The Flesh Remembers

Copyright © Richard Wright 2014

Cover art and design by Vincent Chong

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords edition

The Flesh Remembers

By Richard Wright

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us...

- H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Newcastle-upon-Tyne huddles in the Northeast of England, a hard, cold city that’s as brutal and honest as anywhere I’ve ever been. If you need to have your eyes opened to how meaningless life on this planet really is, how tiny we really are in whatever passes for the scheme of things, then I can't imagine anywhere better to get it done.

My name, for those of you unfamiliar with my work, is Dexter Lomax. I'm typing this from my crappy apartment in New Jersey, and there's a whole ocean between Newcastle and me. That suits me down to the ground, even though I don't know what difference that distance is going to make if I'm due some payback. I’ve learned that some things are so big that quarter of a world might as well be nothing at all.

I'm typing all this up to get it the hell out of my head. Writers are their own best therapists. I know damn well I don't have the balls to publish it when I’m done. It would be quicker to pin a sign on my back saying ‘flay me’. That’s pure and simple cowardice, but what do you really expect? You think I should consider it my duty as a reporter to reveal all? You’ve been playing on Facebook and Twitter too much. Words aren’t solutions. Shouting at something doesn’t fix it. As an old school journalist I was glad to see the rise of social media. It levels the playing field. Used to be we were criticized for always watching and passing comment, but never intervening. Now social media has turned you all into reporters too, and you’re starting to see how much easier it is to bitch that things are broken than do anything about it.

That’s what nobody stops to think about. While the whole world’s so busy reporting stuff, who’s left to get their hands dirty and fix things? You gossip, point fingers, share memes about cats, and call it activism.

Stupid world.

Yeah, you might be thinking, but you actually are a reporter Dex. You get paid to tell us things we don’t know. Sure. That’s the point. I’m the one who gets to choose what you post memes about. Sometimes that has a purpose, but not always. When there’s nothing you can do about what I have to tell you, and nowhere you can hide from the things I could tell you about, what’s the point?

I don’t know, maybe you’re right. I’m new to this whole social conscience thing. To hell with the best interests of the public. Maybe I should stick with what the public is best interested in. Not at all the same thing, as you no doubt understand.

Jesus. When did I get so preachy? I mean, who am I kidding? If I publish the story it's only going to vanish amidst the other freaks and sensations concocted by my fellow hacks at The Inquisitor.

That’s right. The International Inquisitor. You still here?

I've worked for The Inquisitor for going on twelve years now. I've reported on Elvis sightings, alien abductions, alien sightings, sightings of Elvis being abducted by aliens, and aliens being abducted by Elvis. Abominable Snowmen, Kraken, Bigfoot, werewolves, Satanists, vampires, witch covens, sinister plots by the CIA to overthrow the world order, Stephen King assassinating Lennon, celebrity scandals of the most speculative kind – the breathless list goes on. For the most part I figure we’re a pretty harmless sort of entertainment. So what if an old lady in Connecticut killed herself when we printed that an Ice Age was just weeks away, or a guy in China suffocated in an airtight bunker when we reported on the CIA's attempts to introduce sterility inducing chemicals into his country’s air?

I just report it. People don't have to go around believing it all over the place. Since the lawsuit of ’11 we even have a tiny legal notice on the bottom of the front page of the print edition stating that the contents are not necessarily true. It's only because we deliberately include the occasional tidbit of actual fact that we avoided having to say that none of the contents were true. I can tell you, we had to dig through hundreds of back issues to find those useful and mostly accidental excerpts of truth, but the court had to concede the point. Now our editors go out of their way to include at least one undeniably true story in every edition, though they don’t waste a lot of time on it. Last week they reported that the earth was probably spherical.

Contrary to what most of you are going to want to believe though, given our reputation, we do research even our most unlikely stories. I've traveled a good part of this planet running down witnesses and trying to find evidence to back up the wildest of statements. I like to think that rather than twisting the facts, I’m reporting what scant facts exist and then speculating on them in the most interesting way possible.

Not this time though. What I'm recording here is undiluted truth. I was there. I go back there every time I let myself sleep. I even have those damn movies if I ever need to refresh my memory. Wonderful thing, technology. I can't even pretend I've gone mad, or bury the memories in avoidance and denial. Whenever I try, the videocassettes are sitting there inviting me to find an old VCR to play them on. I should throw them away, but they contain things so remarkable that I can't bear to see them destroyed.

That’s messed up.

I guess I'm writing all this down to get it clear in my head. When it’s transparent, and I can talk sanely about what I saw and what it means, I'm going to have to make some hard decisions about whether I should ever breathe a word of it to another soul.

I wish I was just crazy. They can give you pills for crazy.

Better get down to it. Time's passing.

It started with the craters. I was at the London offices of The Inquisitor, based there while I followed through on the usual round of spook stories and old legends. Great Britain has its own edition of the paper of course, with an totally different team. I was there on behalf of the stateside edition, trying to put together some material for our annual supplement about the Old Country. Britain has the best ghosts in the world, hands down. We give it our best in America, and we have strange phenomenon and hauntings we can be duly proud of, but Britain outclasses us plain and simple.

Every year I spend a couple of weeks following up old tales from the island. They tried having the UK staff do it one year, but it wasn’t the same. When you live with all that history every day it gets hard to remember how outsiders might thrill to it. Fresh eyes are needed, and I get the brief more often than not. A perk of seniority. Occasionally I strike lucky on these visits, and get the low-down on a new sighting of beheaded queen X or demon coach Y. I sometimes strike unlucky too. It was while putting together a feature article on lake monsters of the world a couple of years back that I visited Loch Ness. You'll have read just about everywhere how that turned out. Wasn't supernatural or uncanny, exactly. A hell of a surprise, I'll give you that, but in the end just a freak of biology and time. So say the experts anyway, and who am I to disagree?

What I dug up in Newcastle was something nobody who saw would want to argue with me about. I don’t have to worry that they’ll try, because most of them are either dead or a very, very long way away.

So I was telling you about the craters. You've probably already seen news items on them if you live in the UK. They used to turn up all the time as filler material at the end of a slow news day, typical ‘also in the news’ stuff. They were odd enough for word to have crossed the Big Pond, at least in my circles, and Google will find you blogs galore full of exactly the kind of day-glo crap I get paid to exploit.

The things had been appearing in urban zones for months. One day you had a stretch of smooth road, the next there was a six-foot crater smack in the middle of it. Nobody knew where they were coming from, and they caused traffic accidents by the dozen. When I started looking into them they were appearing at a rate of one every two or three days. The area of effect stretched from the north of England to the central regions of Scotland. Newcastle and Edinburgh were being hit hardest. After the Loch Ness disaster I promised myself I'd never go back to Scotland again, and that’s