The Fire Worm

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Psychiatrist John Cunningham is secretly also "Jack Cannon", author of popular horror novels. Under hypnotic regression, John's patient Tony reveals a bizarre and horrifying tale of a "past life" lived on Tyneside in the 1950s, involving two schoolboys and a weird creature with paranormal powers lurking in caves beneath Tynemouth Castle. As John regresses Tony through earlier lives as far back as the 14th century it begins to seem that the local legend, captured in folksong, of a malevolent Lambton Worm may have had a basis in fact: that it was, in fact, the salamander of alchemical belief, summoned by an alchemist known as Raymond Lully, and possibly still locked below Tynemouth Castle And while John Cunningham is exploring Tony's multiple personalities, he begins to experience personality problems of his own, as Jack Cannon beings to assert his own individuality.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 201

Sample

I kept a careful eye on Tony Smith while he read through the pages which Jack, my other half, had typed. Sometimes Tony shivered, sometimes he looked sick.

Jack had entitled the account Jingling Geordie’s Hole, but I’d been careful not to let him add anything else. Here was the story which Tony had spoken into the cassette recorder under hypnosis the week before: the narrative of his previous life.

Tony’s real name wasn’t Smith, by the way. Surname concealed for the sake of confidentiality. And I too had more than one identity.

On the one hand I was John Cunningham, psychiatrist, specializing in what is known as “past-life therapy” or “reincarnation therapy”. My other persona was Jack Cannon, author of horror novels, my secret pseudonym.

Until I met Tony, I had always kept my two identities quite separate. This wasn’t difficult. Patients being treated by past-life therapy didn’t – oughtn’t to – produce horror motifs. They drew upon the brain’s warehouse of memory (of cinema, TV, or books long forgotten by the conscious mind) to invent another life in the remote or recent past. This previous life would expose and explore the problems of their real life now. Thus they were into “historical” fiction, not horror.

Let’s let Jack interview me …

JACK: “So how does PLT work? This Past-Life Therapy of yours?”

JOHN: “A psychological blockage brings a patient to my consulting room. An anguish, a pattern of failure. So then – ”

JACK: “You hypnotize him or her, and tell them they can remember a previous life.”

JOHN: “Right. So they experience a previous epoch. They’re convinced they lived then. They populate it with characters symbolizing the people they’ve known in reality. They fill it with events representing the suppressed traumas of their actual life, so that these can at last be confronted and overcome.”

JACK: “Yet so far as you’re concerned, it’s all invention on their part. You don’t believe in reincarnation, do you? How can you honestly practise PLT?”

JOHN: “While I’m engaged in therapy, perhaps I believe – in the sense that a novelist believes in what he’s writing while he’s busy writing it.”

JACK: “You don’t help them make up their story?”

JOHN: “Oh no. Their own creativity wells up from within. The past lives they recount are often the greatest exercise of artistic creation during their whole lifetime. Sometimes the only such exercise. That’s why this form of therapy is usually so positive and life-enhancing, even if the subject matter consists of misery and tragedy. It’s like dreaming aloud, in a lucid way. My role is to offer a stage for this, using hypnosis. Then I help them interpret their past life.”

JACK: “Without blowing the gaff. You leave them believing in reincarnation.”

JOHN: “Well, I’d have to, wouldn’t I? I’d like to emphasize that PLT often works dramatically well in cases where orthodox psychiatry has failed. Ultimately any type of analysis is a fiction, you see. It’s one possible construction out of many. Freudianism might be ideal to repair the damaged psyche of patient A. It’s no use for patient B, who has different problems. The Jungian approach might be fine for B; or useless. No school of therapy has a monopoly on the truth. Consequently: if it works, use it. Suppose Freudian or Jungian or Adlerian analysis has led to a big brick wall, then roll on PLT.”

JACK: “But you still programme your patients with a new belief system: reincarnation, multiple lives.”

JOHN: “It rarely comes as a shock, let me tell you. Deep down, most people believe they’re immortal in one way or another. When apparently compelling evidence bubbles from their lips, this doesn’t so much astonish – as provide a sense of recognition.

I’m merely channelling immortal yearnings down one particular route.”

JACK: “Which you choose for others, but reject for yourself.” JOHN: “If a person’s been drifting in limbo, perhaps it’s no bad thing to gain a belief system. People don’t really function effectively without some belief system or other to organize their lives. My system has one great advantage over other faiths. Born-again Christianity, Marxism, whatever. Mine doesn’t include any set of dogmas. Its only creed is karma, the notion that your actions in life have consequences and shape your psyche – with which no one can argue. This can only promote a sense of responsibility, for yourself and for other people.”

JACK: “Thank you, Dr Cunningham. Witness may step down.”

JOHN: “So may you, Jack. So may you.”

Tony was thirty years old, with wavy sandy hair on which he obviously lavished care and style. That was his good feature. Despite a smart turn-out – well-cut light-grey suit, striped blue shirt with fawn suede tie, and yuppie grey trainers – he still looked awkwardly, batteredly adolescent, with a pinched, spotty, bruise-eyed face. That’s how Jack would describe him in a story.

As I’d expected, he was taking a fair while to read through all those pages …

or Jingling Geordie’s Hole, begun

On the cinema screen: a grey atoll in grey south seas. A bulb of light expanded suddenly; boiling cloud rushed skywards. Within moments the screen rocked at the impact of an implacable, blasting hurricane.

“This is the first moment of the thermonuclear age!” said the newsreel announcer, proud and cheerful as ever.

Ted Appleby felt such a thrill rush through his whole body at the power unleashed. The eleven-year-old paid scant attention to the rest of the newsreel: the Queen touring her Commonwealth, the French Foreign Legion losing a battle in some country called Indo-China, British troops successfully rounding up Mau Mau suspects in Kenya, a woman athlete running round a cinder track. The therm-o-nuclear explosion continued to boil through Ted, seeking outlet, expression.

Curtains slid across the front of the proscenium, luxuriously hung in tiers of pleats, spotlit in pink and orange and green. The main Art Deco lights came on, illuminating Egyptian-style papyrus columns and friezes. A recording of Mantovani’s string orchestra playing Charmaine began. Ted tagged on to the crowd of children stampeding from their seats, squeezing through the foyer to erupt down mock-marble steps into the bright breezy salty June daylight.

He’d come to the cartoon matinée on his own. As half-expected, Gavin was waiting some way down the street pretending to look in a newsagent’s window. Gavin wouldn’t wish other boys, who might be from the same school, to see them meet; so Ted loitered, to let the mob clear away.

It was thus with all the older boy’s interceptions of Ted; Gavin wanted the two of them to talk alone, to walk alone. Gavin Percy was sixteen. A fortnight earlier a couple of other sixteen-year-olds had surprised Gavin chatting to Ted at a time when Gavin thought they were safe. The older boys had started kidding on. “Got a big sister, then, titch?” Ted had, as it happened: Helen. He nodded. So far as he knew, Gavin had never even set eyes on her. “Percy’s after her – watch out!” Gavin had flushed with embarrassment. “He must be, mustn’t he?” Ted had agreed with the tormentors. Gavin had looked relieved at Ted’s comprehension, at this evidence of his young friend’s complicity.

A lot of smut was talked about girls at that school, a day school for boys only. Lately Ted had been growing ignorantly interested in girls; obviously his own sister didn’t count as an example, though the mysteries of her life would be regarded as fair game by any other boys. Bill Gibbon related that his older brother Brian and chums would go to a chum’s house when the parents were out at the cinema and would undress a sister and pour ink over her then bath her clean thoroughly. They would stick a carrot up her then make white stuff into the dirty bathwater where she lay. Later, after they’d dried her down thoroughly, Gibbon said that they tied a lump of carrot to a string, put this up her to stop her having a baby then stuck their cocks into her. When Ted told Gavin about this game, Gavin had looked offended – resentful at his friend having such things in his mind.

In Ted’s classroom ball-fights were the rage among half a dozen of the boys, chiefly Gibbon who once exposed his cock in class under cover of his desk. Ted steered well clear of ball-fights which seemed excruciating. Two fighters would square off, each with one hand cupping trouser-clad balls, then would dart at each other to claw the other’s defences aside and squeeze his knackers. Howls of pain went up from the loser.

“Hullo,” Ted said to Gavin.

The newsagent’s window display consisted of a row of sun-faded paperback westerns and war stories, a line of pens and pencils, and a box covered with red crepe paper. On that box stood a glass of water and a yellow plastic ostrich a few inches high. The ostrich slowly dipped its beak into the water, raised its head, dipped it, raised it.

“I wonder how that works?” mused Gavin. “Perpetual motion is scientifically impossible. Something to do with water and sunshine, I suppose.”

Ted stared in trembling fascination. The novelty ostrich reminded him … of the crane on the pier!

From where they stood he couldn’t quite see the pier. The clock tower at the bottom of the street was in the way, as was part of the miniature Gibraltar behind which housed the Castle, a small base, and the ruins of the Priory. Turn right at the clock tower and descend the steep road alongside the grass slopes of the Castle moat, and into view would come the great north pier of granite blocks, high whitewashed lighthouse at its seaward end.

The massive wheeled crane rested on several sets of rust-bobbled rails running along the mid-section of the pier, high and low. Anyone walking out to the lighthouse had to pass underneath its looming, girdered bridge then along beneath its hundred foot jib. These days the crane never rolled to and fro nor swung its jib out over the sea. Why had it ever done so in the past? To unload boats tying up formerly at the lower stone quayside, safely clear of the Black Midden rocks?

Many steel hawsers as thick as a boy’s arm tethered the crane to iron rings in the pier walls; at these points the granite was streaked orange with salt-water rust. The crane had to be chained like some mechanical Samson or winter storms could smash it into the bay. Wild waves sometimes broke clear over the top of the crane, even over the top of the lighthouse. But perhaps the machine couldn’t move, ever again; perhaps it was rusted in place. Ted sincerely hoped that this was so, but scarcely dared believe it. Whenever his parents had taken him and Helen for a walk along to the lighthouse of a sunny Sunday afternoon, the passage under crane and jib was fraught with terror. He was sure that the crane’s many wheels might creak into life, and start rolling, that the jib would duck down, dangling chains like octopus arms, to snatch him, crush him. He’d endured several nightmares about that iron giant which brooded over the pathway out to sea.

He imagined a therm-o-nuclear explosion hurling that metal monster into the bay where river met sea-tide, drowning it safely, though bits might still protrude.

Ted’s Dad had told him that a tunnel ran all the way along inside the pier; that’s why there were those opaque green glass slabs set periodically in the concrete path. But how, even in a dream, did you get inside the tunnel which would protect you from the crane?

The ostrich ducked its head into the glass of water, rose erect, ducked, arose, hypnotically.

“I just saw the H-bomb test,” Ted told Gavin and imitated the rush of a hurricane, as he imagined it.

“Oh,” said Gavin. “Are you walking home or catching the bus?”

Buses departed from beside the clock tower. A crowd from the matinée horsed around the bus stop; a melee. Ted knew that Gavin wouldn’t want to mingle with that.

“May as well walk and save the fare,” said Ted.

So they strolled away together from the hidden sea, past a closed fish and chip shop with amber Tizer bottles lining the window, past a barber’s dustily advertising Durex sheaths, a gaunt Congregational church, a small shrubby park with floral clock. Then came a dingy pub, The Dolphin, smelling of stale beer with a blue star mounted outside on a bracket; next to a grocer’s and a greengrocer’s. The plate glass reflected Ted and Gavin both dressed in dark blue blazers with crimson badges framing three black anchors, both wearing grey flannel trousers, in Ted’s case short ones – but he’d been promised long ones when his next birthday came around. Both with close-cropped hair-cuts: Ted’s hair chestnut, Gavin’s gingery. Gavin was slightly plump; Ted was slim. Gavin’s face was freckled; Ted had the complexion of an angel, so his mother said embarrassingly. She used to say cherub, which was worse.

They entered the wrought-iron and dirty glass cavern of the small railway station and climbed the wooden bridge over the rails, pausing at the summit to watch an electric train pull in below. Gavin produced a red-bound school book from his blazer pocket and showed it: Edward the Second by Marlowe.

“We’ve started reading this for the exams.”

“A play.” Ted regarded the volume with mild disgust.

“It’s exciting. It’s the best play I’ve ever read. Part of it happens right here – down by the Castle. Edward’s best friend sailed from France and landed here to meet the king.”

France seemed a great distance from this northern port. Such a voyage – in an ancient sailing tub – made very little sense. If the king’s friend had been coming from Norway, that would have been a different kettle of fish. But then, old plays often didn’t make sense either.

“All sorts of things happen. Do you want to know how the king gets killed? He’s in a dungeon up to his ankles in filthy water. They bring in a table, hold him down with a mattress – then they jab a red-hot cooking rod up his bottom.”

“That must hurt.” Ted felt sick. Another image had arrived to join the crane in nightmare land, one which he knew his mind would dwell on.

“Maybe we could read a bit of it together, another week? Act it out? It’s terribly good.”

“Yes,” said Ted.

They descended the far flight of steps and headed through streets of houses, each with a tiny walled front flower garden, most with stained-glass panes above the doors. From a number of chimneys identical aerials rose in the form of a large capital “H”. Those homes, unlike Ted’s or Gavin’s, boasted television sets. The “H” reminded Ted of H-bomb.

“Pow!” he exclaimed, and made a noise like rolling thunder.

Beyond those streets was a large, tree-dark park with bowling green and pet cemetery as prelude, and a soot-blackened institution set within iron railings as finale. The old workhouse, from Victorian times, was still tenanted by aged paupers, mostly ailing. Some of the residents were sitting on park benches, passively. A few stood watching the bowling, over a low hedge. The players – more prosperous pensioners in white Panama hats and club blazers – ignored their derelict audience of shabby overcoats.

Ted wondered whether any work was performed in the grim building known as the workhouse. He imagined old women knitting sweaters for sale to Norwegian sailors, old men whittling wooden boats, or maybe sewing mailbags. He’d heard that husbands and wives were kept separate inside, spent the nights in separate phlegm-racked dormitories. Only when they were let out could a married couple meet.

Presently Ted and Gavin came abreast of a hunched figure in greatcoat and cloth cap shuffling slowly along. This Methuselah with rheumy red eyes held a huge vile handkerchief at chest level to catch a constant string of grey gluey drool proceeding from lips or nostrils; Ted couldn’t bear to look more closely. He had passed this fellow on other occasions and presumed that he and his like were the reason why this park, which dropped away steeply to the south down a leafy ravine with cascading stream in the direction of the fish quay, was known as Spittal Dene. On account of the sputum.

Soon they were in sight, over treetops, of the roofs along the river bank: those of ships’ chandlers which supplied the trawlers, of wholesale fish merchants, the smelly guano works which manufactured fertilizer from tons of imported bird droppings, the Jungle Arms public house ill-famed for Saturday night fights, and Hood Haggie’s rope factory, staffed mostly by notorious women.

Gavin also was staring at the roof of the rope factory. He licked his lips.

“Do you know what Brian Gibbon in my class heard happened at Hood Haggie’s last month? There was a new supervisor on the job – a young chap. The women pulled his trousers down and fitted an empty milk bottle over his cock. Then they pulled their skirts up over their waists to excite him.” Gavin was sweating, nauseated and excited. “His cock swelled up stiff inside the milk bottle, and wouldn’t go down again. He had to go to hospital in a van to get the bottle off. You know about cocks swelling up, do you?”

Ted nodded.

“Does yours, sometimes?” Gavin asked.

At this very moment it was trying to, and Ted walked on awkwardly. Just the other evening, in his room, he had drawn a naked woman on a sheet of paper torn from an exercise book. A woman with breasts and a smooth sweep of flesh between her legs, like a flap glued down. Soon he had ripped the drawing into tiny pieces and flushed them down the lavatory in case his mother discovered. Some scraps had floated; he had to flush the pan again and again.

“I haven’t told my Mam, but I’ve got hairs growing on me down here,” he said to Gavin.

“Have you? That’s natural.” Somehow Gavin looked as though he deplored this development. “So have I,” the older boy added after a while. “They’re called the short and curlies.”

The sky had been clouding over. A hooter sounded from the river, just as an air-raid siren might sound.

A thought occurred to Ted. “Do women have short and curlies too?”

“Yes!” snapped Gavin, a peevish note in his voice. “Gibbon brought a picture magazine to school last term. I glanced at it.”

Ted brooded about his drawing. It had been copied, to the best of his memory, from a photo of the statue of a goddess in an encyclopaedia. And it had been wrong. No wonder he had felt so odd about it, and baffled as to what a husband and wife were supposed to do, as regards that seamless flap of skin down there.

“I’d like to see a magazine like that.”

“What for?” asked Gavin.

“You’ll not laugh?”

“I promise I won’t.”

Ted explained about the. . .