The Flesh Remembers

When hack reporter Dexter Lomax investigates a series of mysterious craters forming across Northeast England, he fully expects to turn somebody's well-planned hoax into international news for the weak-minded. What he doesn't expect is for suicidal beggars to thrust weirdly compelling video tapes into his hands, to be targeted by two opposing groups with deadly agendas, or to be in the centre of a true life drama that begins with the discovery of dozens of skinned corpses on the Town Moor. Drawn on by his lethal curiosity, Dex is forced to journey further than even he had imagined possible, in pursuit of a story he might never dare write...

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Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the Northeast of England, is a hard, cold city. I've always thought it a brutally honest place. If there are tough truths to swallow, I can't imagine anywhere on earth better suited to administer them. My name, for those of you unfamiliar with my work, is Dexter Lomax. I'm typing this from my apartment in New York, the city of my birth, and there's a whole damn ocean between Newcastle and here. That about suits me fine, even if I don't know what difference the distance is going to make if I'm due some payback. Distance is what it all comes down to, I guess. I've come to appreciate that quarter of a world might as well be nothing at all. I'm writing this down, though I know damn well I don't have the stones to publish it. I should consider it my duty as a reporter. To hell with the best interests of the public, I should be thinking of what the public is best interested in. Not always the same thing, as I'm sure you'll appreciate. Who am I kidding? If I publish the story, it's probably going to vanish amidst the other freaks and sensations concocted by my fellow hacks on The International Inquisitor. Yeah, The International Inquisitor. You still reading? I've worked for The Inquisitor for going on twelve years now. I've reported on Elvis sightings, alien abductions, alien sightings, Elvis being abducted by aliens, and aliens being abducted by Elvis. Abominable Snowmen, Kraken, Bigfoot, werewolves, Satanists, vampires, witch covens, sinister plots by the CIA to overthrow the world order, Stephen King assassinating Lennon, celebrity scandals of the most spurious kind the breathless list goes on. For the most part, I justify it by thinking of the paper as harmless entertainment. So what if an old lady in Connecticut killed herself when The Inquisitor reported that an Ice Age was just weeks away, or a guy in China suffocated in an airtight bunker when we reported on the CIA's attempts to introduce sterility inducing chemicals into the air of his country? Hey, I just report it. Folks don't have to go around believing it all over the place. Since the lawsuit of 98 we even have a legal notice at the bottom of the front page stating that the contents are not necessarily true. It's only because we do deign to include the occasional tidbit of actual fact that we avoided having to say that none of the contents were true. I admit, we had to dig through piles of back issues to find those pertinent snippets of fact, but the judge eventually had to concede the point. Now our editors go out of their way to include at least one undeniably true story in the back pages of each issue. Contrary to what most of you are going to want to believe though, we do actually research our stories. I've traveled a good part of this planet running down witnesses and trying to find evidence to back up the wildest of statements. I like to think that, rather than twisting the facts, we report what scant facts exist and then speculate on them in the most interesting way possible. Not this time though. What I'm going to record here is pure, undiluted truth. I was there. I go back there every time I let myself sleep. Jesus, I even have those damn tapes if I ever need to refresh my memory. Wonderful thing, technology. I can't even pretend I've gone mad, or wrap the memories in avoidance and denial. Whenever I try, the tapes are sitting there inviting me to put them in the VCR. I wish I could throw them away. What they contain though is so remarkable that I can't bear to see them destroyed. I suppose I'm writing all this down to get everything clear in my head. When it's clear, when I can talk sanely about what I saw and what it means, I'm going to have to make some tough decisions about whether I should ever breathe a word of it to another soul. I wish I was just mad. There isn't a treatment they can give you for the truth. Better get down to it then. Time's passing.

About the Author

Richard Wright is a writer of horror and other dark fictions, living in Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of the novel Cuckoo, numerous short stories published in anthologies and magazines, and two plays that toured Scotland in 2001 and 2002.You are encouraged to poke around in his life and fictions, and see what you find there.

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