The fire worm, p.19
The Fire Worm, page 19
When she found out, that evening up in Mrs. Cunningham’s room, that she, Brenda, had no past life at all, perhaps this was the key to her change. So far her own life had been ordinary, oh indeed. This ordinariness had become a habit, was on the verge of becoming her entire self forever till she died. She hardly realized that shehad a life. Oh yes, she lived, and was happy enough. Yet she had not been enraptured by existing.
The certainty that she had no previous life to remember, and perhaps no future one, had shone a spotlight, sunlight, magic moonlight on to her present existence. Here she was, now and forever. And John too, in a hook of time, no matter whatever strangeness was happening to him. Without a past, without a future, she was free.
“Familiar acts are beautiful through love!”
She strolled along that pavement as cars hummed by. Glossy, raggy black rooks circled the elms where stick-nests bulged like cancers of the twigs within parasols of leaves. Higher up, snowy gulls beat inland, so many scraps of paper in a wind, so many flecks of mirror. Her heartbeat quickened. Did she flush?
When she arrived at the house, the door to the consulting room stood wide open. John was poised as if about to set out for town. Beyond sat Tony Armstrong on the sofa, worrying at his thumb, looking anxious, recalcitrant, but feeble. Wondering why the fellow was here so early and unscheduled, whether John was trying to turf him out, Brenda advanced to help.
“Ah, Brenda! I thought we’d be gone by now. I left a note.”
She saw John’s note on her desk. Before she could pick the message up, he stepped over and retrieved it, crumpling the sheet of paper into his jacket pocket.
“I’m taking Tony down to Tynemouth. Be back by lunch. Postpone Mrs. Purdue’s session, will you?”
“I don’t like the coast,” whined Tony Armstrong. “The cold sea. You know why.”
Even from several yards’ distance John addressed Tony softly. “It’s only for a look around, isn’t it? Lovely sunny day. You’ll feel happy. Nothing will worry you.”
“No,” agreed Armstrong, in a lacklustre tone.
Why should John be wanting to take him down to the coast? To confront some memory, perhaps. That was why Tony was resisting. Faintly.
“Of course you’ll come,” John said soothingly. He turned, and now he really noticed Brenda. He darted a peculiar look, and laughed. “You’re different. No lipstick today.”
“Pink lipstick,” she corrected. “It’s called satin coral.” She had taken an aversion to her habitual red lipstick which now seemed garish — designed for the attention of those who were half-alive, with half-blind eyes which only saw what was shouted at them. A bloody, waxen gash of lips like the backside of some obscene monkey.
“Coral isn’t satin,” John said quirkily. “It’s sharp. It rips the skin. There’s no coral in the North Sea, none at Tynemouth.”
What did he mean? Was she somehow banished? Uninvited; yet outcast even so?
“It’s too cold for that,” muttered Tony.
“Come, come.” John’s voice was a caress. The cruel caress of coral, not of satin.
Obediently Tony rose, and went with John.
Brenda phoned Mrs. Purdue to reschedule her past-life therapy. Next, she sorted through the mail, then went upstairs to say good morning to John’s mother. But the old lady was still snoozing; the bedroom was dark, and Brenda left it that way.
A rush of joy propelled Brenda along to the door of John’s study — a sense of exaltation that amazed her, a welling knowledge that she must embrace him somehow … in his absence. She must touch, if not him, at least something of his existence. Something of existence itself. A light glowed in her.
The study door wasn’t locked. Why should it be? She glanced round the room once, then looked at everything again more slowly. An old desk with drawers, and a modern swivel chair. An adjustable spotlamp. An electric typewriter of the same model as she herself used downstairs, a half-used ream of paper beside it. Net-curtained windows looking over unkempt shrubby back gardens. A glass-fronted walnut bookcase crammed with dictionaries, reference books, medical and psychological texts. For a filing cabinet, a huge mahogany cupboard with a dozen doors and drawers, all with keyholes. Over the mantelpiece, a calendar: an old engraving of some dreadful sea monster (a giant squid?) wrestling with a sailing vessel in stormy seas, mariners tumbling terrified, shrieking, into the waves. Somebody’s past life would have involved a briny doom. Or perhaps that was a monster of the unconscious arising from the typhoon-tossed black sea; she knew enough to imagine the connexion.
Seating herself in his chair, she swiveled, then rested her fingertips on the familiar keyboard.
In the desk, most likely, would be the manuscript of the psychology book which he was always working on, every evening. John was always typing, Mrs. Cunningham had told her. The book had taken him years. One day John might be as famous as Freud or Jung. Brenda could surely help out with the rewriting, the retyping and reorganization. If not with the rethinking.
She slid a drawer open to her right and found a bunch of little keys. Of course she would find keys. She jingled these like some quiet bell to attract John’s attention wherever he was. Silence enveloped the room when she stopped. A thrill ran electrifyingly through her being, a shiver rose up her spine, and soon she found the key which fitted the locked middle drawer of the desk.
In which, a pile of typescript lay.
She lifted this out and began reading:The Fire Worm …
Half an hour later, Brenda sat stunned. After the first page she had speeded up, scanning, dipping deeper here and there.
She felt in touch now, not with existence, but with nonexistence — with a malevolent void which would gladly swallow her. The view outside the window (gardens, house-backs) shimmered with the moiré pattern of net, threatening to dissolve, to flow into a different scene, to drift back into the past.
And then it did so.
It was the nineteenth century, the fourteenth century. It was two hundred million years earlier. Dense, swampy, tropical forest grew outside the window. A sluggish river far huger than the Tyne drained its vast estuary through tree-ferns, club mosses, and horse-tails into a shallow inland sea. Through the net and the glass she saw that river. She saw a dry, baked, wind-swept desert — the grains of which still lay upon the beach at Tynemouth, Cullercoats, Whitley Bay where the holiday makers plodged and paddled. Sea rolled over the land, drowning it. Sea withdrew. Volcanoes blasted out fire and lava, staining the sky with smoke and ashes.
A hideous roller-coaster continuity swept her hindward, backward. The present had been but a fleck of dust, a tiny bright speckle of quartz set in a tombstone of granite a billion years deep and more.
She arrived at the much deeper past, when the young world boiled hotly and amorphously — yet there was life-power, elemental life unakin to any later cool animal life. A hell-world, with hot devil life. The first proprietors of the planet. She stared at them through a window of time, unable to focus. Yet she knew that here was the basis, the origin, the core of existence.
Past-life therapy only scraped at the very skin, only plucked loose a few superficial cells. Yawning far beneath all human lives was an awful elemental force. Oh, it had weakened enormously! Yet only because miles of rock separated it from ourselves. The world was still a soft-boiled egg — fragile shell, some rubbery flesh, then a huge potent molten yolk where the Originals circulated.
Dazed by this vision of another reality, she gripped the desk, shaking her head from side to side. She had no knowledge of drugs, yet she felt as if she must have been drugged; as if the desk drawer or the manuscript had released a wraith of stunning fumes.
It occurred to her that her own brain might be drugging her, to cope with overpowering shock. To save her, yes. To stop her from being destroyed by what she had discovered about John’s other self. Hismain self, even. About what that other self was involved in — something which swept away all ordinary meaning.
Yet just then she discovered that the joy was still inside her, like a growing child, alive. The radiance remained undiminished. The love, which had brought her to life.
What had John — Jack — written? “Without ecstasy and passion-fire there is no world.” That was true. Perhaps not as regardsfire , not the fire which he now sought. But as regards ecstasy. Yes, that.
The frozen fire-creature — salamander, worm — would burn him. Freeze him. Both. Ice could burn as well as flames. It would encase him, coil around his mind, lock him like a toad in stone. She had to stop that from happening.
But first, she went to the mahogany cupboard and unlocked doors. Duplicate paperback books were shelved and stacked inside.The Goblin by Jack Cannon.The Nail …
Nodding to herself in simple confirmation, she shut the books away, then locked the typescript back in its desk drawer.
John was someone else, was he? Well, that was remarkable. That knowledge did not depress her now. No, it exalted her.
A bell was jingling insistently. Brenda closed John’s door behind her and went along to his mother’s room.
“Good morning, Mrs. Cunningham!” The tasseled bedside lamp now shone.
“Good morning, Brenda. Is John working upstairs this morning? I thought I heard his study door.”
Brenda shook her head. “No, he’s taken one of his patients down to Tynemouth.”
“Oh. Can’t whoever-it-is use the bus or the Metro? Are they an invalid like me?”
“The idea’s to revisit old scenes. Very old scenes.”
“Ah, from a previous life, I see. John should have taken you along. You could use a breath of sea air.”
“Why? Do I look peaky?”
Brenda was used to this sort of thing. (The local curse-greeting: “My, you’re looking ill!”)
Mrs. Cunningham peered. “Quite the opposite! You look a changed girl, Brenda. Fresher.”
By comparison with what? In the typescript Brenda had discovered helpful, honest, dowdy Jane. The old lady couldn’t help her little drips of impertinence. And shewas Brenda’s ally, wasn’t she?
“I changed my lipstick, Mrs. Cunningham.”
“Iknew there was something different!” John’s mother cocked her head critically. “I like it. It’s more natural. Subtler.”
Compliments with stings attached; it was second nature.
“Did John admire it?” the old lady asked.
“He thought I wasn’t wearing any.”
“Oh, how imperceptive men can be. But my John always has a lot on his mind. He works so hard. Did you have to tell him?”
Brenda flushed. “I may have done.”
“There’s colour in your cheeks today, Brenda. I’m happy to see that.”
Brenda shook her head. Normality, banality. The strange joy in her contrasted so sharply with the flavour of existence hitherto. Would she have wished “hitherto” to continue? No, for now the sun had risen in her. The landscape which its rays revealed was a fearful one, which she must tread, and where she must triumph, guided by her ecstasy. Otherwise John would be burnt and frozen, set in stone.
“I’ll open your curtains then, Mrs. Cunningham.” Sounding cheerful, Brenda revealed busy Jesmond Road and the cemetery. “And I’ll fetch some tea and toast.”
“Please.”
Brenda thought about her own parents, at home just a couple of miles away. Both in their mid-sixties now, and quite able to care for themselves as yet. Her Dad had retired from the MNI at Longbenton five years before, the Ministry of National Insurance. Now her Mam and Dad fitted in a couple of continental holidays each year. Saga Tours for the elderly. They’d been all over the Common Market, carrying their AIDS-free health certificates. In another five years would they still be so spry for travel and housekeeping?
Her older brother Alan — the solicitor — was married. His wife Rachel was a breathless, up-to-her-eyes, always-too-busy sort of woman. Three daughters, three nieces for Aunt Brenda: Patricia, Justine, and Annabelle. They lived in Kent, a long way off. Alan and Rachel wouldn’t be much help. Brenda would have to care for Mrs. Cunningham until the old lady eventually died; and presently she would care for her own parents too. She would, she thought, be a very caring person. Her life would be filled with cheerful, busy usefulness.
She would even have a reward: a noted local medical man as husband, who would no doubt give her a child to look after too. Almost in her forties, she would be in the high-risk category, but she was healthy.
That hadbeen the future, the path of preference. Until she had sat down at John’s desk — no,Jack’s — and opened the locked drawer. Now all was changed. Or was it? It was as if the joy had entered herin anticipation of what she would discover about John. If she rescued him from that terrible supernatural worm, she could put Jack back in his proper place and recover the balance which had existed beforehand. She could even cooperate in his hidden life. Why shouldn’t he write horror novels in private? He simply needed one confidante, to stop the strain from splitting him in half. She could help; she could type. An accommodation could be reached. If only she applied the force of her ecstasy.
Her ecstasy couldn’t create a different world for her, where she lived another sort of life, a more glamorous globe-trotting life. She knew from the hypnotic séance in this very room that she had no other life. Her ecstasy could only apply its strength to the actual world which existed, consisting of John, his mother, her parents.
She hurried downstairs to the kitchen to assemble a simple breakfast on a tray. Cooker and fridge and units might have been up to date in the early Seventies; but no longer. The only improvement was a microwave oven, so that John could heat ready-made meals for himself and his mother quickly. Brenda would need a new kitchen. As a wedding present. If. If she could win him from the worm.
To her mild surprise she found that she did truly believe in the worm. Yes, she didn’t find that too difficult. Not after the vision which her joy had granted her in John’s room.
Ought she not to have felt more surprised? At accepting the existence of a supernatural creature inside the crag at Tynemouth? Oh no. Not when ecstasy had already raptured her. She put any puzzlement from her mind.
As she waited for the kettle to boil, she thought of the child whom she and John might give life to, a child whose ghost almost seemed to pre-exist inside her in the shape of joy. She also thought about sex.
When Brenda was thirteen and her periods had recently started, she had let a boy called Peter Turpin touch her … there. And she had touched him in turn, amazed at how his thing swelled and stuck out, unable to understand how anyone could fit such a thing inside the slit she bled from, or how that could possibly bring her pleasure. She and Peter had hidden under a huge rhododendron bush in Jesmond Dene, well away from the nearest path. She had squeezed his thing to see if it would deflate, and it had suddenly become a fleshy fountain, foaming and spurting white sticky smelly stuff all over her hand and bare thighs. When she got home she washed herself a lot, and she was frightened for weeks. She wouldn’t speak to Peter, and he seemed equally reluctant to come near her, as though she would cause him trouble.
The kettle boiled. Steam jetted. She poured the water into the teapot, and slipped an old knitted cosy over the pot.
So little to have happened — and yet, to her, so much! She had stayed a virgin. She didn’t regard virginity as a condition, peculiar or laudable, any more than she regarded the possession of breasts or legs or a nose as being worthy of note.
Lips, perhaps. She felt possessive about her lips, and both hid them with lipstick and at the same time drew attention to them, enjoying a mild sensual thrill at applying the greasy stick. One day other lips, strong unpainted lips, might kiss her lips. She put that other thing from her mind. Only once had she ever closely examined those secret, private duplicate lips between her legs. That was after a girlfriend, Joyce, whispered thatshe knew of a girl who put lipstickon those lips as well for her boyfriend to kiss. Yes, there was a mouth between Brenda’s legs; but it said nothing, ate nothing. Once a month it was sick, dribbling blood as though it had visited the dentist’s to have something pulled out.
She buttered two slices of toast.
John himself might never have touched a woman that way before. He might never have put hisJack inside the secret lips of a woman. “Jacking off,” Joyce had said, was the name for what boys like Gavin Percy did with their things by hand. Unlike women, they needed to. Otherwise their jack grew big and stiff of its own accord; they spurted in bed at night.
John’s jack had grown so big that it had become a separate individual, full of wild thoughts, to judge from those paperback covers. A cannon was a tube which shot stuff out. Yes, that was where Jack came from — from between the legs of John. She would have to come to grips with Jack, to speak to him with her inner lips. Then John would be all right again.
If she could overcome the worm. The worm of old that made the gold, and ached with cold — which she must hold, if she was bold. She shivered convulsively, but then her ecstasy burned bright and she carried the breakfast tray upstairs.
“You’re quite right, Mrs. Cunningham,” she said as she set the tray down. “I really must go down to Tynemouth soon. I do wish John would ask me along the next time he goes, patient or no patient! In fact I ought to be there as chaperone, oughtn’t I? If I’m supposed to do that here when he hypnotizes people in the next room. I might be able to help.”
John’s mother smiled conspiratorially.
“I’ll suggest it to him. I think he’ll listen to his mother. He’s taking you a bit for granted, and he shouldn’t … not when you’re both on the verge of … you know what.”
As Brenda went back down to her office she glowed with anticipation.
When the brown Volvo pulled into the graveled front drive shortly before one, Brenda went out to meet it. How would Tony Armstrong seem afterhis trip to the coast? She was curious, and thought that John might send him packing while still outside. This was also her first sight of Jack in full knowledge. Joy buoyed her up.
