Magpie's Ladder

By Richard A. Kirk

A researcher's curiosity draws her to the dream realm of the Darkling Lands. Condemned by his own crime, an engrosser plumbs the labyrinthine depths of his firm's building to find that he is not alone. A giant searches for his missing brother. A young woman opens a sealed house atop a crumbling bridge. A young academic moves into the house of a dead professor and finds himself trapped in a dark fairy-tale. These are five stories of yearning, curiosity and darkness. They explore the fragile and dangerous correspondence between people and monsters. This illustrated book is Richard's first collection of short stories.

Magpie's Ladder comprises five stories that came to me while working on my visual art. My preferred drawing technique is stippling in ink, creating images with countless dots using a mechanical pen or brush. During those long hours, my imagination would wander, introducing strange characters and settings. The elements began to cohere into stories. Writing them down became a new path for expression, and for approaching the worlds that I enjoy creating.

Short stories have a special appeal. Unlike novels (which I also love, though they are quite different beasts) they are much like drawings; intimate works that can be experienced quickly, but which can reveal more of themselves with each revisiting. Short stories suggest a broader world beyond their thresholds. Each of the stories in Magpie's Ladder have at various times and degrees tempted me to longer explorations, but in the end I chose to savor the mystery.

Books have always been central to my life. Thinking about my literary inspiration and literary heroes lead me to authors like K. J. Bishop, Michael Moorcock, Mervyn Peake, Borges, John Banville, Brian Catling and John Crowley. These writers illuminate with their prose, but never fear the dark, qualities I'll always aspire to with my own work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786369666

Book preview

MAGPIE’S LADDER

RICHARD A. KIRK

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For Elaine and Emily, with love

In memory of Timothy Mizelle

MAGPIE’S LADDER

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MAGPIE’S LADDER

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There he was, Mr. C. Magpie, lingering under the dripping trees at the edge of the woods. Lily saw the movements of his busy hands through the falling snow. He pulled at something, as curious as his namesake, with fingers of wire and wood. She didn’t call out, or otherwise make herself known, because she was also curious.

He swayed in his dark coat while snow drifted into the dead milk-weeds and grass around his knees. Lily moved closer. Magpie clutched a stick with a bobbing paper wasp nest at the end. With his free hand he peeled away grey layers, releasing them to the breeze. Lily picked a torn strip out of a bush. With the watery ink of their saliva, the wasps of the Darkling Lands had inscribed names, crimes and condemnations in the faded pulp. Magpie appeared to be agitated, perhaps disturbed to have found a puzzle in his garden. His body quivered and his hands were restless. Lily smelled the musty paper. As it happened, she was familiar with the opinions of wasps, having been stung that morning while sitting in a park after an argument with her husband, Lukas. The piece of paper rustled as she put it in her pocket.

Magpie turned toward her, tiny eyes catching her mid-step. The wasp nest dropped to the ground, forgotten.

Lily. His voice was soft, as though he feared waking her. I didn’t think you’d come. I’ve been waiting here a long time, you know. Nothing to do but read and think.

It took me ages to get to sleep. It was true. Even now she felt tightness across her chest and knew that she was tossing, twisting in her sheets. Lukas, a light sleeper, would be awakened by her restlessness. He would worry—and would find her irritable and feverish in the morning. Magpie raised a rusty hand to her forehead and adjusted a string of her damp hair. The tightness subsided.

What have you brought me? he asked. Lily, startled by the abruptness of his question, pulled a book from her pocket. Mildew speckled the cover; foxing stained the yellowed leaves. Magpie trembled as he took it from her hesitant hands. It was another puzzle.

It’s got a secret, said Lily. Open it. The creature held the book in front of him and lifted the cover. He turned the pages with care until he came to an illustration, a collection of shells arranged in the form of a man. It lay beneath a brittle tissue and hung by a loose binding thread. Magpie’s interest in the illustration was fleeting. He had already become aware of the secret.

A cicada, he whispered, turning the page. A green cicada moved within a rectangular hollow in the book. They watched, breathless, as it climbed free and took to the air.

A traveller from the living world. Magpie’s eyes followed the flight of the insect until it vanished in the snow. He returned his gaze to her, his countenance filled with exhilaration. I never expected to see such a thing again. She was a little frightened at the vehemence of his reaction. A tremor in her chest warned her that the fear could push her out of the dream. Her hands had already grown translucent.

You asked me to bring something if I could. She looked down, fumbling for the words to explain her actions. I was going to bring a flower, but I heard the cicada when I was waiting to fall asleep.

How was it done, the magic? asked Magpie. He had also noticed her hands.

The cicada must have come in on the cat. So I caught it and put it in the secret compartment instead of the flower. When I lay back down, I held the image of it in my head. She looked at the hardback in his hand. It was meditative. She gave a nervous laugh. There is something about the book. It creates an opening, allowing me to come here. It let me bring the cicada. She reached out to take the volume back. Magpie retreated a step.

The book had sat undisturbed in a walnut trunk for over two hundred years. The trunk itself had been hidden in a concealed room in an old library. She had blown off the dust, dismayed by a sickening certainty. Something hidden deep inside of her had exposed itself in that moment. Lily, who had never stolen before, had slipped the book into her bag. Darkling Lands by Aquilla. The words were stamped into the cover and burned into her mind’s eye.

She looked at the open book in Magpie’s hands, feeling regret at having let it leave her own. The words on the page moved. They twisted, vanished and reappeared, reminding her of worms in the sediment of a seafloor. She was fading. The afternoon had grown darker and the snow was intensifying. Magpie’s eyes glowed with blue light she had not noticed before.

He closed the book. Lily gasped as it transformed into a torus of bright light. Magpie chuckled.

Apparently you can’t trust appearances, he said. He slipped the torus into his coat pocket.

Hey, she said, frowning.

If it let you come one way, perhaps it will take me the other.

She had never seen Magpie so agitated. He had always been gentle and solicitous, like a character in a children’s book.

I can’t come back without the book, said Lily. She closed her eyes.

No, he whispered in her ear. You cannot. For a moment she could feel cool sheets on her skin. The cat walked down the hall toward the bathroom. But you won’t need to. A cold grip closed around her body, a corset’s cinch. She gasped and opened her eyes. Magpie had wrapped his long arms around her and was rising into the darkness through the whirling snow. How could this be? In a panic, she tightened her eyes and bit down on her tongue to focus her thoughts. She tasted the salt in her blood and reopened her eyes. Lukas was looking down at her, puzzled.

Where have you been? he asked, smiling. She felt the warmth of his hand on her skin and thought that she had succeeded in returning. Lukas’s hand separated from her. She was wrenched from her lover’s presence. A chill plunged through her, and now she was rushing on the wind, hauled through wet branches that tore at her clothes and skin. Terrified that she would fall, she clung to Magpie’s body like a child.

After a time, it was twilight. The sky had cleared. Far below, she thought that she could see lights, but she realized they must have been the reflections of the stars in a body of water. She was carried farther and farther into the Darkling Lands, until all was silent but for the wind, and the rasp of her hand sliding into Magpie’s pocket to steal back the book. All she found was a hole.

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Lily dreamed of a long darkness. She thought it was permanent until a gentle pulse of light brought about a change. The light, which grew in strength, came from a twisting torus above a giant’s head made from innumerable tiny objects—bones, gears and glass. She realized that the life she had thought was forever was an instant, the fulcrum between one thing and another, one place and another.

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Lily stirred awake on top of a fat mattress. She rubbed her arms in the cool air and took a long, ragged breath, as though it was her first in hours. The vertebrae in her neck popped as she sat up to scan the room for Magpie. Alone. Dizzy, she fell back on her elbows, not wanting to