[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":35},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-the-lord-of-flies":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":24,"description":16,"edited":24,"extension":25,"meta":26,"navigation":27,"path":28,"seo":29,"stem":31,"tags":32,"__hash__":34},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-lord-of-flies.md","The Lord of Flies",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":20},"minimark",[9,13,17],[10,11,5],"h1",{"id":12},"the-lord-of-flies",[14,15,16],"p",{},"Perhaps this story will serve as one of those episodes of country life which my children often wheedle at. They have been studiously uninterested until now. But in the last year, after Monica finally left us, and after I have developed sympathetic and ominous signs, they tell me; for the grandchildren, to give them a sense of their history. They want this rural stuff as compost for their kids, to give them \"roots\", to help them grow more fully. Roots are for tearing away when proper ripeness has been reached. We have never been able to speak to each very much, my children and I. Their mother could better pretend. I do not know where this nostalgia for a period of time in which they never lived, for a place they never dwelt, might have come from. They also think that this record keeping will have a tonic effect on my mental state, so they encourage me to pic up my pen as one encourages a surly youth to keep a diary. They try and lamp me like a rabbit with pitying eyes.",[14,18,19],{},"Although as I enter the ever emptying waiting room of my 70s, perhaps it is best that I set down the stories I have often told them of my Shropshire childhood passed in that remote decade of the 1950s. As the future narrows the past proportionally widens, and I fritter much of my time amongst the spent years, on the qui vive for a one sided conversation with those long since keeping green the graveyard grass. We oldsters scour this fallow, discharged time, like the optimistic gardener looking for new shoots in frosty ground, on the hunt for some pleasing memory, forgotten and remembered a dozen times before, in order that we may spend some happy hours in the company of the dead. The older one gets, the less elective is one’s circle of companions. It narrows insidiously to encompass only your children, and your doctor. In the forty years which I have spent, spent with a little too much thrift, between then and now, I have worked as a lawyer, helping others to commit moral if not technical crimes. I have now retired to the county of my parents, which my children visit perhaps twice a year for holidays we no longer celebrate. From my father’s desk I can see the edge of the farm where it all happened, and the pub in which I was told some of it. These events played out long before my children were born, when I was still a person with parents. Now that I've stepped into the vanguard against the encroach of time, I have the dubious pleasure of ticking off another chapter of my own life whenever my offspring attain some new step on the cursus honorem of their marital and public lives. The relationship between oneself and one’s children is governed by a sympathetic black magic. As they blossom and mature, we wither and wane. But as children go, they are attentive without being solicitous and respectful without being fawning, and they indulge me in these crepuscular years. Perhaps it is unfair to wonder if they calculate that time spent writing is time not spent squandering their inheritance on fragments of first folios and incunabula. In any case, before I lose you completely, the countryside in as sparse a county as Shropshire, in as spare a decade as the 1950s, was not a well connected place. Our horizon stopped at the county border. Introspection governed each of our thoughts, habits and concerns. Church going was the norm, and where there is church going, the ancillary practices of, shall we say, less official belief, will tend to thrive equally. There is a consanguinity between doctrine and superstition. There were fortune tellers and dowsers, gypsies and those “who had the knack of herbs.” Grandmothers would urge children to keep clear of some ancient copse where they had “seen those who had no cause to stir abroad, out in their last white suit.” And there was belief and scoffing in equal measure, but there wasn’t the bland ignorance of these sort of things which pervades today. I shall avoid the name of our village in case some camera wielding dolt makes a visit, but where I grew up there was a cunning man, named Thomas Theake. “Theake” is a very old name, and has always been spoken with knowing care in this corner of the county, the current heir claiming to practise his craft by primogeniture from the dusty years when a Stuart warmed the throne. Tom is an old man in my first memories of him, and was the same rather vacant, pent up figure when I saw him for the last time. He would sit up by the fire in the King’s Head, applying himself to his pipe without any apparent pleasure. On occasion he would deign to baffle some auslanders with cheap card tricks in exchange for an afternoon of free jars. He mainly eked out a crust from the small farmers that comprised most of the village’s inhabitants, and whose rugged network of farms lent the countryside its cobbled, hugger-mugger feel. Cows that couldn’t calf, lame sheep, dogs that wouldn’t bark, these were Tom’s patients. A folk vet in essence, who took the odd mole or cold away from human invalids as well. He would croon something into the ear of a beast while stroking its withers, or apply a little ointment from a dark blue bottle kept in his jacket pocket, and when the animal walked contentedly but gravely away he would take a few coins and plod home with a wink and a nod. The Squire, or the the largest farmer who happened to keen a library and styled himself thus, would tell anyone he could that Old Tom wasn’t much more than a confidence man. He even cajoled the Reverend into preaching on the-extra Biblical nature of superstitious beliefs. Neither of them were too familiar with the witch of Endor, whereas Tom could gleefully quote the passage at length. The Squire’s easy scorn was made possible by deep enough pockets for the vet and his antibiotics. Once I was taking a message to the squire’s place from my father, probably a further request for money, and when I rounded the gatepost I saw Old Tom sat on a pail. l I couldn’t say what he exactly he was saying and whether it was backwards or forwards, but he was softly intoning into the ear of a cow that was off its feed and nearly starved, its ribs sticking out like the black keys of a piano. The squire was stood a way off, nervously swinging his thick hands together in front of him. When he saw me his wine red cheeks reddened still more, and he shouted “belt and braces I know but the vets been out twice to no avail! Hah!” He was quieter on the efficacy of Old Tom after that. Well the mind wanders and the pen follows. The subject of this story, its agonist, is Charles Charington, my closest friend with whom I shared the fields, streams and hidden woodlands of youth. All closed off now behind a door at the end of memory’s lengthening corridor. I can see him in the pose I always lent to him even as a boy. Long hair down over his collar, thin, pencil sharpened fingers playing indulgently over his face, caressing it as if he was touching for the first time. Open on the desk a rare tome, which he read searchingly, almost aggressively, like some chess prodigy in battle with a recalcitrant position. He dressed, anachronistically even then, in a well cut dark suit, silk socks and always a tie, undone. His eyes were a very cold, patient, grey. Despite his breeding and despite his dress, he had a look of indecent hunger, spiritual rather than material, carnivorous is the word perhaps. However sleek the plumage of a vulture, it is a vulture still. Charles was primarily interested in books, and we spent many weekends in the dust blanketed second hand shops of the nearby market town, our grubby fumblings at the shelves observed by the aquiline former school mistresses who invariably ran these places. I suppose we were in love, in the bitterly jealous and rather hostile way that young boys are, mocking and teasing each other while scarcely able to endure an hour apart. It was a tortured, platonic attachment, which at least in those early days was mutual I like to think. When it came to books my tastes were in the classics, my prize subject at school, and then the old guard of English literature, Thackeray, Scott and Dickens were my only real friends bar Charles. His interests, well they were a little more recondite. I assume reader you are unfamiliar with “Saint Bessarions Disquisition with the Satyr”, “The Lyrics of the Faun”, and “The Purpure Phoenix”. These were the occluded, unusual subjects of his literary attentions. He would wheedle and cajole the vendors to notify him immediately of any volumes which might meet his requirements of antiquity and rarity. They would arrive in grease paper packets, perhaps a single page, or a sheaf of papers or some creaking tome, scented with age and mounted with a crest from a now stricken noble family. These were times prior to the vast expansion of museums and the facility of digital search. You could take possession of some truly unique pieces, and Charles often did. His room in his father’s rather genteel Queen Anne house was a teeming wunderkammer. Beside the collection of books which would have befitted any professional antiquarian, there was a rack of richly made and finely embroidered vestments which I can’t recall having seen in a church of any denomination, there were specimens of bone which he said he had uncovered while assisting with an excavation one holiday. There were clusters of objet d’art and Classical statuettes in the most looming or harried of poses. And the whole was illuminated entirely by thick, ever burning candles, which diffused a torpid, sepulchral atmosphere through the bedroom. I thought his collecting stemmed from the anachronistic passion of an endearingly pretentious youth who had perhaps read a little too much Verlaine. But it morphed into something of an obsession as he reached the tortured brink of manhood. He would borrow his father’s car, which predated the Somme and looked as if it had been shelled itself, and would scour the bordering counties for a vanishingly rare volume or piece thereof. He always seemed to know when a country house was due to finally shut its doors in the face of a rising tax bill, and auction off its library, curated for five centuries and more than likely to contain a new sheaf of mildewed paper for his shelves. It was in the summer of 1958 that he first mentioned the Lord of Flies. A phrase which spread like an invasive species in a country garden, a creeping progenitive vine, which throttled other growths and filled his mind entirely. He had obtained, for a minimal fee, a tract entitled Signa Legatorum, which dated from the 17th century. It contained illustrations of heraldic achievements of a most distinct type. Sable, gules, and a particularly calcareous cendrée were the colours most favoured. Rampant lions with gore encrusted manes and claws that steamed and reeked, scenes of pursuit by adumbrated figures with hands that pawed and reached, riven sepulchra, laden gibbets. The supporters of these oblique blazons were neither wholly human nor wholly animal, the heraldic lexicon would struggle to define them. They were a miscegenated menagerie with brimming eyes, hanging tongues, the flesh decaying and the bones exposed, all was suppuration, all chaos. One particular leaf became Charles’ utter totem, his fetish, like the favoured rattle to the screaming child, the questing needling to the opiate fiend. This page was titled Dominus Muscarum. Charles, in an act of vandalism I had never seen him perform before, excised the page from the book and kept it in his breast pocket at all times. I’m fairly sure that he slept with it stashed under his pillow. I only saw it once, when he was proudly displaying the new acquisition, a procedure he could never resist. As far as I could tell he never let it out of his sight or under the eyes of another from them on. The device itself was formed from a dark, raised material, a sort of viscous lacquer which had been applied to the page. The supporters on either side of the central shield were not animal but human. Two monks, deeply shrouded in the folds of their habits, stood with bowed heads, the hands each plunged into the opposite sleeve. From the hang of their vestments, one had the impression, of a profound, rather too profound, thinness of bone, with little accompanying flesh. The head above bore a sable helmet, severed. The shield itself, sable again, bore an inverse cross on which was nailed a satyr, one cloven leg too short and thus evading its fastening. From the weeping palms two swarms of flies poured out, and the mouth of the creature hung open in a slack laugh. As Carrington showed me I lent forward to touch, quite involuntarily, and which he snatched the page away cursing at me, like some startled animal with its young, and bundled me forcefully from the room. I began to see rather less of Charles from then. Our conversations became bloodless, atrophied, then we were barely on nodding terms. I was taking a desultory walk one summer’s morning, with the fog still bedded down over the fields like resting cattle, and the drew worming through the uppers of my shoes, when I found myself, quite deliberately I would think, walking down the avenue of lime trees which led to his door. I looked up to his window, as many a lover has done before, and immediately stopped in that rather pathetic attitude. The window sill was entirely covered with rooks, thick as a carpet. Their black bodies and talons traced out its line entirely, on the vertical parts they dug their claws into the rotten frame and jutted out at precarious angles all along the base, top and sides. Every single bird had its beak pointed at Charles’ window, staring fixedly into his room without a caw, or twitch, or ruffle of features. I stood there for some minutes enrapt by this image. Eventually I moved off to continue my walk, but ran into Charles the next day, walking along in his deliberate way with a book and the thick yew stick he had taken to carrying. He looked almost cadaverous, he clearly hadn’t slept for at least a night. When I jokingly described the strange behaviour, all he had to offer by way of a rather gnomic excuse was that the “the lord of swarms preaches to a broad church.” And he strode off, stopping abruptly and looking back, perhaps at me although he hardly seemed to register my presence, and disputing with himself sotto voce all the while. I continued to see Charles at our minor, rather rustic, public school where we had the lesser status of day boys. His eyes were circled with sleepless nights and his hands trembled over his books. I must begin to draw these strands together. Charles’ father, one of the larger farmers in the district, had been struck very suddenly with a bad case of scrapie in his sheep, with no other cases reported nearby. Old Tom was quietly engaged as usual, more to avoid any perception of negligence than any particular superstition,. And as I was told in the King’s Head something like the following transpired. Tom was in Toby Charrington’s farmyard, to attend to his best ram. The animal was wheezing horribly, black blood and spittle bloomed around its jaw each time it did so, and its fleece corroding away. Tom knelt to whisper one some words into its ear as he often did, but as he spoke, the animal looked fully into his face, and as he later swore, spoke the words back to him, its eyes on his all the while, two obsidian orbs. He put a hand on the animal to steady himself, but immediately tore it away like one catching themselves on a stove. Where his hand had made contact the skin was a vicious red and badly blistered. At this the animal bleated in a high pitched, keening way, almost as if in laughter. Tom left his herbs, his moles feet, uttered his words for some hours, and left eventually looking very grave indeed, having returned the money Carrington senior had given him. The farmhand present told me that all of this had been watched intently by Charles from his window, and that as Tom left he directed a very hard look up towards the casement, at which Charles slipped quickly from view. A few more episodes from that summer protrude in the memory. In one of the fields near the village, there was a largely intact long barrow, ignored or at least left alone by any official body which would nowadays be gravely concerned with charging entrance fees. It presided like a rough openair altar over a field used for grazing. We were warned off from approaching the structure by our teachers, on the grounds that it could collapse, although I’m not quite sure that was the whole reason. I should say that this was a large mound, perhaps twenty or thirty feet long, with two large upright stones at the entrance end with a capstone above. The farmer who owned the land would muse over his beer, that although he grazed his sheep in that field, they gave the barrow a wide berth. By his account, the only animals who would go near it were rooks, who would hop about rather horribly over the top of the barrow, switching stiffly from leg to leg and cawing all the while. He had erected a tall spiked fence around the structure, mainly to prevent inquisitive children from tramping through his field. One did hear of boys, of the daring and truant type, who made a nighttime visit. They were never very forthcoming afterwards, but I can’t recall a boy making the trip more than once. In any case, it was rather late one evening, and I will proudly confess that I was waiting for a girl. The copse in the bottom portion of the field was used for what we euphemistically termed courting in those days. As I sat with jogging legs, slightly nauseous with the weight of anticipation for this most serious and entertaining of entertainments, I saw a light placed by the entrance to the barrow, and what looked like movement in and around its ambit. The whole scene was rather potent, the ancient tomb, the midnight visitor, the vague figure in the struggling light. I left the screen of trees and made my way around the wet grass, tracing the boundary of the field, to gain a better view. There was no wind. From the tomb there seemed to be a conversation taking place, one voice, a man’s, asking and pleading, and one very thin voice that answered in an sardonic tone. The timbre of the voice, well, one thought of ash, of dust, of things long left in the earth. It seemed unwise to be discovered by either party, so I crawled along until I was some twenty feet from the tomb. Charles was illumined in the light which seized on his pale face among the shadows. On the ground around his feet there red ribbon laid out, part of which was lit, and which seemed to encircle him. As he moved and gesticulated he would reach the border of ribbon and then step quickly back, taking great care not to cross it, as he imprecated the black entrance of the tomb. I hear Charles gradually grow louder and more forceful in his demands. He gesticulated wildly and was nearly shouting at his interlocutor. As he leant forward in one particularly emphatic movement towards the entrance of the tomb his toe crossed the boundary of the red cloth. The voice from inside the tomb suddenly laughed brutally, no longer thin but very material indeed. And there was the very rapid sound of something moving within the tomb, and its limbs dragging over some material which sounded and echoed with its passing, clinking rather like shattered bone. I saw, very distinctly in Charles light, two very long white hands reach out and seize upon both sides of the tomb, the fingernails facing out into the night, as if something was trying to pull itself out and free. Charles seized the lantern immediately and ran, the light juddering and swooping with his speed. As I watched he made a mad dash over the hundred feet or so of field, and once, around halfway looked desperately over his shoulder and held the lantern up behind him. At this the laugh sounded once more and lit by the outstretched lantern where two sets of black ragged nails reached out towards him, lunging towards his wrist. Charles whirled about and put on a new burst, and I saw the light go swinging over the stile which he took at a bound. I ran myself, the copse a distant memory, across the fence and back down the lane. I didn’t stop until my lungs were ragged and I had the metal taste of blood in my throat. As August came, Charles’ became even more spectral in appearance. Sleep was clearly a distant memory. He would sit at his desk at school, swaying forward nearly swooning into sleep. His father, not the most caring of parents, suspected drink or some other depravity and beat him badly for it. His marks, which previously earmarked him for Cambridge, reached a nadir. Carrington, perhaps you won’t be too shocked or indeed upset to read, was found dead later that month. Outside the barrow, fallen forward as in pursuit, with his neck twisted back over his shoulder almost to the point of breaking. His fingers were dug into the soil almost to the third knuckle. His father had seen him only the night before he was found, and the body had only lain undiscovered for perhaps twelve hours. Yet he was thickly matted with flies, which formed a humming, and quite horribly, digesting shroud. The policemen coming to remove the body were badly bitten by the insects which left large blistered marks one normally finds after a serious burn. His chosen page, the object of his delirious attentions, I never saw or heard of again. When I returned to the country after some years spent in London, I ventured back to the barrow field to find it was no longer used for grazing.”No good keeping sheep there” the farmer sourly relayed “on account of a devilish problem with flies.”",{"title":21,"searchDepth":22,"depth":22,"links":23},"",2,[],null,"md",{},true,"\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-lord-of-flies",{"title":30,"description":16},"The Lord of Flies file","stories\u002Fthe-lord-of-flies",[33],"Spooky","bCnATArA4JIpDgk6LLyuAvKHQ4XSJYrEvIS9hbcaQos",1793724018843]