He has risen up through the barley. As usual, he’s sitting opposite me in the old leather armchair which isn’t really used very much now, except by him. He seems uninterested. His dark eyes are worlds away but occasionally his gaze drifts towards me.

“Who are you?” I say and he answers by extending, very slightly, a barely noticeable smile and lifting his head in the smallest of movements. I could’ve missed it completely but that would be my problem, not his. He’s always this way.

Dressed from head to toe in bright green, in any other situation he would look absolutely ridiculous. A fedora with long feathers tucked into the band, a tunic with gold buttons, tights and boots. His face has an imperious expression but somehow there is humour there too. He’s a joker.

The room smells of something that he’s bought up with him. When I’m not sure if he really has paid a visit, I’ll hold my dressing gown up to my nose the next morning and there’s always a reminder.   

I’m a child and in bed; sat-up and watching strange jugglers performing. There are many emerging from the wallpaper which has changed from off-white to a dull green colour. The jugglers have the same skin colouring as the wallpaper and their costumes are a marginally brighter tone: suits, shirts, bow ties, dress shoes and bowler hats. They have deep black eyes though and enormous smiles. There are at least twenty of them juggling enormous green balls.

My entertainers, apparently at random, take turns in coming centre stage, so to speak. One of them will glide towards me until occupying a space at the end of the bed, stay there for a few seconds and then retreat into the background while another comes forward. Sometimes the retreat takes them all the way into the wallpaper and back to wherever they’ve come from. The whole time, there’s a tune playing, very loud, on what sounds like a fairground organ. I recognise it as Mack the Knife but wouldn’t have known this as a child.

Eventually, there’s just one of them left. He suddenly stops juggling and the giant green balls disappear into thin air. His black eyes find mine while the clown smile contracts into a bitter smirk.  

Momentarily, my consciousness slips back into the living room and now the Little Green Huntsman is looking at me with that quarter-smile. “Is that all for tonight then?” I ask with as much gravitas as I can muster. He says nothing.

It feels like I’ve missed something. The last juggler is fading away into the wallpaper now; show’s over. All of the green evaporates and my childhood room looks normal again, although it doesn’t smell normal. There’s a pungency in the air. I’m drenched in a reeking sweat and I can taste sourness on my inflamed tongue. 

I look over at The Little Green Huntsman and he’s laughing quietly to himself. He bows his head very slightly towards me as if thanking me for the childhood reminiscence that he’s just conjured; for making a small contribution to this evening’s amusement.  

#

I’m always in my pyjamas and dressing gown, watching a film and several whiskey-sodas along when I invite him to pay a visit. He has the power to curate my consciousness. To fill it with high-resolution memories but also with stories, poems, music or visions. I think he wants me to look into myself, into my history and my future and laugh a little bit; not take any of it too seriously. Anyway, his quarter-smile never fades.

Sometimes he repositions himself. Now he’s lying on the carpet in front of the gas fire, stretched out as though confined in a coffin and with his head pointing in my direction. Hands pressed together in prayer at the centre of his chest, fingers towards the heavens, features mimicking the earnest gaze of the sanctified.

His eyes roll up towards me and he starts to mumble. It’s barely audible but l follow everything and feel the deeply mocking lilt of his prayer in my heart; in every organ of my body.

Other times he’ll recite Finnegan’s Wake and it’s a different experience altogether. An enlightenment. I can never understand a word of it when I read it by myself but when a phrase, a paragraph or even several pages emerge from his mouth, the poetry of it stretches my melancholic features into a smile and makes me laugh out loud. Sometimes, I can’t stop laughing for an hour.    

#

He’s back again and with a serious demeanour about him. That smile never goes away but everything else about him seems darker. His eyes settle on me, dull but merciless.   

The jugglers have reappeared and this time I don’t miss any of the performance. After a while, we’re down to the last one and he makes his way towards me from the end of the bed, reducing in size as he advances. By the time he gets to me, he has the dimensions of a large doll and is able to stand on the bed in front of me so that we’re face to face.

            His black eyes give way to a new colouring of dark brown and they are full of mirth. The mouth opens and a musky perfume fills the air. It stays wide open like the entrance to a railway tunnel and then words flow out via a soft and gentle brogue. It’s my mother’s voice: “Why don’t you pretend to be deaf if you don’t want to talk to them?” Sweet laughter from deep in the juggler’s throat and then the mouth closes and he reverses towards the wall, the green already disappearing.

            The next time my teachers, or the ones that feed me, speak, I pretend that I can’t hear a word of what they’re saying. I stare into space, without ever looking at them. I don’t do it all the time, just when it suits me. After a few weeks, my feeders take me into town for a hearing test at one of the big hospitals. I pass with flying colours.

            Still, I keep it up but now they know I’m not deaf so they just shout at me and pull me around until I respond in some way.

            I can hear them talking. I’m under the covers and they are directly below me in the living room. “He don’t need to see no fucking psychiatrist!” says the male one.

The Little Green Huntsman looks me over with a questioning expression. His eyebrows remain raised as he slowly melts into the black leather of the armchair. I can never really predict what he’ll do but this is one of his tricks: to call up events from the past, hallucinations and day to day experiences, that fill me with a sickening blackness.

#

Sometimes he’ll conjure a vision of something that may have happened or will happen or that can never happen. These insights are quite different from the memories that he selects from the archive. They tend to be hazier. They feel more speculative. Sometimes they are blended with historical fact.

I’m standing on a chair in the kitchen so that I can reach a box of biscuits on a high shelf in the larder. The one we call Nannie is in the living room. The feeders have gone out to dinner and she’s babysitting. She appears in the kitchen doorway, her creamy white face pointing towards me. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asks with all the warmth of a mortuary.

“I’m just getting some biscuits down for us.” I explain.

“You’re a liar!” she shouts. “Get down from there!”

We sit in the living room for the rest of the evening in an atmosphere of pure hatred.  

The Little Green Huntsman looks at me with a joyous expression. I think he has something in reserve for me, a little confection.

            This time, their green jugglers’ balls have an image of Nannie’s face painted on one side. The last of them stands in front of me again. He mouths a silent “Oops” and a ball falls onto the eiderdown. Soft as it is, Nannie’s cheeks bruise-up immediately and her eyes fill to the brim with a viscous gore.

The juggler opens his mouth and as his enormous tongue pokes out, I can see a tiny Nannie on the end of it: at home in her kitchen and looking up into her own larder at a distant tin of custard. She wanders off into the juggler’s mouth and returns a short while later with a small set of steps.  

She mounts the steps nervously, taking forever to get up the first three while holding on to the middle shelf in the larder with both hands. From this position, she reaches up with one hand towards the custard while holding the middle shelf with the other hand. As she reaches up, more of her, not insubstantial, weight bears down onto the middle shelf. Rather predictably, it gives way and she falls down, her head crashing into an old saucepan full of onions on the floor of the larder. I hear my mother’s seductive laughter.

I have no memory of this accident in Nannie’s kitchen ever happening.   

  #

            What’s his purpose in all of this? Sometimes, I get the sense that he’s showing me possibilities. That he can actually make things happen, even in the past. I already know that he’s a masterful conjurer of memories, dreams and visions. That he can lure me into a semi-hallucinogenic state. But are these the limits of his powers or does he have the ability to influence events in the world?

What does he want from me? I often suspect that a Faustian pact, or similar arrangement, will be on offer at some point. But I think it’ll be up to me to ask the question: “Can you make these things happen and, if so, what do you want from me in return?” I’m not sure that I have the energy for such an adventure.

I don’t like it when, occasionally, he moves from the chair to the ceiling. Then he’s like a spider, looking down into the room. I prefer him in his usual spot: in the old chair where he certainly does have a Mephistophelean charm about him. 

We are both conjurers and there is a ritual in the way that I conjure him. I always hold the whiskey glass up as though making a toast, look into it and whisper to myself: “He rises up through the barley.” So, I don’t have to see him or experience his interventions unless I want to. His presence is by invitation only.

Sean Flood

Sean Flood is a professional engineer and, whenever possible, a writer of stories. He mainly writes short stories and sketches and is currently working on a set of these. Sean lives in South London.

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