D. F. Lewis

Entry Four HERE. --------------------------- ENTRY FIVE These are five entry doors from which to choose for anyone seeking a reality where death is fictitious. The first entry, as you can see, bears the symbol of a frothing tankard of real ale, the second some art by William Blake infiltrated by a Lovecraftian monster, the third a thumbnail you may recognise as a Midnight Child with a large ligottum around its neck, the fourth a photograph of someone you will definitely recognise as the new President being sworn into office by a skilful interlocutor, the fifth a written notice that starts by explaining the purpose of the overall choice. The notice does not explain the basis of choice or that there is only the single chance of...

The clown was essentially white-costumed, even given the black hemispherical hat, the broken golden-hoop large enough to be a wide belt or sash, black slip-on shoes, bleached face containing tiny red lips and drooping black eyes .... sitting upon a huge domed mushroom mound .... awaiting the promised arrival of a blue tree embedded within a solid glass cone. Surely, a snow-globe to shake would have been better to amuse the clown or to amuse the children who might also arrive soon for Christmas – or, better still, another clown as company, bearing in mind the children were not promised to arrive at all. A smile threatened to shatter the real face the clown was wearing as a frozen mask. Thoughts of sadness often made clowns smile and...

Below is the last posting of a DFL story in this folder until 2009. I try to post stories here that carry at least a Ligotti theme or two. However, I do not consider myself generally to write *like* Ligotti, although I have been a significant fan of his work since the late eighties. The story below was first published on the LOST PAGES website in 2005, but this website is now defunct as far as I can see. ========================== WHY BEHIND THE FENCE? When I took the house, near the city airport, I did not quite expect the future to blot out any memory of why I decided to take it in the first place. Whether the family I called my own was always my own, I suppose now has taken on a blinding irrelevancy, bearing in mind the events I...

First published 'Connections' 1999 "I have a washing-machine with several programmes but I only ever use one of them," she said aloud. The statement was crazy, she feared. There was no possible excuse for it. She spoke to nobody. The house was semi-detached, the room was dark, the clock ticked ponderously - the window faded into dusk. Sadie was Sadie. Sadie, sadly, was not happy. Loneliness had dogged Sadie for most of her life but, tonight, it used the brute force of silence to deepen a dark grip. Yet, paradoxically, the silence was so there, so up-front, so damn tangible, it actually kept her company. Never before it had held sway like a nothing so nothing it was something. It conjured up another person sitting slightly...

Deleted

Written today and first published here. Mind The Gap by DF Lewis Snap! When a photograph was taken of the puppet it seemed fleetingly to become a natural human being as it posed for posterity. Before and after this split second gap of secondhand time during which the puppet was thus exposed, it had strutted stiltedly upon its strings proud of its own potential ability or eventual achievement to fool a camera with a real human gap between two puppet minds. Hadrian loved his puppet. He had been told by his Mum that it was much older than him. It felt to him better than any imaginary friend even though imaginary friends were often more flexible in what you could do with them than toys (such as puppets) were. But Hadrian’s puppet was...

YET OTHERS by DF Lewis Published 'Purple Patch' 1991 He ushered the walking wounded, as well as the dead, into the field chapel. Better under a roof (if ramshackle) than the bomb-laden sky, he thought. Taking example from a dream he once saw, he knelt before the rude cross and mumbled inanities under his breath. The rest followed suit, where they were able. Some relinquished their crutches, others had already fallen off their stilts, yet others cut their own strings. The chapel's roof had not been conducive to the puppet-master's continued vigilance, the strings having been stretched at right angles under the door, others slipping through the gaps in the makeshift roof, yet others tangling up in games of blind cats'...

by DF Lewis Written today and first published here: When Simon saw the secret house he knew there was a key to it somewhere. The map hadn’t shown any properties at all in the vicinity, but perhaps it wasn’t a map that would have shown them even if there had been any properties to show. He wondered why he had bothered to bring the map, as he hadn’t really been following it. Simon had simply been following his nose – shorthand for misguided instinct, and sometimes one needed a misguided instinct to fetch up anywhere at all one wanted to be. Indirect meant direct, when one least expected it. Simon smiled. This was the house he had been seeking all his life. He shrugged the rucksack to a hopefully more comfortable position on his...

Published in the THE LAST BALCONY 2012

First published in 'Not Dead But Dreaming' 1996 (edited by Lara Haynes) At the beginning was the graveyard: a place that normally would have served better as an ending. HP Lovecraft lost his innocence in that lakeside garden of death. Yet death was not death until he created the death in death simply by his act in life ... like bait. And yes, of course, he was fully aware that a graveyard was the most appropriate venue for wooing death; but since he knew more about death’s intentions than a man had any right to know, what alternative had he other than to sneak out one night, ensuring that the garden gate’s going didn’t sound? Only a graveyard’s moonful darkness, in the end, could extend death’s possibilities. Death was no easy target...

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

COUNTER TENOR First published in 'Skeleton Girls' 1995 The angel crept into my prayers – to assist their passage upwards, it said. “May the angel in this prayer carry my words further than they otherwise would reach,” I intoned, upon realising that the angel was present in the meaning, if not the voice. But then, as I continued, even the timbre changed to a genderless falsetto, to such an extent that I felt I was actually upon the point of becoming the angel. I knew that, if God didn’t listen to His angels, He’d listen to nobody. So I pursued my course of cross-over invocation, despite the arrival of Susie – whose visit I must have expected before becoming the angel. “Are you allright, George?” she asked, plonking a bottle of red...

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

SOLEMN Bournemouth contained the unemotional anemone. The flower bloomed – even though I wasn’t even sure if anemones bloomed at all – towards Bournemouth’s sea front, quite near its pier. Or it may have been Alum Chine, a salubriously peripheral area of Bournemouth with guest houses and neatly manicured lawns. A short springy bridge in Alum Chine stretched over a cultivated gorge where the unemotional anemone was thought to thrive according to hearsay. Could there have been more than one unemotional anemone? I ever discovered despair even though I had searched the world for happiness. I knew all along that I would never find happiness, thus making it certain that despair would flourish. Meanwhile, I hoped that the consequent...

“Time?” I repeated. “The time, please,” answered the questioner. I now knew the nature of the question he needed me to answer and, taking my ungloved hand from its pocket, I glanced at the wrist, feeling myself intent on more than just cracking the old schoolboy joke (“Two hairs past the tick”); I felt myself guided by the assumption of memory that I was wearing a watch where, in truth, I wasn’t. The man was a stranger. Strangers always asked me the time. This stranger was no exception, fulfilling the role of making me his own stranger (he always asked strangers the time rather than wait for them to ask him), creating from me, therefore, the necessary stranger to be encountered upon his own constitutional that chilly Spring evening...

Deleted 21.4.2010 Please see: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/weirdtongue__novella.htm

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)