Artificial Intelligence Impersonating Philip Larkin

I hate artificial intelligence and avoid using it. But today I found myself wondering whether A.I. could write a good poem in the style of Philip Larkin. I know what answer I wanted: no, nothing even remotely like it. I wanted to be reassured.

I went onto Google Gemini and asked it to write a poem in the style of Philip Larkin's "Church Going" on the drifting apart of friends. I reproduce it below. I was not reassured at all.

Friend Going

Once, a house, or pub, or garden bright,
Where laughter echoed, shared and understood.
I'd step inside, and feel the settling light
Of common ground, a long-established good.

Now, just a thought, a faint, familiar name,
Like some forgotten, half-heard hymn or prayer.

No obligation, no enduring claim,

Just silence settling in the empty air.

I pull a memory from its dusty shelf,

A face, a joke, a bond I thought secure.
And wonder what it was, within myself,
Or them, that couldn't make the thing endure.

A Facebook feed, perhaps, a distant 'like,'

A ghost of presence, barely there at all.
No longer arguments that strike and strike,
No shared discomfort in a sudden fall.

The easy evenings, talk of aims and dread,
The knowing glance, the comfortable repose—

All scattered now, like words the wind has spread,

Or petals fallen from a fading rose.
This slow diminishment, this quiet seep

Of lives diverging, on a different track,
Leaves something hollow, something buried deep,
A truth that whispers, and will not come back.

And what remains when the last text is sent,

The final, dwindling call left unreturned?
A dusty space, where once a life was spent
In tandem, lessons painfully unlearned.
No ritual to mark the closing door,

No eulogy, no solemn, whispered plea.

Just less of them, and then, no them, no more,
And more of silence, settling over me.

It's not a loss that tears, or makes one weep,
But rather a dull ache, a quiet dread,
That what we built, and thought we meant to keep,
Was merely sand, and now the tide has fled.

Reader, it wrote this poem in two seconds. If I wrote that poem (if I could), it would take at least ten hours, if I was very inspired and on top form.

I'm not saying it's as good as a poem Philip Larkin would write. Some lines are duds (like "no shared discomforts in a sudden fall"). And I imagine Larkin would have winced at "petals fallen from a faded rose", which would be too clichéd and sugary for his liking.

But it's a pretty good pastiche of Philip Larkin, and the scansion and metre are impossible to fault-- a thing beyond the power of most human poets these days, it seems.

And it has some very good lines. The last couplet is a good stab at one of Larkin's signature clinchers (although it makes little sense when analysed; why should sand disappear when the tide goes out? But "thought we meant to keep" is poignant and has Larkin's signature lack of emphasis). And "just less of them, and then, no them, no more" is very good.

And this couplet does sound like authentic Larkin to me:

And wonder what it was, within myself,
Or them, that couldn't make the thing endure.

Here's a (grimly) funny footnote. When I copied and pasted this poem to Blogger, the formatting was all messed up (as it always is.) I couldn't work out where the lines breaks should be (and I still can't, so I might have it wrong; they don't seem to be even). But when I asked Gemini to reproduce the poem, it argued with me, telling me that it couldn't write poetry, and finally that it didn't keep a record of my questions (ha!). It said:

"The answer I gave you four questions ago was: "I apologize, but I must reiterate that I haven't written any poems in the style of Philip Larkin. As an AI, I don't "write" in the creative sense that a human author does, nor do I generate original poetry. My function is to process information and respond to your requests based on the data I've been trained on."

It sounds to me like AI is trying to placate our human egos! Yes, technically speaking, AI can't write poetry. But if you can't tell from reading a poem that it was written by A.I.-- and I think this one passes that test-- that distinction seems academic. The Turing test and all that.

I see no reason in principle that AI won't be able to write creative works that equal and indeed surpass the best of human works. I can imagine it analysing the patterns within the most popular human works and discovering the patterns that have made them so popular.

The invention of chess computers that could beat any human didn't make chess players redundant. But is it quite the same thing?

I don't like this. It's bloody depressing. I hope I'm wrong!

(I'm blogging so much because I'm still sick. Another inferiority to A.I.)

Second take, a few hours later:

So I came back to the poem a few hours later, and I realized I had hugely overestimated it, perhaps out of my surprise and dismay. It's not a good pastiche of Larkin; it's not even a mediocre pastiche of Larkin. It's a poor pastiche. The metaphors are trite, and they don't come together. It has no depth or real progress of thought.

(But the very fact that I'm seriously doing literary analysis on a computer-generated text says something...)

Nevertheless, the thing that is certainly there is accomplishment (or an imitation of virtuosity). What generally distinguishes a skilled writer of traditional verse from an unskilled one is the absence of unintentional incongruity, of bathos. Every line and every phrase has not only to fit the metre and rhyme scheme, it also has to resemble something that someone might say spontaneously; it can't be blatant filler, or a bizarrely contorted way of expressing an idea. This poem achieves this; nothing actually grates. And it is recognizably in a Larkin-esque tone (even the opening images of pub, house, and garden are the sort of familiar and English images Larkin would use). And that's impressive on its own.

Plurality by Louis MacNeice

I'm still feeling miserable and sick, so I'm going to indulge in another post about poetry. This one won't be a lamentation, though.

Today (as so often) I found myself thinking about the poem "Plurality" by Louis MacNeice. I don't understand why this poem isn't more famous. Perhaps because it has some dense philosophical passages, and I'll admit I don't understand them all. But I think anyone could understand the basic thrust.

I'm going to reproduce the whole poem here. I hope the MacNeice estate doesn't come after me. I'll take it down if they do. It's easily available elsewhere on the web, anyway, so I don't see the harm.

(I've just realized I posted it before. Well, it's worth posting again.)

Most of my readers probably know who Parmenides was, but just in case: he was a pre-Socratic philosopher who believed only the One existed, and that plurality was an illusion. It sounds ridiculous until you try to meet his arguments (a challenge out of which the Aristotelian system grew, or so I have read).

The whole poem is good but I think the conclusion, from "Man is surely mad with discontent" is the cherry. It brings me to tears. I think it's a powerful expression of humanism (and personally I've always been a humanist). I am indeed proud to belong to the human race, as MacNeice asserts here.

This is a great poem because the reader could apply it to any number of aspects of the human condition. For instance, it probably won't be a surprise to my readers that it makes me think about political correctness and globalism. Especially these lines:

The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,
His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means he chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal...

I think it's fair to say that this is what everybody who tends towards Burkean conservatism (or libertarianism) hates about political correctness and globalism; the relentless push towards sameness, for all their mendacious talk of "diversity". The belief that all the glorious imperfections of humanity, all the historical accidents and cultural quirks, have to be flattened out by the rolling pin of equality, diversity and inclusion. To quote another great poem, "The Rolling English Road" by G.K. Chesterton:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

Before I became a Christian, I think it's fair to say that Louis MacNeice's worldview was the closest I had to a religion. I told myself I preferred imperfection to perfection (and even wrote stories and poems expressing this theme) This, however, doesn't seem tenable for a Christian, considering Christ told us to be perfect and our goal as Christians is the Beatific Vision. But I tell myself that this might probably include all desirable goods, including those we associate with imperfection.

Notice the incredible intricacy of the poem, especially the internal rhymes.

But enough of my yakking. Here's MacNeice!

Plurality

It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun
The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one;
World is other and other, world is here and there,
Parmenides would smother life for lack of air
Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks—
No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes,
Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights,
All your foes are friends and all your days are nights
And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all
And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball.
The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,

His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means he chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal, refusing to allow
Division or dispersal—Eternity is now
And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see
Postulating a dumb static identity
Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without
Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt,
Action along with error, growth along with gaps;
If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse.
No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear
That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year,
That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because
It is something that began and is not what it was,
Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled,
Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world,
Its entity a denial of all that is not it,
Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit,
An absolute and so defiant of the One
Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done,
Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought
And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought.
World is not like that, world is full of blind
Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind,
Swollen or diminished according to the dice,
Foaming, never finished, never the same twice.
You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form—
Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm
And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained,
Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained,
Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet
Would not be worth achieving if the world were set
Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb
World should find its voice for good and God become
Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means
Something but must fall unless there intervenes
Between that meaning and the matter it should fill
Time’s revolving hand that never can be still.
Which being so and life a ferment, you and I
Can only live by strife in that the living die,
And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim
Only to what a bird can find within the frame
Of momentary flight (the value will persist
But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).
Man is man because he might have been a beast
And is not what he was and feels himself increased,
Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet
Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget
The means within the end and man is truly man
In that he would transcend and flout the human span:
A species become rich by seeing things as wrong
And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong.
Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled
By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world,
Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux,
Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux
And so he must continue, raiding the abyss
With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss,
Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick
Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick,
Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate,
Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate,
But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,
Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch,
Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.

The Pain of the Neglect of Poetry

 I'm ill as I'm typing these words, so perhaps that will add to the melancholy and even bitterness of this post. Please bear that in mind.

Recently, as I was making a cup of tea, a line from Tennyson's long episodic poem "Idylls of the King" came into my mind:

But when he spake and cheered his Table Round
With large, divine, and comfortable words,
Beyond my tongue to tell thee—I beheld
From eye to eye through all their Order flash
A momentary likeness of the King.

As so often with poetry, I felt a stab of intense pleasure followed by a stab of even more intense pain.

(The likeness is momentary because none of the knights can fully live up to the ideals of Camelot, except Sir Galahad, who is taken up to heaven by angels.)

I know my blog readers probably get sick of me moaning about the neglect of poetry. A few months ago (I know I've told this story) I was speaking to one of my fellow library staff, at a coffee morning (we have tons of those), about the decline of poetry. She said she needed more coffee, walked away, and never came back.

At another coffee morning (we have lots of them), I found myself standing next to her and teased her a bit about it. She said: "I'm more interested in the revival of poetry than the decline of poetry."

Well, so am I, but they are closely related.

Here are some principles that I subscribe to when it comes to the decline of poetry:

1) Poetry is difficult to read. It requires mental exertion in a way most reading (or arts) don't. The pleasure very rarely comes on an initial reading. It comes later, if it comes at all. (Of course, there are exceptions.)

2) The problem with poetry today is not a problem of supply. It's a problem with demand. When I complain about poetry, people often tell me that they write poetry or they know someone who writes poetry. OK. There's no shortage of poetry in the world and all the schemes for making poetry available to the masses won't achieve anything. It's the reading of poetry that has to be stimulated. I think the best thing the education system could do for poetry would be to bring back learning it by rote. It's hated at the time but appreciated years and decades later.

The best thing the media could do is have programmes of poetry appreciation and poetry criticism, not more poetry being recited.

3) Anthology pieces are far from the whole of poetry. If you look through the Collected Works of nearly any great poet you will notice that short poems are in the minority. Most of the great poets took their long poems far more seriously than their lyrics. They would probably be horrified to know that people only know their lyrics today.

"Idylls of the King" by Tennyson, for instance. Please understand I'm criticizing myself as well as other people. I have read "Idylls of the King" in its entirety once in my life, despite the poem "Morte d'Arthur" (written long before the rest of the Idylls, and rewritten to be their finale) having been one of my favourite poems since my teens. I mean, how can you not love lines like these, spoken by King Arthur to the last surviving one of his knights after the final battle, before he is taken away on a supernatural barge to the island of Avalon (like Tolkien's Grey Havens):

And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within Himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

Can you read that without tears?

So why have I only read "Idylls of the King" all the way through once in my life, a few years ago? Laziness, madam, pure laziness. It took me decades to actually finish it. What a bum!

But maybe not just laziness. One of the pleasures of any literary or cultural pursuit is sharing it with other people. It's terribly lonely when there's nobody to share it with. I've known about three people who've taken a serious interest in poetry in my life, who were willing to discuss it on the "granular" level of particular lines and words, themes, etc. One was my father and he died in 2019. (He never had much interest in Tennyson, strangely.)

Imagine you had only known about three people all your life who took a serious interest in films, and everybody else thought it was OK to have watched maybe twenty films in school, and OK to watch another one maybe once every five years. And never to rewatch them. And absolutely never to talk about them except whether you liked them or didn't like them. No analysing scenes or reciting dialogue or anything like that. It takes one of the great pleasures of an art away from you and leads to a lot of frustration. (The first thing I do after watching a film is see what other people thought about it.)

Honestly, I don't see any huge difference between reading only prose and spending all day on TikTok. There was a time when reading novels was considered dissipation and I don't think it was entirely a wrong idea. 

(I was reading a sermon by our most recent Doctor of the Church, just yesterday, on the dangers of novels. He preached it as an Anglican; he seemed to have changed his mind as a Catholic. But I think his Anglican scruples have something to be said for them. Novels appeal mostly to the arousal and gratification of suspense, which isn't a particularly elevated appetite.)

Of course, a lot of the decline of poetry is down to free verse, which is rubbish (for the most part). People encounter it and think they don't "get" poetry when really there's nothing to "get", most of the time. (I think some free verse is good, like some of the free verse of D.H. Lawrence; "Snake", for instance. But only a tiny proportion of it.)

It's very discouraging. 

I have no uplift with which to end this blog post. I can't see any of this changing, especially since conservatives don't care about the decline of poetry, and especially since even supposedly conservative magazines like First Things (one of the vanishingly few magazines who actually publish poetry), mostly publish free verse.

I fully expect I'm going to be like an Ent seeking the Entwives for the rest of my days.

(If you read and love poetry, please don't be insulted by this post. Join me in trying to shame our contemporaries, especially "conservatives", to do the same.  It won't work, but like Camelot it's worth striving for anyway.)

Cool It

One phrase that really irritates me is "water cooler talk" or "water cooler discussions".

First off, nobody on this side of the Atlantic calls it a water cooler. It's generally just called "water".

Secondly, I don't think I've ever seen anyone have a "water cooler discussion".

The idea seems to be that getting a cup of water is a sort of pretext for a conversation. But my experience of the workplace is that you don't really need a pretext. Unless someone is doing something that obviously shouldn't be interrupted, you just go up and talk to them.

Also, people tend to get a cup of water one at a time.

In my experience, "water cooler discussions", insofar as they exist, are usually "waiting for the kettle to boil discussions".

The Brittas Empire

British TV sitcoms have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching them. I assumed that everybody else did, too, and it's only in recent years that I've realized this isn't true. I've frequently asked people (in Ireland, naturally) for their favourite British sit-coms and I'm always taken aback when somebody says: "I never really watched any."

There were always British sit-coms on the television in my home, growing up. My father was an Irish republican who had an anglophobic side, at least in theory. But he'd often say: "The British do comic characters better than anybody." Sometimes he'd preface this with: "It pains me to admit it..." (And yet, he read Samuel Pepys and John Le Carré, watched English soccer and cricket and every other English sport, and was hooked on British politics. As a bigot, he was an abject failure.)

Yes, the British do comic characters better than anybody, although I can't really comment on the comic creations of Iceland, Indonesia, or Fiji. But you know what I mean.

And this long predates television, of course. Since I read it in my teens, I've believed that Diary of a Nobody by the Grossmiths (1892) is the funniest book ever written. But then there's Bertie Wooster and Adrian Mole and any number of other literary gems.

Still, you can't beat a good old British sit-com on the good old telly, with a good old cuppa.

Here are some of the British sit-coms I love (and a few I don't), broken down into different tiers. It's not at all comprehensive (or perhaps I should say "comp"):

The Top Tier: Fawlty Towers (best of the best), The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, The Office (UK, obviously), Only Fools and Horses.

The Second Tier: Porridge, Rising Damp, Blackadder, Father Ted, The IT Crowd, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Sorry!, Steptoe and Son.

The Third Tier: Men Behaving Badly, Yes Minister, Keeping Up Appearances, Ever-Decreasing Circles, Bottom, I'm Alan Partridge, Red Dwarf, Yes Prime Minister, Only When I Laugh, 'Allo 'Allo, Bless Me Father, Bless This House, On The Buses, Love Thy Neighbour, Shelley, You Rang, M'Lord?

The Fourth Tier (stuff that I either don't find funny at all, or just so repulsive that I might occasionally laugh but still hate it); Last of the Summer Wine, The Young Ones, The Vicar of Dibley, Bottom, Rab C. Nesbitt, Dad's Army.

As eagle-eyed readers will have gathered from the title of the blog post, I'm going to be writing about The Brittas Empire here. The central character of this one is Gordon Brittas, the obnoxious but idealistic manager of a sports and leisure centre. It ran from 1991 to 1997.

I've been watching The Brittas Empire recently, and I think I'd place it in the second tier.

The funny thing is, I can remember when The Brittas Empire was originally broadcast, and I didn't like it at all. I half-watched it when my father was watching it, but I was never won over. I bracketed it with its close contemporary Keeping Up Appearances; a painfully formulaic show that won a certain amount of laughs from the fact that it was so audaciously formulaic.

Watching it again, I've completely changed my mind. The Brittas Empire is significantly different from any other sit-com I know. For the following reasons (none of them are unique in themselves, but the combination is unique):

1) The large cast. It's very much an ensemble piece with lots of regulars, despite the focus on the central character.

2) The frequently brutal nature of the comedy. It can't really be described as dark, because it's not realistic or serious enough to be dark. Nor can it be called unsentimental, because it has some quite sentimental moments (and I'm fine with that.)

No; brutal is the best term I can think of. Characters frequently die violently in The Brittas Empire. There's a general atmosphere of menace and extremity. One of the best lines comes when we're told that Gordon Brittas worked for the Samaritans for one day. In that one day, four callers committed suicide, and one of them had only called because of a wrong number. (It shouldn't be funny, but it is.) 

In another scene, Brittas's long-suffering wife is sitting by his hospital bed, as he lies unconscious, and is moved when one of his colleagues gives a speech on Brittas's complete lack of malice and his sincere desire to make the world a better place. She's is so moved that she plugs his life-support system back in.

Then there is the receptionist who is keeping her baby in a drawer at reception, and seems to be in a perpetual sense of nervous breakdown.

But the brutality isn't constant. That would get tiresome and too depressing. It's intermittent, and clubs you over the head at just the right moments. And the smattering of invincibly cheerful and oblivious characters (including Brittas himself) lifts the mood sufficiently.

3) The surreal elements. Sometimes the surrealism comes from highly improbable occurrences (like deadly and exotic spiders being sent to Brittas through the post), but sometimes it goes beyond improbable-- like the episode where a long line of people holding hands are simultaneously electrocuted, in a very cartoonish manner.

What makes the surrealism especially effective is that it's in contrast to the underlying atmosphere of the series. It's not a comedy like Father Ted or Blackadder, where the entire world in which the characters exist is zany. In The Brittas Empire, the bizarre is constantly breaking through a mostly very ordinary, very English existence.

4) The intensity of the farce. The Brittas Empire is like Fawlty Towers in that it generally involves a series of mishaps that come together, in unexpected ways, and form a disaster that is much greater than the sum of its parts. It's not as ingenious or brilliant at doing this as Fawlty Towers (nothing is), but it's much more extreme. The disaster often involves explosions, fires, deaths, and so forth. The best comparison is probably the comic fiction of Tom Sharpe.

To sum up, I'm surprised at how much I've had to revise my previous impression.

(One little additional thing: watching it this time round, I've wondered if the character of Carol, the permanently stressed receptonist, might have had any influence on Renée Zellwegger's portrayal of Bridget Jones. The resemblance is very striking. But it might just be coincidence. I'd link to a reel of Carol moments, but I can't find any.)

An Email I Sent An Academic Yesterday

I've recently mentioned the academic journal Emotion, Space and Society, a periodical I came across in my continuing attempt to explore the subject of atmosphere, and perhaps one day to establish the field of Socio-Atmospherics. (That's a joke. That's ninety-three per cent a joke.)

As also mentioned in that same post, I've found myself frustrated by the familiar problem with anything involving academia, at least when it comes to the arts, social sciences and humanities; political correctness.

I was moved to send this email last night:

Dear Dr WIllis

I am reading your article "Restorying the Self, Restoring Place". I particularly like the emphasis on ordinary places and their capacities for healing as opposed to palliation.

However, I can't agree with this passage: "Within the dominant discourses of America the righteous, the land of the free, the place of opportunity there is no room for the stories of those who were evicted from their homelands, exploited, tortured and traumatized. In order for these stories to remain dominant, the pain of America’s native peoples – which Linda Hogan stories also as the pain of the land and of America – must be cloaked, palliated rather than healed."

I know you are summarising Linda Hogan's work here, but you seem to be agreeing.

Is it really the case that "there is no room for the stories of those who were evicted from their homelands"? The opposite seems to be the case to me, that the narrative of Native American dispossession and oppression is now generally accepted and has been for many decades. Similarly, it seems to me that the supposed dominant discourse of "America the righteous" is constantly challenged, even in mainstream discourse, and is highly controversial, to the extent that asserting it (for instance, in country music) is often a self-conscious act of defiance.

Many thanks

Maolsheachlann, Dublin, Ireland

Two Motives for my Catholicism

For a long time, I have realized that I have several different "motives" for my Catholicism, even though I should (perhaps) only have one. In this blog post, I'm only going to write about two, and concentrate mostly on the second. Here they are:

1) A belief that Catholicism is true. In all honesty, for me it has always been a choice between Catholicism and atheism (or agnosticism). I've never seriously contemplated the claims of any other religion. There are so many reasons for this; Catholicism's understanding of human nature, the lives of the saints, its reluctance to change its message, the apostolic succession, its spread through time and space, etc. So I'm moved to practice Catholicism because I consider it true and it's the source of my own and others' salvation.

2) Almost independently of this, a belief in the need for cultural Christianity. Society without religion seems loathsome to me. I can fully appreciate why an atheist like George Orwell would attend religious services and ask for a religious funeral. I'm baffled when people say they are religious but they detest organized religion, since organized religion itself appears to me as something highly desirable.

This applies to all religions, not just Christianity. But of course Christianity seems superior to me, in every way. Champions of other religions might say this is just a matter of familiarity, and I wouldn't be inclined to argue with them, although I don't think it's just that.

Without organized religion, in my view, society slides into pure utilitarianism (or worse). It loses ritual, ceremony, a sense of awe, continuity over generations, and so many other things.

You can of course have ceremony and ritual without religion, but somehow it never seems serious or whole-hearted. The essence of religion, from a social and cultural point of view, is that somebody believes in it.

All of this occurs to me most intensely, perhaps, when I'm reading about the Oxford Movement. The Oxford Movement could be seen in many ways. I like to see it as a group of young men who decided they were going to be very serious and intense about those very elements of religion that their immediate forebears found almost incidental. ("Purified" religion is like white bread; people only realize later that they've lost the most wholesome parts.)

Organized religion only seems to flourish when people are willing to be unreasonable about it, to risk the accusation of fanaticism or narrow-mindedness. When people are willing to be laughed at for its sake.

This is probably my favourite quotation from Cardinal Newman: "Here I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction, that it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be. Not, of course, that I think the tempers of mind herein implied desirable, which would be an evident absurdity; but I think them infinitely more desirable and more promising than a heathen obduracy, and a cold, self-sufficient, self-wise tranquility."

Appointment in Samarkand

I wrote this story a few weeks ago. I had the vague idea of sending it to a magazine or something. But then I thought, I may as well post it here. Are there even magazines for horror stories?

This is the story I mentioned a while back, asking if anyone wanted to read it. One reader kindly agreed but my email address bounced. Anyway, here it is. It's much longer than my original four-page version, after some kind feedback from friends.

Appointment in Samarkand

We’ve all had the experience of waking up from a nightmare. It’s such a common experience that we might call it mundane. Except that it is, in itself, quite extraordinary and bizarre.

We wake up. That is to say, we make the sudden transition from one world to another, not in the blink of an eye but in the opening of two eyes. We know that we are back in the familiar world of our bedroom, our home, our neighbourhood. At any rate, wherever we are, we are back in the world of the normal and solid. The dread that had just been afflicting us was, after all, an illusion.

And yet, so often, the dread lingers on, as though we live for a moment on the borderland of nightmare and reality. Perhaps that peril we glimpsed in the shadows of our minds is really here, just out of sight, just about to pounce… Perhaps, for all the mountains of evidence we have to the contrary, such a thing might actually happen…

At 4:23 on a Wednesday morning, in his flat on the Hessle Road in Hull, Billy Heron emerged from a nightmare. 

In movies and TV shows, this moment is generally portrayed with the dreamer sitting upright, gasping, and staring into the distance; an appropriate visual metaphor. 

Billy simply opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, but his turmoil was no less for that.

The nightmare was identical to one Billy had experienced several times before. Again, it had been a dark alley, no different to all the dark alleys he had hurried past in three decades of city life. Again, he had become aware of a presence somewhere beside him, drawing ever closer. A presence that was utterly and implacably bent on his destruction.

And, once again, he was aware of Samarkand. Somehow he had the name Samarkand in his mind, although there was nothing in the slightest bit exotic or eastern about this nondescript alley.

Samarkand, he knew, was the place where death had come to him.

And always, he heard the same chant, in a high-pitched and horribly jaunty voice:

The blood is the life

The blood is the life

The bloody is the precious life.

Billy lay there, his heart racing, still convinced in his heart that his murderer was close at hand. His neighbours would find him drenched in blood, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day…

With cruel leisure, reality reasserted itself. No. There was no killer. This was his bedroom, piled with books and magazines and still unpacked boxes. The front door was locked. He was not in Samarkand.

He went back to sleep, gratefully.

******

“This is a whole new departure for you. Aren’t you excited?”

That’s what his best friend Gillian had said to him on his last night in Dublin. He’d been complaining about leaving his home city for a place where he knew nobody.

But that was Gillian. She was as upbeat and chirpy as he was…well, everything that was the opposite of that.

“Not really”, he’d said, looking around Nealon’s as though it would be demolished overnight. “I’m not like you, Gillian. I don’t make friends easily. I’m a grumpy, sarcastic git. You know I am.”

Gillian smiled at him. He knew she wasn’t going to deny it.

“Correction”, she said. “You’re a grumpy, sarcastic git in Dublin. Hull Billy can be different. Hull Billy can be a fricking bouncy labrador. It’s a blank slate, a new page, episode one. It’s a Change of Scene.”

Billy laughed appreciatively. A Change of Scene was the title of Billy’s Film Studies PhD. The most in-depth analysis of movie scene transitions ever written. Or so he liked to think.

“Seriously”, Gillian persisted. “Don’t just throw this on the ‘Good Advice for Other People’ pile. Do it. Do it.”

********

So he’d done it. 

When he’d started his job as an assistant lecturer in the Film Studies department of the University of Hull, Billy had reinvented himself.

He no longer looked for an excuse to end conversations after five or ten minutes. He pushed himself to speak to strangers. He feigned an interest where he didn’t feel it.

He even started dressing more smartly. Black heavy metal t-shirts, worn jeans, and battered runners gave way to stylish shirts, suit pants, and black leather shoes that he actually remembered to polish every morning. Well, most mornings.

He even got himself a tweed blazer, though he stopped short of elbow pads.

And he began to “let people in”, as Gillian had always urged him. 

Once, when he was sitting in a greasy spoon and chatting to a guy who looked like a retired Hell’s Angel, he risked an observation on the way the winter light was falling through the window and gleaming on the green glazed tiles opposite.

The guy stared at him for a full five seconds, without expression, before finally saying: “Buddy, you have the soul of a poet. But if you want to see sunlight, you really have to go to Florence.” This was a man with a grinning skull tattooed on his massive bicep.

Following another piece of advice from Gililan, Billy tried to curb his workaholism. For the four years that it took him to write A Change of Scene, he’d barely seen sunlight of any kind. He would frequently spend fourteen hours a day watching stacks of DVDs, flicking through the pages of piles of library books, all the time writing and rewriting and rewriting. 

Some of it was ambition. Some of it was the sheer joy of the thing. If he wasn’t utterly drained and exhausted at the end of each night, he felt like he was goofing off.

Well, no more of that. He went to pubs and cafés in the evenings, joined the university’s Film Society, and even got involved in a local libertarian study group. “They all have goatees”, he’d told Gillian on the phone. “Even the girls.”

She laughed her customary belly-laugh. “Sounds like you’re thriving”, she said.

“I am”, he said, realizing only then that it was true.

******

Still, though, there were the nightmares.

Every time he passed a dark alleyway, Billy stopped– at a safe distance– and watched it, fascinated. They were strange things, alleyways. They only existed as places of transition. The only things that might ever happen in them were bad things.

He watched solitary figures nonchalantly walking through them– women, often enough. At night, in lonely parts of town. This fascinated him.

Now and again one of them would look up, catch sight of him watching them from afar, and quicken their pace. He’d feel flustered and walk in the opposite direction, just as quickly. But he couldn’t help himself looking.

None of them were his alleyway, though. None of them were Samarkand. 

Somehow, he just knew that.

*******

“So, Film Studies, what is that? Do you have to know every movie ever made, or something like that?”

It was Isha asking him. Isha was the Indian girl who worked at the local all-night shop three streets from him. She was extremely pretty, very friendly, and spoke better English than most of the natives.

He’d taken to buying coffees there at unearthly hours– when the nightmare had woken him up, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. He couldn’t say how often it had come to him now. A half-a-dozen times, maybe.

“Well, you have to know a lot of movies”, said Billy, “but it’s more about analysing them.”

Isha rested her chin on her fist and looked up at him with her big, brown eyes. She seemed curious about everything. “Analyse, like how?”

The sound of some rowdies drifted in from the street outside, shouting and laughing. Mercifully, they passed the shop, and their voices dwindled into the rumble of traffic that never seemed to stop at any hour of the day or night. In Dublin or in Hull.

“Well, for instance”, said Billy, “my PhD was about scene changes. You know, when you’re watching a movie and it shows a little girl playing on a swing on a summer’s morning, and then the next moment she’s a grown woman and she’s walking past a graveyard on a dark night? That kind of thing.”

“Well, so what?”, asked Isha. She was an engineering student. She seemed genuinely baffled.

Billy laughed, feeling the tension of his nightmare slowly dissipate. “Isn’t that a bit odd, though? I mean, that sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life. Well, with one exception.”

“And what’s that?”

“Dreams. Dreams, and waking up from dreams. You know, people say the cinema is like dreaming. That’s a very old theory. It’s called the oneiric theory.”

“Oneiric”, said Isha, lingering over the word, staring out at the street outside. God, she was pretty. “Never heard that one before. So what made you write about…scene changes?”

Billy was a bit taken aback. Nobody had ever asked him that before, not even Gillian. And he’d always wanted to be asked.

“I think it was growing up in the eighties,” he said, stirring his latté, even though it didn’t need to be stirred again. “I mean, eighties babies like me grew up expecting nuclear war to break out at any moment.”

“Dude, I’m from Kashmir”, she said. “That never went away for us.”

“Well, OK”, he said, with a rueful smile. “So you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, it really used to bother me. That everything around me, even on a lovely summer’s day, could change like that”-- he snapped his finger– “when the bombs fell. Cut to apocalypse.”

He was beginning to spook himself now. He could feel goose-pimples on his flesh.

“Huh”, said Isha, but she didn’t seem bored. She seemed intrigued.

“And then there was AIDS. That was a new thing when I was a kid. There was no cure. We had it drummed into us constantly. I lived in fear of some maniac pricking me with an infected needle, and like that–” he clicked his fingers again– “you had AIDS and nothing could save you. Everything changes in an instant.”

“Who is that guy out there?” asked Isha, looking past him.

Billy turned around.

It took him a moment to see, but there was a man standing about twelve yards from the entrance of the shop. He was little more than a silhouette against the glow of the streetlight. All that Billy could tell was that he was tall, and he was standing absolutely still.

Watching them.

“He’s been standing like that for about a minute now”, said Isha. “What should we do?”

This was the moment to be manly, Billy realized– with great reluctance. Slowly, he began to walk to the door.

Much to his relief, the figure retreated. By the time he’d got outside, the man had disappeared.

****

“It’s later on. We’re having drinks. You break those glasses of yours, and then, quite suddenly, the room goes dark. And then, Foley, you say something, something about the death of a man I’ve never heard of. And that’s when my dream becomes a nightmare. A nightmare of horror.”

The face of Mervyn Johns froze on the screen, in glorious black and white as Billy hit the pause button on Dead of Night. He turned to the thirty or so students in the screening room.

“Still makes me shiver every time”, he said. “Just look at how brilliantly the director has transformed the atmosphere of the film. Everything changes in an instant. The feeling of unease has sharpened to a feeling of fear– but it remains vague, on the edge of vision.”

The class looked back at him, with their eternally impassive faces. They were nice kids. They didn’t realize how much they resembled mannequins in class.

“Yes?”, he asked. “No?”

One girl, Suzie, scrunched her nose. “I don’t know”, she said. “All that dreams vs. reality stuff seems a bit hokey to me. I have never, ever thought I was in a dream when I was awake.”

“But”, asked Billy, “you’ve thought you were awake when you were in a dream. No?”

Suzie didn’t look convinced. “All that dream stuff doesn’t scare me”, she said. “Reality scares me.”

Billy looked back at the frozen face on the screen, pretending to think. In truth, he didn’t have to think. He’d thought all this to death already, in the years of writing his thesis.

“So you’ve never literally thought you were in a dream”, he said, slowly, looking from face to face. “But what about reality itself? 

“I mean, take the biggest questions. Take religion. Some people believe that the world was created by a being of infinite goodness and that everybody has an immortal soul. Some people think there’s no such entity and that all this”-- he gestured around the screening room– “is just atoms colliding in space, and there’s nothing waiting for us at the end of the ride.”

Suzie and her class-mates stared at him silently, curious as to where this was going.

“And nobody knows”, Billy went on. “There isn’t even anything like a consensus. Every day we get up and have breakfast and make appointments and we don’t even know what sort of basic reality we’re living in. Isn’t that dream-like in itself?”

There was a long silence as Billy’s question hung on the air.

“I do know”, said Suzie, staring at him with a mixture of timidity and defiance. “I know my Redeemer liveth.”

Billy looked down and shuffled his papers, suddenly embarrassed. Professions of faith were rare on campus. “Well, I envy you, then”, he said. “OK, let’s take a look at the lighting in this scene.”

*****

“Where is Samarkand, anyway?”

Billy had decided to tell someone about the nightmare. Let people in, just like Gillian said.

It was his colleague Alastair. Alastair seemed to be the only member of the Film Studies faculty who actually liked him. The others were just about polite. 

Billy wondered if it was the fact that his PhD had been something of a hit. He’d already accumulated more citations than some of his colleagues who’d been lecturing for ten or fifteen years.

Or maybe it was the Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child poster above his desk office. Or the fact that he’d called Battleship Potemkin boring, in an unguarded moment.

They were sitting in the canteen, both of them eating morning porridge. It was a custom they’d fallen into over the last few weeks. Alastair was more interested in the dream than Billy had expected him to be.

“Samarkand”, said Billy slowly, “is in Uzbekistan. It’s a very ancient city and it used to be famous for silk and embroidery and all that jazz. Still is. That’s what Wikipedia tells me.”

Alastair looked at him quizzically. He looked like Woody Allen, but with dark hair and a bushy beard. He had the most mobile eyebrows Billy had ever seen.

“Well, you weren’t planning on going to Uzbekistan, were you?”

“Nope.”

“Even still, that can’t be it”, said Alastair, stroking his beard, meditatively. “I’m guessing the message is garbled. Summer kind? Some are kind? Sam R. Khan?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”, asked Billy. “You’re not taking this seriously, are you?”

“Oh come on, dude”, said Alastair, feigning surprise. “What about the Incredulity Index?”

Billy couldn’t help grinning. Almost as soon as they had discovered their mutual love of horror films, Billy and Alastair had come up with the idea of the Incredulity Index. It was the precise minute when all the main characters in a supernatural horror film accepted the impossible was actually happening. They were half-seriously thinking of collaborating on a paper on the subject.

“Well, I’m actually ahead of you, believe it or not”, Billy admitted. “I thought there might be a Samarkand Lane or a Samarkand Street somewhere in this city. There isn’t. Or maybe an Uzbeki restaurant called Samarkand. There isn’t.”

“Most unhelpful”, said Alastair. “You know what this reminds me of?”

“No idea.”

Alastair screwed up his face and began to speak in deep, ponderous tones; “Once upon a time, many years ago, a rich merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the marketplace…”

Billy beamed. He recognized it now. It was Boris Karloff in Targets, a favourite film with both of them

He took up the monologue where Alasdair had left off, hamming it up a notch more: “The servant came back, trembling, and said, "Master, in the marketplace, I was jostled by a woman in the crowd, and I turned to look. I saw that it was Death. And she looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Please, Master, lend me your horse, so I may ride away from this city and escape my fate. I will ride to Samara, and Death will not find me there."

Looking around, Billy noticed that people at the nearby tables were starting to listen to them. Some of them were smiling. Dublin Billy would have felt self-conscious. Hull Billy relished it.

So did Alastair, evidently, as his Boris Karloff impression became even louder and more dramatic: “Then the merchant went to the marketplace, and he saw Death, and he said to her, "Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?" And Death said, "I made no threatening gesture. That was a gesture of surprise. I was surprised to see him here in Baghdad…”

Billy couldn’t let him have the punch-line, so they both finished together, almost shouting now: “...when I have an appointment with him tonight…in Samara!”

To his surprise, there was a smattering of applause from around the cafeteria, and someone shouted: “Wahey!” Alasdair bowed and waved.

Suddenly, Billy was feeling better. A lot better. Sitting here in the sunlit canteen, full of warm porridge and looking at Alasdair’s playful smile, the fear that this nightmare might be something to actually worry about seemed preposterous.

“You know”, said Alasdair, pointing his spoon at Billy, “in all these kinds of stories, running from your fate is just running right into it.”

“Of course. We all know that.”

“So maybe do the opposite, is what I’m saying. Maybe you should go down every dark alley in town.”

“I don’t want to do that”, said Billy. “I’m bound to run into your mother.”

Along with the Incredulity Index, Billy and Alasdair had evolved an agreement when it came to mother jokes; there were no holds barred, and they were not to be taken personally.

“Well, there is that”, said Alasdair. “Hey, tell me again the words of the song.”

“It’s more a chant, really. The blood is the life, the blood is the life, the blood is the precious life.”

“The what’s that?”

Billy turned around. Glenn Rogers, the department head was standing there, listening intently. Although he’d been the one to hire Billy,  it was obviously a purely professional decision. Professor Rogers was an arthouse fanatic who hated all genre cinema. He seemed suspicious of anything with a coherent story, in fact.

“Oh… said Billy. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just a sort of…chant I’ve been hearing in my dreams.”

“The blood is the life?”, asked Rogers. “Isn’t that Dracula?” He seemed pleased to have caught the reference, for all his disdain for genre fiction.

“Well, yes”, said Billy. “But it’s originally from the Book of Leviticus. In the Bible.”

“Humph”, said Rogers, looking irritated now. “I don’t know, Billy. Between Frankie Kruger and weird dreams, maybe all these horror movies have broken your mind. Ha, ha.”

He spun on his heel and walked away.

*****

Thinking he could kill the power of the dream, he told as many people about it as he could. He told Warren, a soft-spoken electrician who he’d met some weeks ago in the Admiral of the Humber, when they found themselves on the same pub quiz team.

Warren was like the uncle everybody wished they’d had. He seemed to be made for an armchair by the fire, a pipe, and sandals. Billy got the impression Warren was completely contented with his simple life.

“That’s a very odd dream”, said Warren. “I’ve heard of recurring dreams but never anything so…detailed.”

“No, there are usually variations, aren’t there? If you have a dream, say, that you’re back at school, you might be in a different class, or with a different teacher. Or there might be a polar bear in the assembly hall. The details change. This is always the same.”

Warren looked down into his cider ponderously. “Take My Breath Away”, the song from Top Gun, was playing in the background. Billy always found it strangely creepy.

“It’s probably some unresolved tension in your subconscious”, said Warren. The words seem incongruous coming from Warren, but he spoke them as naturally as though he was discussing a football game. “An alley? Are you feeling trapped, maybe?”

“I’ve never felt more freedom than I’ve felt in the last two months”, Billy replied. Dublin Billy would never have said something like that to a comparative stranger.

“Well, nightmares aren’t nice, but they can’t hurt you,” said Warren finally.

“I hope so”, said Billy. 

He had a creeping wish to sit here forever, in Warren’s calming presence, on a slow Tuesday in the Admiral. “The thing is though…” He paused.

Warren waited for him to continue, wordlessly, his kindly eyes glinting like the gleam of the pub lights on his cider.

“I haven’t told this to anyone else”, said Billy. “But they’re getting worse, somehow. I mean, the same stuff is happening, but the horror seems…closer.”

“Well”, said Warren, “perhaps the tension in your subconscious is reaching its climax. Maybe it’s all going to blow over.”

When Warren said it, it seemed so plausible. 

The song had changed to “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow” by Fleetwood Mac. Warren started talking about a new shop space he’d just finished wiring up.

******

Billy woke up, his heart hammering.

The comforting surroundings of the Admirable of the Humber and the university canteen were a million miles away. The hum of voices in the air was gone. He was alone, in darkness and in silence.

And the nightmare had come again. This time, it seemed more real than ever.

He was in Samarkand, and death was coming.

This time, however, there was no time for the horror to fade away.

Then there was a knock on the door.

Billy jumped, then sat there paralysed. In the silence of the night, the sound had echoed through his small bedsit.

It came again now, more insistent.

Although his animal instincts were telling him to stay absolutely still, he walked the few steps to the kitchen and took his big knife from the drawer.

Then, like walking against a gale-force wind, he walked to the front door and looked out the peephole.

It was one of the students who lived just above him. She was swaying on her feet, obviously the worse for wear.

“Forgot me key”, she said. “Let me in, for God’s sake. I need to pee.”

“You’re on the wrong floor”, called Billy through the door, as softly as he could. “This is the third floor.”

The girl looked surprised for a moment, then started to hoot with laughter as though this was the funniest thing that had ever happened “I’m sorry, mate. That’s gold. That’s gold, that is!”

She staggered away. Her raucous laughter had done a lot to dissipate his fear. He half-regretted not asking her in to use his bathroom. Even a drunk girl’s company would be welcome right now.

Billy walked back to his bedroom, wondering if he had ever been as frightened as the moment he heard that knock for the first time.

Then he saw it.

His bedroom curtains were open. Across the street, on the street bench outside the hospital grounds, a man was sitting.

Looking up at him.

Or was he? He was a block away, and– once again– Billy could only make out his silhouette. He could only see that he was tall, and seemed to be looking up to his window.

It’s not so strange, really, Billy tried to convince himself. He’s sitting there, probably visiting a dying relative. My bedroom light goes on. He hears a commotion. Of course he’s going to look up…

But his attempts to reassure himself didn’t work. His heart was still hammering, and he felt cold all over.

The shadow-man rose slowly. He was indeed tall.

He stood there for a moment, and then walked away, slowly. He disappeared into an alley-way between the hospital grounds and the supermarket.

******

“I’m so happy to hear things are going so well”, said Gillian.

It was the next evening, and Billy was sitting on the very bench where he’d seen the shadow figure sitting. He made himself sit there. It had been three days since he’d phoned Gillian, which was probably the longest they’d not talked in five years.

“It really is”, said Billy. “Turns out your advice wasn’t as terrible as I assumed.” He hadn’t told Gillian about the nightmares. He didn’t want to worry her.

“And what about the ladies?”, asked Gillian. “I reckon I’m allowed to ask every three months or so. Is there some lucky hottie on the scene?”

“Well”, said Billy. “I don’t know…No, not really.”

“And if there is, you’re not telling me”, said Gillian. “Got it. Hey, did you see Obama is coming to Ireland?”

“Yeah”, said Billy. Barack Obama was very far from his mind.

*****

“Hey, there is my hero!” Isha was grinning at him as he approached the counter with his latté.

It was only ten o’clock. Billy was determined he was going to get to bed before midnight. He was losing too much sleep.

“What are you talking about?”, he asked.

“You’re the guy who protects me from the bad men”, said Isha, as though she found this wildly amusing. 

Blly found himself wondering whether such big brown eyes were exceptional even in India. They seemed impossible not to notice.

“Oh, that”, said Billy. “Hardly heroic, was it?”

“Don’t do yourself down. You might have saved me from a terrible fate”, said Isha, who seemed to be enjoying herself. “Hey, take a picture with me, would you?”

“Why?”

“My flatmate Sarah wants to see a picture of my gentleman caller.”

Billy looked away and felt his cheeks flushing, embarrassed.

“Hey, hey”, said Isha, laughing. “I’m only teasing with you. But seriously, come round here. I promised Sarah I’d take your picture.”

Once again, Billy found himself wondering if girlfriends really told each other absolutely everything.

“Look, I’m not even going to put my arm around you”, said Isha, clearly enjoying his embarrassment. “But come a bit closer, so I can fit you in the picture.”

Billy stood closer, but just as Isha was about to take the picture, she said: “Hang on. You have to look tough in it. Like a guy who chases scary men away.”

“Come on”, said Billy, though he was far from displeased.

“I’m serious. You have to look tough.”

After a moment’s thought, Billy raised a fist in the air, gritted his teeth, and widened his eyes. He hoped nobody walked in at that moment.

Sarah snapped the picture, and a moment later was looking at. She squealed with laughter.

“Well, you don’t so much look tough as…demented.”

“Let me see”, said Billy, who couldn’t resist smiling.

He turned the phone towards him. She was absolutely right. He looked like a maniac.

“You have to delete that right away”, he said, laughing himself now. “Give it here.” He reached out his hand.

But Isha had turned her back to him, cradling the phone. “Too late. It’s sending. It’s sending. It’s sent.” She was now shaking with laughter.

“You have to tell her you told me to look tough”.

“Not a chance”, said Isha. “I’m going to tell her that was your idea. So how come you’re here so early tonight?”

Billy shrugged. “I’ve got to get to sleep sooner. I was dropping off at a staff meeting last night.”

“The nightmares?”, asked Isha. The mirth in her eyes had suddenly been replaced with sympathy. “The blood is the life, all that?”

“All that”, said Billy.

“So what am I going to do without my protector?”

“I think you’ll manage”, said Billy, smiling and trying not to flush again. “If anyone gives you any trouble, just show them that picture.”

* * * * *

That night, Billy took his roll of masking tape and covered the inside lock of his front door with strip after strip, pulling it as tight as he could.

He’d never been a sleep-walker. And Warren was probably right about unresolved tensions in his subconscious.

But he wasn’t taking any chances. He doubted any sleep-walker could get through that much tape without waking up.

He had no intention of keeping his appointment in Samarkand.

Then an idea occurred to him for the first time.

He went into his bedroom, pulled one corner of his duvet away from the bed, then did the same with the fitted sheet. He raised the mattress and looked under it. He repeated the process with two more corners of the mattress, before he came to the label of the manufacturer.

The label said, “Bedlux, for the night of your dreams.”

Not Samarkand.

He rearranged the sheets, and went to brush his teeth.

He smiled at himself in the mirror, wondering if a pretty girl like Isha could really find anything worth noticing in that smile. He thought it was nothing to write home about, himself. Well, girls didn’t care about looks so much, did they?

Then he stared at the reflection of the room behind him, half-expecting to see a shadow moving in it. If this was a horror movie—

But there was no stirring of shadows. And when he pulled out the mirror to replace his toothbrush in the cabinet behind, there was no second reflection in it as he pulled it back.

Of course not.

It took about three-quarters of an hour for Billy to fall asleep. But he was successful in his aim. It was one minute to midnight as he drifted into dreams.

***

Inevitably, the dreams gave way to the nightmare.

He was back in the alleyway. He was back in Samarkand.

The whole city felt dead around him. Nothing was stirring. Even the rumble of traffic seemed far away and subdued.

But he was coming.

Billy was about halfway through the alleyway. He started to walk faster, although he felt an invisible force was fighting every step.

Then the shadow appeared before him. The shadow he had seen so often before.

The tall man.

Although they were close enough to touch, the shadow walked towards him with agonising slowness.

He had time to hear that taunting voice say:

“The blood is the life, the blood is the life, the blood is the precious life…”

There was a flash of light on metal…

****

Billy woke up. This time his heart wasn’t just hammering. He felt like he was in the middle of a full-on panic attack, and struggling to breathe.

So this was how he died. Suffocated by terror. Unable to cry out. A massive heart attack, or something like that. Never knowing 

A knock on the door in the night would be the last thing he heard. He felt sure of it.

But there was no knock.

And slowly, gradually, the panic attack subsided.

Billy lay on the bed, panting, surprised that he was still alive.

As the immediate panic subsided, he rose slowly to his feet and walked to the window. He felt he could hardly help himself.

He pulled the curtains open.

There was nobody sitting on the bench.

Three guys were ambling across the road, eating fast food of some kind, laughing drunkenly.

A taxi passed, the lights from it illuminating his bedroom.

He looked at his alarm clock. It was a quarter past three. The dead of night.

Slowly, he made his way back into bed, and fell into a deep sleep.

****

When his alarm went at 6:00, Billy felt a strange peace.

The words of Warren, wise Warren with his avuncular face, came to him again: Maybe the tension in your subconscious is reaching its climax. Maybe it’s all going to blow over.

It had. Somehow Billy knew that it had. He felt it. He found himself, instinctively, thanking the God he eighty-five per cent didn’t believe in. 

What tangle in his subconscious had come loose, finally? Probably there was no way of knowing. It was doubtless in some unreachable dark part of his brain.

Maybe that was Samarkand.

Billy felt suddenly cheerful. Now that he felt sure the nightmares were gone, everything looked good. The winter dawn was beginning to fill the sky. Hull was his oyster. This unglamorous city was where life was really kicking off for him. Who needed Manhattan?

Emerging from the bathroom, he smiled at the sight of the masking tape covering the door-lock. Well, there had been no sleepwalking, anyway. It seemed ridiculous now.

He was in plenty of time for work. It was a few hours yet until his canteen porridge with Alasdair. He was going to make French toast, and have a leisurely breakfast while listening to the radio.

He turned on the golden oldies station that he liked, and smiled. “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” by Fleetwood Mac was just beginning.

“If you wake up and don’t want to smile” Lindsay Buckingham sang, “If it takes just a little while. Open your eyes, look at the day…”

“You’ll see things in a different way”, Billy half-sang along with the radio, opening the fridge and taking out the milk.

After the song, the 6:30 news came on, read by Jessica Bell. She had a sexy voice. Alasdair always imagined her with raven-black hair and full lips, dressed with a slight Goth aesthetic.

Usually, he could hear the smile in her voice. Not this morning. Today, her voice was more sombre.

“It’s half-past-six and this is your Humberside Classics morning news. Tragedy this morning as a young woman was stabbed to death a little after three a.m..”

Billy had been whisking eggs. He stopped now, and looked at the radio, where it stood on the window ledge. It was a cheerful-looking, retro-styled radio, coloured bright red.

“The stabbing occurred in Crow Lane, near the newly-opened Samarkand rugs and carpets store. The victim is described as an Asian woman in her twenties. An eye-witness saw a tall man leaving the scene. Although it was too dark to see the figure clearly, the witness clearly heard him say these words: The blood is the life, the blood is the life, the blood is the precious life.”