Black Static Horror Magazine #1 Page 8

  Actually, that's not fair. We all have to make a living, don't we? True, we could get together to bring water to Africa, but we'd probably just end up arguing and the work would be difficult and it would be a step-down, salary-wise, and everything will work out fine eventually, just you wait and see.

  This is the new world in which this magazine now exists. Not bound by politics or policies, but sales units. It is a world which brings us back to the ever-prescient Ballard, who says that ‘as the nation infantilises itself, the point is finally reached where the abandoned infant has nothing to do except break up its cot.’ Michael Bywater writes about this end-game beautifully in Big Babies, his book of essays about the end of culture and society. He says ‘our damnation is that we so happily trade our autonomy for the illusion of perpetual promise,’ so that we approach the condition of insects, where ‘only the collective can possess any individuality'.

  And to place a counter-argument here it must be asked, is this just a kind of early Grumpy Old Man syndrome, complaining that ‘things were better in our day'?

  Certainly politics, music, film, art and literature were woven together without their own assigned sales divisions, so that they felt reliant on each other, but you be the judge. People like Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross and Chris Moyles are hugely popular. They're probably better known than Disraeli or Mussolini ever were. Ask yourself if they grant you any insight into your life and remember—every society gets the icons it really, truly deserves.

  Copyright © 2007 Christopher Fowler

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  ACTON UNDREAM—Daniel Bennett

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  Dan's extraordinary stories are beginning to see print in all sorts of places. We hope to publish many more here in Black Static and in our sister magazine Crimewave—check out, for example, his ‘You Will Be Wearing Green’ in the current volume, Transgressions.

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  Bax once had a dream where Joseph Goebbels was working as the entertainer at a children's birthday party. I have never forgotten it. At that time, the TV had packed in and the mother board on the computer was shot. Bax and I relied on each other's dreams to pass the time.

  As Bax explained it, Goebbels stood in front of a large map of Europe with the children seated on the floor. The map was a large, box-like structure, decorated with brightly coloured leadpaints on embossed tin. Under the shape of each country, Goebbels had hidden small balloons, and when a child called out a country's name, Goebbels would lift a lid off and present a balloon as a prize. One country had a picture of Hitler underneath its lid. The child who chose this country would receive an extra special prize.

  The hinges on the lids were very stiff, and Goebbels had trouble in prising them open. The balloons kept bursting on the sharp metal edges of the map. The picture of Hitler did not appear. The children grew more and more restless and began to heckle Goebbels, which flustered him more and more. Fingers straining on the lids, balloons popping as soon as he was able to retrieve them, the search for the non-existent picture of Hitler, the laughter and taunts of the children: all of this made Goebbels sweat and shake.

  "I woke up laughing,” Bax told me at the time, still chuckling to himself as he blew on his morning coffee, a Gauloise burning in his mouth. “It was incredible. It seemed perfect, somehow."

  Bax and I have lived together for five years, introduced by a mutual friend after I had returned from Indonesia and Bax's marriage ended in divorce. Over the years, we have grown accustomed to one another's habits, and even begun to share each other's interests, sometimes collaborating on various projects. This has developed over the past year, when both of us were made unemployed. Bax lost his job reviewing books for a science magazine, after some unfortunate remarks about Buckminster Fuller. I have been out of work ever since the College of Art in Barking decided to dispense with my services, feeling, as they did, that my particular research into the philosophy of avant-garde science was not relevant to their operation. I was not surprised. Throughout my career, I have encountered much ignorance in the face of my work. I realise that in such a materialist world, results are more important than theories. Over the years, I have begun to embrace this philosophy, as it spurs me on to the proof that I crave. Together, Bax and I live hand-to-mouth, surviving on vegetables and pulses, drinking the cheapest of wine and supermarket brand Scotch. We continue our studies.

  Some time last year, I had a dream where Bax referred to his penis as “Unston's Weeble.” That time, I woke up laughing. When I told Bax about this, he was delighted, and on those occasions when he found it necessary to refer to his penis in my company, he began to call it Unston's Weeble. At first, I found this dream slightly disturbing, not because I dislike relaxed banter about penises between male friends (I'm comfortable with this) but because my dream came true. After much contemplation, I arrived at a few conclusions and the case of Unston's Weeble gave rise to my first theories on the nature of dream objects. I call these theories my own, although I have drawn upon works by Leibniz, Marshall Maclune and Karl Jung.

  In essence, the dream object is something that, once dreamed, comes into being. I am not talking about prophecy. Events are predictable in many ways, and what we once thought of as second sight long ago became the business of the financial markets. Rather, I am intrigued by something dreamed that enters the real world. This is not as simple as you might believe. Taking Bax's dream as an example: we know, of course, that a person such as Joseph Goebbels existed, that there are such things as children's birthday parties and that they have entertainers. We also know that children are apt to become restless when bored. Although it is unlikely that the large metal map of Europe exists, given specifications supplied by Bax, it would be easy enough to construct one. It is feasible. Therefore, no matter how funny or bizarre we may find Bax's Goebbels dream, however improbable, it is entirely possible.

  The example of Unston's Weeble is different. Although both Unston and Weeble exist in our world, the former a place in Derbyshire, the latter a variant of ‘weevil', put together as a linguistic construct they are unique. Incidentally, I don't care to what, in the logic of the dream, the words actually referred. The fact that they created a name for Bax's penis are completely arbitrary as I see it. Aside from one drunken night two years ago, ours has never been a sexual relationship. I care nothing for Bax's penis, per se. Before my dream, the structure “Unston's Weeble” did not exist. Now it does. This is my starting point.

  I wrote a paper on my theories and sent it around the usual institutions with an application for funding. I had little success. I did have some encouraging feedback from a small journal run from Dalston, but I later discovered that the editors regarded the report as ironic. Faced with this ignorance, Bax and I began to conduct our own researches into dreams. I theorised, with Bax's help, that with a more concentrated dreaming experience, it would be possible to create actual objects, events in physical space in the same way as events in language. Over a number of weeks, we sat up in the front room in Acton, Bax fuelled by nicotine from his French cigarettes, both of us sharpened by a supermarket whisky. We formulated our plan.

  Through an old friend in the pharmaceutical industry, I acquired some cutting edge cancer drugs which I had read about in a recent journal. At first, my friend was very nervous about supplying them, but he was soon persuaded. Over the course of my research at Barking college, and earlier during my time in Jakarta, I made a number of discoveries relating to the use of certain chemicals by these companies, which, if they were widely known, would be unpopular. When I explained all of this to my old friend, he was happy to help me out. Blackmail is only a word. These cancer drugs were remarkable for the intensity of the activity they provoked in the deep occipital lobes and the right posterolateral thalamus: the dream centre of the brain. Not only were the pills extremely effective at treating the cancer, this side effect reduced the activity in the brain's pain centre and literally to
ok the patients’ minds off their treatment.

  Of course, the cancer drugs alone wouldn't be enough to create dream objects. We could have spent days, it is true, revelling in their excitement, transported into the luminous worlds which our subconscious could create. But these would have been redundant visions, almost sybaritic. While Bax and I regard the use of hallucinogens as beneficial (I taught a seminar on political hallucinations while at Barking College) we both agreed that for us, that time had passed. In order to manipulate our dreams the better, we began to study the practice of lucid dreaming, the technique of controlling one's dreams. After a few months, we had trained our subconsciouses to manipulate our dreams. Bax, in particular, was adept at this. He spent most of his time asleep, controlled the phantoms of his imagination.

  "You know, I've been thinking,” Bax said to me one night after spending the whole day in his room, dreaming. It was a dark evening, glowering with autumn. “It hadn't occurred to me before, but surely the process can be reversed."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Theoretically, if a dream can cause these objects to come into being, then surely it can cause pre-existent objects to fall out of being."

  I nodded. “It's an intriguing possibility."

  We talked about it late into the night, over cigarettes and whisky, agreeing to call this theoretical phenomena an undream. That night I wrote up the notes concerning the undream in my room, staying awake till the hours of early morning the only sound in my room the pen scratching on the paper. I had the feeling that life was about to change.

  The experiments continued. Every night, Bax and I would retire to our rooms and take doses of the cancer drugs. While the drugs certainly provoke wild dreams—an orgy in the Sahara, Gordon Brown cockfighting in a late night drinking den in Clapton, an expedition to a mountain that had arisen in the middle of Hyde Park—the sheer intensity of the experiences made them very difficult to control. Soon, Bax and I were exhausted by each stint of dreaming, and waking became a kind of blank state, filled only by various bodily needs. We spent days sitting around the flat, too tired to move. We bickered often. Bax accused me of stealing his ideas. I accused him of never having got over the night we'd shared a bed. We drank heavily, and once even came to blows. The morning after, we apologised, and agreed to call a break in our dreaming. “Take a holiday, perhaps,” Bax said. “I've a friend with a cottage on the Pembrokeshire coast. Get away from Acton, come back refreshed and start again."

  I agreed with him, of course I did, but I was not quite prepared to leave the experiment. Without Bax knowing, I went to my room, and took a double dose of the cancer drugs. As the rain pecked at the window of my room, I let myself drift into sleep.

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  And in the dream I had that night, I walked the dank maze of the underground hospital in Guernsey. Smells of mould and damp brick came towards me. Puddles shined black on the floor, illuminated by weak yellow halogen bulbs, caged behind wire. The grim white walls had been blotched by graffiti. I read the slogans out to myself as I walked along. i am dog ... qui-est the motivator ... who is processing the water?

  I heard voices in the corridor behind me, but I was not scared. Suddenly, out of the dark, a small child ran towards me. Looking closer through the gloom, I saw that he had curious red lumps, the size of thumbtips, on his eyelids. He spoke in a rough voice, ravaged by cigarettes smoke. “Who would you say would want the world?” he said to me. “Who would have it?"

  "I don't know."

  He coughed, rasping, and the knobs on his eyelids fluttered as he blinked rapidly. “The first man will be your father,” he said, suddenly, and then pushed past me and ran down the corridor.

  But the first man was not my father. He was an old man, with yellow tinged skin, and blue rheumy eyes, his long grey hair tied in a ponytail. I came across him in a room further down the corridor, a few doors down from the old morgue, that word sprayed in military stencil on the bubbling white wall. I'm not sure how I began to talk to the old man, but suddenly we were discussing the nature of dreams, their significance, their magic and architecture. The old man had many things to say, and as I followed his words, I knew that I would not even remember half of what he told me. I felt dizzy, drunk. Everything became unconnected. At some stage the man put his hand on my shoulder. “This is the world,” he said to me, and pressed an object into my hand. I looked down to see a red brick of some indefinable material.

  "Yes,” the old man said, nodding at me. “And you can be sure we know what that means."

  I woke up in my bedroom in Acton. I held the red brick in my hand.

  It took me a while to realise what had happened. The experiment had been a success. I had proved my theories. Amazed, almost deranged with excitement, I ran out of my bedroom and down the hall. I burst through Bax's door. The bed lay empty. Bax had gone.

  * * * *

  During the days after his disappearance, I realised that like me, Bax had been unable to let the experiment pass. After counting up the blister packs of cancer drugs, I guessed that Bax had retired to his room that night, and unable to let go of the intense dreaming experiences, he had taken his usual dose. As I sat alone in the flat, it became clear that Bax had dreamed the undream of himself. I don't need to tell you how horrifying I found this. Now that this had been so clearly proven, I began to wonder whether the undream might be an established natural phenomenon, accounting for disappearances every day. I thought of all those objects we lose: a set of keys, a favourite pen, and odd woollen gloves. I thought of the missing people throughout the world, the sad reminders of the absences on milk cartons and the backs of magazines. I even wondered whether it was possible to undream a country, and theorised the glorious, immense undream of Atlantis. I typed all of this up on the computer in the living room, washing two fingers of Talisker around a glass.

  Meanwhile, the red substance was mutating.

  It began quite quickly. When I discovered Bax had disappeared, I placed the brick on a shelf in my room. An hour later, I returned to examine it. I saw that it had lost its brick shape, that it had seeped slightly into the wood of the shelf. I managed to pull it away, thinking only that the room had been too hot. I ran a few tests on the substance, but they were rudimentary at best. I have to admit that I spent these few days in a mild sort of shock. The intensity of the dream, the disappearance of Bax, the dream object: all had left me feeling slightly removed from the world. When I examined the red substance, it occurred to me how lucky I had been with its appearance. If it had possessed a new colour, for example, one outside of the established spectrum, then the effects on my psyche would have been catastrophic. As it was, its appearance had unsettled me. The thrill had given way to a kind of depression. I spent my time sitting around the front room in my dressing gown, staring at a blank patch of wall. I drank too much and could not sleep.

  But one night, I came into my room to discover that the red substance had once more leaked into its surroundings, and that it had almost quadrupled in size. It was now impossible to remove it from the shelf. Daily it grew, spreading into the wall, absorbing everything around it into its structure. Things started to happen. One night, I was awoken in the living room by a giant orange butterfly fluttering against the inside of the window. When I went to catch it, the butterfly broke apart in my hands, covering my skin with a fluffy orange powder, like delicate pollen. One morning, I left the front door of the house to see an old woman standing at the bottom of the front yard, waiting with her dog. When she caught my eye, I smiled. As I stepped outside of the gate, I saw that the dog was blind, with no eyes in its skull. It seemed to find its way along purely by its sense of smell. I noticed that his nose had been lacerated, and was little more than an open wound. The old woman grinned at me. “He's able to smell so much better, now,” she said to me. “It's the surface area."

  I stopped leaving the flat. I began to detect signs of strangeness, proof I thought that the red substance was having an effect on the outside world. Music
began to play throughout the day, the same three tones. I heard it from passing cars and personal stereos. It began to play through the wall of the house next door. On the television, newsreaders became unable to deliver the headlines without laughing. Reports spoke of people submitting to the signs around them, following the directives of adverts without being able to resist. A man literally ate himself to death while walking down a high street, unable to resist the orders given to him by fast food chains. A woman spent her entire savings in half an hour, after becoming snared by the adverts for a travel agent. The red substance had now covered my old bedroom, creeping up the walls like some malignant, sentient wax. It throbbed with an animal heat, but it was cold to the touch. I slept on the floor of the living room, too scared of the substance, too superstitious to use Bax's bed. I did not dream.

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  Eventually, I couldn't stand to be around the flat any more. I packed my bag, ready to flee the substance, which was now creeping out of my bedroom, down the hall. On the television, a hysterical newsreader cackled through a report. Vehicles were disappearing mid-journey, only to re-appear thousands of miles away from their original destinations. An aeroplane bound for South Korea made an emergency landing in the North of Spain. A Uzbek yurt appeared on the Twickenham roundabout, its owner surveying the traffic with a baffled serenity. I stopped packing. There was nowhere left to run. The substance had taken hold. With a recognition of fact that was more terrifying than any kind of heroics, I realised that only I could stop this.