Chapter Two (not so much this time as I am on the road)

So the lack of pigmentation in the hair follicles by my temples that only appeared in one mirror was clearly a sign that something was afoot. But then I saw what I thought were wrinkles in the skin around my eyes, a pair of crow’s feet at the corner of each eye; a sunken hollow around each eye socket; long latitudinal furrows across my brow. You could say that I was already aged and why was I worrying about these cranial crinkles, surely I should be getting used to them especially at my age and at this point in my career.

I wasn’t so worried about the formation of these features but it was how they became more exaggerated in the mirror in the flat at home. The mirror at work showed the usual dulled effects of the lined around the creases of my face, however after coming back from work I would be able to see that the lines had increased in width and depth, they exhibited an slightly darker pinkish hue as if they have recently been excavated by a lone archaeologist digging preliminary excavation trenches. I would rub the tips of my fingers along the grooves and as I looked at my reflection I saw that an accumulation of debris appeared on the skin. Yet, if I drew my attention away from that polished reflective surface I would gain a better view of my finger s and there would be no remains of what I thought may have been skin.

So I think to myself, “You know when you suddenly look at yourself in a mirror you see something that you hadn’t seen before, well maybe this is just the same with the wrinkles, the creases, the furrows…It’s a bit like that picture of the naked girl that leans back on her legs with her hand through her hair, however, if you were to look at it in a slightly different perspective you would see the profile of a moustachioed professor, some even say Dr. Freud. You know the one, they used to be sold as postcards from Athena, you know the poster shop – the one on a corner of two streets in Canterbury, near the Butter Market. And it was a black and white postcard that would slowly turn yellow with age.” As I thought these things, I also thought to myself, “I never used to talk to myself like this, bloody hell!”

I pulled open a drawer in the desk that acted as a sideboard and a place for storing congealed cereal in bowls from hastily eaten breakfasts, I extracted an old diary and opened it to the first of those blank pages at the end where you can write your own notes. I decided to keep a record of these mystery apparitions, these facial fallacies if such a thing exists.

Grey hairs
Crow’s feet
Hollowed eye sockets
Forehead furrows

Nothing much to be worried about that surely some hair colourant and a tube of skin cream could sort out. Or that is what I thought until I woke up on Saturday morning. (Tomorrow's posting to come)

I can now added hidden and some not so hidden patches of psoriasis. It has left my elbows and knees migrating to the scalp, ears, eyebrows and eyelids. 

Happy New Year and a belated Happy Christmas

So the time has come to tell the story that has been brewing in my head for a while. It has changed a few times since the thought of writing a Christmas ghost story and the fact that I am hideously late for Christmas Cards.

One of the exponents of the Christmas Ghost story is, of course, Charles Dickens – but like the courses in a Christmas dinner there are many writers. One of the writers that I admire for his use of the aforementioned genre is the man named Montague Rhodes James. He was known for being a scholar in mediaeval history, a provost of King’s College in Cambridge (1905-1918) and was at Eton School until 1936. But his ghost stories, which have had many incarnations as radio and television plays, were written as a Christmas Eve entertainment and were read aloud to a gathering of friends. So if I am to obey the Jamesian rules of his ghost tale (established in 1929), I have five to adhere to:

1) The pretense of truth
2) A “pleasing terror”
3) No gratuitous bloodshed or sex
4) No “explanation of the machinery”
5) Setting: “those of the writer’s (and reader’s) own day”

If, of course, you would like to read one of Mr. James’ own ghost stories, as mine will pale into the swirling mist of a new dawn, can I suggest you look at the story entitled, “Whistle And I’ll Come To You” (http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0163.pdf). However if you dare read any further:

The Mirror

I could tell you that I am telling you this tale from comfortable, leather and wing-backed armchair by a coal fuelled fire surrounded by books. But that would not be the truth and this is the time, New Year’s morning, is exactly the time to tell the truth.

The crying of seagulls and the paddling noise of the webbed feet on the flat roof of a rented seaside flat woke me up this morning. There was a dull thud along the left-handed side of my head, more to the feeling that if any spare room in my cranium was filled with a semi-liquid like glue. I had been reading a paperback on the scientific writings of Stephen Jay Gould; I have a pile of paperbacks perched on the water reservoir of the toilet bowl in the bathroom. When I have a quiet thirty minutes to myself, I pick a book at random, open it up and indulge my curious literary appetite. This time, as I had already stated, I was deep into the Mister Gould’s scientific outpourings. The line that I had to read twice, as I poured some semi-skimmed milk on the amber blooming teabag that floated like a bloated body on the surface of the tea bag, had something to do with a mirror and survival. That was when a scrap of paper floated out from amongst the leaves of the book. It had a black and slightly-spidery, hand writing style that I didn’t fully recognise as mine to start off with, the message, itself, took longer to translate. As I understood that I had written the note upside down and by the look of it, backwards without the aid of a mirror. The dark letters when rearranged spelt out the message below. I ask you not read the message aloud, especially if you have a mirror in the room where you read this, you may think me superstitious but maybe my cautionary tale will explain what causes my visual vigilance:
Don’t trust the mirror

I had recently moved from my original flat, it was a time of a renaissance; new friends, new job, new surroundings and the removal men had been pretty thorough in their translocation of my belongings. No such damage had been recorded and by the end of the second night I had got most of the boxes folded in to their smallest dimensions and stored in the cupboard under the communal stairs. The new job was an easy one. It was one where I would virtually move information from one filing cabinet to another. The only problem was it was virtual.

I was stuck in an office that when busy sounded like a flock of flamingos nesting and chattering on one of those soda lakes in East Africa, but on the very slow days you could throw a paper aeroplane from one side of the office to the inoperable window at the far side without hitting anyone on its inevitable flight path – as there was no-one there. The swapping of data from one file to another led to a crick in my neck, a pain in my wrists and a distinct weariness in my vision. So I thought nothing of my reflections in the mornings and evenings when I returned home and looked at the full-length mirror in my sitting room come kitchenette.

The first signs that I saw reflected in the mirror was a greying of the hair around my temples, nothing much odd you say. The job could be quite stressful, especially if your line manager didn’t get the results she wanted, so she would pass on those inadequacies in her life coupled with the shit that got passed down onto her from her area manager. So a greying of a few hairs wasn’t much too complain about and nothing that a bottle of hair dye would cure. But at the office, in there less than salubrious surroundings of an office toilet block, I would look for those annoying greying hairs and would find none. I didn’t think much of it to start with but since I had no mirror in my pitiful excuse of a bathroom at the flat, there was no place to hang one. So I had to use that one full-length mirror in the sitting room and normally not at a decent hour of the day when there was enough light. So for the next week, I did the usual game of checking the colour of my hair at work and at home, each place showed an opposite vision.

(The next chapter tomorrow...honest) Any comments, please feel free to add some...