Sweatdreams 1&2 (1999)

1. I walk down greasy steps, dark and spidrous concrete roughly set, collarstained rats and scabrous bone, patterned with the chaos of half-witted Friday Afternoon accelerated idleness. My hand grips the lightermelted formical rail that is ripped off from the cold and rusted iron clasp. I walk down these steps, coming away from a meeting, or a party, in dusk and nervy of the rectangled dimtodark below.

I sense behind me another who walks in my footsteps so I speed my solefall and breath, dare not to look back and whisper to myself tuneless minutesoaking distractive parodies of dull tuneage.

I reach the first cornerlanding and as my pace once more quickens I feel the thudding follower’s five-yard backstare, so I step to a jilted job and through my mind sneaks the proposition of being followed, and though I shrug it away I can feel fear stronger than my feeble faith. I twitch a look back and eyes flash back at me in smirk of shared knowledge of my lies of my transparency, of my spud-doctor spasticity, bared translucent to my liver I jog faster and down and launch round the next corner with my shadower solidifying into a demon and the faster I run the more solid and horned he is but I jump not run now with my biceps straining to pick my too-hefty body round and down as the light of freedom, of daytime is tantalising through a door I fear not to reach.

One more flight and now I am exhausted, a spinning threnody of unbreathable danger and terror as my ghost saps from me all energy all confidence all hope my sandbuilt career and turtleneck gesturing presumptuousness.

I sense the last corner is near and can see the Exit Door ajar where sunlight winks but in sight of freedom I am caught by my shadow my ghost my past the figure the form of my doubledealing, ignorant, posturing watertreading gelatine past and present and I feel in this moment that I know I realise that I’ll never reach the daylight break into freedom burst past myself because the terror of the past assaults the present and I scream silently one two three times and though I am now awake I cannot draw out any noise more than a gargle.

And my room is filthy, dark, the neon numbers of the alarmclock are a jumble and I shiver and I swear because I can’t won’t give way give myself away to this finality because somewhere I still hold on for the exit door all the while.

So I chide myself and turn on my side and do not turn on the light because it is too easy and I have to conquer these shadows and I try to drift away but am mortally scared to look over my shoulder for fear that another shadow is forming in a pernicious heart spotted rotten hell.

2. I am in a dance club, and I’ve been here a while, and it’s great, and the drink is great, and it’s chilled and energetic at the same time. I walk around alone though my mates are here somewhere, but soon I realise I’ve lost everybody and I have no hope of finding them. So I decide to go to a different club but before I leave this one I buy some Ecstasy from a dealer who refuses my money with a shake of his head and a too-wide-boy smile that I take initially as friendly but is also somehow sinister.

I neck the pills and start to walk up the hill toward the new club with a small crowd of people, jiving with myself ‘this is cool, like Glastonbury’ as people queue for cashpoints and shortcut through fields. Two of us take a new shortcut and stumble, arms round each other’s shoulders, over a stile. In the distance two massive hounds of hell are circling; but they are far away and their hoary sillhouette fierces with the treelined hillscape as my new mate runs ahead to get us tickets for the new club which we can now see is not so far away.

As I reach the hilltop I can see and hear the slavering wolfdogs running closer and closer as my heart races and the world itself shifts to shit and scrub as I start to feel the swift and malignant drugs take hold. The black feral fuckers are very close now and are superrottweilers, horrendous, spiky-backed insectdogs, mutant woodlice, bloody of eye and dribbling from coarse-tongued, black-breathed, scum-yellow talon-teeth andI realise I can’t escape them the way I came, and I pant and slide and my brain siezes and shakes andjumps inside my sprocketted skull as it tries to find an escape from htis poisoned protoplastic skeleton. I try and snide away down a different part of the hill but the devils and cackling barking shitting spiderlice spin on six-legged lice-limbs  and follow, and though I scrabble and scramble to hide in tawny trees one of these irradiated monstrosities is now a woodlousedogsnake which is black and red and luminous green with eyes that have no pupils or pulse, and I kill it before I kiss it.