It is my distinct pleasure to welcome DM Gillis back to the blog with another of his short stories. One of the real treats since starting this blog is being able to host stories by some fabulously talented writers - and DM Gillis is without a doubt one of those. If you don't follow him on Twitter, do. He's right here - you'll find him chronicling the world of politics in astute observations, and the world of Vancouver in classic photography. He's a fine fellow, and here, he carves out a story from Shakespeare and Coltrane, trapdoors and lies. As ever, this above all else, to his own self, he is true. Enjoy.
Hamlet, a Tragedy
shortly before
He wept, looking up from his prison beneath
the open air stage on the Thames, through the cracks between the boards where
above the actors strode and hammed-it as he lay forever - sleepless in his
paralysed and prone position upon the dark and spidery dirt. He’d been there so
long that his self-pity had become a script in its own language, written
overhead on the stage’s dark underside—an enormous page of words beginning at
its centre and radiating out, dense and nearly endless, in all directions. A
greedy soliloquy with no one to hear, for muteness was also an infirmity he
suffered from the spell that held him in place. He hated her for it, and prayed
to demons and angels and archaic realms, if there were any of those, for
someone to come to his rescue. But no one had ever come, not for a hundred
years.
Until the night he saw the burning red eyes of
Cyro, peering at him through the floorboards above.
“Edwardo,” Cyro said. (It was more of a
sizzling lisp.) “The stench of self-pity is more repulsive than the grave.”
“Meaning what?” said Edwardo, or thought,
since he couldn’t speak.
“Meaning you stink.”
“Bastard. My plight is my own, and I’ll suffer
it in my way. And if I stink, it’s because I’ve lain here a century without a
bath.”
“Yes, there’s that too.”
“Who are you?” Edwardo said.
“I’ve been called Cyro. Let’s stick with that.
I’m a spirit of a kind.”
“You’re the powerful demon, then. The one I’ve
beckoned.”
“Not the demon, but a demon. One
who once sat at a crossroads and heard a pitiful call, and came.”
“Then you’ve come to set me free from this
spell?” Edwardo was delirious.
“Maybe,” Cyro said. “But this spell she’s cast
on you is more than just ironic. (A talentless actor imprisoned beneath a
stage; that’s rich.) No, a spell like this is like a house with many rooms
woven one twig at a time. A clever witch knows how to squeeze time to make it
look quick and easy, but in reality, it takes a very long time cast. Stones
disappear in the time it takes to cast a powerful spell like the one you’re
under. And a house with many rooms, like the one she’s built, takes time to
deconstruct.”
“How long, then?”
“A very long time.”
“How long, damn it? How much more do I wait.
Maybe I need to conjure a better demon than you.”
“The spell is already broken,” Cyro said. “I
foresaw your situation long ago. Before many of your rude, muddy-faced
ancestors were even born. Such is the imperceptible unfurling of mischief, as
I’m able to see it, but that’s beside the point.”
“So I’m free, then?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well damn it,” Edwardo startled himself by
shouting for the first time in too many years, “I can’t move.”
“Try,” Cyro said.
Edwardo lifted a finger. The pain was cruel,
but it was a start.
“Now hear the nails,” said Cyro.
Edwardo listened and heard the shriek of nails
pushing themselves out of the boards and joists. Then the boards flew away, and
suddenly Edwardo saw the light of stars.
“Now, Lazarus, rise up,” Cyro said.
Edwardo did, creakily at first. And as he
stood for the first time in a century, he saw Cyro as a whole for the first
time. The demon was at once hideous and handsome. A molten monster Adonis, and
Edwardo couldn’t help his gaze.
“Don’t fall in love, fool,” Cyro said. “You’ve
got a witch to hunt down.”
“Where is she?”
“A city in the New World,” said Cyro. “Look
for her there. That’s all I’ll say, until we meet again.”
*
* * * *
She waited for song, walking the streets of
dreaming, hovering half haunted above herself in the dark. And she saw its face
at her tenement window, its moist poisoned palms on the glass, its eyes of
buttons and teeth of stitches. Of all the demons, her lips moved in unconscious
summoning prayer, in all of the splendidly lonesome worlds, you are the one.
Sing for me again, she said, dreams still thick round her shoulders and endless
in the territory behind her eyes. But it didn’t sing, only watched. Night had
come, and she woke to the popping of firecrackers and the not too distant booms
of larger ordnance.
Having risen, she sat in the light of a
computer screen, the grim pixels of war news. She ate thick-skinned grapes and
drank coffee in her solitude, sealed in her cherished killing jar of isolation.
A man upstairs played his jazz too loud, Monk and Coltrane, others. She
listened carefully, and against all rules, lit a cigarette. American forces had
been discovered in Niger, inexplicably. The dead marched off a transport plane
at Dover Air Force Base. She showered, dressed, and left her rooms. The city
was already ablaze. There was the conflicting threat of rain.
Her name was Bridget and she seemed no older
than twenty, and she knew that it was her pale absinthe eyes and paper-white
complexion that separated her physically from the ordinary. That even now on
the burning sidewalks, eyes were on her, and she was glad. She kept the far
less ordinary things to herself, however. The things that really mattered¾how
she romanced shadow, could conjure and reshape matter, and how she’d survived
for so long in her pale, slim body, while so much of what and who she’d known
over the millennia had wilted beneath the rays of distance and history.
History and distance, they were nothing
without seconds. This she knew. Seconds colliding and fusing. They were the
source of everything that appeared and perished, hope and hate. Minutes and
hours, atoms and ages, were incidental. Seconds ruled. Almost painfully
ignorant, they were monsters, they were chaos. It was pointless to measure them
the way men did. Only the dead and the shadows that ate the human heart could
measure them.
She could measure them too, and she’d lived
too many. She was a crypt of memory, of conflict, much of it thousands of years
old, long foxed round the edges. It was the curse of immortality. Memories of
torture, lunatic religion, genocides, jungle napalm. Witnessing the history of
intentional inhumanity. Witch magic was a blessing; life eternal was damnation.
It was a neighbourhood of dark edges and
ebbing angles in an angry, violent city. A left-behind kind of place that
excited vandals and the instincts of the unseen. There weren’t even
jack-o-lanterns this Allhallows Eve. The first hint of him was an out of place
shape, still as a century, silhouetted against vandal-fire across the road. She
stopped and said his name out loud, “Cyro.”
“I could never hide from you,” he said to her
in his blistering lisp. “Not when so nearby, anyway.” He stood next to her now.
“And, by the way,” he said, “I resent that this is how you see me now.” He
turned a 360, showing off his filthy voodoo doll-like appearance. No longer
robust and six foot tall, but the size of a plump child. “It’s offensive and
clearly a slight.”
“It’s how you come to me in dreams,” she said.
Seeing him how she liked, after so long was her privilege. “I dreamt you
differently when we were lovers, before your many betrayals. When I could still
see you beautiful and nearly human.”
“You have to take some responsibility for
those betrayals,” he said. “You knew I was a villain when we met, and don’t the
girls just love a villain?”
“I was a fool,” said Bridget.
“One of many.”
“Now you must end this curse. That’s why I’ve
summoned you.”
“What curse?” Cyro shrugged.
“This curse of endless life; you know what I
mean. End it.”
“You called it a blessing once. You begged me
for it.”
“I’m begging for something else now,” Bridget
said.
“But you’ll die if I do it,” said Cyro with
questionable concern. “Besides, I’ll say it again, you were the one who asked
for immortality, and it was granted.”
“I was young and ill-informed,” she said, now
having a familiar vision, remembering a lantern lit cave in the hills over the
sea in what was now Ireland—priests and fellow witches chanting in a circle and
in dark passages, drumming, phantoms dancing. It was a memory of them both, the
night he granted her wish. Him terrible and handsome, savage and vile. And her,
ambitious, a witch too young and guileless to be consorting with a devil,
unaware that it wasn’t necessary. She’d seen his cold, warning eyes in that
cave, and he’d tricked her by granting her wish of life everlasting. A spell,
he knew, that would cause everlasting pain.
After that he used her. He sang so beautifully
from afar and in her dreams—a demon’s most powerful lies are told from afar and
in dreams, he’d said once—and she was smitten. It was an innocent adolescent
smitteness, though, which made it all the more amusing to him.
“I’ll die for certain,” Bridget said, “when
you remove this spell. I want that right returned to me, and only you can do
it.”
“I saw this coming,” said Cyro.
“Then do something.”
“You should have asked me for wisdom,
instead.”
“Just do something,” she hissed.
“Who
says that I won’t,” he said, “but you should know that forever doesn’t end with death. Death just
changes the scenery.”
“Do it now.” Bridget held her head in her
hands. “The suffering is endless. This world is Hell.”
“Immortality requires patience, my dear. Death
is an idiot. It lacks discipline. It lacks subtlety and courage. And it
routinely fails to follow instructions, even from someone like me. Especially
in a case like yours. Immortals scare the life out of death. But don’t worry.
Because of this maddening moan of yours, I’ve intervened on your behalf. Watch
this night for a man we both know.”
“Who?”
“I’ve granted him certain advantages.”
“Who? Tell me who it is.”
“It’ll be fun for me, entertaining, because
he’s only a man.”
“Who, damn it?”
“I think he found you a little while ago,
actually, but has waited for tonight to reveal himself—a night of witches and
darker things, the moon waxing like an animal chasing itself in orbits. He
loves irony. He’s creative that way.”
“Tell me who it is,” she shouted, “or I’ll
send you back into the fire.”
“Then I’ll cancel everything.”
She said nothing. Cyro vanished.
There was a massive explosion in a tenement
two blocks away, more festive high-explosives. She saw the building’s facade
crumble onto the street, as the blast wave nearly knocked Bridget off her feet
“Hey bitch,” someone shouted behind her. “What
you doin’ on our street?” It was a neighbourhood gang. They were all wearing
devil masks. She thought she recognised the voice of the leader. “Tonight’s
some serious shit,” he said. “We’re out huntin’ for some treats, and you’re
lookin’ very edible.”
“Don’t hassle her, Elijah,” someone said. It
was a gang member heard from the back of the small crowd. “She’s that spooky
wench from up the street.”
“Yeah,” said Elijah, “I know it, and I’m sick
of lookin’ at her walkin’ round the hood. She don’t sell it; she don’t give it
away. Maybe tonight we take care of her.”
“Yeah, yeah Elijah,” came assenting voices.
“Take care of her.”
“We’ll cut you up,” Elijah said to Bridget,
pulling a knife out of nowhere.
Flames glinted off of the blade, and she
wondered if this was it, if somewhere behind a mask was the face of the man
Cyro said they both knew. Elijah broke from the group, and walked up to her.
“Take off the mask,” she said, and the man
did. Bridget recognised him. He was local. Tall and well built, but a bully and
petty criminal. Maybe this was the night he hit the big time. Rape and murder.
“You know Cyro, then?” she said.
“Don’t know no Cyro.” Elijah spit out the
words, as he held the blade against her throat.
“Then too bad for you,” Bridget said,
grinning.
Suddenly there was fear in Elijah’s eyes, as
the knife in his grip began to move back, away from her throat and towards his
own. He clearly couldn’t stop it. In seconds he was holding the knife against
his own throat. Blood began to trickle. Then began to stream.
“See,” she said to dying Elijah, “your homie
was right. I’m spooky.” There was horror on Elijah’s face as the blade dug into
his throat. He screamed, and Bridget said, “Bye-bye, tough guy.”
Now
she heard words like fuck and holy shit coming from the gang, and Bridget set
each member afire without warning. There were shrieks of agony and a grotesque
dance for several moments, before the scene was reduced to nothing more than
smoldering bodies and bones on the pavement.
“Well done,” someone said behind her, slowly
clapping his hands.
She turned to see who it was.
“You?” It was Edwardo. “You moldy ham
sandwich,” she said, “you’re what Cyro sent me? Last I checked, you were where
I put you—under that stage with the bugs. This is very disappointing.”
“Not for me,” he said. “And you had no right
casting a spell on me.”
“But you outted me as a witch.”
“But you are a witch.”
“But I was run out of London by the Church,
because of you. By a horde of cross-dressing priests with their torches.”
“But I thought you’d enjoy the drama, since
you’re such a bloody aesthete.”
“But you only did it to get back at me,”
Bridget protested, “for questioning the quality of your acting.”
“But you’re not a drama critic.”
“But you stank,” she said. “Your Clown Hamlet
was an apocalypse.”
“It was innovative for 1917.”
“It stank the place up.”
“Besides,” said Edwardo, now dewy-eyed,
placing his hand loosely over his heart, “I thought we had something.”
“You’re mad.” She waved him away. “I don’t
carry-on with mortals. I’d tear you to pieces in bed.”
“But we attended parties together. Gala
dinners. They said we were inseparable. I thought they were right.”
“It was all for show,” Bridget said. “You’re a
fool if you think otherwise, and you know it. A witch either hides or takes the
town by storm. She doesn’t have a quiet little flat and attend the shops daily.
Not when you stand out like I do.”
“A pale goddess. Everyone said so.”
“It would never have worked, Edwardo.” She was
sneering now. “Besides, you stole from me.”
“Well, I was willing to try.”
“You lied,” she shouted. “You told the whole
of London that we were sleeping together.”
“I did it because I loved you.”
“You were a pickpocket and an embarrassment,”
she said.
They both paused and look into each other’s
eyes. So many memories for Edwardo. Just a miserable pinprick in time for
Bridget.
“I hate you,” she said to him.
“And maybe after all,” said Edwardo, “ I hate
you, too. For leaving me in that prison. When was my term to end? When would
you have released me?”
“Maybe never,” she said, smiling as a heavy
rain began to fall.
“You pig!” he said, grabbing her round the
throat and digging in his thumbs. “I hate you more than anything.”
She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t
struggle when her time came, but this was Edwardo. Passivity was out of the
question. Cyro had made him strong and had seized her immortality. Suddenly she
was witnessing her life passing before her eyes, one infinite second at a time.
The carnage and injustices of man. In Washington, DC, a fat sociopathic apricot
held the nuclear codes in the sweaty palms of his diminutive hands. Things
would never change.
If Edwardo succeeded in killing her, he’d be
left behind to live out the remainder of his mortal life, to artlessly walk the
streets of an unsuspecting world. Perhaps even to take to the stage again. She
knew she had a duty to prevent it, and reached up taking his throat in her
throttling hands. Now it was Edwardo’s turn to struggle as a small crowd of
revelers raced past, and ran into a derelict building across the street,
oblivious to these two people violently trying to kill each other.
“You bitch,” Edwardo gagged and gulped. “Cyro
said you’d die easy, so die.”
“No,” Bridget wheezed and heaved, “not at the
hands of a degenerate, no-talent stage fart like you.”
“I thought this would be more meaningful,”
Edwardo choked. “I hoped for some last minute intimacy coming out of my
strangling you, but you’re still the cold blank landscape. I thought you’d show
some appreciation, some passion in dying so savagely, but I was wrong about you
again.”
Now, as the revelers sped out of the derelict
building across the street, he reached under his coat and pulled out a
revolver.
“I’m going to splatter your brains all over
the sidewalk.”
Bridget knew she was in trouble. Suddenly, she
wanted her immortality back. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to muster whatever
magic she had left to cast a spell. Just a small one would do. As she focussed,
she heard the hammer of the snub-nosed revolver against her head drawn back,
but no spell seemed forthcoming.
“Say your prayers and good-byes,” said
Edwardo, “you little whore.” And he pulled the trigger, somehow missing his
target. As it turned out, Bridget did have a speck of magic left inside of her.
The bang, however, was much louder than either
of them expected from such a puny weapon, though neither was experienced in
such matters. In fact, it was deafening and had caused a shockwave, pushing
them both down onto the pavement. And looking up, as they fell, they saw the
facade of the derelict building across the street exploding outward, its lethal
flame and aggregate soon to snuff them both out as the revelers who’d set their
masterwork Allhallows Eve firebomb danced and jumped with joy a block away.
shortly afterward
She was in what was either a small gymnasium
or auditorium—Cyro standing in the centre of the room in all of his tall,
purple lava-like glory, surrounded by an adoring crowd of geriatric women. He
seemed to be signing autograph books. Bridget smirked and made a self-deriding
tsk-tsking noise.
“Oh!” said Cyro, looking up and acknowledging
her. “There you are.”
“Yes,” Bridget said.
“Well welcome to our little troupe meeting.
Ladies, meet our guest.”
The circle of aged women turned its attention
on Bridget and applauded.
“And look!” Cyro enthused. “There’s our very
famous guest star, Edwardo.”
Edwardo skulked in a far off corner. One or
two of the senior women made as though to swoon.
“We’re dead, aren’t we,” Bridget said.
“Why, yes you are,” chirped Cyro. “Isn’t it
wonderful? It’s just what you asked for.”
“And this?” Bridget waved her hand, taking in
the entire room. “Is this what you meant when you said that death just changes
the scenery?”
“Yes it is.”
“Explain.”
“Well,”
Cyro said, “this is a ladies dementia ward, and they’re rehearsing their
production of Hamlet.”
“Hamlet,” Bridget said flatly.
“Yes,” said Cyro, with joyful enthusiasm.
“It’s Hell, don’t you see. The ladies are rehearsing for a Shakespeare Festival
that will never come. Never ever, ever, ever,” Cyro grinned. “And you’re the
director, and our cringing Edwardo in the corner is the star. Isn’t it wonderful?”
The elderly ladies applauded some more.
“So I guess suicide’s out of the question.”
“Don’t be such a Silly-Willy,” Cyro said.
Edwardo now wept and gnashed his teeth, as a
bevy of demented old women danced round him in his corner, nakedly waving their
diaphanous hospital gowns over their heads.
“I hate you, Cyro,” Bridget said.
“That’s the spirit,” the purple one beamed.
