THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK - Strange devices, curious gadgets and other weird contraptions

"Inventions" by D. F. Lewis

His presence was doubtless intended to cheer Doone up – but with doctors so busy and most hospital visitors being patients themselves, any old Tom, Dick or Harry was sent with a soggy bunch of grapes. Never a Florence Nightingale. Nor an angel with a shining face. A buxom nurse hurriedly passed through, her hands dripping with something that looked like human remains.

"It's a bundle of laughs being here, eh?" suggested the hospital visitor.

Doone scowled, but the visitor's reaction confirmed that Doone had not managed to scowl at all, but simply smiled.

"You can smile, but me and my wife Tessa have been put through the hoop recently..." the visitor said. He twirled a finger above his head, as if to demonstrate the godawful hoop to which he referred.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

Incredibly, Doone was listening to the visitor's troubles, whilst the intention was surely vice versa. But listening didn't necessarily change anything.

"Yes, me and Tessa, we've been having a spot of trouble in the waterworks area," the visitor continued.

"Oh dear, that must have been awkward."

"They got us both in adjoining beds separated only by a discreet curtain."

"I know the sort," Doone said.

Indeed, Doone had noticed that the hospital had curtains all over the place – presumably to spare blushes. One day, Doone would invent curtains which actually came together and did not gape upon the patient's most private moments of ablution and evacuation. And then he imagined a scene where hospital porters pushed contraptions between the beds like sparkling beach-hut confessionals on wheels. But if the patient was really noisy, there would be double-glazed versions with heavy velvet drapes.

"Well, one day," said the visitor, breaking the track of Doone's future daydream, "they replaced the floral curtain on runners with a glass wall, one with a light frosting, so they only needed a net-curtain."

Somehow, the visitor had inadvertently confirmed Doone's as yet unformulated invention. Doone nodded, although, of course, he was in two minds as to the visitor's sanity. Looking at the visitor's nether region, Doone could see that the visitor himself must have recently undergone an operation. Whatever the case, the visitor had actually made Doone believe in suffering-windows and privacy partitions. False memories played fast and loose with Doone's future belief-system.

The visitor paid no regard to Doone's condition. Did he not know Doone was in for schizophrenia as well as for a wisdom tooth?

The visitor continued undeterred: "Tessa, you see, had a swollen tongue and I had a permanently swollen..."

"Yeah, and I've got a splitting pain in my head," Doone interrupted.

And Doone abruptly pulled down the four-poster's double-layered leather blind over the bright shining face. But Doone could still hear the blighter. Doone hoped there would be sound-proofing in Heaven – and no bloody angels.

But, later, there was a half-hearted attempt by an angel to contact Doone, an attempt that failed abysmally, to such an extent that Doone ended up himself trying to to re-establish contact with the alien intelligence (if not an intelligent alien) – only to discover he was on a crossed-line with a lady called Tessa. She shut the hardback, having riffled through its pages in search of its end, picked out the can from the flip-top and listened. She being religious thought Doone was one of God's messenger-angels. She was not sufficiently religious to have full faith in the existence of God Himself, so an agent, as she assumed Doone to be, was, presumably, more believeable than the principal.

"Wishful thinking if you think a message from me is a message from God," Doone said. Doone tried to conceal the noise of the recognisable traffic outside by cupping his mouthpiece nearer to what it was a piece of.

"Who are you, then? A salesman? Or one of those dirty, filthy..."

"I assure you, Tessa, I'm not any of those things – we must be at crossed purposes..."

She took her ear away, thankful that Doone was at the other end of a line rather than directly there. She had evidently abandoned him to the ranks of the cranks, without herself questioning Doone's knowledge of her name. He wondered how he had managed to cross wavelengths with Tessa. He could not possibly believe that their mind-entwined contact had been at either extreme of a taut wire stretched between two hole-punched bases of tin-cans now empty of their runny baked beans or chunky soup: a telegraphic device, if rudimentary, that always seemed to work, if only during earth-bound childhoods. Another one of Doone's inventions. An early one, perhaps.

It was a nonsensical statement to claim that a complete stranger like Doone was actually sitting just outside Tessa's kitchen door, where she sat book-browsing; a nonsensical statement that made less nonsense than saying Doone wasn't, because Doone was.

Doone then heard a key go. This was someone, he assumed, who had more right to be in Tessa's house than a complete stranger: her husband, fresh from hospital-visiting, doffing his over-things in the hall so as to enter the chintzy parlour with a petal-based cone of forgiving flowers – or, perhaps, wanting-to-be-forgiven flowers. Only to find that Tessa wasn't there. She was in the kitchen, consigning the unspeakably jagged-mouthed baked bean can back into the flip-top waste-bin – wherein Doone heard the residue of muck resettle around its restored constituent: heard it as if it was inside his head.

There followed a further half-hearted attempt to contact Doone – once more failing totally. He needed to resort to guesswork, he guessed, to pinpoint his avenue out of Tessa's kitchen, a place which, for all he knew, had become the sole extent of the universe.

He watched helplessly as the strangest stranger possible in the guise of her husband beat Tessa to a tomato puree as punishment for talking not rubbish but to rubbish. Meanwhile, with this particular God's message undelivered, Doone returned Planetside to initiate another one. Indeed, it is said that the mad are saner than the sane – which makes them mad indeed. That trite tale of a one-eyed man in the country of the blind told of a situation which must have sent the sanest man mad, him seeing things which nobody else could see. Well, Doone was now very much in that position.

Now out of hospital, and consigned to his own devices, Doone was the only person in the world who had actually seen the mad monster that lurked invisibly at the back of everybody's mind – a sure sign of severe sanity. And he knew that part of town down by the Sludgy River, near the Farmer's Arms, with a mind sufficiently pliable to picture Wilson Arches where the Underclass congregated, taking advantage of the many competing soup kitchens – not a million miles from Hell, it seemed. It took a smidgin of invention. So, now, Doone had to close his eyes. He hoped it was not too much to ask, because, self-evidently, without being in complete darkness he wouldn't be able to empathise with those inhabitants of the country of the blind. He appreciated that closing eyes in a lighted sitting-room was not exactly the same as being blind. So, to improve the effect, he switched off the light, before closing the eyes. Squeezed them tight, so that any residual floaters were drowned...

One night, when the moon had vanished behind a clutch of dead stars, there was a stirring among the dossers under Wilson Arches down by the Sludgy River. Dreams were reaching their heads. The angel was awake, forking away with its eyes' stares. It never slept. It was able to stay awake, slipping into real dreams, rather than the false ones of the surrounding dossers.

Darkness was constituted of black straw – a not unfamiliar phenomenon when everybody was snoring. Then the angel saw the poking through of the sucker, the same size as an elephant's trunk, a trunk covered in smaller suckers like women's pouting kisses. The mangey head was even larger than the angel had predicted from the leading sucker – covered in ripe green wounds and weeping sores, each edged with hair not unlike ranks of eye-lashes. There were no real eyes to speak of, to cross swords with the angel's. Others might not have realised it, but the full-length version of this creature (the whole of which the angel had not seen) haunted all waking and sleeping moments – thankfully, however, beyond the retention of waking consciousness. Now, Doone opened his eyes...

The all-clear sounded. Back at the Sludgy River. Soon, morning would buckle the prison-bars of night as he heard again the competing cries of soup kitchens touting for his beggary. But that was wishful thinking on their part, since Doone was sitting or lying in a warm lighted room – or within a train or aeroplane or water craft – or bathed in sunshine amid nature's and man's wise accoutrements – with a book or magazine open. Yet, he had nothing but madness to invent himself. And even madness would not last.

Meantime, having been steeped overnight in sanity, he simply sloped off alone by the stinky sludgy River, waving his albino trunk like a blindman's stick before me. Or a wireless engineer's trial aerial connection...

"I don't think it's working," said Doone.

Having now been given a home by the hospital, he found himself twiddling the knob of the wireless, trying to tune the voice a little more clearly, yet, give or take a little background static, the voice that said "said Doone" was far less audible than the voice that purported to say what Doone said.

Giving up the ghost, he clicked the wireless fully off. The room's consequent silence was heavy and he began to hum tunelessly so as to break the monotony. He stared at the wireless' sound-vent, a tightly woven wickerwork surface that pre-dated the invention of stereophonic twin-loudspeakers by about a half century. The voices had been so muffled, when the tuning-bar was lit up, it felt as if the vent was knitting closer: noises trying to break free from their prison of valves.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" That was Mrs Willoughby. She always came into the sitting-room at about this time of day and asked the same question. A heart of gold. But a tongue like jagged glass.

Doone turned round from the lace-trimmed backgammon-table, where the wireless set sat, and nodded. He did not want to converse with this woman who he considered to be the older version of an erstwhile sweetheart of his, in case she noticed that he was about to dismantle the built-in speaker. Lodgers had no right to meddle with the landlady's equipment.

One couldn't help smiling that Mrs Willoughby once gave a previous tenant called Mr Uquhart a piece of her tongue. Not that Mr Urquhart's crime deserved such punishment: merely replacing a light bulb in the smallest room upstairs. She had wanted to check the wattage. Still, Mr Urquhart hadn't lasted long under Tessa's regime. But Doone should not be so presumptuous as to call Mrs Willoughby by her Christian name. She was a stickler for standards. And her tea was sixpence a pot. Nice tea, though, and well-strained.

"Yes, please, Mrs Willoughby." She had evidently not seen Doone's earlier nod. "Nasty day." He nodded again, this time towards the rain-blurred bay window, which looked out on several different bus routes. No 67 went into town, and out towards the football ground the other way. No 45... No 22... No 56... And so forth. He often used No 22, having much business at the warehouses on the periphery of the town. Other than playing Patience with a deck of nothing but double-headed Queens, he enjoyed looking at all the audio equipment, the various breeds of loudspeaker, complete with tweeters and woofers, Nicam Stereo TV's, personal headsets, digital sound-quality and so forth. Pity Sickness Benefit couldn't allow him to afford to buy any of them. Still, nice helpful young men were there who knew him for what he was. One even gave him an adaptor plug free of charge telling him his shaver was on the blink. The young man said Doone needed a transformer. But an adaptor plug would do just as well. The shaver was still on the blink, but it was the thought that counted. Doone wondered what they'd think to invent next.

With Mrs Willoughby now pottering in the kitchen, clinking frangible crockery and tinkling sugar-spoons in an attempt to order her utensils into some system of order, Doone turned to his screwdriver-set which he had purchased at one of those DIY warehouses soon. He was preparing the ground for removing the back of the wireless, to see if he could straighten out some of the voices. Dramatic plays were a real devil when the rush-hour was on. He could only hear one word in three, if that. Perhaps he should have a shave first, in view of his grizzled chin. But now he could hear the tray coming nearer, bearing, no doubt, a steaming samovar, a jug of milk, a crystal bowl of sugar cubes, a silver strainer, a wedge of lemon, a cup, a saucer and a teaspoon. He dug into his trouser pocket in search of a sixpence. Charity didn't go far these days ...

Suddenly, the wireless burbled into life. He had not twiddled any of the knobs. A bus was passing in rather a heavy-handed fashion, as if it were over-loaded. (The house was on a hill). No doubt the number 45 on its way to the cattle market. But Doone had never heard of unsuppressed static causing a wireless actually to turn itself on without the invention of some other motive force. Through the hiss, he could hear a voice saying, "You remember hospital radio? Well, the plays are all different on this wireless. It's not even a public channel, Doone."

He tried to speak back through a mass of ill-tuned mush, his prised-open mouth healed over with the thickest spider-web his tongue had ever had the misfortune to be tangled up in...

"What's the matter?" shouted Mrs Willoughby.

Throwing all caution (and her long-held standards) to the wind, Tessa smothered his spiky kisser with her own less spiky one. But it was too late. Doone was doornail dead, if still slightly warm. She withdrew his fingers and thumbs from the ten-pin adaptor plug, with herself already in too much shock to notice a new shock. A numberless bus grunted by, also unnoticed ... and late. Listening to Beethoven's late string quartets, as Doone often did, he wondered whether they would have been any different if they had turned up early or, even, on time.

Doone had other quaint thoughts, like believing he was the reincarnation of one of God's angels, like believing things that beggared belief, like the Mona Lisa's smile being that of a woman who has just dined off her husband. He found himself worrying, too: needless worries in the main such as next day's weather or the imponderables of death. He even fretted over his vasectomy. He imagined the seeds, or whatever they were called, building up behind a dam, until the pressure, one day, would make his testicles explode. Even the actual origin of such nagging worries in his mind he blamed on the vasectomy – some of the seeds seeping back up his bloodstream, eventually reaching and then curdling the chemicals of the brain. No wonder he had spent half his life already in the funny hospital.

In two (or even three) minds about the nature of reality, he worked hard at crystallising it into something fixed and certain. Dreams could not bother him since he spent sleepless nights keeping them at bay, mainly by counting the silent nightingales to which he listened. But, sometimes, his many invented children in far corners of the house could hear him shouting at the top of his voice: "Get thee hence, damn dreams!"

Doone had eaten Tessa. Or so he thought. On one of those rare nights of peaceful slumber, without even the suspicion of a rogue dream, he woke up before daylight, feeling decidedly full. He looked at the pillow next to him, expecting to find his dear wife of some years' standing laid out in the trench she had gradually worn into the mattress – a trench deeper than his own, for no reason he could fathom, since their relative weights were roughly equal. She was gone. Perhaps for a light surreptitious snack. Or a glass of lemonade. Or to calm the nightmares of his multitudinous children.

Doone's belly swelled to pregnant proportions, which he decided was Tessa not agreeing with him (which had always been her custom). Bile was rising in his gullet, except it tasted slightly odd – not his normal style of indigestion. There were bits of stringy gristle on his tongue as if he had gnawed at his own innards. There was an undertaste, too, which reminded him of childhood nosebleeds. The children, by their very nature, ignored his frantic shouts; they'd heard them all before. Meanwhile, the enormity of his crime slowly dawned on him. Burying their heads one by one under pillows to dull the dire dirges of Dad, even his children became as non-existent as dreamerless dreams. The neighbours eventually called the police who discovered Tessa in the fridge barely alive but with an inscrutable smirk on her face. The shelves had been removed to make room for her. Nobody could explain the huge mound of bubbling come in the bedroom, so this was diplomatically omitted from all police reports.

After treatment, Tessa met someone called Hubert Willoughby whom she married. He was able to bless her with the delights of several children – real ones this time – something Doone had not possessed the bottle nor the nous to do. So it was a most happy situation and, what was more, Hubert couldn't abide Beethoven's string quartets, whatever their punctuality. Hubert enjoyed clicking his fingers to boring middle-of-the-road ditties and dire dirges with a samba rhythm. Hubert's children buried headfuls of ears under pillows and prayed longingly to their guardian angels for a different Dad called Doone. And dreamed of having no heads for sharp ears to grow on ... and a card sharp saw a likely looking victim idling along the opposite side of the busy street. Another mortal young enough to fail to "find the lady". One with no nous and a decided no-way code. The pavement dealer loved streets. Always a dosser, once a dosser. He hated shopping precincts. The sound of traffic was part and parcel of his act. The eyes in the sides of people's heads, where ears should have been, were engendered by the necessity to avoid jay-walking: a deck-shuffler's bread and butter, since such people tended, paradoxically, to notice him more – in spite of or, rather, due to their over-active weather-eyes.

Yes, the trickster spied, beyond a trundling truck, the young joker: this the prestidgitator's next sucker. And, lo and behold, the boy started to cross the street between the trucker's tail-lights and the staring beams of a sleeker beast, with a lady at the steering-wheel. It would seem, so as to miss giving the boy a glancing blow, the lady would have to swerve – together with a touch of a touch on the foot-brake.

"Stupid kid!" Tessa Willoughby said so quietly, she may not have said it at all. She would have shouted it, had she not despised traffic hogs who loudly cursed everybody, disowning any blame. But the real reason why the expostulation faltered between voice and lip was the finger-twisting gesture from the down-and-out card sharp on the pavement, a man whom she vaguely recognised as someone from her past.

Yet there was nothing worse than stale terror except, perhaps, terror undergone vicariously. Tessa remembered where she had first met that plug-ugly conjuror. At that time, too, he'd been semi-circled by a splay of cards (all Queens) – each upside head joined to another upside head, with scarlet and black spots more akin to a geometrical dose of the plague than items of gamble. She shook off the memory by concentrating again on her driving. But too late. Horrifically late. The boy – the one who had been tempted to cross the road to "find the lady" amid the man's fan of icons – had actually ensured that a real lady found him instead. Tessa killed the ignition with a mindless flick of the wrist and a consequent fingers' twitch of the switch. She stumbled from the car to investigate what or, worse, whom she had spread like jam – dreading, in her middle somewhere, that it was the worst possible victim: a male child at the dawn of its life – snuffed by her wheels – a boy whose gamble came before he'd guessed.

The card sharp was standing now. Even if the incident was half his fault, surely that meant the other half was his credit, not blame. And he smiled to himself. He picked up his white stick and waggled it like a vestigial trunk at the invisible traffic. Or a wiry wand with ability to pick up signals from the dead.

Upon alighting from the car, Tessa had toppled and both her heads hit the concrete of the street. And a red yolk spilled from the top one. She was not Tessa, after all, but a two-headed Angel. And that was perhaps why she couldn't focus on foot-brakes. Water on the brain. Ruptured pomegranates in the unbifurcated middle areas.

Young Doone wondered who they'd get to visit him in hospital this time. Not a nightingale, he'd be bound. Not the card sharp. Not the dosser. Not even himself as an older man. A wireless puppet, perhaps, with more motion than impetus.

Whatever the case, no curtains could be invented to stop the Elephant Man's trunk poking through.