The Circle by Christopher Grant

THE CIRCLE - CHRISTOPHER GRANT

 

There’s a gigantic circle, with jagged edges, carved out in the stairs leading from the main floor up to the apartments. The staircase is curved and has probably a good thirty to forty steps. The jagged circle is no more than six stairs up from the main floor. It looks like blood has been spilled into this circle and then someone attempted to wash it out with mixed results. On the back of the front door, there are bloodstains.

 

Legend has it that a woman who caught her husband cheating on hung him in the front doorway and people could see him struggling to free himself. They just stood and watched, apparently. Ultimately, however, he succumbed to the to the strangulation. His body is rumored to hung there for days before anyone did anything about it.

 

There is also the matter of the phrase that’s said to hang in the air, “With these words, I hung him.” The words, as tenants have discovered are Fuck You, which is carved into the doors and walls of all of the apartments, as well as the wall leading down the staircase until it reaches the front door. Some tenants say they have seen the hanging man after uttering the words Fuck You in genuine anger.

 

Some people believe that the curse of the building can be lifted if two people, who love each other, have sex in the jagged circle in the stairs.

 

THE CIRCLE - CHRISTOPHER GRANT

 

There’s a gigantic circle, with jagged edges, carved out in the stairs leading from the main floor up to the apartments. There is blood splashed in the center of the circle and skin around the edges. No one has ever been brave enough to determine if the skin belongs to an animal or a human.

 

On the back of the front door, there are bloodstained handprints.

 

Legend has it that a cult used to inhabit the apartments up the curved staircase. Legend even says that a young Charles Manson drifted through here on his way to California and infamy.

 

At night, people that used to live in this neighborhood but long gone now say that you could hear screams and chanting coming from behind the closed doors. On the lawn, they say, there were hordes of copulating men and women. Cars would pull up to the tenement and sometimes one person would get out and sometimes it would be a half dozen.

 

For days, these cars would sit on the street while their owners were inside the apartment house.

 

Sometimes, those owners didn’t come out at all, their cars driven away by other, previously unseen people.

 

When the police were finally brought into the matter, they found the bloody handprints on the back door and the jagged circle with blood in the center and skin on the edges and, carved into the walls leading up the staircase, the words Fuck You.

 

Oddly, they never found the inhabitants of the apartment house, even though many of their cars were still parked out on the street.

 

The police investigated but, ultimately, the file was buried and the case never discussed again.

Deviant Star by Richard Godwin

DEVIANT STAR - RICHARD GODWIN

The man who dreamed of deviation’s exaltation was born in a puddle in a small damp room in South London. Max Dregs climbed clear of his mother’s oversized placenta and rose to his name with alacrity in his spoiled tired teenage years when he idly perused the websites that filled the internet with trash and false information. And it was this he liked about it, the distortions it allowed. It catered to the possibility of serious subversion.

He was a skinny pale boy who stared mannerlessly at passing strangers and kept a cache of porn beneath his urinous rotting mattress. His mother doted on him and he would yell at the postman if he was late. For Max hated anything he deemed inefficient. He liked the sense of control the internet gave him and the illusory notion of virtual relationships, for real people were boring. He wanted to rebel, he wanted to do something different. He knew one day he would make a name for himself.

When he was eighteen he burned his school uniform and sent it to 10 Downing Street with a note that read ‘I am the King of the Future. Max.’ The sender information was not securely attached and fell off the parcel in transit.

As he returned from mailing it he opened a cupboard to get some cake, which he consumed by the cartload, only to rise and concuss his fragile head on the open door.

While Max lay in a coma at the local hospital with his wan hand squeezed by his sobbing mother, he dreamed of cake, endless galleries of cup cakes, chocolate gateaux, éclairs and Victoria sponges spurting cream into his sunken jaws as he salivated in his comatose virtual realm at the images paraded before him like some sick twisted little sadistic film.

He dreamed of Mirabelle Floss, a devotee of the guru Sri Baswati, curer of all ills. Mirabelle was a seeker of truth, an ardent believer in higher things, who gave up knitting when she became disillusioned with Sri Baswati after a major press exposé of his abuse of children. She received the sign that Max was God from a message inside a muffin. She ditched the anti psychotic drugs, kneeling on the floor of her tired room until her knees bled for two whole weeks while she conjured Max from the darkness. She would wash his feet with her lank and greasy hair.

Max dreamed he woke up in the future to discover Mirabelle had started a website in his name called Flutter.

And it had soared.

Flutter encouraged members to expose political lies and it had grown into something of a monster, outdoing all other social networking sites.

The Prime Minister was outraged, but he could do little to stop the kinetic energy that had been set in motion.

In his dream Max walked from the hospital to find himself surrounded by an army of devoted followers, men and women with pictures of him tattooed to their foreheads. They wore robes and reached out to touch him with hungry hands.

He returned home and found they had camped outside his house. And so, he went among them, raising his arms and touching them, as they asked him to do.

He screwed a few women, talked to some of the men, and quickly became bored, finding he only had a craving for cake.

He also became increasingly annoyed by the efforts of politicians to shut down his empire and would lie awake at night making rude posts about them.

One day Max decided he had had enough. He ordered 1,000 cream puffs and injected them with poison. Then he fed his followers death. He had decided death resided in the hidden crevices of networking sites and that salvation was to be found in the fondant centre of a sleeping meringue. Max sat and watched his followers cough their lungs out.

His dream ended with the smell of burning. He was standing in Pudding Lane as the fires raged.

He opened his eyes to see his mother hopping about with her blouse alight. She’d started smoking again and set fire to herself.

Two days after mailing his letter Max sat up in bed and said: ‘Cake, I want some fucking cake.’

He had the vague sensation he had lost a hand, so strong was his devoted mother’s grip.

After the hospital staff put out the alarms, his mother fetched him some Genoa slices from the meagre hospital shop and popped them in Max’s pale mouth piece by piece as he spilled crumbs down the open front of his sweaty pyjamas.

‘More,’ he said.

She went and got every piece of cake in the shop and fed her hungry son, feeling virginal in her devotion.

Finally Max staggered to his feet and said, ‘Mum, I want out of here.’

He didn’t see the papers that littered his hospital room. His mother hadn’t left his side but had read with interest of the threat of nuclear war. The danger from the Middle East had been escalating.

The Prime Minister had been notified by special services that he would receive a coded message when it was time to let the missiles fly. Emails were no longer safe since there was so much hacking. The code was ‘I am the King Of The Future.’

That day the Prime Minster called a cabinet meeting.

‘I received a package today that spells out clearly what I have to do. It contains ash, which designates annihilation. The accompanying letter uses the emergency code. It reads Max, I think you all know what this means’, he said with trembling hands.

As Max left hospital he heard a screaming overhead. To him the burning buildings looked like Baked Alaskas.

Deviant Star by Richard Godwin

DEVIANT STAR - RICHARD GODWIN

The man who dreamed of deviation’s exaltation was born in a puddle in a small damp room in South London. Max Dregs climbed clear of his mother’s oversized placenta and rose to his name with alacrity in his spoiled tired teenage years when he idly perused the websites that filled the internet with trash and false information. And it was this he liked about it, the distortions it allowed. It catered to the possibility of serious subversion.

He was a skinny pale boy who stared mannerlessly at passing strangers and kept a cache of porn beneath his urinous rotting mattress. His mother doted on him and he would yell at the postman if he was late. For Max hated anything he deemed inefficient. He liked the sense of control the internet gave him and the illusory notion of virtual relationships, for real people were boring. He wanted to rebel, he wanted to do something different. He knew one day he would make a name for himself.

When he was eighteen he burned his school uniform and sent it to 10 Downing Street with a note that read ‘I am the King of the Future. Max.’

Max was semi literate and had spelled the address Drowning Street and got the postcode wrong. He also filled in his address under sender information on the parcel.

As he returned from mailing it he opened a cupboard to get some cake, which he consumed by the cartload, only to rise and concuss his fragile head on the open door.

While Max lay in a coma at the local hospital with his wan hand squeezed by his sobbing mother, he dreamed of cake, endless galleries of cup cakes, chocolate gateaux, éclairs and Victoria sponges spurting cream into his sunken jaws as he salivated in his comatose virtual realm at the images paraded before him like some sick twisted little sadistic film.

His letter was opened my Mirabelle Floss, a devotee of the guru Sri Baswati, curer of all ills. Mirabelle was a seeker of truth, an ardent believer in higher things, who gave up knitting when she became disillusioned with Sri Baswati after a major press exposé of his abuse of children. The grey morning she opened Max’s missive she needed a sign.

She had ditched the anti psychotic drugs and had been kneeling on the floor of her tired room until her knees bled and now she had a direction for the future. The contents of the parcel looked like a series of burn marks on an old rag. Mirabelle decided these were images of the face of her saviour.

God’s name was Max Dregs and she would wash his feet with her lank and greasy hair.

Some months later Max woke up in the future with the vague sensation he had lost a hand, so strong was his devoted mother’s grip.

He opened his eyes, tasted sugar, stared at the white walls of the hospital and said: ‘Cake, I want some fucking cake.’

His mother fetched him some Genoa slices from the meagre hospital shop and popped them in his pale mouth piece by piece as Max spilled crumbs down the open front of his sweaty pyjamas.

‘More,’ he said.

She went and got every piece of cake in the shop and fed her hungry son, feeling virginal in her devotion.

Finally Max staggered to his feet and said ‘Mum, I want out of here.’

And so the new era was born.

Unbeknown to Max, Mirabelle had started a website in his name called Flutter.

And it had soared. She’d gone to Max’s house and met with his mother, who gave her pictures of her son.

Flutter encouraged members to expose political lies and it had grown into something of a monster, outdoing all other social networking sites.

The Prime Minister was outraged, but he could do little to stop the kinetic energy that had been set in motion by Max’s blundered effort at sending a letter.

As he walked from the hospital Max found himself surrounded by an army of devoted followers, men and women with pictures of him tattooed to their foreheads. They wore robes and reached out to touch him with hungry hands.

He returned home and found they had camped outside his house. And so, he went among them, raising his arms and touching them, as they asked him to do.

He screwed a few women, talked to some of the men, and quickly became bored, finding he only had a craving for cake.

He also became increasingly annoyed by the efforts of politicians to shut down his empire and would lie awake at night making rude posts about them.

One day Max decided he had had enough. He ordered 1,000 cream puffs and injected them with poison. Then he fed his followers death. He had decided death resided in the hidden crevices of networking sites and that salvation was to be found in the fondant centre of a sleeping meringue. Max sat and watched his followers cough their lungs out, with their screams ringing in his ears.