The fire worm, p.5
The Fire Worm, page 5
“Unless there’s a storm.”
But there was no storm. When they climbed into Jingling Geordie’s Hole that Saturday at ten o’clock the sea was already sluicing across the boulders. White foals — only junior horses — capered along rock-broken, breeze-flicked waves. In deeper water, swells and gulfs of dark green glass undulated frigidly. The sky was a dismal uniform grey.
The cave was damp though not too chilly. Ted had on his thickest jumper as well as blazer and mac; Gavin likewise, with the addition of a woolen scarf. From his deep mac pocket Gavin pulled a bundle wrapped in theShipping Gazette , unwound a bottle of Gordon’s Gin almost as darkly green as the sea; then he produced a small First Aid tin with some bandages and gauze in it. Finally, a chocolate bar and mince pie for himself.
Ted disgorged a crumpled envelope with birthday card inside and something in gift wrapping.
“It’s a Dinky tank. Fires matchsticks. Cost my Mam four and sixpence.” Ted tossed the wrapped present aside.
Health and Efficiencyand the empty Nivea jar were still where they had left them, though the magazine was now a damp wad, the pages sticking together.
Ted thought of other places where they might be doing this. In a pill-box along the dunes? With its machine-gun slits facing the beach where concrete blocks still lay slumped, waiting to repel the Nazi tanks brought on landing craft from Norway … a pill-box with no door, where courting couples went for a feel. There was nowhere else.
Gavin uncapped the bottle. “Don’t swig it like lemonade or you’ll cough it up again. Gibbon said so. Get as much down as you can, slowly, and keep on getting it down.”
Ted started swallowing gin.
Though Ted was lying flat he felt desperately ill and dizzy. The cave roof rocked from side to side. The walls rotated. The largest of the slapping waves just below tossed their icy spittle inside, which gave some momentary relief. He sweated, he shivered. His tummy burned and churned. He longed for it to spew out everything, including that living creature that lurked there. But it would have to come out of his bottom, like the biggest turd ever.
Suddenly he did vomit. A stinking flood pumped out over Ted’s mac and over weed, as convulsively as though his guts were unreeling through his mouth. Gavin had squirmed aside, swearing, “Bloodyfuck !” Even after nothing more would come, Ted was still racked by gasping spasms, deep down in him now, doubled him up on his side.
Gavin began to press Ted’s midriff excruciatingly. “You can do it, you filthy little tyke!” he screamed. Ted hardly heard. Waves of pain were squeezing downward rhythmically.
Gavin hadn’tentirely believed till now. Even though he had felt those spasms in Ted’s tummy. The younger boy was loopy because of what he and Gavin had done together. Gavin knew that people could make themselves ill by imagination. If only he could purge Ted, “catharsize” him — just as Mr. Brennan the English teacher said that a tragedy like Marlowe’s was supposed to do to the audience.Drive the nonsense out of Ted which had cost Gavin a fountain pen, money, extra hours of homework, worst of all: obligation to Gibbon. Make Ted utterly sick of it! This had been in Gavin’s mind as a safety valve of sanity alongside the mad steam-boiler of Ted’s impossible pregnancy. A safety valve, till now.
Now Gavin unbuttoned Ted’s spew-smeared mac and his blazer and hauled his flannels and underpants off over the shoes. If Ted was to give birth — tobelieve he was giving birth — he must be naked from the waist down. The sight of Ted’s parts gave Gavin no joy now. Swollen, red-streaked tummy. Shrunken knob, wrinkled nuts, hairs. Ted seemed to have passed out, but his midriff convulsed; with each flux the boy’s legs slid further apart — and his bottom gaped. Now there could be no doubt in Gavin’s mind: the boywas giving birth. Having a baby, in a cave cut off by the sea. Gavin backed away up against the cave wall, chilled with dread and disgust.
He forced himself to look.
Ted’s anus had split open amidst reeking shit, blood, and yellow juices. Something rather smaller than the boy’s head had forced its way out and lay between the spread of his legs, writhing, wriggling.
Was that a miscarriage? A premature baby?
Premature meant feeble, weak, unable to survive. Let the thing stop moving, let it die! But it wouldn’t; or not immediately. He should snatch it up and toss it in the sea; he’d have to touch it, though. Or bash it with a stone.
Ted looked dead.I’ve seen my Teddy bare and now he’s dead; the stuffing has come out of him. I didn’t kill him!
Roll Ted’s body into the sea? The corpse might float, pointing at the cave where Gavin sat imprisoned.
The thing between Ted’s legs thrashed about as if to right itself; as if growing stronger. Gavin crept closer, then jerked back. The baby looked more like an octopus with bulbous body, suckery arms. Or legs. How many? Where the coat of blood and shit had rubbed off, it was white as cow-tripe, white as cooked cod. Made of strong white rubber. A glossy patch might be an eye; a puckered ridge: a mouth. It was a monster, a terrible deformity. Gavin scrambled to the back of the cave where a hill of stones was piled, rubbed smooth by years and years of sea-grind at highest tide. He cast about for a suitable instrument with which to destroy it. The stones were jammed into a lumpy jigsaw. When he tugged loose an ostrich-egg of speckled, salt-whitened granite another stone shifted of its own accord; then its neighbour, and the next. As if that particular granite egg had been a keystone, the whole top of the pile started to slide, scraping and grinding. As Gavin jumped clear, dropping his bludgeon, it almost seemed that the stones were being shoved from behind. High up, an opening appeared — big enough to crawl through.
The creature slithered up over Ted’s body. Floppily, fast, it squirmed up the tumbled hill — Gavin shrieked and dodged — and disappeared through the gap.
When his heart stopped thumping Gavin re-armed himself. Cautiously he climbed the slope, having to duck as he came to the gap between stones and roof. The opening appeared to give on to a rough tunnel — faintly visible, extending away upward into almost-darkness. If only he had brought his torch today.
Maybe he was just seeing a rear section of the cave, one which the stones had blocked off? Surely there couldn’t be a tunnel — not an actual Jingling Geordie one! Why, it would have been discovered years ago, explored, and barricaded with a padlocked iron gate, not with a heap of stones. Its existence would be common knowledge, not some legend printed in a nineteenth-century tome. Yet he perceived a tunnel. Yet a faint foetid breath wafted against his face.
The creature’s breath? If such creatures breathed. He couldn’t see it anywhere, though he could see little enough. As his vision adjusted, however, a blob of grey appeared to flee uphill.
Gavin descended to where the half-naked boy lay sprawled with filth and blood between his legs. Discarding the stone, he shook Ted, slapped his cheeks, tried to find a pulse, tried to find a heartbeat. Ted’s flesh felt unnaturally cool; bleeding had apparently stopped.
No one knew they were here. Gavin dragged the boy toward the rear of the cave, humped him up the slope. Using all his strength, he eased the body through the opening until Ted’s weight finally pulled him down out of sight.
Quickly Gavin collected Ted’s trousers and pants, the wrapped present, the card, and stuffed those through the gap, too. After he had crammed the opening tight with fallen stones, he sat to await the sinking of the tide, trying not to think of what was behind him.
An hour later, having looked to see that no one was visible on the pier, he climbed from the cave and worked his way over high slippery boulders, still sloshed by the waves, back to safety; to the stone steps with their rust-bobbled rail that led up from shingle to where the granite pier rooted into the land.
In the early hours Gavin sat up in bed in a sweat of fear. With blankets dragged up to his throat, he pressed his spine against the wallpaper. The bedside lamp, which he’d switched on with a panic hand, illuminated the same familiar bedroom: blue imitation velvet curtains, untidy work-table, chair with flat orange cushion, full bookcase, calendar of Canadian scenes sent by an aunt that Christmas, tick-tocking Swiss chalet clock with chain weighted by a metal fircone, a long framed school photograph: four ranks of tiny faces all topped by caps, one of them Ted.
Gavin had just dreamt the worst dream of his life, and knew that Ted was linked to him by an invisible cord which could stretch for miles, miles which had no meaning.
Gavin had been within Ted in that dream much more deeply than he’d been within him the previous summer. This time, he’d been wholly inside his skin.
He woke, half-naked on cold rough stone. His tummy, and beneath, was a cavern of dull pain. His head ached.
Light. More in the distance than close by, as though light needed to gain depth before it could show him his surroundings; a tunnel in rock, stretching one way and the other way to the limit of the light, the limit of his eyes.
Ted knelt on bare knees. He noticed clothes nearby. Staggering to his feet he reclaimed his underpants and trousers and managed to draw them on, over a kind of emptiness as though something was missing from him. His mac stank of stale spew; he dragged the raincoat off and dropped it.
Some way along the tunnel he noticed movement. Something small, complicated, and white was climbing along the floor toward him. Pulling, sucking itself along.
He mustn’t let it reach him! He began to limp away — but now ahead of him he saw another white thing, twin to the first, an afterbirth, only the second creature was retreating from him as if filled with loathing. As he moved, the thing behind advanced, the thing in front fled. He was a kind of mirror between the two. The one ahead wanted nothing to do with him. The one behind — they were both like swollen white balls dangling long soft cocks — was doing its best to reach him, touch him, cling to him. He feared it would join itself to him suckingly, and though he sensed a hole in himself he didn’t wantthat inside him ever again.
Therefore he must trudge along the tunnel, to escape from one white thing while tormenting the other white thing by pursuing it. He hadn’t the strength to overtake the creature ahead, unless it stopped to welcome him; and he hoped it wouldn’t. If he himself stopped, the creature behind would catch up. The tunnel seemed to extend from forever to forever, perhaps because space and time had changed.
Night after night Gavin dreamt the same dream, as if Ted was calling to be let out from behind the wall of stones.
Police visited the school to question Ted’s class-mates. In assembly the headmaster said a prayer for the missing boy and his family, and warned of the dangers of not confiding in one’s own parents. Word went around the school that Ted Appleby had killed himself — probably by jumping in the river — since he was depressed at putting on weight and being useless at games. No finger pointed at Gavin. Bill Gibbon may have felt scared and guilty at having persecuted Ted a bit. So ifhe knew any other explanation, he wasn’t saying — even to his big brother.
Brian Gibbon asked Gavin furtively whether the gin had worked.
“Like a bomb,” said Gavin. “But maybe she wasn’t really knocked up in the first place! I think she was having me on.”
“They do. Slags! Did you use a coathanger?”
“She refused. She just drank.”
“She just wanted the gin.”
“She got pissed as a newt and sick as a dog. Serves her right, I say.”
Gibbon nodded, approving Gavin’s new worldly wisdom.
The next Saturday Gavin went back to the dreadful cave, to try to purge his dreams. Scrambling to the top of the stone pile at the rear he began pulling the salty granite eggs loose one by one, tumbling them down behind him. Within five minutes he had cleared the upper reaches. He shone his torch.
On blank rock.
No opening, no tunnel, no body, no octopus-baby, nothing! Just the solid back wall of the cave.
For a moment, in spite of his clear recall that there was one cave and one cave only in the cliff, he wondered wildly whether there might be another, very similar, a few yards away. Then his gaze lighted on the empty Nivea jar. Frantically he began unloading all the loosened stones, tossing them out of the cave mouth to crash and bounce down the boulders. Then he attacked the bulk of the pile.
He worked hard. Half an hour later the cave was bare. He had even torn up the weed matting from the floor. He stood gasping for breath in an empty hollow, a barren stone womb. The only way out or in was the way he had come already.
Gavin sat on the stone floor and wept.
That night in the dream for the first time Gavin’s perspective altered. Now he himself was the terrified, nauseated creature which groped and sucked its way along that dim tunnel — to escape from the zombie figure of Ted which lumbered helplessly after him.
Images began to form in Gavin’s mind. He saw that something ancient existed behind that hollow pocket in the headland known as Jingling Geordie’s Hole. It could open up its own spaces when it wished. The previous summer the creature had opened a door from its stone depths, to enter Ted; to put part of itself into him, to grow there for a while. Two weeks ago it had opened the door again, to reclaim itself. And to claim Ted, its spent host.
Why? Its thoughts weren’t human thoughts. Maybe it wished to escape, but didn’t know how. Maybe it wanted to taste the outside world, like an octopus poking an arm from its lair then pulling it back in again, a phantom, ectoplasmic arm emerging out of stone.
Now it was claiming Gavin too, sucking him through the cord which joined him to the dead boy; who wasn’t exactly dead. Just as the creature, though cased in stone, wasn’t dead.
Gavin glimpsed a fossil: of a primeval, mutated octopus-thing which possessed strange and terrible persistence, a suction upon existence; which had somehow stayed alive in stone. Imprisoned under prehistoric mud, its flesh had changed to rock during a million years but its whole pattern persisted, the pattern not just of body but ofwill .
Yes, he saw this image clearly now! — as a distant, mute beckoning, from the far end of the tunnel — though really the tunnel had no end. Its earlier stretch and its later stretch were the same, eternal stretch.
It must get lonely inside that rock. But the everlasting creature didn’t seem to be imaginative. Or insane, or sane. It merely exerted power over the space around it, and over time; power which caused it to survive. People in the past had sensed its presence: the “knight” — a naive medieval youth on a quest for some holy grail? — and the old time smuggler, Geordie, with his trinkets clinking about him, whom it swallowed into the rock as he was stowing kegs of rum or whatever. Possessing them both.
As it had possessed Ted, and was now beginning, from a distance, to possess Gavin … until one night soon he would find himself out of bed, dragging coat and shoes on, tiptoeing from the house, hurrying helplessly through the darkness down to the sea, to climb into the cave for one final, everlasting time. The door to the tunnel-which-wasn’t-a-tunnel would open and close behind him, and he too would be encased in stone, a fossil continuing to think clinging thoughts, and dream, and sense existence. In the grip of the octopus-wraith, near the ghost-fossils of Ted and the knight and the smuggler who must be insane long since, buried alive in their solid, perpetual, cold hell.
“Only a therm-o-nuclear explosion right above the pier could melt us out of our rock! Turn us to gas and dust, and end us. Could kill the white stone octopus. Bomb the Priory, Gav! Get in the crane and rip the cliff open!”
Ted’s thoughts were reaching Gavin! Gavin was thinking the boy’s thoughts now. Their minds were mingling. Or was the octopus-creature transmitting Ted-like thoughts — which it hardly comprehended? Whichever, Ted and he would have ages together to think such thoughts, ages haunted by a foul noise of monotonous, circulating reverie, degenerating yet never fading. Unless a thermonuclear war broke out.
As if the fear was parent to the deed, the next night Gavin woke to find himself standing in near-darkness. He was out of bed. Something soft clutched at his arms.
Gasping with panic he blundered toward the hidden light switch. Iron fircone and Swiss chalet clock flew askew. With his brow he butted the switch. Light blossomed. The thing that was gripping him was his own raincoat, half donned. His sockless feet were stuck into unlaced shoes.
Tearing off the mac and kicking the shoes away, he plunged back under the blankets where he shivered with dread.
That night, or the next night. That week, or the next …
Deep within mad Jingling Geordie’s Hole, there in the young knight’s hell-bound corridor, next to the cracking fossil of Ted: forever the stone ghost waited. Ghost out of ancient Carboniferous seas, prehuman, perpetual. Potent — and imbecilic.
Forever its petrified prisoners whispered their crazed memories of the greed or fierce desire or yearning which had led them into that cave, and which had spurred the living fossil to open its stone door.
Chapter Seven
It was a week later, as arranged.
“Rewind!Go back to the previous life before you were Gavin.”
I had found it a handy trick to instruct my patients while under hypnosis as though their minds were tape recorders or videos. I would explain this to them in advance, and run through the commands I used so as to programme these in.
“Who are you now?” I asked Tony.
“Me name’s Harry Bell. Aa live with me Mam in Front Street, Tynemouth, alang from Missus Halliday’s. That’s where aal the important folks come to visit Miss Martineau in hor sick room. She’s too ill to step ootside the hoose, but ye can see hor telescope at the window watchin’, everything as gans on. Miss Martineau’s deaf too, ye knaa, so she can read lips. With that telescope she can tell what the sailors is sayin’ half a mile oot.”
Harry’s accent was much broader than Tony’s, or Gavin’s. That meant little. Any Tynesider could put on the voice.
“Well, Aa had a bigger ear trumpet than hors — in the shape of me own two lugholes, God help me. An’ Aa spied more than she ever did with hor telescope! Only, there’s some sights nay boogar should ever see; an’ Aa saw one o’ those sights last year. It’s laid its finger on me — not as it had any fingers to speak of. It’s hooked its clarty grappers in me buttonhole, an’ Aa canna shake loose. It’s slid itsel into me heed, where the dreams are.”
