Remembrance Day – Part One (Deleted Stories)

Water drip-drop-dripped upon his crinkled forehead , some rolling off and spilling onto his left eyelash which woke him up and then he saw that the ceiling was leaking and that it had formed a large damp patch, the shape of Australia, in the wall paper above him.

It was a relief to know the ceiling was leaking and that he was just in his own dear little house in modern day Rixton Avenue, not in one of the inhospitable times and places that his historical nightmares took him to.

It had been a particularly terrifying nightmare that night and as real as any of his life experiences. No wooly mammoths this time or whistling doodle bugs overhead but something much worse he thought.

He’d been chained up to a stone seat of judgement by heavy iron chains that grated against the stone; the great, ornately decorated marble walled hall of judgement all around him and, infront of him, the red robed and bloody handed cardinals of the holy inquisition with scowling mouths and grim faces, throwing questions at him while sounds of horror and hopelessness drifted up from prison cells below.

“There’s no way that it could have been real”, he reassured himself, “It is the year 3636 and there
is no Spanish Inquisition in this time”.

Perhaps it was just the fear of the Mentist exam, he thought, that’s all it was but he had nothing to fear, surely; a good, clean, loyal and patriotic citizen like him and, according to the E-letter, it was nothing more than a routine check-up, although, hadn’t he had a routine check-up just a week
previously? Why were they calling him for another one so soon?

The clock on the wall seemed peculiarly loud all of a sudden like the tapping of a hammer and chisel, he thought, like the sound of Rodin’s hammer and chisel as he’d carved “Francesca da Rimini”.

“My friend. You watch too many of those history documentaries”, said his neighbour, Mr Grimaldi, “You should try watching the Soaps. They’re good for washing your brain, those Soaps”.

“But I want to understand my nightmares”, Herbert had told him, “They keep taking me back in time. Why only back in time? I feel like they’re trying to communicate something to me. Something about here and now”.

Herbert opened an umbrella and selotaped it to his bed post. He would get someone out of the yellow pages to fix his leaky ceiling in the morning, after the mentists appointment.

Sandman slipping
through the hourglass,
Herbert slept and dreamed deeply;
leaping between sepia scenes;
seeing mushrooms shatter cities
and green forests explode from seedlings;
roaming amongst Neanderthals;
floating with Astronauts;
drifting on a stormy sea of constant changes;
seeing people become ghosts;
coming through fire,flood,famine, war,poverty and plague;
love;birth;hope; always moving on.