Nigel Long


Magnetic North

Broken-toothed and hollow, the ticket-collector sits under uncertain skies. “Can’t come in here without the proper authorisation, sonny,” he says, grinning up at me from inside his shabby wooden booth. He spits a stream of tobacco juice. “Reverse the wind and black snow’ll blow in from the south.”

It grows cold, but no one seems to know why. Faded 8mm footage of my mother’s wedding is projected onto a makeshift screen of corrugated iron, her face sliding in and out of the shadow. Ice forms on my bed. There are lumps of coal in my pillow. Someone coughs behind me in the queue. “Why, I oughta…”

King Moth arrives on the next train, his carriage covered in cobwebs. They hold a firework display on the platform in his honour, but the Mayor’s nervous about meeting him: “He doesn’t, y’know, sting, does he?” Young buck-toothed assistant smiles cheerily, “No, boss. It’s not real. He’s just an actor.”

So they all go for coffee together in some run-down diner in the early 1950s. “This is fucking delicious,” says the Mayor, eating cheesecake. “What’s it called again?” King Moth looks around the room nervously with his blank compound eyes. The red moulded plastic chairs and the simian waitress are a giveaway. “The whole thing’s a set-up!” A taped explosion plays loudly over the tannoy.

Unable to concentrate, I put down my newspaper. I have been in denial, I realise that now. My mother was a moth and I need to come to terms with this. I remember I touched her once and she winced, pale clouds of blue powder falling from her skin. She slept all day on the ceiling, only emerging in the oppressive, autumnal gloom of late afternoon. The film of her wedding was obviously an elaborate fake. As a small boy, I was often in trouble.

“The further north you go, the sicker you get. Something to do with the magnetics, I guess,” says the ticket-collector, his rheumy, almost colourless eyes lost within their own sockets. All the passengers are unwell now. They retch half-heartedly and look out the train’s windows, pale and listless, at the unremarkable landscape that crawls past outside. Overwhelmed by nausea, I stagger to the rest-room, but somehow fall from the train. A farmer finds me lying in the black snow at the foot of the embankment. He rolls me over and looks down at me, almost kindly, as the sun rises over his shoulder. “Gosh, you sure look like your pa,” he says and switches out the light.

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Lipstick Mushrooms in the Church of Lice

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Nigel Long aka Kek-W lives and works in Somerset, deep in the dark, mythic heart of England’s West County. A music journalist and alt.culture obsessive, he writes regular features for the ink and electronic editions of UK magazines such as FACT and Dazed & Confused. He is also a long-term contributor for the UK weekly comic 2000AD. Recent short stories have appeared in the Chimeraworld #4 and Nemonymous Seven: Zencore paperback anthologies. He is currently preparing a mainstream Fantasy novel for a UK publisher. He blogs here.


 
 
 
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