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I froze with my chopsticks halfway to my mouth, the tiny corpse of a tempura-battered baby squid clutched precariously between them,
“Eat your baby tentacle monsters before they go cold.”
I drop the camera, scream, and reflexively try to eat her soul. Ever got that sensation when you bit into a pitted olive and discovered a stone? Keep a grip on that feeling. Now imagine that instead of doing it with your teeth, you just did it with your brain.
wunch
The immediate nature of the teachable moment for little old twenty-something me was, as a drunken friend of mine questionably phrased it sometime later, “Do not stick your dick in the bad crazy.”
The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up. And we are now entering stage three.
Lockhart gives his assent, then sends me a quelling look. “Mr. Howard, if you’d be so good as to wait in the quiet corner?” he asks. It’s an order disguised as a request. I stand up and shuffle over to the corner and stand facing the wall. All the sounds from behind me are abruptly muffled, as if a great distance away. Most of our meeting rooms are fitted with these cones of silence, for just this sort of situation:
Nerd with social deficit disorder: give him time to work it out for himself, or some such. “She was just using me as a scratching post and chew-toy? Well, shit!”
The older parts of Highgate Cemetery are preserved as woodland these days, overgrown with ivy-clad sycamore and ash trees, limestone and marble walls of gape-mouthed crypts gently aging into the landscape.
antenatal
“Vampire blancmange.”
“Well, as an agency tasked with providing intelligence and countermeasures against paranormal threats, obviously we take a keen interest in computational demonology, inductive oneiromantic ontology, and the geometry of Riemannian manifolds, to say nothing of the applications of Kolmogorov complexity theory to topological . . .”
“Don’t be silly, Bob, everyone knows vampires don’t exist.”
There’s a thudding sound behind me: I whip round in a hurry and am confronted by a mad, black-eyed stare from atop the kitchen table. “Hey, cat, what are you doing there? Get down—” Spooky levitates as if a poltergeist has just grabbed her. She comes down on top of the kitchen unit, a good two meters away, then leaps again, for the precarious gap between the top of the storage unit and the ceiling. “Oh for fuck’s sake—” I pause. Why the hell am I talking to a cat?
After about half an hour I realize there’s an unaccustomed warmth on my lap. And it’s buzzing. This perplexes me for a few seconds, until I realize what it is. Dammit, I’ve caught lap fungus!
So it’s off to the dojo I go-go, dammit. (Where I am signed off as somewhere between “cannon fodder” and “zombie bait,” but that’s another story.)
spaghetti bolognese,
jamais vu.
Funny: whatever killed Angleton will probably make short work of me. So she won’t even get to yell at me for getting myself killed—
I’ve lost co-workers and, dare I say it, friends tonight. To start with: Howe. Well no, he wasn’t a friend. But I’ve ridden along with him a number of times, from that crazy hole in reality that opened in Amsterdam to training sessions on Dartmoor. He’s helped pull my nuts out of the fire more than once. Now he’s gone, just a smelly stain on my damaged-beyond-cleaning Google tee shirt to remember him by. And my life is smaller as a result.
Even if I wasn’t married, I don’t think I could sleep with her now. Something in the back of my head thinks she’s the sort of thing I eat.
