The Cosmic Horror

So , I write a bit. I have never had anything published, but it’s not for want of trying , poetry, horror stories , short stories about my childhood, local history articles,  you name it, I've done it for years!

Murray's the name, writing's my game!

A game, that's what it’s all been, my whole life, and here I am , sixty-odd, with nothing tangible to show for it, no prizes, no medals, no trophies.

I was never a Yuppie or avaricious or anything like that, I was always happy to get by on what money I had, thinking that I would become ‘someone’ one day, through my writing.

I played ‘the game’ , dutifully turned up for work day in day out for years, saying 'Yes sir, no sir'  and doing what I was told all the time, and 'knowing my place' as my old mother used to say.

      That's how it was back in those days, in the early 1980's when the world was a hugely different place.Didn't we all think that fame would take us away from the drudgery of the workplace, or even the winning of the football pools in those days before the National Lottery was invented?

     I never found love either, I didn’t look hard enough, I didn’t have any self-esteem, I always just got on with life, there was just me , call me selfish or solipsistic if you will. After I turned forty or so,  my family stopped asking when I was getting married, as it was obvious that I was not the marrying kind. I must admit , I always found the idea of being in relationships a bit cringeworthy, being referenced as ‘we’, or ‘us’ wasn’t for me, in my mind  I was a loner, an outsider, whatever, it sounded good if you were a writer like me,  like Lovecraft, Camus or Dostoyevsky , the lot of us!

     Anyway, I have to tell you,I bought the toy machine gun at a car boot sale the other day. It filled me with nostalgia for my long-gone youth back in the  early'70s when we played war games in the streets of our council estates. We hid behind hedges and ambushed those in the rival 'armies', hedges and bushes became barricades and trenches to our young imaginations. When we were 'shot', we would roll over and die, or writhe around as if in pain before flopping down on the ground and playing dead.

My purchase of the gun was not something  I have taken lightly, I plan to hold up the newsagents on the corner of my street and shake up the owner of the place. He's a nasty piece of work, that Joe Smith, and he deserves some bad luck, I've certainly had my share of bad luck over the years, so wouldn't it be nice to pass on the bad luck baton to someone else?

     He nicked one of my story ideas years ago and made a packet off the back of it. My Horror story, he even used my title, ‘The Cosmic Horror,’ and he said it was about a fictional version of someone he knew in his youth, me presumably?

After years of anonymity, I crave the limelight, and what better way to do that than getting your picture in the newspaper, or even reported or photographed by a passing witness , and posted online for all the world to see.

I won't be disgracing my family -I'm the only one left, the last man standing.

Although I’m an older man, I still love the rock music , the heavy metal of the ‘seventies and ‘eighties, I suppose I look a bit like the stereotypical image of the ageing rocker, with my long grey hair in a ponytail, my goatee beard, and of course , my ancient biker jacket bought from a long-closed city store. Some folks think I look like a tramp, a down and out, I’ve been called all sorts by kids in the streets, who have filmed me on their I-Phones , as if I were someone famous , notorious or just an easy target,   but I don’t really care much these days about what people say.

     I play my music loud in my little flat, ‘The Garret’ I call it, the neighbours often complain, and the police have been called countless times, I have been cautioned once, like I care.

Judas Priest’s ‘Breaking the Law’ is my favourite song, from  back in1980,  the lyrics speak to me as much as they did when I was seventeen, even at my advanced age.

I fondly remember seeing  ‘Priest in concert back in 1980, and it  was one of my favourite concerts ever, the support band was Iron Maiden, another top rock band in my book, but I digress as I always do.

The singer’s lyrics  could have been voicing my own thoughts then and now, but I was never one to step out of line, to disobey the rules or even contemplate such a thing, until now that is.

     My attempts at writing were never well received, I’m not sure why, but if I’m honest, I was never any good at taking criticism, as I always believed that I was right, that’s why I have never got on with people. It’s amazing what old age and the hindsight it brings can do!

I remember in 1984 , when I bought my first Lovecraft book, ‘At The Mountains of Madness and Other Stories’, my folks freaked out , wondering what sort of a son they had raised, I would be quoting to them from the book , wittering on about  ‘dark entities’, ‘shoggoths’, ‘the eyes in darkness’ and the like, which my mum, a devout Christian, frowned upon. My dad shook his head and  looked at me askance at the mention of the name ‘Lovecraft,’ thinking it was something pornographic, or ‘dodgy.’

I liked the verbose flights of  description in the writing, I won’t quote from them verbatim,  but suffice to say, H.P’s writing made me, as a 21 year old,  want to write my own scary stories of many tentacled beasts and monsters, which helped me reconnect with my childhood interests of all things frightening, and the pictures I used to draw of monsters and ghosts. I won a prize for a monster painting when I was 9 ,  in a Dr Who themed competition. It was a portrait of the creature I saw in my bedroom mirror, a beast with many arms and eyes, lurking behind my reflection. According to my school reports of the time, I was ‘ an imaginative child, who showed an aptitude for reading and English from an early age.’

      I was twelve when I found the book ‘The Cosmic Horror,’ in an old lean to shed near to my cousin’s house in a village outside Aberdeen. It had a battered leather cover, speckled with what I thought was mould,  and it looked to have been written in old fashioned ‘cursive’ writing, in an ink pen, a quill, it looked ancient, like one of those Books of Days or Kells or whatever. I was visiting Richard, my cousin, and hid this grubby old book under my jumper, wiping all the dirt from it. My aunt, a stern teacher who never seemed to switch off from ‘work mode’, scolded me for keeping rubbish like this, but I knew better in my 12 year old mind, she had all her Penguin Classics in her bookcase and thought she was something special, but I had found ‘The Cosmic Horror’, which I thought might be what I was looking for in my dull schoolboy life.

     It was in 1984, when inspired by  the books I had read since school, Stephen King, Lovecraft, Bram Stoker,  Jack Kerouac and George Orwell, especially the horror ones, I started writing , in secret at first, but once I realised that I could actually write stories, I showed then to  a couple of my school friends I still kept in touch with. They were met with sniggers and derision, so I was a bit discouraged, but one friend, Joe Smith,  was interested . I had never been great friends with him at school, but we worked in the same supermarket,  so I knew him fairly well. I knew he was ‘into’ horror books and movies, so we had that in common at least, and we had the odd pint of lager in the local pub every Friday night.

     One day when I was raking about in the attic of the family home , on the pretence of assisting my Dad. Rooting about in a battered old  box, I found ‘The Cosmic Horror’, the faded pages with its cursive writing, I never understood the language it was written in, it wasn’t Gaelic or Latin, to be honest, it looked incomprehensible, but the epigraph and book’s title were written in English. I spoke to Joe about this at the supermarket, and he suggested like it might be something like the ‘Necronomicon’, a book we had both read about in Lovecraft’s stories, a grimoire, a book of spells, a book not to be ‘messed with’ in the terms of our own times. I could base a story on it, set in the present day, it was worth a try. It would make a change from my vampire stories set in my old school, or ghosts haunting the church I attended as a child, which, worked as stories, but weren’t frightening at all. Maybe this one would be.

So, I wrote the story, ‘The Cosmic Horror’ about a boy who finds a mysterious book written in strange hieroglyphics, which brings bad luck to all who come into contact with it. It wasn’t really scary, but I wrote it. I think I still have a copy somewhere in my garret.

Meanwhile , Joe came back to me saying that he couldn’t come up with anything, his ‘muse’ had deserted him, as he said. Life went on as it had before, for a few months more, we stacked shelves in the supermarket, maybe we could escape that place for a better job, maybe one day.

One day, Joe came in to say that he was resigning . He was going to London to ‘be a writer,’ as quick as that. He hadn’t wanted to tell me , or so he said. He too had written a story called ‘The Cosmic Horror’ , based on the old book I found back in the day. He had won a competition, and this had brought him to the notice of a publishing company in London who were offering him a book deal for five novels based on ‘The Cosmic Horror’, he was being hailed as ‘The New Lovecraft’, and ‘The Next Clive Barker’ by various publications and critics down south, or so he said.

     I was annoyed at him to say the least, I was never the most demonstrative of people, my parents always told me to ‘keep a dignified silence’ in time of annoyance, so I shook him by the hand,  quietly wished him good luck, and reminded him to remember his friends in Aberdeen, when he was living the high life in London.

I watched him leave the manager’s office as I returned to my stacking shelves of soup cans, the mindlessness of this work hitting home to me.

I continued my life of drudgery, writing my stories, reading my books for inspiration, keeping to myself, ‘a poet and a  dreamer’ one of my colleagues in  the Civil Service called me. I liked that.

     My fortunes never improved, bad luck and trouble were my only friends, like the blues song, ‘Born Under a Bad Sign ‘says. I went down to London in the early part of the century to see Joe, hoping to mend fences with him, but ending up with an injunction against me. Meanwhile, the image of the monster from my childhood drawing  , and ‘The Cosmic Horror’ continued to haunt me. I turned to drink briefly, but didn’t want to end up on the streets , a down and out, so I stopped once I returned to Scotland. My writing kept me going, playing the game, you know the thing.

Time passed, I went back to Aberdeen and so did Joe, family people died, life went on.

All this came back to me as if it were yesterday.

I wonder if all my bad luck in Life was because of the old book  that I found out by Cousin Richard’s. Was it my upbringing, the fact that my face never fitted no matter what I said or did, was it that I was not a kid who ‘showed off’ in class? Or was it the monster in the mirror, the beast with many arms and eyes ,  the thing I had based my prize-winning Dr Who monster drawing on?

     So, I’m sitting outside Smith’s newsagent, there’s just me and a couple of black clad kids shouting at I-Phones. It’s getting cold and dark out here, it’s getting on for late October. The moon is gibbous above us, and the autumn trees paint eldritch shadows against the night sky, I think this and smirk to myself, as it sounds like a Lovecraftian description, maybe I am becoming like him, such has been my fixation with his work.

I feel the gun in the inside pocket of my parka, if I approach Joe, I wonder if he’ll recognise me. Maybe if I call him ‘Joey,’ he will realise who it is , as that’s what we called him at the supermarket when we took the piss out of him.

I’m hearing a song in my head , what I call my ‘internal jukebox’,  it’s the cracked , nicotine hoarsened voice of Lemmy Kilmister, singing about getting ‘Sweet Revenge’ , saying that he can almost taste it, a classic from Motorhead’s best album, which I still play to annoy the neighbours. I walk into the shop’s doorway. I point the gun at ‘Joey,’ and sternly accuse him of stealing my story, he looks at me as if I am mad.

It’s at this point I see the reflection of the monster, the beast with many arms and eyes, staring evilly back at me , its mouths open as if to say something.

It holds something in one of its many arms, it’s a tattered leathery looking thing.

 A few pages fall from it , and I see the title page -‘The Cosmic Horror,’ and more pages fall from it and weirdly begin to ignite, forming a small fire on the shop floor which looks to be spreading.

Then, the monster is gone, I am inside the shop.

 Joey is lying on the floor, struggling to breath, like a child playing a war game years ago in the council estates, the only difference being is that he is not acting.

I smell smoke.

Then I hear the sirens.