Metronome

Oliver Langmead

Description

You and I, we wear our wounds. I wear my scars, you wear your tattoos, and we don't forget who we are.'It is for the entities known as Sleepwalkers to cross the doors between dreams, and hunt the nightmares that haunt sleeping minds. Theirs is a world of impossible vistas, where reason is banished and only the imagination holds sway: the connected worlds that all sleeping minds inhabit, and the doors that lead between.But tonight, one Sleepwalker has gone rogue. Abandoning her sworn oath to protect the dreamscapes, she has devoted herself to another cause, threatening to unleash a nightmare older than man. The only chance of stopping her lies with a man named Manderlay. Once a feted musician, William Manderlay is living his twilight years in an Edinburgh care home, riddled with arthritis and filled with a longing for his youth, for the open seas, and for the lost use of his hands and the violin he has always treasured.For too long now, Manderlay's nights have been coloured by dark, corrupted dreams: dreams of leprous men in landscapes plucked from his memory, of dark figures seeking him on city streets. His comrades in the retirement home believe Manderlay is giving in to age and senility - but the truth is much worse. For in dreams, maps are made from music - and it just might be that one of William Manderlay's forgotten compositions holds the key to unleashing the nightmare that holds the world of dreams in balance. The Sleepwalkers are zoning in on him. He might be their saviour, or his music might be their damnation...From the acclaimed author of Dark Star comes a literary fantasy like no other.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Unsung Stories
• Date de parution: 16 janvier 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781907389405
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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Winter by Dan Grace
The Bearer of Grievances by Joseph McKinley
The Speckled God by Marc Joan
The Dancer by Rab Ferguson
Pseudotooth by Verity Holloway
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The Best of Unsung Shorts
Metronome
Oliver Langmead
Published by Unsung Stories, an imprint of Red Squirrel Publishing "Red Squirrel" is a registered trademark of Shoreditch Media Limited
Red Squirrel Publishing Suite 235, 15 Ingestre Place, London W1F 0JH, United Kingdom
www.unsungstories.co.uk
First edition published in 2017
© 2017 Oliver Langmead
Oliver Langmead has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work
This book is a work of fiction. All the events and characters portrayed in this book are fictional and any similarities to persons, alive or deceased, is coincidental.

Cover Artwork © 2017 Alex Andreyev Interior Illustrations © 2017 Darren Kerrigan
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-907389-39-9 ePub ISBN: 978-1-907389-40-5
Editors: George Sandison and Gary Budden Copy Editor: Rob Clark Proofreader: Katherine Stephen Designer: Martin Cox Publisher: Henry Dillon
For Dad
Part One
The Doors Between Dreams

Awake
There is a painting of a fishing boat at sea on the common room wall, and if I stand close enough, I can just about make out the sailors. The artist put a lot of effort into things like the froth of the waves, and the billowing sails, and even the texture of the clouds, all so vividly captured that sometimes I imagine I can smell the salt coming off the canvas. But the sailors bother me. They are lazy matchstick lines, with black blobs for heads, and no sailor I ever knew was so two-dimensional. It is as if the artist has missed the entire point of the piece.
‘Dreaming again, Manderlay?’
Valentine is proud of his new slippers. They let him sneak up on people.
I turn to see him. ‘One day, you’re going to give me a heart attack.’
Though bent-backed to the point of being crooked, and made squinting by the fact of his glass eye, Valentine is still a proud military man. Something in the curl of his bushy grey moustache, perhaps, and the way I know he insists on wearing green. I am aware that, on more than one occasion, he has been made to remove medals from the front of his dressing gown. Valentine grins a grin made simultaneously ugly and silly by his false teeth. ‘Missing the waves, eh?’
‘Something like that.’
He draws in closer beside me, as if he is admiring the painting as well.
‘Meet you out back,’ he mutters, out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Got some contraband.’
The two of us shuffle towards the back door.
Right now, the common room is full of broken folk like us, who have been deemed by higher powers – our families, mostly – of being incapable of living without carers. There is an almost funereal air to the place, as if mortality is something tangible here. There is the clatter of Connect 4 pieces, and the shuffle of cards, and the murmur of idle recollection as a dozen pensioners slowly fade from the world.
However… Once a week, on Fridays, this room takes on a different atmosphere. At precisely half past eleven at night, a small group of us sneak down from our rooms and gamble in the light of a lamp stolen from the storage room. We play poker, and bet whatever it is that we have to bet: coins, and stationery, and all manner of marbles and trinkets. I once saw Valentine try to bet his glass eye.
The game is run by one of our fellow pensioners, lovingly dubbed Island Pete because he insists that he once owned an island. He also insists that he lost it to a wealthy baron playing blackjack on a steamboat docked in Glasgow.
‘So… where is this island of yours?’ I ask, sometimes.
Island Pete will waft his hand of cards vaguely around. ‘Tropical,’ he replies, as if that is an answer.
Valentine and I have a side bet going about whether or not he is telling the truth about his island. And being the sentimental old fool that I am, I have wagered that one day Island Pete will arrive at our weekly poker game waving some kind of deed, or an ancient photograph of him on his island, and prove all the sceptics wrong.
Today is Wednesday and the home is already suffering from its weekly paper-clip drought, as we few gamblers seek out tokens with which to place bets. I am looking forward to Friday. Of course, because of my hands I am unable to hold my cards steady when we play, so Valentine lifts them up for me, and I know that the crafty old fool uses this opportunity to cheat whenever he is able, but this does nothing to deter me from playing. Indeed, I rather think that without Valentine, and Island Pete, and all the rest, I would have run away from this place by now.
There is a nurse on duty at the back door, absorbed in a well-thumbed novel, and Valentine loudly proclaims that he wishes to stretch his legs outside as we pass her by. ‘Oh, how they ache!’ he moans, theatrically.
There are quite a few folk in the garden, enjoying the late summer. Some sit nattering and knitting in that way which makes them look like caricatures of the elderly – balls of wool at their feet – and others kneel at the edge of the grass, digging with trowels and planting bulbs. Valentine navigates us a route around all this outdoor industry to the very back of the place, where there is a hidden veranda half in shadow. There, he quickly patrols the perimeter to make certain that we are alone.
I settle down on a bench. ‘What have you done?’ I ask him.
Valentine raises his storm-cloud eyebrows mischievously, before drawing a pair of lollipops out from beneath his robe. ‘Strictly between you and me,’ he says. ‘Nearly half an hour of reconnaissance for these. That chap at the front desk is a stickler, and I was running out of excuses to be there.’ Licking his lips, he unwraps the first. ‘A dashing shame to waste these on the kids, eh?’
I raise my hand to accept the contraband, but my fingers refuse to grip.
Seeing my struggle, Valentine is kind enough to simply pop the sweet straight into my mouth. Then, he lowers his bones onto the bench beside me, sucking industriously at his own lollipop and eyeing me up. ‘What’s that, then?’ He jabs his lollipop in the direction of the letter sticking out of my shirt pocket. I am quite certain that Valentine has the sharpest eye in our home – as if, when he lost one, the other became twice as powerful.
I lift my aching hand to pat the folded paper there. ‘A cheque,’ I tell him.
The letter from my old record label genuinely surprised me when it arrived this morning. I am quite used to mail from my daughter, and the occasional bit of mail from the bank, as well as news of another death among those I used to sail with. But mail from my record label is quite unheard of. After all, I have not released anything new in nearly a decade now.
‘Won the lottery, have you?’ asks Valentine.
‘Not quite,’ I tell him, rolling the lollipop around in my mouth. In fact, the cheque is for 40 pence, and by my calculations, this means that over the past six months I have sold a grand total of one album. Still, the cheque is cause for celebration, because someone out there is actually still listening to my music. I do not think that I will ever cash the cheque. Instead, I will save it, and place it upon the mantelpiece in my small apartment upstairs, beside the picture of my daughter, Samantha, and my grandson, George, from the last time they came to visit.
‘I sold a CD,’ I tell Valentine.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ says the old soldier, chuckling, ‘that’s bloody marvellous. Well done, Manderlay, you old codger.’ He raises his lollipop into the air. ‘A toast! To whichever fool out there stumbled across your album and actually bothered to pick it up. May their ears survive the onslaught of your terrible songs!’ He laughs loud, but so do I, and we two share a long moment of peaceful reflection at the bottom of the garden, sucking on our illicit sweets and watching the trails of planes as they fly through the blue sky.
Eventually, there is a change in the direction of the wind, and a chill in the air. I pull my old threadbare dressing gown closer around my shoulders. And perhaps it is the chatter I can hear from the garden beyond, or perhaps some wisp of smoke from somewhere outside the garden, which reminds me. But it is then that I remember my dream.
I turn to Valentine, rolling the lollipop around in my mouth.
‘I had the most peculiar dream last night,’ I tell him. * I dreamed of the time I wandered the shipyards of Gothenburg.
It was midway through a voyage I remember well, because we were under the command of Captain Radley, who was a good man when he was drunk and a tyrant when he was sober. That whole journey through Europe, delivering cargo from port to distant port, was an unforgettable experience. Thankfully, as we pulled into Gothenburg, Radley was as drunk as a lord, and gave everyone on deck a day’s shore leave.
I had taken it upon myself to leave the rest of the crew to their drinking and explore the port-side. I remember that afternoon clearly, because of the peculiar taste of the tobacco I was smoking: a fresh blend from Indonesia with a sharp kick to it, which I have never been able to find again.
It felt good, being so young. It felt great. I could flex my hands as easily as a man without swollen joints, and the tattoos on my arms looked close to fresh. There was the serpent and rope coiled around my shoulder, still clear, and the dozen white sails of the galleon over my heart, still seaworthy, and the small heart on my wrist for Lily, the clearest of all.
With the sun about to drop behind the hills of Gothenburg, everyone at the docks was working harder than ever. I walked through the ribbed shells of gigantic housings, dappled with lowlight