Other even more deranged stories in the book ’Ghost Queen’
Spider to Fortune
A long short story involving drinking, fucking, loyalty, stupidity, hermeneutics, ‘The Exorcist’, and god knows what else.
Some days before leaving on my journey, I searched for my friend Brad on the internet. He had no idea I planned on visiting him. I wanted to be sure I had his correct address.
And I eventually found a photograph of him on a school website, where he was apparently still teaching. The quality of the scan was so bad that it was impossible to make out his features — or even the features of any of the other six teachers standing with him. Brad was just a dark-haired shape, without a definite face. You could just about tell that some of the figures were male, and some female. Had Brad’s surname — Kramer — not been on the screen, I would have had no idea that it was him. There was some fascination for me in this — my happening across this blurred photograph of these faceless creatures; almost amounting to a ghostly portrait of the undead — as it accurately symbolised the marginal figure he had become for me. It made me think also of psychic photography, where seemingly innocent information can lend itself, with hindsight, to a sinister interpretation.
