Proud to be European (read on; I am NOT a bigot). I like the United States of America too. These short stories were written around the year 2000 and I cannot emphasise loudly enough that I no longer subscribe to MANY of the sentiments they express. More short stories by Eoin Dunford will be appearing at this webpage in time. Thanks for visiting eoindunford.com .
AFTER THE HOLOCAUST
by Eoin Dunford (1997)
"Another horse, fiery red, went out. And it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, so that people should kill one another; and there was given to him a great sword" (Revelation 6:4).
Diary entry, 6 August 2045.
In all my life, I have never been outside the town of Limerick. It is my whole world, this muddy, smelly enclosure of noisy streets and crumbling houses near the end of the River Shannon. The Shannon once gave clean pure water, but now it is infected, like everything else. The Town Council says that we cannot even be sure that stirring the water with clay and boiling it before drinking will make it safe. But few of us have died since the initial plagues and sicknesses that took so many. Since I was born here 17 years ago, most of us -- from both the New Times and the Old Times -- have survived. That is all we can do, "survive" from day to day -- with the help and protection of God. My father, who is from the Old Times, always says that the Holocaust came because the people back then had turned away from God, become evil in their ways.
The world has never changed so much, or so quickly, as over the last fifty years. We have gone from being one global village bound together by mass communications to a fragmented collection of isolated settlements, the living bits left at the edges of the Wastelands. The world has regressed, since the day of the Holocaust, from being a modern industrial society to a medieval feudal one. But for the shells of motorcars and wrecks of electricity pylons around the place, one would be forgiven for thinking that we are living in the 13th or 14th century, with our horses and carts and town criers. We have truly been plunged into a terrifying new Dark Ages, with Famine and Pestilence everywhere. The world's surviving cities have been reduced to bare towns, its remaining towns to mere villages. Even Limerick, which fifty years ago was a thriving bustling city of tens of thousands of people, is now but a shadow of its former glory.
So how did such a sorrowful state of affairs come to be? The Holocaust was more like the Apocalypse, a wholesale destruction of human beings which made Hitler's Jewish Holocaust look like a mere pogrom. Bluntly, the lunatics they put in charge of the rest of us decided, at the end of the 20th century, that it would be nice to eliminate each other -- and us all -- with nuclear weapons. The leaders of the Eastern Allies had been planning and preparing their lovely little "War to End the Western World" for many years beforehand, and certainly nobody in the West expected the rapid and powerful advance through Europe of their combined forces in the late 1990s. Entire nations fell before the Asian invader, with little immediate resistance -- not that there was time to fight back anyway. Shocked that their "unstoppable" army should be suddenly routed by the French in the Great Battle of the Alps, the leaders of the Eastern Allies decided to make rubble of Paris. The men, women and children of that grand city were the lucky ones, vaporised in their sleep. Many of the inhabitants of the rest of France were to die slowly in the Fallout. This nightmarish scene was soon repeated the world over.
Reprisal by the leaders of the West was swift and without mercy. The arid capital of the Eastern aggressor was the next city to be annihilated, and within 24 hours the whole world became embroiled in a series of retaliatory and simply "preemptive" strikes. Britain and even "neutral" Ireland were dragged into the madness, and London, Manchester and Dublin were spontaneously razed to the ground, following the way of New York, San Francisco and the other great cities of the earth. The global population was decimated, yet the number of those killed immediately was still only a fraction of the billions to waste away in the years afterwards. That terrible day, the Day of the Holocaust, will forever be painfully remembered as "Doomsday."
Naturally my parents are thankful to have survived into the New Times, and I don't regret having been born, either. My father fled here as a young man, after the rest of his family were consumed in the blast which flattened Dublin. He was given refuge on condition that he helped to build walls around that part of the old city which has since become inhabited Limerick Town. Only by faith in God and assiduous labour has Limerick become the largest and most prosperous settlement on this island. Though the good people of Limerick (and of other places like it) have become prisoners in their own citadel, they are secure and relatively comfortable at least. Our town's most valuable assets, its walls -- and the builders who strengthen them and the pikemen who guard them -- shelter us from the storm which still rages on the outside, in the empty blackness of the "countryside."
The green fields of Erin are, of course, lost in the mists of time. All that exists between here and Galway, between here and Cork, is a wild, ravaged, bandit-infested Wasteland. Anyone making their way between these last outposts of civilisation travels in fear of these outlaws. The bandits are those who never made it to the towns before the Great Pestilence, were refused sanctuary afterwards, or were just kicked out for not contributing to the effort to resurrect civilisation. They are a half-mad half-starved breed without discipline or morals who, when not fighting each other, will attack, rob and often kill any innocent God-fearing traveller on the road. That is why, when venturing "outside," it is advisable not to use the nice wide flat "motorways" of the Old Times, for they are the favourite haunts of bandits. There are various "clans" of bandits out there, the largest and most dangerous of which are believed to be Zeppers in the northeast and the Revellers in the southwest. For a few anxious years the Stormers of the Midlands of Ireland formed themselves into a motorised gun-swinging brigade, but their petrol, and bullets, soon ran out. No clan, however, presents any real threat to our civilised way of life: the bandits are neither organised nor intelligent nor brave enough to penetrate or scale our proud stone walls.
The Town Council, and the townspeople, are far more worried though by the sudden emergence, and incessant growth, of the River Vikings. These scheming bandits have taken to water as a means of transport and attack. To make a pun of a phrase from the Old Times, they "dress to kill," just like the Norsemen of a millennium ago who are their inspiration. They are every bit as ruthless and savage. Based in one of the lakes further up the Shannon, they patrol the river in longships and periodically make bloody raids on inland villages. These pagan butchers still practise the evil of the Old Times; they recently burned yet another monastery of our holy Celtic Christian Church, slaughtering all its blessed, peace-loving monks. The River Vikings have not dared to venture as far down as this acknowledged Irish capital of Limerick, but knowing how devious those barbarians are, they are probably right now planning an assault -- and a massacre. If they do come, we shall have to be prepared.
What the future holds we know not. We can only trust in God, and pray that He saves us from the wrath of the River Vikings. Our generation has no memory of the past; we know only what the books tell us, and often even they prove useless. Who, born in the New Times, understands how a "television" worked? We gain our little knowledge of the world around us from the tales of travellers. My first cousin, Stefan, who has a spirit for adventure, recently returned from Britain and was greeted as a hero. He made his way to some little fishing village on the south coast called Dungarvan, where he bargained a trip across the sea with some local pirates. They brought him to Cornwall, and for four years he lived in one of the southern British towns which had escaped the "Death of England" -- Plymouth, I think it was. Things are slightly better organised over there, so he joined the new reformed Army of the British, and helped in their attempt to bring order to the Wasteland. That Stefan even survived, let alone fought and recruited bandits, is a tribute to the New Man's endurance and perseverance. We are all trying hard, and we will win. Civilisation will rise from the ashes, like the proverbial phoenix. History is beginning for the second time, but I hope that Man, the maker of it, has learned his most important lesson. In writing this today, on the hundredth anniversary of the dawn of the Age of the Holocaust, I pray to God above that His creation will never again cause fire to fall from Heaven.
"The first angel sounded: And hail and fire followed, mingled with blood, and they were thrown to earth. And a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up. Then the second angel sounded: And something like a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood" (Revelation 8:7, 8).
***
EUROPE -- LONG LIVE DIFFERENCE!
by Eoin Dunford (1997)
Welcome to Europe -- a very different Europe to the one in which you live, however. We of the British Resistance Movement send you this communication [back in time!] from the year 2018, having recently discovered the technology to send information, through the internet, back in time. Our "Temporal Info Transfer Continuum" is yet far from perfect, but by our calculations you live at some point towards the end of the last century [when I wrote this], in 1997 or 1998. The monster we call "Europe" would be totally alien to you, but take heed: it is being slowly and subtly forged all the time, while you sleep. So listen well to our brief history of Europe as it has developed between your time and ours!
By 2002 Strasbourg was officially the highest lawmaking body on the continent, the national assemblies demoted to little more than parish councils. The single currency had been achieved since the "big 2000," monetary union meaning of course total union. Control a nation's pockets and the rest follows -- no country can go its own way through economic sanctions and trade embargoes. This precise situation was actually predicted by the British foreign secretary in early 1997, and of course he was laughed into the political netherworld. The British were one of the few peoples to have any widespread misgivings about the whole arrangement, even after the assenting new Labour government's barrage of pro-European propaganda. And of course it was Britain, as you will see, along with countries such as Sweden and Poland, which would later offer the strongest physical resistance to the so-called "federal" regime.
Although there had been some minor contentions between local populations and members of the security services before 2006, active Europewide resistance began in earnest in that year with the outbreak of the First Asiatic War. The Compulsory Military Service Act had been extended to all corners of the Union two years earlier, involving conscription to the Federal Army on a two-and-a-half-year basis. "Conscientious objectors" were imprisoned. However, matters now became deadly serious, as not many young men and women felt the need to suffer and die at the hands of the latest battleground technology, certainly not over a handful of Greek islands. Compliance with the draft meant killing or being killed for the glory of the superstate. Refusal to obey the draft meant being killed for treason to the superstate. So instead of rushing off to end up as forgotten statistics, much of the youth of Europe, particularly in the "peripheral" regions, took up arms for their own cause -- the rebirth of the nation state. Thus began the Nationalistic Wars.
Resistance was in every area across the continent an uphill struggle, however. Even with the means to obtain arms, the support of local populations, and an undying loyalty to one another, the rebels were opposed by the limitless financial, numerical and technological resources of the central government. The short-lived Italian Resistance petered out when members were betrayed by bribed civilians. In Norway and Sweden, the Scandinavian Freedom Fighters ceased to exist for all intents and purposes when federal troops poured into the region and "requested" information from civilians. The small but spirited Irish Ireland Organisation, which operated from the hills and woods, was tracked down by satellite imagery and obliterated. These are but some examples.
The ability of our movement, the British Resistance, to last until this stage is due to the simple fact that we operate in urban environments and keep our membership and movements privy, even to our immediate families. Our only friends are fellow insurgents -- you cannot trust the general population, which is being increasingly corrupted by defeatist propaganda, especially on the Euronet and on the five-hundred-plus TV stations (these are all basically the same, by the way). Therefore any threat to our survival comes from within rather than from without. Our biggest disaster occurred in 2012 when a traitor, disillusioned with our "terrorism," caused our entire London Underground cell to be captured and shot. By the way, we are not and were never terrorists. We never in any of our operations put the lives of non-collaborating British citizens at risk; we simply target members of the Army, the Europol and the administration. The label "terrorists" has been given to us by the Euromedia, and the plot seems to be succeeding. New recruits are drying up and our membership is now below one quarter of a million.
This is the reason for "Operation Difference." We now concede after a decade and a half of fighting to free England from the shackles of the Union, that we have failed to make the difference. The Nationalistic Wars were officially declared over in 2015, but ours is the last major resistance group. The establishment predicts that within two years we too will be dead. However, we harness our newly discovered technology in a desperate bid to inform you, who live in an era where there was still time to change the direction of European integration -- that you must make the difference. It cannot be made in our present, so it must be done in the past. We are sorry that we are limited in the length of this message, but the amount of energy required to send even this much information is still enormous. So we, the next generation of Britons, urge you -- go out onto the beaches, into the fields, the streets. Shout our message from the rooftops: "Long live difference!"
***
MONEY MATTERS
by Eoin Dunford (1998)
Philip Rutherford waited impatiently as the queue rolled on. For a while he exchanged pleasantries with Carson ahead of him, who seemed preoccupied with the Games -- like everyone else at the moment, Philip reflected. Finally his time came and he faced the overseer, who sat crouched at a computer terminal. He greeted the overseer in the usual, standard way, though privately he recoiled at the idea of giving glory to the Community.
Philip nodded cautiously as the overseer spelled out his earnings. When he notified him of the Seasonal Bonus, Philip smiled ostentatiously. He remarked that the Community was good. This month's salary came to 650 credits. He saw the overseer click a button and knew that the money had been instantly deposited in his account. A few seconds more and this week's light, heat and TV/internet connection would be paid for.
As Philip turned to leave the building, the clock above the door flashed the time. 24th December 2038, 17:17 hrs. The door locked automatically behind him, and Philip walked in the open air. He wove his way down Abbey Street, trying his best to ignore the insidious overhead screens, which splashed down blessings from Coca-Cola and Microsoft. Philip looked forward to getting home. He had worked very hard these last few days, with all the coverage of the Games. Philip had worked for the Irish version of The Times for eight years now. He was known as a "processor": his job was to process information. He would take the truth, which was news of what was really going on in the world, and would work it into a more "acceptable" form, which could often be downright lies. It was a subtle and devious craft; but one which The Times and the other mouthpieces of the Community worldwide had mastered. Little did the public realise, Philip contemplated, that truth is lies. He enjoyed his job for the sole reason that he was one of the privileged few who had access to the real truth; otherwise, he knew, he would have hated it.
Philip's thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a street message. Everyone stopped where they were standing. The voice of the Community was inescapable. Even in the public places where there was no television or internet, the Community had ingeniously blended these loudspeakers into the architecture. Philip had no choice but to listen as the Community spewed forth its propaganda. "The Community takes this opportunity to wish all its members in Dublin the happiest possible Festive Season. This message has been issued by Community Headquarters, Washington, D.C." The message was not over yet: there followed the all-too-familiar Slogan, which was engrained in the mind of every person in the world. "Remember members, the Community is watching you. Because the Community wants to protect you. The Community cares!"
The Community is watching you. The first, most sinister part of the Slogan reverberated around Philip's head. He started to walk again, avoiding the rush of people. It was believed (by many, Philip knew) that the Community had even installed secret cameras in the lampposts, so it could keep a constant, parental eye on its members. But what was the need for street cameras if there were already satellites watching from the sky? Philip felt confused. He had come to the corner of Capel Street and Ormond Quay, and didn't fancy walking the rest of the way to the flat. He decided to call a taxi. He spoke clearly into the microphone in the wall: "Taxi for one." Within moments a gleaming green-and-blue taxi pulled up and the door slid open. Philip climbed in and the driver welcomed him without smiling. "Glory to the Community!" "Glory to the Community," replied Philip, almost without thinking. He informed the driver of his destination. The taxi took off, and Philip sat back. The driver made no attempt at conversation.
Outside the people hurried around, as always, with blank, empty, faces. There would be a lot of spending this Festive Season, Philip mused, as the taxi sped past a McDonalds. Especially with all the merchandise from the latest space mission. Bloody ignorant fools, he thought, not without pity. To buy so many useless luxury goods and services, when every good-producing corporation was controlled, even owned, by the Community. He laughed, inwardly, at the irony of it: people spend the week sweating for the Community, and then, at the end of it, give every credit they've earned back to the Community. It was evident that the masses were falling for it more and more, from this year's record figures for the pay-per-view Community Games. The Games, Philip pondered -- truly the perfect medium for the new religion, the adulation of the Community. He hated the Community.
Philip was awoken from his anger as the taxi came to a sudden halt outside the Virgin Megastore. Even with the ban on private transport, movement could be made impossible by pedestrians. He glanced in the inviting doors of the store as seemingly gratified shoppers poured out with their newly purchased record-balls. From every shop, down every sidestreet, unrestrained capitalism ran amok. People today think they are free, Philip figured, because they are well off. Capitalism, communism, it's all the same. Once they have the money, they have you -- trapped in their rotten system. It doesn't make a difference whether you have plenty of money or none at all; you're their slave. Freedom is slavery. He recognised the song which pounded from the Megastore. It was by the late 90s band Radiohead. Called "Paranoid Android", Philip had always found it particularly depressing. Now it was worse than ever. The song overwhelmed his emotions, and he became its subject. He felt paranoid that the Community was watching him; an android whose every action it could control. Mentally he slapped himself back to positive thinking. My actions, he said to himself, but not my thoughts. He allowed himself the satisfaction of the belief that they could never have power over what went on inside his own head. For that was the only place where real freedom existed.
The key to the Community's power, Philip considered as the taxi took off again, lies in its control of the global money supply. The ability to create vast sums of money out of thin air had been there ever since the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, and had been used to full effect since the abandonment of the Gold Standard in 1914. European Monetary Union in 1999 saw that power to create credit fall into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and the subsequent loss of national sovereignty was an ominous sign of what would come. Though few guessed it at the time, Philip recalled. The gradual regionalisation and eventual unification of the world gave absolute power to those who had the most money. The New World Order, as promised for years on the old American dollar bill, had finally been born. Enter the Community -- or to put it more truthfully, the universal financial dictatorship. This dictatorship, through its absolute control over all money matters, held complete sway over every aspect of every person's life!
As the taxi drew up beside his apartment, Philip reached into his pocket with his right hand. It was a long time since he -- or indeed anybody -- had carried cash. He held out his credit card to the driver, who inserted it indolently into a slot. The fare was automatically deducted from his account. As the door of his flat opened for him and a tinny monotonous voice welcomed back "Member Rutherford," Philip wondered what percentage of the fare would end up in the electronic vaults of the Community. As he ascended the stairs he pointedly realised that if true freedom were to be restored for mankind, the system of universal credit would have to be destroyed. After all, what that really meant was universal bondage. Entering his room, Philip knew what he would write. He turned on the light, drew the curtains and made sure the wall-mounted screen was off. Then, sitting at his desk he opened his diary. He wrote the words: I understand why but I don't understand how.
***
THE ABANDONED
by Eoin Dunford (2002)
The young gentleman dismounted from the carriage and ran through the gravel up the steps of the great house. His father dislodging himself from the carriage was clamouring at him to conduct himself as he repeatedly rang the bell in darts of rapid succession. Thoughts of the impending trenches were far from his mind as he desultorily greeted the answering maid, giving her a long smile, and hurried through the hallway to the kitchen and his dog. His mother was there; she was studying Brandy with concern, and only looked up when the surprised cook loudly greeted the young man.
The young man and his mother exchanged affections and then the cook asked the Master if he was excited about finally being able to do his patriotic duty. The Battle of the Somme was past and the War had already degenerated from the high clouds of jingoistic hope to the apprehensive mire of the neighbourhood of all-embracing Death.
The Master replied that he couldn't wait to perform his necessary chores; the cook was studying him admiringly. His mother continued to look at the dog, intently, apart from one brief moment which the boy observed where she looked up and beamed at her son; then the Gentleman of the House entered and nodded gravely to the assembled party. He greeted the cook curtly and attentively turned to his wife, while his son, a hand caressing the dog, looked up expectantly.
"The vet will be here shortly," said his wife. The father looked away briefly, his eye somewhere in the distance above the head of his son and away from the gaze of the cook, who now once again busied herself, returning from her convivial chat with the Lady of the House to her remunerative duties. His wife noticed his eyes and it seemed that there was a longing in that stare, or an absence, that induced perhaps by the recognition of a thought too expansive to be contemplated, or the acknowledgement of an idea that would never be brought to fruition.
The father quickly returned his eyes to the floor, to where his boy sat hunched over the dying animal. The family stayed like that for some minutes, all eyes fixed on the dog, before the young man suddenly rose and stated that he should gather his belongings from the carriage. His father stepped aside to allow him pass and the young gentleman shuffled through the cylinder of the hallway to the main door.
At the back door he heard some hushed words exchanged which had not been uttered during his presence in the room. Thoughts of war and possible death had been relegated to the back of his mind, however, by the distraction that was Brandy's illness. He loved Brandy and he couldn't bear to see him threatened like this. Swiftly fleeting down the front steps he gathered his possessions and gave the driver, who was smoking a cigarette, leave to return the carriage to its proper station. Hurrying up the steps he dumped his bags in the hall before appearing in the kitchen; his father ordered him to place his stuff in his bedroom, which he did before returning to the downstairs company.
His father now excused himself, saying that he had more important things to attend to, and passed into the hallway. The young man heard his heavy steps grow fainter and fainter in the direction of the study. The boy once more took to crouching beside the beast, studying it apprehensively. He heard his mother approach and she placed her hand on his shoulder. Then turning to the cook the lady asked the girl to see to it that she was consulted when the vet had finished, that she would be in the study, and disappeared out the door like her husband. As usual the young man did not hear his mother's feet at all as she passed down the carpeted corridor.
Presently the vet arrived and the boy stood up to allow him to attend to the dog. He knew what was the matter, for he had been coming here for days now. The cook asked him if he would like something to eat, but the young man replied that he was unable to eat anything. Again he took to studying the dog, while the vet worked. After perhaps half an hour the vet, rising slowly, turned gravely to the Master and stated that he had an unpleasant report. At this the young man rushed gasping from the room, out the back door, into the Scottish air.
A few minutes later his father appeared, and told him that it was necessary, and that it was for the best. Then he did something that he had never done before, he took a cigarette from his pocket and gave it to his son.
The young man was alternately blowing smoke up into the air and staring morosely at the ground when they dragged the body from the house. The man, hearing the vet's tedious approach on the gravel, did not look up. As the vet passed by him, he dropped the failing cigarette and returned to the back door, where he heard his father summoning for a servant. The servant appearing quickly with open eyes nodded to the young gentleman -- who did not respond -- before being escorted by the father into the back garden.
Later the young gentleman sat alone in his room, having failed to read, unable to think, and feeling sad and abandoned as the servant, directed by his father, dug a trench outside to put the body in.
***
THE ARTIST SUICIDAL
by Eoin Dunford (2002)
He had dabbled in a lot of things. He had spent time dabbling in wine, in women, and he had spent too long waiting for buses. It was a cold December night when he walked alone through the city streets to the quiet place on the river.
He considered himself an artist. He had been brought up beneath the wings of austerity and moralising and he had early learnt to frugally gather what resources he might, be they mental or material, to turn into didactic entireties, for himself or for others.
Yet this stern and uncompromising moralising did not detract from the imaginativeness of his thought and work; from an early age he had fled to the soft bosom of an alternative world of fantasy, as an impassioned escape from a world he had learnt to fear, and which unfailingly and unflinchingly rejected him.
He walked briskly along the quays, his collar to the light but chilling wind, dimly aware all the time of the streetlights offering their skewed reflections in the dark water. The black river below him ran swiftly through the night, bubbling in its intensity here and there and elsewhere forming white foam, which in its ethereal beauty stood at odds with the violent power of the river, like the ephemeral glint in a sunlit place of a knife in motion. The river ran on, cutting its way through the city and its bowels, burying itself under bridges in places but always re-emerging victorious, and hurtling down steep weirs, seeming to stop stagnant at their bottoms but escaping each time and rushing on relentlessly on its inevitable course.
Tonight the river was at a greater height than its usual self. The whole cityscape was covered in snow. The roofs, the window-ledges, the sparse treetops, the roads and the pavements -- all were covered in a white skin. The hills afar possessed this glittering skin, and he surmised that it should be cold in those fields; but no more so than in the city, he reckoned, for the city lay in a valley which formed a natural funnel, and it seemed to the artist that all the coldness of the flanking hills poured down avalanche-like to intensify the freeze of the streets. A lone magpie ambled in the snow, and all the artist saw were the black bits of his body as they tripped across his path, and a trail of insecure prints, tentatively piercing their way to the other side of the walkway. Here and there isolated outgrowths of snow overhung the flood, and it was only a matter of course before they individually fell away and added their disembodied weight to the coursing torrent below; and if the walker's head had not been firmly set on the ground he would indeed have perceived and perhaps remarked on the passing gently, quietly, unknown to the world, of one of this tribe of growths, and its bearing away in the river's vivacity.
Yet if the river was at a higher level than usual his spirit inside was at a personal low; it seemed to this dreamer that the ashes of consoling imagination left by the fire of his thirty years had finally been blown away, and that all that remained was the ground. He passed street corner after street corner, each street adding its voiceless voice and rude, unhallowed breath to the street on which he walked; and he passed many dainty little bridges, but he did not cross any. He walked on, his mind locked in the brilliance of the snow, oblivious to all but this effulgent carpet, inhabiting a universe composed entirely of snowflakes and where past, future and the present moment all merged into one white sheet.
He was deeply unhappy. What had he ever contributed? What had he left to contribute? His work went unappreciated, and his talk even less. He was an extra. He was all extra in this world. Finally he came to the place and stopped.
It was the quiet place. A quiet place that no one would know about. A quiet end for a quiet man. He thought of one of those snowfalls melting gently with the river, and being absorbed into its clasp. It was the quiet end of a quiet life, and they would find his body in the morning. A quiet place, and he would pass into quietness.
He turned to have one last look behind him.
A man looking out a window saw a black-clad man walk to the river's brink, look around, hesitate, and begin to journey back the way he came.
The lonely artist had turned and walked away, leaving a second set of footprints to mirror the original.
***
THE CLOTH
by Eoin Dunford (2002)
They found him lying face down in the mud. After the great war the whole world had become a great graveyard, desolate, lonely, and barren, and putrefying with the uneaten remnants of stinking flesh. He was lying prone among many other skeletal heroes in a sea of wrecks that had once been a field. They turned him over and they found him clutching a piece of cloth, a shred of something greater that had existed before.
Even after all these years of scavenging the battlefield was still aglint with shiny things which could be salvaged. On finding this piece of rough cloth, however, knowing it to be important, they straightaway mounted their horses and one of them, placing it in the breast of his tunic, led the way back to the village. The village elders were summoned and spent time surmising as to its import. The oldest and wisest of them held it to be something of immense worth. It was believed to be a shred of something that had been called a "flag," which was a symbol of group identity. The piece of cloth was blue, white, and red. The village elders spent time studying it and then moved off in their own directions. Caressing it lovingly between his fingers the chief elder removed it to his house for later inspection. He deemed it to be a symbol of unsurpassable value. "It is greater," he was heard to say, "than all our trinkets collected."
That night at the special convening the chief patriarch remembered the tales from his boyhood. Everyone was gathered, the women in their most stunning apparel and the children with wide eyes aglow in the lamplight. A special table had been placed in the centre of the hall for the wonderful cloth. The patriarch's wife had washed it in the afternoon. As the chief elder spake she sat with her eyes closed and she too tried to remember.
The chief elder stated that before the War every people had a flag. Nervously the children whispered this new word among themselves: flag. He ordered the artists to design a new flag for the use of his village. He told them that in size it was a much greater spectacle than the riven ribbon on show before them. Then he began to recount the history told to him by his father. All in the hall hushed as the history was retold. The elder stated that he knew of three peoples whose flag had been blue, white, and red. The first was the greatest country on earth -- he explained the word country -- and could swallow up all its enemies. It was so great that it was simply called "us," and all "they" was excluded. It had risen from the sea and began its course by massacring its native inhabitants. The patriarch explained that the new inhabitants had come from afar. There was a silence of shocked wonder. "Here is wisdom," said the patriarch: "See how good and evil can be contained even in one country... and," he continued, with suspicious eyes afire with the demand for loyalty, "in the one village." The second nation had been the greatest land in its day and had given birth to the first nation. Many assembled did not understand this. The second nation had started as a barbarous tyranny but progressed to become the abolisher of all slavery and a great defender of civil liberties. "Civil liberty," quoth the elder, "is what we have in this village and what many other villages must lack: the right of every man, within sound reason, to do what he please." "Boys," he said, "grease yourselves to be warriors like your fathers. Some day another tribe will come and try to take away our liberty. Be prepared to fight, under the banner of our people's flag, which will be modelled on this one." The third people with a blue, white and red flag, continued the village elder, had spoken another language to that which the villagers spoke themselves. It was a most graceful and civilised language and indeed the nation that spoke it had been most civilised. The ordinary people of this land had risen up and overthrown its corrupt patriarch and legend dictates, said the grey old man, that in this event lies the origin of the three colours. This country had been an exporter of revolutions, both good and ill, said the wise old man, and had been in conflict with the other two peoples who bore the three colours. But that had been before the black beast. The level and quality of this last nation's thought was unparalleled, said the old man, and this provoked the land of the black beast to jealousy. This land had once been civilised as the latter nation -- but alas! because the people were desperate the black beast rose up and began to tear apart everything it saw. The black beast, void, said the elder, his voice now rising to a roar, in intellect -- subjected its own people and then began to subject and abase other peoples. At this cruelty -- the wise man's voice now died away and he stopped talking. "At this cruelty..." He now rose from his pedestal and descended to the centre of the floor. Taking the cloth in his hand he held it aloft and exclaimed, "Under these colours our three nations joined forces and killed the black beast!" A gasp of awe volleyed around the room and the patriarch gently replaced the piece of flag on its table. "My people," he said, "we do not know whence these colours, what people they represent. But we may be sure of the idea they represent: they represent liberty, progress, justice!"
The leader of the village then dropped to his knees and kissed the sacred colours. A stunned silence again invaded the room; because the people had never seen their leader on the ground before. Returning to his dais the elder declared the meeting finished and gathered the artists to himself. "Make," he told them, "a new building. Make a shrine to house this piece of cloth." The artists bowed and left him.
The village was alive with talk in the following days. There was much hustle of activity as the artists set about constructing the shrine and creating a flag. The riflemen on the village's defences seemed twice as alive and alert as usual. The little children went about with blue, white and red on their clothing; their mothers had dyed these colours and sewn them on. All the people seemed imbued with a new love for their village and for each other. As the village elder went among them he told them that the piece of cloth had been found at the dead man's breast; and he proposed that the red in the cloth stood for the terrible sacrifice necessary for preserving freedom.
A fearful rumour, however, was doing the rounds. It was expressed that long ago another flag had been found, and burnt. This flag was entirely red, and therefore had justly been taken as a bad omen. When questioned on this the village leader told his people that the red flag had started out as a good idea, and that the red part of the original one had been expanded to symbolise increased freedom. However, it was a flag of blood, and its red totality could well be said to stand for the seas of blood that had been wrung from its bosom.
"Never make such a flag," the patriarch commanded. "It is evil and does not stand for liberty."
Finally the new flag was ready. It featured the same three colours as the one found but they were in a different design. A part of the guard was set aside to watch it permanently. "The price of liberty," the chief elder reminded his people, "is eternal vigilance."
***
by Eoin Dunford (1997)
"Another horse, fiery red, went out. And it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, so that people should kill one another; and there was given to him a great sword" (Revelation 6:4).
Diary entry, 6 August 2045.
In all my life, I have never been outside the town of Limerick. It is my whole world, this muddy, smelly enclosure of noisy streets and crumbling houses near the end of the River Shannon. The Shannon once gave clean pure water, but now it is infected, like everything else. The Town Council says that we cannot even be sure that stirring the water with clay and boiling it before drinking will make it safe. But few of us have died since the initial plagues and sicknesses that took so many. Since I was born here 17 years ago, most of us -- from both the New Times and the Old Times -- have survived. That is all we can do, "survive" from day to day -- with the help and protection of God. My father, who is from the Old Times, always says that the Holocaust came because the people back then had turned away from God, become evil in their ways.
The world has never changed so much, or so quickly, as over the last fifty years. We have gone from being one global village bound together by mass communications to a fragmented collection of isolated settlements, the living bits left at the edges of the Wastelands. The world has regressed, since the day of the Holocaust, from being a modern industrial society to a medieval feudal one. But for the shells of motorcars and wrecks of electricity pylons around the place, one would be forgiven for thinking that we are living in the 13th or 14th century, with our horses and carts and town criers. We have truly been plunged into a terrifying new Dark Ages, with Famine and Pestilence everywhere. The world's surviving cities have been reduced to bare towns, its remaining towns to mere villages. Even Limerick, which fifty years ago was a thriving bustling city of tens of thousands of people, is now but a shadow of its former glory.
So how did such a sorrowful state of affairs come to be? The Holocaust was more like the Apocalypse, a wholesale destruction of human beings which made Hitler's Jewish Holocaust look like a mere pogrom. Bluntly, the lunatics they put in charge of the rest of us decided, at the end of the 20th century, that it would be nice to eliminate each other -- and us all -- with nuclear weapons. The leaders of the Eastern Allies had been planning and preparing their lovely little "War to End the Western World" for many years beforehand, and certainly nobody in the West expected the rapid and powerful advance through Europe of their combined forces in the late 1990s. Entire nations fell before the Asian invader, with little immediate resistance -- not that there was time to fight back anyway. Shocked that their "unstoppable" army should be suddenly routed by the French in the Great Battle of the Alps, the leaders of the Eastern Allies decided to make rubble of Paris. The men, women and children of that grand city were the lucky ones, vaporised in their sleep. Many of the inhabitants of the rest of France were to die slowly in the Fallout. This nightmarish scene was soon repeated the world over.
Reprisal by the leaders of the West was swift and without mercy. The arid capital of the Eastern aggressor was the next city to be annihilated, and within 24 hours the whole world became embroiled in a series of retaliatory and simply "preemptive" strikes. Britain and even "neutral" Ireland were dragged into the madness, and London, Manchester and Dublin were spontaneously razed to the ground, following the way of New York, San Francisco and the other great cities of the earth. The global population was decimated, yet the number of those killed immediately was still only a fraction of the billions to waste away in the years afterwards. That terrible day, the Day of the Holocaust, will forever be painfully remembered as "Doomsday."
Naturally my parents are thankful to have survived into the New Times, and I don't regret having been born, either. My father fled here as a young man, after the rest of his family were consumed in the blast which flattened Dublin. He was given refuge on condition that he helped to build walls around that part of the old city which has since become inhabited Limerick Town. Only by faith in God and assiduous labour has Limerick become the largest and most prosperous settlement on this island. Though the good people of Limerick (and of other places like it) have become prisoners in their own citadel, they are secure and relatively comfortable at least. Our town's most valuable assets, its walls -- and the builders who strengthen them and the pikemen who guard them -- shelter us from the storm which still rages on the outside, in the empty blackness of the "countryside."
The green fields of Erin are, of course, lost in the mists of time. All that exists between here and Galway, between here and Cork, is a wild, ravaged, bandit-infested Wasteland. Anyone making their way between these last outposts of civilisation travels in fear of these outlaws. The bandits are those who never made it to the towns before the Great Pestilence, were refused sanctuary afterwards, or were just kicked out for not contributing to the effort to resurrect civilisation. They are a half-mad half-starved breed without discipline or morals who, when not fighting each other, will attack, rob and often kill any innocent God-fearing traveller on the road. That is why, when venturing "outside," it is advisable not to use the nice wide flat "motorways" of the Old Times, for they are the favourite haunts of bandits. There are various "clans" of bandits out there, the largest and most dangerous of which are believed to be Zeppers in the northeast and the Revellers in the southwest. For a few anxious years the Stormers of the Midlands of Ireland formed themselves into a motorised gun-swinging brigade, but their petrol, and bullets, soon ran out. No clan, however, presents any real threat to our civilised way of life: the bandits are neither organised nor intelligent nor brave enough to penetrate or scale our proud stone walls.
The Town Council, and the townspeople, are far more worried though by the sudden emergence, and incessant growth, of the River Vikings. These scheming bandits have taken to water as a means of transport and attack. To make a pun of a phrase from the Old Times, they "dress to kill," just like the Norsemen of a millennium ago who are their inspiration. They are every bit as ruthless and savage. Based in one of the lakes further up the Shannon, they patrol the river in longships and periodically make bloody raids on inland villages. These pagan butchers still practise the evil of the Old Times; they recently burned yet another monastery of our holy Celtic Christian Church, slaughtering all its blessed, peace-loving monks. The River Vikings have not dared to venture as far down as this acknowledged Irish capital of Limerick, but knowing how devious those barbarians are, they are probably right now planning an assault -- and a massacre. If they do come, we shall have to be prepared.
What the future holds we know not. We can only trust in God, and pray that He saves us from the wrath of the River Vikings. Our generation has no memory of the past; we know only what the books tell us, and often even they prove useless. Who, born in the New Times, understands how a "television" worked? We gain our little knowledge of the world around us from the tales of travellers. My first cousin, Stefan, who has a spirit for adventure, recently returned from Britain and was greeted as a hero. He made his way to some little fishing village on the south coast called Dungarvan, where he bargained a trip across the sea with some local pirates. They brought him to Cornwall, and for four years he lived in one of the southern British towns which had escaped the "Death of England" -- Plymouth, I think it was. Things are slightly better organised over there, so he joined the new reformed Army of the British, and helped in their attempt to bring order to the Wasteland. That Stefan even survived, let alone fought and recruited bandits, is a tribute to the New Man's endurance and perseverance. We are all trying hard, and we will win. Civilisation will rise from the ashes, like the proverbial phoenix. History is beginning for the second time, but I hope that Man, the maker of it, has learned his most important lesson. In writing this today, on the hundredth anniversary of the dawn of the Age of the Holocaust, I pray to God above that His creation will never again cause fire to fall from Heaven.
"The first angel sounded: And hail and fire followed, mingled with blood, and they were thrown to earth. And a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up. Then the second angel sounded: And something like a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood" (Revelation 8:7, 8).
***
EUROPE -- LONG LIVE DIFFERENCE!
by Eoin Dunford (1997)
Welcome to Europe -- a very different Europe to the one in which you live, however. We of the British Resistance Movement send you this communication [back in time!] from the year 2018, having recently discovered the technology to send information, through the internet, back in time. Our "Temporal Info Transfer Continuum" is yet far from perfect, but by our calculations you live at some point towards the end of the last century [when I wrote this], in 1997 or 1998. The monster we call "Europe" would be totally alien to you, but take heed: it is being slowly and subtly forged all the time, while you sleep. So listen well to our brief history of Europe as it has developed between your time and ours!
By 2002 Strasbourg was officially the highest lawmaking body on the continent, the national assemblies demoted to little more than parish councils. The single currency had been achieved since the "big 2000," monetary union meaning of course total union. Control a nation's pockets and the rest follows -- no country can go its own way through economic sanctions and trade embargoes. This precise situation was actually predicted by the British foreign secretary in early 1997, and of course he was laughed into the political netherworld. The British were one of the few peoples to have any widespread misgivings about the whole arrangement, even after the assenting new Labour government's barrage of pro-European propaganda. And of course it was Britain, as you will see, along with countries such as Sweden and Poland, which would later offer the strongest physical resistance to the so-called "federal" regime.
Although there had been some minor contentions between local populations and members of the security services before 2006, active Europewide resistance began in earnest in that year with the outbreak of the First Asiatic War. The Compulsory Military Service Act had been extended to all corners of the Union two years earlier, involving conscription to the Federal Army on a two-and-a-half-year basis. "Conscientious objectors" were imprisoned. However, matters now became deadly serious, as not many young men and women felt the need to suffer and die at the hands of the latest battleground technology, certainly not over a handful of Greek islands. Compliance with the draft meant killing or being killed for the glory of the superstate. Refusal to obey the draft meant being killed for treason to the superstate. So instead of rushing off to end up as forgotten statistics, much of the youth of Europe, particularly in the "peripheral" regions, took up arms for their own cause -- the rebirth of the nation state. Thus began the Nationalistic Wars.
Resistance was in every area across the continent an uphill struggle, however. Even with the means to obtain arms, the support of local populations, and an undying loyalty to one another, the rebels were opposed by the limitless financial, numerical and technological resources of the central government. The short-lived Italian Resistance petered out when members were betrayed by bribed civilians. In Norway and Sweden, the Scandinavian Freedom Fighters ceased to exist for all intents and purposes when federal troops poured into the region and "requested" information from civilians. The small but spirited Irish Ireland Organisation, which operated from the hills and woods, was tracked down by satellite imagery and obliterated. These are but some examples.
The ability of our movement, the British Resistance, to last until this stage is due to the simple fact that we operate in urban environments and keep our membership and movements privy, even to our immediate families. Our only friends are fellow insurgents -- you cannot trust the general population, which is being increasingly corrupted by defeatist propaganda, especially on the Euronet and on the five-hundred-plus TV stations (these are all basically the same, by the way). Therefore any threat to our survival comes from within rather than from without. Our biggest disaster occurred in 2012 when a traitor, disillusioned with our "terrorism," caused our entire London Underground cell to be captured and shot. By the way, we are not and were never terrorists. We never in any of our operations put the lives of non-collaborating British citizens at risk; we simply target members of the Army, the Europol and the administration. The label "terrorists" has been given to us by the Euromedia, and the plot seems to be succeeding. New recruits are drying up and our membership is now below one quarter of a million.
This is the reason for "Operation Difference." We now concede after a decade and a half of fighting to free England from the shackles of the Union, that we have failed to make the difference. The Nationalistic Wars were officially declared over in 2015, but ours is the last major resistance group. The establishment predicts that within two years we too will be dead. However, we harness our newly discovered technology in a desperate bid to inform you, who live in an era where there was still time to change the direction of European integration -- that you must make the difference. It cannot be made in our present, so it must be done in the past. We are sorry that we are limited in the length of this message, but the amount of energy required to send even this much information is still enormous. So we, the next generation of Britons, urge you -- go out onto the beaches, into the fields, the streets. Shout our message from the rooftops: "Long live difference!"
***
MONEY MATTERS
by Eoin Dunford (1998)
Philip Rutherford waited impatiently as the queue rolled on. For a while he exchanged pleasantries with Carson ahead of him, who seemed preoccupied with the Games -- like everyone else at the moment, Philip reflected. Finally his time came and he faced the overseer, who sat crouched at a computer terminal. He greeted the overseer in the usual, standard way, though privately he recoiled at the idea of giving glory to the Community.
Philip nodded cautiously as the overseer spelled out his earnings. When he notified him of the Seasonal Bonus, Philip smiled ostentatiously. He remarked that the Community was good. This month's salary came to 650 credits. He saw the overseer click a button and knew that the money had been instantly deposited in his account. A few seconds more and this week's light, heat and TV/internet connection would be paid for.
As Philip turned to leave the building, the clock above the door flashed the time. 24th December 2038, 17:17 hrs. The door locked automatically behind him, and Philip walked in the open air. He wove his way down Abbey Street, trying his best to ignore the insidious overhead screens, which splashed down blessings from Coca-Cola and Microsoft. Philip looked forward to getting home. He had worked very hard these last few days, with all the coverage of the Games. Philip had worked for the Irish version of The Times for eight years now. He was known as a "processor": his job was to process information. He would take the truth, which was news of what was really going on in the world, and would work it into a more "acceptable" form, which could often be downright lies. It was a subtle and devious craft; but one which The Times and the other mouthpieces of the Community worldwide had mastered. Little did the public realise, Philip contemplated, that truth is lies. He enjoyed his job for the sole reason that he was one of the privileged few who had access to the real truth; otherwise, he knew, he would have hated it.
Philip's thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a street message. Everyone stopped where they were standing. The voice of the Community was inescapable. Even in the public places where there was no television or internet, the Community had ingeniously blended these loudspeakers into the architecture. Philip had no choice but to listen as the Community spewed forth its propaganda. "The Community takes this opportunity to wish all its members in Dublin the happiest possible Festive Season. This message has been issued by Community Headquarters, Washington, D.C." The message was not over yet: there followed the all-too-familiar Slogan, which was engrained in the mind of every person in the world. "Remember members, the Community is watching you. Because the Community wants to protect you. The Community cares!"
The Community is watching you. The first, most sinister part of the Slogan reverberated around Philip's head. He started to walk again, avoiding the rush of people. It was believed (by many, Philip knew) that the Community had even installed secret cameras in the lampposts, so it could keep a constant, parental eye on its members. But what was the need for street cameras if there were already satellites watching from the sky? Philip felt confused. He had come to the corner of Capel Street and Ormond Quay, and didn't fancy walking the rest of the way to the flat. He decided to call a taxi. He spoke clearly into the microphone in the wall: "Taxi for one." Within moments a gleaming green-and-blue taxi pulled up and the door slid open. Philip climbed in and the driver welcomed him without smiling. "Glory to the Community!" "Glory to the Community," replied Philip, almost without thinking. He informed the driver of his destination. The taxi took off, and Philip sat back. The driver made no attempt at conversation.
Outside the people hurried around, as always, with blank, empty, faces. There would be a lot of spending this Festive Season, Philip mused, as the taxi sped past a McDonalds. Especially with all the merchandise from the latest space mission. Bloody ignorant fools, he thought, not without pity. To buy so many useless luxury goods and services, when every good-producing corporation was controlled, even owned, by the Community. He laughed, inwardly, at the irony of it: people spend the week sweating for the Community, and then, at the end of it, give every credit they've earned back to the Community. It was evident that the masses were falling for it more and more, from this year's record figures for the pay-per-view Community Games. The Games, Philip pondered -- truly the perfect medium for the new religion, the adulation of the Community. He hated the Community.
Philip was awoken from his anger as the taxi came to a sudden halt outside the Virgin Megastore. Even with the ban on private transport, movement could be made impossible by pedestrians. He glanced in the inviting doors of the store as seemingly gratified shoppers poured out with their newly purchased record-balls. From every shop, down every sidestreet, unrestrained capitalism ran amok. People today think they are free, Philip figured, because they are well off. Capitalism, communism, it's all the same. Once they have the money, they have you -- trapped in their rotten system. It doesn't make a difference whether you have plenty of money or none at all; you're their slave. Freedom is slavery. He recognised the song which pounded from the Megastore. It was by the late 90s band Radiohead. Called "Paranoid Android", Philip had always found it particularly depressing. Now it was worse than ever. The song overwhelmed his emotions, and he became its subject. He felt paranoid that the Community was watching him; an android whose every action it could control. Mentally he slapped himself back to positive thinking. My actions, he said to himself, but not my thoughts. He allowed himself the satisfaction of the belief that they could never have power over what went on inside his own head. For that was the only place where real freedom existed.
The key to the Community's power, Philip considered as the taxi took off again, lies in its control of the global money supply. The ability to create vast sums of money out of thin air had been there ever since the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, and had been used to full effect since the abandonment of the Gold Standard in 1914. European Monetary Union in 1999 saw that power to create credit fall into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and the subsequent loss of national sovereignty was an ominous sign of what would come. Though few guessed it at the time, Philip recalled. The gradual regionalisation and eventual unification of the world gave absolute power to those who had the most money. The New World Order, as promised for years on the old American dollar bill, had finally been born. Enter the Community -- or to put it more truthfully, the universal financial dictatorship. This dictatorship, through its absolute control over all money matters, held complete sway over every aspect of every person's life!
As the taxi drew up beside his apartment, Philip reached into his pocket with his right hand. It was a long time since he -- or indeed anybody -- had carried cash. He held out his credit card to the driver, who inserted it indolently into a slot. The fare was automatically deducted from his account. As the door of his flat opened for him and a tinny monotonous voice welcomed back "Member Rutherford," Philip wondered what percentage of the fare would end up in the electronic vaults of the Community. As he ascended the stairs he pointedly realised that if true freedom were to be restored for mankind, the system of universal credit would have to be destroyed. After all, what that really meant was universal bondage. Entering his room, Philip knew what he would write. He turned on the light, drew the curtains and made sure the wall-mounted screen was off. Then, sitting at his desk he opened his diary. He wrote the words: I understand why but I don't understand how.
***
THE ABANDONED
by Eoin Dunford (2002)
The young gentleman dismounted from the carriage and ran through the gravel up the steps of the great house. His father dislodging himself from the carriage was clamouring at him to conduct himself as he repeatedly rang the bell in darts of rapid succession. Thoughts of the impending trenches were far from his mind as he desultorily greeted the answering maid, giving her a long smile, and hurried through the hallway to the kitchen and his dog. His mother was there; she was studying Brandy with concern, and only looked up when the surprised cook loudly greeted the young man.
The young man and his mother exchanged affections and then the cook asked the Master if he was excited about finally being able to do his patriotic duty. The Battle of the Somme was past and the War had already degenerated from the high clouds of jingoistic hope to the apprehensive mire of the neighbourhood of all-embracing Death.
The Master replied that he couldn't wait to perform his necessary chores; the cook was studying him admiringly. His mother continued to look at the dog, intently, apart from one brief moment which the boy observed where she looked up and beamed at her son; then the Gentleman of the House entered and nodded gravely to the assembled party. He greeted the cook curtly and attentively turned to his wife, while his son, a hand caressing the dog, looked up expectantly.
"The vet will be here shortly," said his wife. The father looked away briefly, his eye somewhere in the distance above the head of his son and away from the gaze of the cook, who now once again busied herself, returning from her convivial chat with the Lady of the House to her remunerative duties. His wife noticed his eyes and it seemed that there was a longing in that stare, or an absence, that induced perhaps by the recognition of a thought too expansive to be contemplated, or the acknowledgement of an idea that would never be brought to fruition.
The father quickly returned his eyes to the floor, to where his boy sat hunched over the dying animal. The family stayed like that for some minutes, all eyes fixed on the dog, before the young man suddenly rose and stated that he should gather his belongings from the carriage. His father stepped aside to allow him pass and the young gentleman shuffled through the cylinder of the hallway to the main door.
At the back door he heard some hushed words exchanged which had not been uttered during his presence in the room. Thoughts of war and possible death had been relegated to the back of his mind, however, by the distraction that was Brandy's illness. He loved Brandy and he couldn't bear to see him threatened like this. Swiftly fleeting down the front steps he gathered his possessions and gave the driver, who was smoking a cigarette, leave to return the carriage to its proper station. Hurrying up the steps he dumped his bags in the hall before appearing in the kitchen; his father ordered him to place his stuff in his bedroom, which he did before returning to the downstairs company.
His father now excused himself, saying that he had more important things to attend to, and passed into the hallway. The young man heard his heavy steps grow fainter and fainter in the direction of the study. The boy once more took to crouching beside the beast, studying it apprehensively. He heard his mother approach and she placed her hand on his shoulder. Then turning to the cook the lady asked the girl to see to it that she was consulted when the vet had finished, that she would be in the study, and disappeared out the door like her husband. As usual the young man did not hear his mother's feet at all as she passed down the carpeted corridor.
Presently the vet arrived and the boy stood up to allow him to attend to the dog. He knew what was the matter, for he had been coming here for days now. The cook asked him if he would like something to eat, but the young man replied that he was unable to eat anything. Again he took to studying the dog, while the vet worked. After perhaps half an hour the vet, rising slowly, turned gravely to the Master and stated that he had an unpleasant report. At this the young man rushed gasping from the room, out the back door, into the Scottish air.
A few minutes later his father appeared, and told him that it was necessary, and that it was for the best. Then he did something that he had never done before, he took a cigarette from his pocket and gave it to his son.
The young man was alternately blowing smoke up into the air and staring morosely at the ground when they dragged the body from the house. The man, hearing the vet's tedious approach on the gravel, did not look up. As the vet passed by him, he dropped the failing cigarette and returned to the back door, where he heard his father summoning for a servant. The servant appearing quickly with open eyes nodded to the young gentleman -- who did not respond -- before being escorted by the father into the back garden.
Later the young gentleman sat alone in his room, having failed to read, unable to think, and feeling sad and abandoned as the servant, directed by his father, dug a trench outside to put the body in.
***
THE ARTIST SUICIDAL
by Eoin Dunford (2002)
He had dabbled in a lot of things. He had spent time dabbling in wine, in women, and he had spent too long waiting for buses. It was a cold December night when he walked alone through the city streets to the quiet place on the river.
He considered himself an artist. He had been brought up beneath the wings of austerity and moralising and he had early learnt to frugally gather what resources he might, be they mental or material, to turn into didactic entireties, for himself or for others.
Yet this stern and uncompromising moralising did not detract from the imaginativeness of his thought and work; from an early age he had fled to the soft bosom of an alternative world of fantasy, as an impassioned escape from a world he had learnt to fear, and which unfailingly and unflinchingly rejected him.
He walked briskly along the quays, his collar to the light but chilling wind, dimly aware all the time of the streetlights offering their skewed reflections in the dark water. The black river below him ran swiftly through the night, bubbling in its intensity here and there and elsewhere forming white foam, which in its ethereal beauty stood at odds with the violent power of the river, like the ephemeral glint in a sunlit place of a knife in motion. The river ran on, cutting its way through the city and its bowels, burying itself under bridges in places but always re-emerging victorious, and hurtling down steep weirs, seeming to stop stagnant at their bottoms but escaping each time and rushing on relentlessly on its inevitable course.
Tonight the river was at a greater height than its usual self. The whole cityscape was covered in snow. The roofs, the window-ledges, the sparse treetops, the roads and the pavements -- all were covered in a white skin. The hills afar possessed this glittering skin, and he surmised that it should be cold in those fields; but no more so than in the city, he reckoned, for the city lay in a valley which formed a natural funnel, and it seemed to the artist that all the coldness of the flanking hills poured down avalanche-like to intensify the freeze of the streets. A lone magpie ambled in the snow, and all the artist saw were the black bits of his body as they tripped across his path, and a trail of insecure prints, tentatively piercing their way to the other side of the walkway. Here and there isolated outgrowths of snow overhung the flood, and it was only a matter of course before they individually fell away and added their disembodied weight to the coursing torrent below; and if the walker's head had not been firmly set on the ground he would indeed have perceived and perhaps remarked on the passing gently, quietly, unknown to the world, of one of this tribe of growths, and its bearing away in the river's vivacity.
Yet if the river was at a higher level than usual his spirit inside was at a personal low; it seemed to this dreamer that the ashes of consoling imagination left by the fire of his thirty years had finally been blown away, and that all that remained was the ground. He passed street corner after street corner, each street adding its voiceless voice and rude, unhallowed breath to the street on which he walked; and he passed many dainty little bridges, but he did not cross any. He walked on, his mind locked in the brilliance of the snow, oblivious to all but this effulgent carpet, inhabiting a universe composed entirely of snowflakes and where past, future and the present moment all merged into one white sheet.
He was deeply unhappy. What had he ever contributed? What had he left to contribute? His work went unappreciated, and his talk even less. He was an extra. He was all extra in this world. Finally he came to the place and stopped.
It was the quiet place. A quiet place that no one would know about. A quiet end for a quiet man. He thought of one of those snowfalls melting gently with the river, and being absorbed into its clasp. It was the quiet end of a quiet life, and they would find his body in the morning. A quiet place, and he would pass into quietness.
He turned to have one last look behind him.
A man looking out a window saw a black-clad man walk to the river's brink, look around, hesitate, and begin to journey back the way he came.
The lonely artist had turned and walked away, leaving a second set of footprints to mirror the original.
***
THE CLOTH
by Eoin Dunford (2002)
They found him lying face down in the mud. After the great war the whole world had become a great graveyard, desolate, lonely, and barren, and putrefying with the uneaten remnants of stinking flesh. He was lying prone among many other skeletal heroes in a sea of wrecks that had once been a field. They turned him over and they found him clutching a piece of cloth, a shred of something greater that had existed before.
Even after all these years of scavenging the battlefield was still aglint with shiny things which could be salvaged. On finding this piece of rough cloth, however, knowing it to be important, they straightaway mounted their horses and one of them, placing it in the breast of his tunic, led the way back to the village. The village elders were summoned and spent time surmising as to its import. The oldest and wisest of them held it to be something of immense worth. It was believed to be a shred of something that had been called a "flag," which was a symbol of group identity. The piece of cloth was blue, white, and red. The village elders spent time studying it and then moved off in their own directions. Caressing it lovingly between his fingers the chief elder removed it to his house for later inspection. He deemed it to be a symbol of unsurpassable value. "It is greater," he was heard to say, "than all our trinkets collected."
That night at the special convening the chief patriarch remembered the tales from his boyhood. Everyone was gathered, the women in their most stunning apparel and the children with wide eyes aglow in the lamplight. A special table had been placed in the centre of the hall for the wonderful cloth. The patriarch's wife had washed it in the afternoon. As the chief elder spake she sat with her eyes closed and she too tried to remember.
The chief elder stated that before the War every people had a flag. Nervously the children whispered this new word among themselves: flag. He ordered the artists to design a new flag for the use of his village. He told them that in size it was a much greater spectacle than the riven ribbon on show before them. Then he began to recount the history told to him by his father. All in the hall hushed as the history was retold. The elder stated that he knew of three peoples whose flag had been blue, white, and red. The first was the greatest country on earth -- he explained the word country -- and could swallow up all its enemies. It was so great that it was simply called "us," and all "they" was excluded. It had risen from the sea and began its course by massacring its native inhabitants. The patriarch explained that the new inhabitants had come from afar. There was a silence of shocked wonder. "Here is wisdom," said the patriarch: "See how good and evil can be contained even in one country... and," he continued, with suspicious eyes afire with the demand for loyalty, "in the one village." The second nation had been the greatest land in its day and had given birth to the first nation. Many assembled did not understand this. The second nation had started as a barbarous tyranny but progressed to become the abolisher of all slavery and a great defender of civil liberties. "Civil liberty," quoth the elder, "is what we have in this village and what many other villages must lack: the right of every man, within sound reason, to do what he please." "Boys," he said, "grease yourselves to be warriors like your fathers. Some day another tribe will come and try to take away our liberty. Be prepared to fight, under the banner of our people's flag, which will be modelled on this one." The third people with a blue, white and red flag, continued the village elder, had spoken another language to that which the villagers spoke themselves. It was a most graceful and civilised language and indeed the nation that spoke it had been most civilised. The ordinary people of this land had risen up and overthrown its corrupt patriarch and legend dictates, said the grey old man, that in this event lies the origin of the three colours. This country had been an exporter of revolutions, both good and ill, said the wise old man, and had been in conflict with the other two peoples who bore the three colours. But that had been before the black beast. The level and quality of this last nation's thought was unparalleled, said the old man, and this provoked the land of the black beast to jealousy. This land had once been civilised as the latter nation -- but alas! because the people were desperate the black beast rose up and began to tear apart everything it saw. The black beast, void, said the elder, his voice now rising to a roar, in intellect -- subjected its own people and then began to subject and abase other peoples. At this cruelty -- the wise man's voice now died away and he stopped talking. "At this cruelty..." He now rose from his pedestal and descended to the centre of the floor. Taking the cloth in his hand he held it aloft and exclaimed, "Under these colours our three nations joined forces and killed the black beast!" A gasp of awe volleyed around the room and the patriarch gently replaced the piece of flag on its table. "My people," he said, "we do not know whence these colours, what people they represent. But we may be sure of the idea they represent: they represent liberty, progress, justice!"
The leader of the village then dropped to his knees and kissed the sacred colours. A stunned silence again invaded the room; because the people had never seen their leader on the ground before. Returning to his dais the elder declared the meeting finished and gathered the artists to himself. "Make," he told them, "a new building. Make a shrine to house this piece of cloth." The artists bowed and left him.
The village was alive with talk in the following days. There was much hustle of activity as the artists set about constructing the shrine and creating a flag. The riflemen on the village's defences seemed twice as alive and alert as usual. The little children went about with blue, white and red on their clothing; their mothers had dyed these colours and sewn them on. All the people seemed imbued with a new love for their village and for each other. As the village elder went among them he told them that the piece of cloth had been found at the dead man's breast; and he proposed that the red in the cloth stood for the terrible sacrifice necessary for preserving freedom.
A fearful rumour, however, was doing the rounds. It was expressed that long ago another flag had been found, and burnt. This flag was entirely red, and therefore had justly been taken as a bad omen. When questioned on this the village leader told his people that the red flag had started out as a good idea, and that the red part of the original one had been expanded to symbolise increased freedom. However, it was a flag of blood, and its red totality could well be said to stand for the seas of blood that had been wrung from its bosom.
"Never make such a flag," the patriarch commanded. "It is evil and does not stand for liberty."
Finally the new flag was ready. It featured the same three colours as the one found but they were in a different design. A part of the guard was set aside to watch it permanently. "The price of liberty," the chief elder reminded his people, "is eternal vigilance."
***
