IT IS A curious anomaly that we seldom evolve beyond our most lacerating experiences—scarcely ever learning from them. One such instance involved Lyall Rowland; thirty two, plump, largely self-satisfied, and the Team Strategy Leader at the Pendle Street branch of the Dreadnought Building Society.
Decency incarnate, Lyall began the day feeding the neighbour’s cat with scraps—unaware that the creature had already gorged itself on bin waste, and schmoozed saucers of milk from the old ladies at 18, 24 and 45. He shaved, showered, then dressed from a selection of pre folded, neatly laid out clothes, while the radio warbled a mixture of syrupy tunes and bad news. He tucked his laminated ID on its lanyard into his top pocket at three minutes to eight and locked the door to his apartment at five past.
He stepped aside briskly on his brief walk to the bus stop, smiling, as assorted Pavement Nazis—e scooter riders or huffing joggers—swerved past him, sullenly ignoring his bright ‘Good morning!’
Lyall had small ridges of accreted scar tissue on his scalp—from the same scrapes when he obligingly stepped aside for others, directly under overhanging hawthorn branches.
Phone scrollers, deliverymen and mums towing cranky kids, scowled or blanked him, hurrying on.
Lyall was rarely wounded by rudeness, indifference or brusqueness: neither the jostling for the bus doorway where he was sharp elbowed for his deference, nor the buffeting from behind and tutting provoked by stepping aside for the elderly; for heavily laden, pushchair pushing or dog walking fellow pedestrians, as he walked from the bus stop to the Dreadnought office—For Families. For You.
All he sought was an uncomplicated life.
He was utterly at ease in his position at work—managing eighty seven High Street business and over three thousand domestic accounts; he processed applications, advised investors, mentored trainees, promoted the branch, fixed the photocopier, mopped the floors, restocked the snacks trays from his own pocket, and bought fresh doughnuts or cupcakes for the three staff: Mary, Trina and Duncan, every Friday.
Lyall hummed the same pop tunes; ate granola for breakfast, owned seven shirts worn in sequence, bought exactly the same brands of toothpaste or shampoo, watched the same TV shows, and attended the same Satanic rituals—naked, smeared with black salt, sage ash and crow’s blood, at each lunar phase.
And Lyall loved Trina: desperately, hopelessly; helplessly.
It began simply with the slant of light through her auburn hair; when she smiled at him and touched his shoulder, handing over the quarterly currency exchange rates’ printout, softened her tone or widened her eyes.
It ended—or any remote hope of it was stifled—when Trina knocked back jello shots with her pals at Trends Nitespot—giggling, then jeering acidly at their teasing, plainly revolted at the very idea.
It was a Tuesday—that grey blurry, disposable, most mundane day of the week, when Nick O’Raw called to collect Trina for a post work pizza and drinks. Lyall was sliding files into a drawer when the shadow fell across his desk; he looked up smiling, to freeze and flinch: it wasn’t the composite of deep Spanish resort perma-tan; a bald, gnathic jawed shaven head, the bull neck with its smudge of tattoos; the barrel chest or the taut shoulders suddenly filling the doorway—or the gaze, which somehow slid greasily, mockingly, up and down him—but the sheer swagger which crushed his heart.
The overpowering impression was of a slab sided, leering, looming, bipedal smirk.
Trina scampered to Nick, and Lyall beamed affably at them through his agony until his eyes hurt.
It rained of course that night—shocking columns of the stuff blasting down, spray frets forming when the wind whipped it across the streets; sloshing of downspouts, swirling inch deep on the pavements, as Lyall squelched home, sodden, utterly defeated, with his heart in his heels.
His usual antidote to A Bad Day was comfort food—cheese on toast, egg and chips, a pot of tea and an old movie on the telly, but this was a deeper soul sickness: the sort of horribly compressed feeling he associated with the convulsive, wracking sobs of early childhood, when the entire world seemed pitted against him.
Thin skinned. Too nice. Too generous. Mug. Loser. Saddo. Leave it all to the Hairy Arsed Alphas—they always win. All smash and grabbery, untroubled, uncomplicated, uninhibited.
After two hours, he realised he’d been sitting in the dark, staring at the wall.
O’Raw—a notorious local thug who boasted openly of his gangland connections—was a taxi and mini bus driver, and the District Organiser for the regional branch of Action Now—a rapidly recruiting self-styled neo-Nazi faction which considered other single issue ultras too soft: they terrified asylum applicants, bellowing, chanting, and howling hate at government requisitioned hotels.
Lyall audited the organisation’s headquarters’ local accounts: he knew that chunks of their funding to cover printing costs, online media subscriptions, transport costs for travelling to rallies and demonstrations, came from deeply dubious, murky funding streams—the usual hazy sources: illicit meat trading, under the counter vapes; knock off branded toys, cosmetics and electronic goods.
The rain had stopped.
He rose: utterly intent on murdering his conscience.
The attic room was bright and welcoming—stacked neatly in vials, jars and waxed cartons were rows of carefully procured herbs—foraged in the wild; dried, mail ordered, traded or bought at coven moots: hyssop, monkshood, sage, wolfsbane, lavender, rosemary, rosehips, red clover, basil, cinnamon, lay laurel, yarrow, chamomile, cornflowers, mandrake roots, comfrey and witch hazel—their merged scent had seeped into the floorboards and roof timbers; dizzying: scouring the lungs with a deep reek of Old Ways.
Lyall had painted this fastness with soothing, muted earthy colours flecked with gold: planetary alignments, sigils, zodiacal signs and constellations. He lit, with deliberate, hushed care, a double circle of green and black candles wrapped in spiders’ webs. In their centre was an altar: a thing of curated beauty—twists of pewter; silver bowls filled with salt, incense ash, charcoal and crushed eggshells; offerings of bread, plaited corn and stem woven flowers, a gold stencilled pentangle, a tiny brass bell; his athame and a Book of Shadows, its pages thumbed slick.
He must scrutinise every intention brought into this space: once the altar was cleansed and prepared—they must be clear, measured, and precise. He wanted to compel banishment; to summon strength and resilience—and maintain a healthy respect for ‘the rule of three’.
Exhaustive and exhausting care would be needed to void tainting the rituals with hate or his own wounding. He must use his pain, not as a contaminant, but as an accelerant.
For six weeks Lyall cleansed, summoned and warded: he devoted every night and weekend to chanting naked; pulverising, distilling, burning, grinding herbs and resins; beseeching, rocking on his haunches in the attic—even crunching up sixteen hundred feet of sleet lashed fell in mid-winter to an Iron Age cairn on the summit of Learchild Fell—under a blood moon eclipse—to invoke powers from all cardinal points and elements to bind his magic.
Lyall’s sadness, and his ache to act without conscience, lacked sufficient fury to intend Mick actual bodily harm—perhaps a virulent dose of flu; a stomach upset, runny bowels, recurring insomnia, or a nasty rash would suffice.
The ‘universe’ is of course just messy physics: ice, rocks and gas. It is not remotely cognisant of our clamouring, imploring; our noisy pain, rituals and decorous faiths.
But there are deep fissures; the cracks in between where things crouch, thrive, slither, scuttle and listen.
They crave our pain; our million griefs, our spite, failings, bitterness, confusion, indifference, cruelty and hate.
The same morning Lyall strode out into the brittle sunlight after sealing his final cast, shoulders thrown back, striding out with vigour and confidence—Nick collected his pal—and notional Second in Command—Jayden Hibberd—from outside the British Legion on Barrett Street, and drove them both to Huddersfield—the day’s rallying point for an ‘Action’.
Over seven hundred patriots packed into coaches were ring pull popping, chanting and fart gagging their way in coaches to a car park on the town’s outskirts—their target was the Bella Vista Hotel: a stifling, down at heel temporary home to fourteen Sudanese, Eritrean and Kashmiri refugees.
At nine fifteen, Punjabi mother and daughter Nir and Simar bagged their groceries, linked arms and—with Nir scolding her daughter for constant phone scrolling—headed home along Greenhead Road.
By ten seventeen they were found, sobbing, bloodied; clawing at their faces, howling out their grief and dishonour: Simar’s phone lay smashed alongside their earlier purchases—now scattered—bags burst into a smeared arc of paneer, pigeon peas, mustard greens, red lentils, tomato paste and poppy seeds: both women had been assaulted, punched, kicked, and spat on; their modesty violated—shalwar kameez torn down and flung into the road.
Horrified local women wrapped them both gently in coats and called an ambulance. They noticed with alarm that when her sobbing subsided, Nir grew increasingly dazed and unresponsive.
She succumbed to her injuries—three broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and a fractured skull—shock and shame, twenty minutes after her admission to the Accident and Emergency unit, Simar clasping her mother’s hands, utterly inconsolable.
Jayden and Nick—both forensically astute—scrubbed their hands and knuckles with surgical spirit in the ripe Gents’ lavatory at The Hussar pub; checked each other’s clothing, shoes, scalps and faces, before joining their mates in the bar—to celebrate the day’s triumph: three hours’ howling at a hotel.
Nick found Jayden’s jacket flecked with tiny poppy seeds, and hurriedly brushed them away.
Lyall bypassed the corporate desktop in his office and spliced in his laptop. He scrolled through the group’s account for a current overview. It must be bracketed, firewalled, deflected—if not untraceable, then stacked and diverted in such a way that Headquarters’ IT experts—and the ones outsourced from agencies—would have to dig for days.
The day paled; he told the others he would work late and lock up, re setting alarms. By midnight, every penny had been drained, siphoned off, re distributed; made glaringly liable to the steepest tax rates, or given to charities.
Action Now had donated lavishly to Medicines Sans Frontiers, Save the Children, Oxfam, the British Red Cross—and dropped sixty thousand pounds into The Snowdonia Donkey Sanctuary’s funds.
Lyall had stifled his conscience, but knew perfectly well he’d committed a sacking and an indictable offence.
And yet he felt wonderful.
By first light, he had packed a single suitcase and was heading for the station.
In the gnarled, brown Karakorum foothills, Nir’s mother left the path from the village below, already rippling in the morning’s heat, and began the steep climb, her bare feet skilfully avoiding the acacia thorns and sharper stones. She did not pause for three hours—though she carried water, it was for ritual washing, not drinking. Yellow dust enveloped her, rising in swirls with each step. They were not her steps; not the steps of an eighty seven year old devoted grandmother—hate held both her hands and guided her. Her tears instantly evaporated, leaving caked salt streaks down her face; she did not pause to brush away the swirling flies but pressed on into the glare.
At the summit were three undifferentiated boulders, tapered, ochre, pitted. She knelt before them and began to chant, rocking, drawing in the dust, placing broken clay figures and smearing saffron coloured paste on them.
The Pakhtunwali sang in her blood. She called to the Rakshasas, Ravana and Kumbhkarna, for vengeance.
Her curses can never be known or rendered intelligible—they were old before there was grief; before there was even sentient life.
And they were heard.
Jayden woke early two days after the rally in Huddersfield to a distinct, pulsing hum—assuming he’d left the TV on. He shuffled, bleary and thick headed, to the console.
Only when he found it switched off did he realise that he was studying the screen and the remote by a curious light. It was not the usual dirty orange filtering through thin curtains from the streetlights outside, but a soft, wispy blue.
It had no source—it grew in pulsing intensity and came from everywhere. It seemed to solidify around him. There was now a humming which had a distinct sound shape: multitudes weeping, sobbing, retching, and howling out their grief.
And then the light devoured him.
In an instant he was eviscerated—his chest cavity exploded, ribs shredding; every single organ, his entire musculature burst, his bones liquefied; the glutinous mass sluiced across the tiny room in a slithering, foul, arterial red slop.
The humming stopped; the brackish sodium light returned.
Nick switched off the headlights. He checked his texts, yawning. He could smell Trina on his clothes and smirked at the memory. Then his phone light flickered, paling to blue. Through the drizzle spattered windscreen he saw something—an indefinable shape: a weaving of convulsing patterns appear above the rooftops. He watched, face pressed against the perspex; transfixed: yes, it was real, it was happening. There was a central form—gigantic, muscular, blue and gold, descending somehow through the rain to the end of the lane: terrible, implacable. He heard its every footfall as it came for him—shuddering, booming crunches.
He clawed at the car doors—all clicked shut and the key froze in the ignition. Then the roof distended, bellying down towards him, screeching jaggedly as each window burst in turn.
It stopped three inches from his face as Nick lay bloodied and snared; pinned by the steering column, dashboard, inflated airbag and twisted seats.
The petrol tank detonated.
As the fireball curled back on itself, the pale light dimmed, then vanished.
There was the faintest, whispering sob, then only the sucking, greedy flames and approaching sirens.
Lyall is a good worker. He mops in a figure of eight; adds the right proportion of vinegar to dilute the sauces in the table top condiment sets in a distant seaside cafe. He beams at customers, opens doors for the elderly; takes long walks along the beach beside a wintry, silt sea.
Of course, he is no longer called Lyall, and though he can never return to High Street finance, he gives invaluable advice on savings and investments to his employers, Kevin and Anita, who run the Ocean Breeze chippy. He has quite forsaken magic.
And he is smiling right at you. |
