Dark They Were and Golden Eyed

During the 1970’s there was a small dark shop halfway down Berwick Street called Dark They Were and Golden Eyed. Fruit stalls lined the narrow street outside and the smell of fresh and slightly less fresh fruit was ever present. The thing is that as soon as you stepped through the doorway you were setting foot into a world far from that of fruit market hawkers and fat Soho prostitutes. Inside the small shop there was a world of seeming impossibilities. Herbal cigarettes and joss stick scent filled the shop but nothing was as intoxicating as the smell of imported books and comics. Music filled the air as I'd crouch down and read the greatest works of fantastic literature known to man.

I was young then. I think I started going there from the age of eleven or twelve and kept going for many years. Every Saturday I'd browse the shelves looking for something new. Something that you couldn't find in the smaller bookshops. It was on one such Saturday that I first came across the work of Eldred Starling. The cover paintings alone hooked me into his world. They always seemed to be set in a world of impossible colours. Violet lawns with pale orange skies. And the figures on the covers always seemed to have their faces turned away screaming in horror at some sight too terrible to show.

Starling came from a world similar to that of Lovecraft, Bloch and Clark Ashton Smith. He was an American writer who wrote for Weird Tales magazine in the twenties and thirties but little, almost nothing, was known about him personally. He wrote a similar kind of impenetrably thick and vague prose that forced me to keep a dictionary to hand whenever I dipped into the stories but I came to identify myself with his work because it felt as though I had discovered him.

The strange thing was that his stories were remarkably similar to each other. They were all about protagonists able by science or accident to see beyond the dimensional limitations of our normal senses. This vision was usually expounded using incredibly complex language that left my perception of exactly what had been seen vague. Ironically the vagueness really worked. You managed to get a sense of altered realities from the very fact that Starling avoided being precise. The darkest element in Starling’s stories was the notion that there is nothing to men at all. We are simply puppets of these other dimensional creatures. Every mood, every thought and every desire experienced by men was merely the result of some vast sick cosmic joke.

When adolescence and the intoxicating allure of the unfair sex came to dominate my life I left much of this stuff behind. In truth I always I always felt slightly at odds with the world I inhabited. I didn’t know the rules that seemed so evident to everyone else. I couldn’t lose myself in sports or politics or academic studies and sex became the dominant element in my life. Unlike most lads, however, I couldn't be light about sex. It felt much much more than the gratification of some mindless procreative urge. Sex seemed the answer to all the problems that had dogged my childhood. It felt like a kind of freedom from madness. The trouble was that I completely lacked the social skills which made it available to me.

I tried very hard to be normal. I looked at the kind of men that women liked and tried to ape their behaviour but my attempts simply seemed laughable. When I met Jill all that changed though. In Jill I found someone who saw something in me that I hadn't ever seen in myself. She saw the soul of an artist. I followed her belief in me and tried to become just that. I worked in stupid jobs and went home to paint. The results were lamentable. Jill could see my frustration but she never stopped believing in me.

Then some idiot crashed into her car. Only the memory of her remained.

I carried on in stupid jobs. I carried on and in moments I found women to share my bed... But the meaning was lost. Then one night when I was about 22 I had a dream; at least I told myself it was a dream. In the dream my life was taken away from me by creatures who, like Starling's creations, were beyond my daily reality. All the experiences which I took to be of value, especially my memories of Jill, were nothing more but fictions played to my brain by these creatures. I was nothing but the sum of what these creatures played me. Jill had never existed.

I woke up with a blasting headache. The glaring light of the moon burning felt like it was burning a hole in my brain. The next morning I felt profoundly depressed. In fact I felt a deep depression for several days after. I mentioned the dream to some stupid girl I'd slept with and she told me I'd been abducted by aliens. I laughed but on some level this is what I believed.

The thing is that the experience felt so much like a story by Starling that I went to my mother's house to look through his books and find out which story it was. I couldn't find it... Nor could I find any other book by Eldred Starling. I forgot about this for a while but every so often the depressions would recur. The other day I looked up Starling's name on the internet.

There is nothing.

Neither, according to Wikipedia, was there ever a bookshop in Berwick Street called Dark They Were and Golden Eyed.

Just recently I've started being more and more haunted by the sensation, as ludicrous as it may sound, that Starling's stories, or the stories I'd imagined written by Starling were actually some kind of memory. In the daytime I feel fine but at night, when it's quiet and the world seems to close in around me, I feel it more profoundly true than I feel anything else. At times I feel that nothing in my life is remotely real and I wish it was me that couldn't feel it. I wish that I was the thing that someone else was imagining.

It's getting dark now... I started writing this when it was light but now it's dark.

The thing is that I know I should have written this... Maybe a part of me hopes that, like Starling, I too can disappear from history; from reality.

They're here again.

I can feel them.

Every night I can feel them but tonight I can feel them more. Playing with me. Making use of me. Some days go by as if they've never happened. And it's always night.

Oh fucking God they're here now...

I can feel them here.

But I'm not alone because I know I'm writing this and I know people will read it.

Oh fuck. I can hear them... I can hear them inside my head.

Small terrible noises. The tape looping echoing voices. Fictions playing like reality.

The noise hurts.

Oh God save me.. If there is a God then save me from this.

They aren’t in front of me but I can still see them from the corner of my eye. At my shoulders, resting their limbs against the nape of my neck.

Rattling their limbs and other things inside my mind.

Their eyes are gold... Oh fucking hell... Please make it stop.

© Edgar Chappel. All rights reserved by the author.