A Walk on the Weird Side

By Linda Talbot

The stories in A Walk on the Weird Side flirt with outlandish fancy. They include unfettered fantasy in Orchis Amoroso where an orchid engenders a bizarre encounter between a human and a potently bizarre being, a haunting experience among the spheres in a tale told from the grave in Music of a Golden Grave a sculptor's audacious and futile quest to create the ideal woman in The Price of Perfection, an unnerving assault by a mythical troublemaker in The Abduction and in Callisto's Conversion, the voluntary, if unlikely taming of a harpy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linda Talbot
• Release date: Nov 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310605994

Linda Talbot

Linda Talbot has written fantasy for children and adults and for many years reviewed art, theatre and books in London. She now lives in Crete. She published "Fantasy Book of Food"; rhymes, stories and recipes for children and "Five Rides by a River" - about Suffolk, seen from a bicycle! She contributed a chapter to a book about Conroy Maddox, the British surrealist and features on art to "Topos" the German landscape magazine. She published short stories with the British Fantasy Society as well as stories and poetry in other magazines. And she launched "Wordweavers", an online supplement of poetry and fiction, published in conjunction with The Cretan International Community.

Book preview

A WALK ON THE WEIRD SIDE

Tales Beyond the Banal

by Linda Talbot

Cover: illustration by Linda Talbot for Orchis Amoroso

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Linda Talbot 2013

Smashwords Edition, License Notes.

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Contact blog: http://lindajtalbot.wordpress.com

Table of Contents

Orchis Amoroso

Music of a Golden Grave

Wind Walkers

Sand

The Price of Perfection

The Secret of the Stone

Callisto’s Conversion

The Abduction

The Wicker Man

The Back Street Boy

Author’s Note and Contact blog

Elisha gazes fondly at the dwarf she has just found under a drooping palm in the palace garden. He is brooding, but brightens when she takes his hand and smiles into his pale green eyes.

She is spoilt but solitary, and, anticipating unprecedented novelty, draws him out from under the palm. He sits shyly on her knee as she strokes his thin hair which feels like leaf mould and runs her fingers over his close-fitting jacket made from looped blades of grass.

As she strokes him, he slowly grows. His head wobbles as his brown neck thickens, his face expands, but he retains his squashed nose, his transparently pointed ears and wispy beard. His arms and legs lengthen. Soon he is half her height.

He does not speak; merely mutters incomprehensibly and chortles as she caresses him. Eagerly she undresses him and tries to rouse him, but he is as limp as a wet leaf. Angrily, used to having her way, she pushes him into the grass. His squashed face crumples in dismay.

Elisha strides indoors. In the library she seeks information on dwarves. She discovers they are merely figments of men’s minds. Yet she has found one. At least he looks like the illustration.

Elisha is bored and needs a lover. There is no one suitable in the palace. The attendants are wimps. Her snobbish cousins are engaged to cold women from other dull dynasties. How can she cultivate lust in the bearded dwarf?

She is incongruously compelled to lift down a book about flowers. She studies the aloe’s spikes, primed like red hot torches, the virginal gaze of the African daisy, the spotted convulsions of a canna.

Then she sees the orchids. There is Orchis Italica with petals resembling a satyr; a pink blotched being that might break into devilish dance. There is the Ophrys Scolopax, from which an ominous insect seems suspended and the Greater Butterfly Orchid; green-faced and fanged with apparent ill intent.

Then she reads that the orchid’s tuber is an aphrodisiac because it resembles a man’s testicles. If men eat the large firm tubers, their women will give birth to sons. If they eat the small ones, daughters will be born. And she reads of the places where they grow.

Elisha steps, blinking, into the afternoon sun and runs to the drooping palm. She sees the dwarf wandering round it in a daze, wondering perhaps how he has come to be half the size of a human. She grabs his arm and he stares at her, his watery eyes wide with apprehension.

Come with me! Elisha urges, pulling him towards the end of the garden and beyond, into a countryside of spiky blue trees with purple fruit and plumed grasses ethereal in sunlight. The dwarf hangs back, casting long looks over his shoulder at the distant palm, but Elisha pulls him on into the murmuring growth of the grasses.

We’ll make a man of you! she promises, gripping his damp hand. He stumbles two steps behind, muttering at stones that shift under his feet, whose length he cannot yet manipulate.

The huge white orchid gleams suddenly in their path.

Aha! Elisha stops, bends and fondles its sensuous petals. She runs her fingers slowly down its stalk, then starts digging in the soft soil with her long nails, until she uproots the plant to reveal the double tuber.

The dwarf watches, mystified. He balances on branches, leaps through leaves and rolls recklessly down hills, but he has never uprooted a plant, because in bad weather and when man thunders past, he burrows down wet holes to wriggle through a labyrinth of roots. There he rests his back, gnaws their fibres to sharpen his teeth and swings under and over them to keep his damp limbs in trim. Rheumatism is a scourge.

Elisha picks up the root, grabs the dwarf once more by the hand and drags him on through the grasses that fly at him like feather whips.

Aha! Elisha spies another, smaller orchid. Within green petals stands a proud centre; yellow with red spots and orange stamens. Again she scrabbles in the earth and pulls it free, breaking off a more modest tuber.

The dwarf frowns and mutters. In this mutated world, reverting to a magical past, he has watched the damage done by man; choked on the dirty air, seen birds and insects dying from insecticides. He has watched men shoot birds too small to eat and pour effluent into clear rivers. Now this girl is mutilating orchids.

Are you wondering what I’m up to? laughs Elisha. No doubt by the same enchantment that increased his size, the dwarf understands her words. But not her action. His frown deepens.

Come on - I’m going to give you a delicious dinner! she says. She holds the orchid roots by their base in one hand and grasps the dwarf with the other.

Tripping over his feet, he hurries in tow, casting a malevolent eye at a low-flying aircraft and saddened by the thorny growth replacing the lush leaves of ancient trees. He assumes the whispering grass and rare orchids will vanish next - especially if this excitable girl persists in her vandalism.

They reach the great garden; a muddle of growth that has coarsened through self defence with struggling tufts and depleted flowers. In the centre lies a glowering pool where black fish that have relinquished their colour through an evolution of withdrawal, swim in desultory isolation.

The palace looms. Its turrets probe the sky like a mouth of mal-formed teeth. Long windows mourn. A bramble clings to the blemished stone.

Our children will inherit this! says Elisha with an imperious sweep of her hand.

The dwarf’s dark complexion pales. Children? Inheritance? The girl is deranged. Dwarves breed by shaping their image in earth and leaving it to breathe under the moon. Yet, during his strange growth, he has noticed a change in his formerly innocuous genitalia. A protrusion mysteriously appeared, where Elisha had rested her slim hand. What does it mean?

Now she is striding through the garden to worn stone steps leading steeply to a bronze coloured front door. Briefly she and the dwarf are reflected in its shiny surface; distorted like mutants at the end of man’s maltreated world.

Elisha pushes the door which glides silently open and they step into a high-ceilinged hall painted red as running blood. Tables bearing bowls of inflated fruit and chairs whose legs end in twitching human feet, stand against the walls.

At the end of the hall, to one side, stone steps lead down to a dim door. Elisha and the dwarf descend. He thinks of the underearth - the mangled roots where he finds release and recreation. The underearth he enters through the dim door is filled with pots, pans, ladles and a bulbous vessel on a ready-built fire.

Sit here! Elisha points to a chair with a cleverly carved back. Clumsily the dwarf climbs