'Pandemonium'

Here's a completed story I did that came third in a competition where we had to do something creative about books. It's what I came up with...

Consider me, if you will, as a box. A box where all your ideas and wonders come from. A box which you can fall into and forget everything. A box that is completely you. Now this box, like everything, has a maker and this maker has a story also, just as I do. My story, before I was, for want of a better word, a box, began all those years ago when I was born into this world, a world of questions and very little answers. It’s not a fun thing to talk about yourself in the past tense but it is something I must do for I am no longer living, for my soul moved on and I now reside in something that I had little consideration for when I was living, in the beginning of course. In fact the thing to which I speak occurred to me on the most grief-filled of days when I staggered up the snowy hill, my footprints were marks on my heart and soul, and cried.

            I stood on the hill top, my black hair fraying across my face, my coat billowing behind me, my hands dug in my pockets and my chin deep in my scarf. As my eyes sparkled, bleeding with tears of destruction, of hate and sadness I thought I was lost. In my drunken state, as I looked down at the waters below, I thought all was gone, that I had reached my inevitable end. But as pathetic and idiotic as it sounds, as supreme and wonderful it could to others, I saw something, that glimmer of hope. I turned to see a man standing opposite me, a man dressed in his own black coat, with a hat tilted, casting a shadow across his hazel eyes. The man was elderly, with wrinkles showing his age and secrets and scars informing me of his crazy life.

            With a pair of spectacles hooked across his nose he said the words: “Has it really come to this, Monty?”

            That was me back then – Montgomery Fleming, nearing thirty, recently broken up with his girlfriend, failure filmmaker, failure writer, failure boyfriend, failure everything, ready to reach the end. My life up to this day had been one of little importance, one of questioning and little answers, one of laborious exercises and then the pivotal moment – meeting Lucy. Hopelessly falling in love with her, a woman I would later despise, the woman who revealed me to be pathetic and lonely and stupid, a woman that broke my heart, I wished for it all to be gone, for the pain and resentment to melt like an ice cube under the strong beaming sun.

            “Who – Who are you?” I had half stuttered and snapped to the elderly man.

            “I’m Grady...Grady Irving.”

            I looked at him blankly.

            “You probably haven’t heard of me,” he said, edging towards me.

            I continued to stare at him, oblivious to whom this man was.

            “I am a writer,” he said, smiling, “I am a very famous writer if I’m not blowing my trumpet. But you wouldn’t have heard of me, Mr. Fleming, because you do not read, correct?”

            “I read the newspaper,” I grumbled.

            He shook his head. “You read the news but you don’t read anything else.”

            This man had begun to irk me. “Yeah, could you leave me alone? I’m sort of in the middle of something here.”

            “You’re in the middle of contemplation, in the middle of ending everything, all pain, all worry and, in turn, all hope. By jumping, Mr. Fleming, you are breaking all chance of hope, all chance of happiness.”

            “Who are you?” I barked. “How do you know me and what...what ARE YOU ON ABOUT?”

            “I am on about the only thing you are blind to, Mr. Fleming. You witnessed many things, you have experienced many things and yet you are blind to the true escape that is there to offer. You have tried drugs, alcohol, anything but you miss the easiest form, you miss the thing that people talk about, that children love, that you used to love.”

            “W-What?”

            Grady smirked. “You are now filled with questions and I must leave you. You have some thinking to do.”

            “No, wait I -”

            I stopped, for a minute I called after him he was gone, vanished, just like that. I turned back to the edge and looked down at the crashing waves. I looked back up and frowned. What had he been on about? Who was he? Nevertheless I turned, giving the cliff one last look and proceeded back into my life.

            I remember it to be three days later when I walked into a library, a library I had never known was there let alone been in and picked up a book by one Grady Irving. The book was called Pandemonium and as I turned the pages, as I tore my fingers and stayed up all night I devoured the book in one great sitting on that snowy night in the bleak city. With the never-ending lights blazing in on me, in my small, dingy flat, a flat Lucy had never liked, I completely forgot everything. There was no Lucy, there was no dingy flat, there was no failed job, no failed everything, everything was gone, everything was now my own.

            I looked up from the book, my head rummaging with ideas, my fingers ready to zap and I placed it down and looked out of the window. I can’t explain, dear friends, what I felt. I wanted to scream, I wanted to sigh, I wanted to do everything and yet was not able to. The next day I returned to the library and by the end of the week read every single Grady Irving book that was in print. The following week I moved onto Dickens, then King, then Hemingway, then Yates, then Tolkien, then Bronte. I read everything, everything I was given and simply because I could, because the books were there at my fingertips because all the knowledge, all the joy that is needed was there.

            Now I cannot blind you, possess you even into believing that my problems were solved simply by reading of Oliver or Frodo or Carrie, no, I cannot make you believe that. But what I can make you believe, what I can tell you, is that it helped, is that when I finished those novels, those works of genius I managed to understand what I had to do. And so my life changed. Now I am not going to go in the ins and outs of my up and down life, and it was up and down, just because I read a book doesn’t mean everything was hunky dory, oh no, far from it. But each time I argued with my wife, my third and last love, I would reside to my office and read, fall into the words and imagination of others.

            When I found out that my son had been expelled I managed to settle the problem and then forget by use of a book. The legal drug. Reading the book did not blind me of the problems I had to face, oh no, it cleared my mind, it emptied all of the rubbish that lay attacked to my brains, my tissue, my heart, and helped me become who I am today. It helped me become Montgomery Fleming, loving husband, caring father and helpful filmmaker. Sure I made a few films, none of them successful, none of them were the next Godfather or Jaws but they were quirky in their own respect.

            And, as nature does, I became ill, my body succumb to cancer and I died with the weeping family around me in my bed with nothing but the last petals of kisses coming from my beautiful wife’s mouth. The soft kisses led me into death, led me into the long tunnel of white light, of wind, of happiness, of the end. I walked it, like many before me, and as I died, as I saw the light I expected it to be that. That final explosion of light would lead me into oblivion. But no. No, after the light I opened my eyes and was reborn.

            I was something else.

            An animal? No. A statue? No. I was something nobody would expect me to be. I had a voice, a voice that people listened to and got happiness and enjoyment out of. I was something that touched people, that made them who they were. And now, as I say this to you, I shall explain what exactly I am, what Montgomery Fleming finally became. What me, that boy that wanted to end it all, that miserable man, became in his later life.

            As the people walk past me, as they make quick glances and make their selection I rest on the shelf, with all the others like me, waiting to be heard. Waiting for that correct person to choose me, out of all the others, take me somewhere and open me up. On this day a small girl, a girl I would later understand to be Amelia, used her tip-toes to grip me and walk with me over to the desk. I looked up at her, at her bright blue eyes, at her sweeping hair, at her innocent face and spoke my words and she read them.

            For she, like all of us in the end, was reading.