The Fire Worm, page 21
“Who?” a voice gibbered at her. “Is it Gav? Don’t come near, Gav! After … after … long. It’s long. Only a therm-o-nuclear explosion could melt us out. Turn us to gas, and end us. Could kill the white stone octopus. Climb in the crane and bomb the rock to atoms. Gav, is it you? No, don’t come near. Don’t touch.”
Somehow she reached him and cradled him in her white invisible arms, wrapped him in her white invisible legs, in her soft tough sucking tentacles.
“No, Gav, don’t!” he shrieked.
She had to hold something, touch something, feel something struggling. If she clutched him for long enough his senses might return. Hers might.
She went on holding Ted, and remembered hot ecstasy.
I read what Jack had typed, and stood up swaying. I had no memory of any of this, none at all. Surely this was only a story? Yet … what if not? The sun shone upon the back gardens of Jesmond Road. Eleven o’clock on a Wednesday morning, by my watch.
Downstairs the telephone started to ring. It went on ringing. Ordinarily Brenda should have answered. Where was she?
Where wasJack ?
Whoever was calling wouldn’t quit, so I hurried down to Brenda’s office.
“John Cunningham speaking.”
“Thank God. This is Andrew Jarvis, Brenda’s father. Is she there?”
I visualized him: a short, thick-set, balding man with a ruddy face. Brenda couldn’t be here, or she would have taken the call.
“No,” I said, “she isn’t.”
“Well, do you know where sheis ?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Look, she didn’t come home last night. We thought maybe the two of you might have … how do I put this?”
“I understand what you mean.” We might have spent the night together.
“This isn’t like Brenda — not coming home, and not calling us by now. Something’s wrong. Youdid go down to Tynemouth last night? That wasn’t just a story she was telling us?”
Did we? Didn’t we?
“Are you still there, Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,what ? Did you go to Tynemouth?”
I could only take my cue from Jack’s story, so it seemed safest to agree.
“We did.”
“For heaven’s sake, did you bring her back to Newcastle afterward? Whereabouts? To your own house?”
“Well, I dropped her off,” I said. “She wanted to walk. Clear her head.” Implications of tipsiness. Not my fault.
“What time about?”
“Maybe eleven. This is worrying, Mr. Jarvis. I think you ought to contact the police.”
“Was she with thatother fellow? The disturbed one? Did you drop them both off together?”
What had happened to Tony?Jack had written nothing about that. Tony might be able to contradict me. If only I could break off and call Fenwick’s, get Tony on the phone.If he was at Fenwick’s. Carol Armstrong hadn’t phoned me, hunting for him. She had been getting pissed off, hadn’t she? Maybe she had walked out. Or no longer cared.
“Yes, I dropped him off too.” Don’t say where. Let Jarvis assume.
“Was he behaving disturbed?”
“I wouldn’t describe him as disturbed. Anyway, I shouldn’t discuss —”
“God almighty, Brenda’s missing! She walked off into the night with a nutter!Where? ”
“Beside Jesmond Dene — that’s where she asked to be dropped.”
“TheDene ? That’s no place for a young woman to be alone. Oh but she wasn’t alone, was she? You’re trying to protect this nutter of yours! Don’t you realize that Brenda might be —” he hesitated —”might still be in the Dene? If you follow me. The bloody irresponsibility of it. And we thought that you two —” Jarvis’s voice caught on what might have been a sob. “You’re damn right I’m calling the police.” He rang off.
No, Brenda wasn’t in the Dene. Lying murdered under a rhododendron. No body in the Dene.
She was inside the Pen Bal Crag, where no search party could ever find her. She was encased along with Ted. The worm had embalmed her alive with the elixir of life, transmuting her to ectoplasm which could exist inside stone. Sensible place to live everlastingly; inside of stone. Better than being inside a tree, or a book. Books fall apart, trees rot. I glanced out of Brenda’s window at the cemetery across the way, but those were only dead stones over there. They didn’t have souls locked inside them.
Jack’s typescript upstairs!
“You’ve got to burn that, old son.” That wasn’t Jack talking; that was me. Talking to myself.
Forget about calling Fenwick’s. What did it matter? My word should outweigh Tony’s any day. Get rid of the evidence — the utterly mad evidence. That’s how Jack’s account would seem, if anyone else read it.
Where was Jack?
Gone away, sublimated, evaporated into his own domain of the imagination — where he had triumphed and become a free-ranging elemental, a spook, a ghost, a demon spirit.
On the way back up to the study I remembered to look in on Mother.
She was sitting up in bed, with a book; so she was all right.
“Where’s Brenda this morning?” she asked.
I noticed her breakfast tray on the side-table. Plate, cup and saucer, tea-pot. Someone had brought breakfast earlier on. Me. In a hypnotic trance, induced by Jack.
“Mr. Jarvis phoned, Mother. Brenda didn’t go home last night. He’s worried sick. He’s calling the police.”
“Oh John, this is awful. What can have happened?”
“I don’t know. You must excuse me. Things are frantic.” I backed out.
“Tell me the moment you know anything!”
“Yes.” I shut her door, and hurried to the study. There was still an open fireplace in the room. Never used — an electric heater stood in front. The fireplace wasn’t blocked off, nor the chimney. Never got around to it. Would any neighbour notice a small column of smoke puffing from our chimney? In the desk I found a book of matches from the Midland Hotel, Birmingham. Souvenir of Jack’s weekend of glory.
Shift the heater aside. Crumple the pages in the grate. Apply lighted matches. Ten minutes work at the most.
Like some faith-healer absorbing the essence I rested both hands on the typescript.
I shouldn’t have done that. It came to me with total and instant conviction that if I burnt these pages I would be annihilating Brenda. And maybe Ted too. Maybe even Jack, my missing part.
Maybe Brenda would want to be extinguished, rather than being locked in that rock. Maybe not. She had someone to touch.
I was in the story too. Would I extinguish myself in the fire, like some spontaneously combusting person? Would there only be grease in the grate, smuts on the rug, a scorched empty bundle of clothes?
If only I could re-enter the story, take control of it, change it.
Sitting down, I fed a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter.
Phone ringing again. Or the front door bell. No, just Mother’s bell. Still time.
The world’s still fluid. Everything’s loose. I can alter it. I can sense the worm! Writhing in Tynemouth.
Ican escape — into a previous life! There’s the place to hide. Never believed in past lives, myself, not until now. It’s my speciality, right? My area of expertise. Now I believe in it. Escaping into the future: that’s not on. There’s no future till it occurs. Can’t leap ahead. The past exists, though. Because it existed.
The worm wants me. It’s reaching out. Don’t I belong with Brenda, inside the rock? In her white invisible tentacles?
Bells ringing. Mother, phone, door. All of them at once. Bells in my brain.
Jack has gone; but I can still be someone else.
“ ‘Why call us to revoltless doom?’
With grief the opening buds reply.”
Mumbling his own lyric words to himself, John Cunningham slouches slowly along Broad Chare, heading away from the quayside, Rialto of Newcastle. In one hand he clutches a torn handkerchief, from which a herring pokes. A cart clatters by, the horse’s hooves striking sparks from the road slabs.
A herring for his supper. A fishy, not even on a dishy. What a catch, from that cran barrel while backs were turned. What a treasure. He might as well hoy it down a well, the way the accursed young Lambton tossed the worm down a well in the old story! As he stares at the fish it seems to twist in his hand, and its glossy dead eye mesmerizes him.
He’s drawing abreast of an old haunt. It’s the High Dykes Tavern. Long, tiny-paned corbelled windows, top-heavy upper storeys with upside-down battlements of beams — and an archway to ale. He’s aware that someone is dogging him inquisitively. Someone is passing by and loitering, penciling away in an open leather-bound book.
John pays scant heed. The eye of the herring has captured him, and he has remembered himself. All his struggles as a poet and an actor are burning away like mist. After forty-five years of life, he has recalled who he is.
He is John Cunningham.
He’ll surely die in a few days’ time. Almost within hours. He feels like death warmed up.
What matters death? Isn’t verse immortal? More to the point, isn’the ? He’ll be reborn, of course. Later in time, or earlier. Why not earlier still? He is, after all, on the run. The worm will eat his mind, and spit it hindward, back into the past, maybe disgorging him at Lambton Castle.
Meanwhile, must keep body and soul together. Slowly John shambles back toward Mr. and Mrs. Slack’s premises in Union Street, to fry the fish and eat it.
“You wet fart. I’m going to write horrors on your heart. You’ll be Ted, and you’ll be Gavin. You’ll be Harry Bell. Particularly Harry Bell. I have you all taped. You’re all recorded in stone. It’s just a question of shuffling the tapes around, melting them into each other. You could call me a tapeworm.”
The voice is Jack’s. It is also the worm’s. And it is his own.
There’s an infinite white tunnel. White space, white stone. He’s encased in rock under Tynemouth Castle; he’s the writing in the seaside rock, and a worm’s licking it.
“And when you’re hot enough with the horror of it, and mad enough, maybe I’ll free myself. Maybe I’ll dive back into the fire I came from.”
It must be that the worm reached out to him from Jingling Geordie’s Hole years since. It mesmerized him, wrote Jack into him. Now it has him.
The worm must have Tony too. At last. Tony didn’t get away this time.
“Where’s Brenda?” he begs; though he already knows the answer.
“Oh,she’s here. Nearby. But also, far far away. You could try to reach her. Crawl up the tunnel, eh? And she’ll crawl away, clutching Ted. But she’ll be crawlingafter you , too. Or will that be Tony who’s crawling after you? — Gavin mistaking you for Ted? There’s so much time, so many possibilities, once death is undone, dear John.”
Noo lads, Aa’ll haad me gob,
That’s aall Aa knaa aboot the story
Ov Sor John’s clivvor job
Wi’ the aaful Lambton Worm.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Epilogue
Ian Watson, The Fire Worm
