Grimiver Gables.

The hallway was cold again as I had no merriment to warm it for me and the torches burnt low in their sockets like guilty eyes. I wandered aimless and surprised to find that each corridor I turned down yielded nothing but empty air and shadows. Not a soul did I encounter in my undestined journey through the wallpapered catacombs and my footsteps were unaccompanied as they dislodged the dust that had settled on the stained floorboards. You could get so easily lost backstage, as you could get so easily lost in a story or a play. Tumbling blindly through the intricate workings of the authors mind and dreams. So it did not worry me that I was. Very much alone.
It stayed like this for a while and I was satisfied with the company of my own musings, trailing my hand along the walls feeling the rips and tears in the worn wallpaper. It had been tattered by the thousands of people like me, running their hands along it absentmindedly, catching their rings on it and destroying it slowly so that now it supported a great streak of grime rubbed deep into its fabric at hand level. The floorboards were knarled and uneven, chipped and wonderful. A varnished pine that had been pounded and battered by the feet of the gods and mortals of this play house.
‘I was told that to die would be an adventure’ a voice snuck round a corner and seeped into my bones. Grimiver Gables followed like a faithful dog or an echo and lurched towards me like a man about to relive himself of his last meal.
‘but now I find it is not’ he lamented and approached ever closer. He was tall but the years has bent him almost double and his spine poked so violently out of his back you felt that with just another move it would burst through the paper thin skin stretched tightly over it and glint in the low lighting, joyous at its release as the old man collapsed beneath it. White hair jutted out in tufts from under his battered top hat as crippled and crocked as its bearer, it had faded with age and now was like his skin, a shadow of its former glory, a dirty grey.
The light was enough to see how dull his eyes were, but it could never have reached into the depths of the deep wrinkles that carved their way about his face in strongly defined lines of laughter and woe in equal measure.
‘It is a pity’ he croaked trailing like I had, and the thousands before me, a single hand along the wallpaper.
‘I loved these walls, I guess it is fitting they should be my prison, if I were acting my character in some great play I might have called it’ he searched for the word.
‘ironic’ he sighed and continued
‘not that it really matters, poor wenches can’t hear me anymore. My words are as my spirit, gone from their world, along with it would seem, the condition of my clothes’ he opened his arms wide revealing filthy garments that were more rags than anything, mere ghosts of expensive finery. A waistcoat inlayed with silver thread that would have been quiet magnificent had the silver not become unravelled and fallen into a threadbare mess, patches of a white shirt that was frayed at the cuffs and moulding a sick grey pocked through were the fine silk was no more than a hole.
‘Dust, that is what I am. Disregarded and unwanted, ignored. Nothing more than a film that protects the unused from false hope, gently lulling them into the acceptance of time. Time that will eventually welcome them into warm archaic arms and crush them in an embrace. I float, unnoticed from place to place a speck, a folly, a nuisance that is swept up and forgotten. That is what has become of me. All my years. My beautiful wife. And all I count for. Oh well, not that I accounted for much in their life. But still ‘tis an awful shame, I had half a bottle of brandy left under my bed. One would have hoped that their god almighty would have let his poor mortals finish off the Bourbon before he relived us of our mortal coils’ he paused
‘wasn’t that a whisky?‘ he came to a stop in front of me and continued with his apathetically sorrowful monologue.
‘If only I could just’ he trailed away and raised his hand. A hand so bent and knurled and wizened with arthritis that it was a claw that hooked in a threatening crescent articulated with swollen knuckles and hanging with loose powdery skin that was cracked with wear and relentless age. As he reached out I almost heard the bones creak in protest at this uninvited movement, joints screaming and squealing as each finger unfurled in a one slow painful action. Until it finally came to a stop when I breathed a sigh of relief for the man, the tips of his fingers brushed my cheek. It felt like leather, smooth but broken in wrinkles and hard with over use, but the flesh was warm and alive.
‘I wish I had not died, I had so much left to do. Who is left to drink if not I?’ he frowned and fresh wrinkles fell into practiced place over weak watering eyes.
‘I joke, but no one laughs, it’s lonely, it’s cold and there is no merriment left on my lips. Why am I still here? Have my feet not filled their quota of steps? Oh what I wouldn’t give to be visited by the sweet taste of my lady again, or the fire of a good wine. Where are my angels to raise me to my own cloud were I can sit and wait for all eternity and spit on the mortal ants as they busy about thinking how very important they are. How robbed am I? it seems god has the last laugh indeed. So for now I shall spit on him’ he looked around for a second, his pupils edging towards the ceiling lit up in guilt.
‘Okay perhaps I was too harsh on you? I take it back?’ he traced a cross over his sunken chest and waited, nothing happened. He sighed and mumbled
‘no, of course not, too much to hope for’
Suddenly his eyes bulged, hugely and luminous in the tired light. Panic stricken as he groped at his neck which hung with slack skin. I had encountered Grimiver many times and come to regard him with a fondness so allowed him to continue his little fantasy. As he fell slowly to his knees in front of me gasping for the air that was so readily available only one name played on his lips. And only in this moment of terror was the truth scared out of him.
‘Evelin, oh Evelin Gables you are the one I miss most’ and with that his eyes closed and a sound of what could really have been his last breath rattled about his hollow chest. I stood there regarding his body crumpled on the floor half propped up by the wall with mild interest but nothing more. Grimiver was a good man, but good men no matter how far they have sunken into the depths of deep depression are still at their souls good men and therefore of nothing more than fleeting interest to me. Casper is not a good man. Suddenly a whirlwind tore down the hall and flung itself onto the still body of Grimiver Gables. Awakening me from my thoughts and buffeting me to the side as it proceeded to issue shrieks and wails at high pitches.
‘Grimiver Grimiver!’ it cried pawing and shaking the limp body.
‘Grimiver Grimiver, wake up I beg of you wake up and come back to me!’ she slapped his face and beat his chest in such a frenzied manor that I was sure she would crush it and his chest having been staved in by his loved one, Grimiver Gables would truly be dead. This effort yielding no fruitful result the woman turned her disparate and enraged attention onto me.
‘You beast, you monster, you devil, you foul contemptuous conceited whelp!’ she screamed, her wide face red and wet with the effort of her tears.
‘How dare you look on in such indifference as my husband dies before your very feet, neih even the gods have not had that pleasure so you little whoreson, will not have it either! I should beat you for your arrogance and your dispassion!’ she finished her speech with an exasperated shriek and thumped Grimiver one last time hitting his sternum straight on.
He awoke with a great gushing of air into his dry crackling lungs and his mouth opened into a comical ’o’ of surprise. A small gasp issued from between cracked lips and he sat up in time to be knocked over once more by his distraught lover.
‘Evelin?’ he managed through her thick sobs.
‘Evelin my darling, why must you cry over me so?’ he looked at her quizzically and stroked her thinning hair in slight bemusement.
‘Why cry as if I were dead?’ he chuckled and his thin shoulders shook and his bones jangled.
‘No such luck I‘m afraid my dear, I am here to stay’ Evelin calmed herself into a wretched sob every now and again wiping her tear stained ruddy cheeks stubbornly with the palm of her hand. Grimiver took her into his arms.
‘what day is it?’ he asked
‘no, more to the point, what time is it? And will the world think me a drunk if I drink at this hour?’ Evelin climbed up using the wall lit up in flickering candle flame as support, her lank hair falling down in front of her worn face.
‘you are a drunk my dear’ she taunted half heartedly, too relived to put any force behind her playful jibes. Grimiver smiled and I half expected dust to trickle from the cracks in his lips.
‘oh yes, I had forgotten about that, well then don’t deprive a man of what he does best, I do believe there is half a bottle of Bourbon under our bed’ he himself got up. It was a spectacle, like watching an old ruin unfurl itself from mossy grounds and grow to if only half its former glory, but still to renovate impossibly some more of its being back to working order.
‘Or was it brandy?’ Grimiver mused over that as Evelin walked at his side, clinging to his arm in those beautiful moments when her husband was inhabiting his right mind. Grimiver was depressed, and his depression had eaten away rotting in the back of his mind for years. It was no ones fault, but that didn’t change anything as it rarely does. The depression had finally driven him mad and he slept in a coma for countless years. He was a relic, as prised as a public statue, forgotten by everyone. Until the day woke up and was dead. He believed he was so, but walked among the living. Evelin, being the strong woman that she was, troublesome but strong no doubt, took to following him around like that lovesick spaniel Helena imitated. Waiting for these moments when he came too. These poor, brief, fragile, wonderful moments. They were breaking her heart. Because inevitably as I watched them walk half way down that dim corridor and his legs buckled from beneath him and a broken yell escaped his lips the depression took hold again. I wandered over as a spectator would follow the sport. Evelin was on her knees, holding his diseased hand as he screamed his sorrows to the world that wasn’t listening.
‘I can feel them, thousands of them, tiny bodies, tiny ruthless bodies burrowing under my dead skin. Eating at my still warm flesh. Writhing there. Feeding off my substance. I am fodder for the worms, the bugs. Hundreds of tiny mouths, hundreds of tiny teeth rendering me but a meal for insects so low they wait for me to die before they feast. I can feel them, oh god, oh please, have mercy, have mercy!’ the last was a broken shrill shriek as he arched his back and flailed brittle limbs and all the time Evelin, ever faithful Evelin, closed her eyes, tried not to listen and thought of the times when he would kiss her with lips as full as their glasses, hold her hand with more than claws and speak to her in a voice that reminded her of spring, not book pages old, rustling and yellowed or cobwebs that have caught nothing more than dust for centuries.
I walked by, I had no curiosity left for this scene and no words to part with and so decided that a parting of company was the wisest course of action. They were both good people with good souls, good uninteresting people.