a frightened look, then back to him, placing a delicate and chilled finger against his cheek.
"Do you hear that, Travis?"
Travis strains to hear anything other than the wind and the rain, and the droning hum of his computer.
She straightens, trails her finger across his cheek, and departs the room.
"I'm sorry about Katy," she says. "But please be careful. Perhaps it's time to go home."
##
Travis gives up straining to hear whatever sound the weird girl was fixated on, so he picks up the phone, places it back in the receiver, then picks it up again. He does this about four tines, before finally sitting back in his chair, and minimizing the email.
Suzie has gone. He doesn’t really remember her leaving, maybe he got so engrossed in listening, or lost in memories of...
He shakes the thoughts out of his head.
The office takes on an ethereal quality, all noise muted and distant like sound effects in a black and white film. Travis laughs to himself. What would he say even if she did pick up?
"Like this is going to solve anything," he whispers to himself, checking behind in case Suzie has wandered in. But there's nothing, just the room, with its array of black monitors, gray potted plants, and neat shelving. Not a space for dreams or tangible memories, more like a posh waiting room in transit, between one dying place and another dying space.
He maximizes a browser, facing the page he'd been looking at earlier, before it all became a bit too much. Suicide in young people. He'd started the search by checking his own name out of boredom, but down the rabbit hole of pain and misery he's gone, and now all he thinks of is Katy.
