"Discourses on the Seven Headed Monkey" by Tim Lieder (Fiction Extra)

The sixth head drooled as if ready to die but smirked eager for vibrant door slamming.

Every Wednesday evening at a certain Baker Street residence, Nigel Thorne, a man of honorable lineage and unfortunate facial hair presented himself to the splendid domicile of the brilliantly eccentric Lord Ridgely, explorer, billiards enthusiast and patron of three ballet companies, who just happened to be 45^th in line for the throne. The civilians who witnessed Nigel's ritual visit would speak of duels and passionate regret. Some even mentioned the lovely doomed Lady Katherine Happerlyn by name - who would dress as a man and found herself at the receiving end of one of Nigel's youthfully drunk fists. According to the most enthusiastic of gossips, a duel had taken Lady Katherine's life and Young Nigel Thorne had been ostracized from society with the typical shunning and non-invitations.

It may prove anti-climatic to learn that the friendship between the infamous Nigel Thorne and the honorable Lord Ridgely sprang from a simple longing for days when the empire was truly blessed with inexpensive spices and imported giraffes. The gentlemen bonded in faith over a time of Great Men when chartism, radicalism, reform bills, tithe bills, and infinite discrepancy for acid jargon remained safely far away in the House of Commons, and never ventured within the view of a carriage ride to the House of Lords. They spoke daringly of a blessed decade when the colonial office was safe from blind obstructions, fatal indolences, pedantry, imbecility, jungle thinking, humanism and vile status seekers. The two men congregated in Lord Ridgely's richly furnished apartment to address times long past when life was extravagant and humanity did not worship the survival of the fittest jackanape.

Inevitably, their communication spun and twisted to the discourse of the seven-headed monkey.

Lord Ridgely encountered the seven-headed monkey in Rhodesia on his 18^th birthday. Every head was uglier than poverty. The encounter greeted Lord Ridgely long before Rhodesia received the name and became utterly ravished by imperial inevitability. The land and the monkey represented an exquisitely haunting revelation.

According to Lord Ridgely, the wretched creature had inhabited the sacred spring of the Elysium Jungle. The power of speech, the authority of persuasion and the monkey's magical paw rendered its kingly position involute. Lord Ridgely once spent eight days explicating the seven-headed monkey without sleep or food. Daily, he described a single head in detail and then on the eighth day, he took to praising the monkey as a calculative symphony of autocratic dissipation. Upon completion of the discourse, he honored the quintessential seventh head with loving poesy, before succumbing to the long-anticipated nap that offered his guests a sweet departure.

Without discovery, Nigel had invested in American companies and enjoyed witnessing his money grow a hundredfold. Whereas the peers of his class were suffering their family fortunes to disappear in the diamond mines of the Congo and the Indian troubles, Nigel was handing pound notes to a banker possessed of moral turpitude that allowed him to secure a fortuitous bounty in the stormy petrels of the former colonies. Sir Nigel Thorne, who had traced his lineage through malcontents and unfortunate lords–many of whom found their heads on spikes–was suitably ashamed of his inability to maintain his family's tragic inheritance. Nigel Thorne had been expected to wear his family shame with a dissolute smile and self-incriminating tales of forlorn poverty. Had fairness directed the world, Squire Thorne would have been an entertaining failure in the gentlemen's club alongside fading nobility who spent their days chattering about Impressionists and gilded lilies and the unfortunate working conditions of the common man. At the very least, he should have ventured an opinion about the German royal family.

Instead, Sir Nigel Thorne quietly counted his money and waxed poetic when confounded with profane vanities and vain profanities. The tales of Lady Katherine were such barnstormers that eventually her unfortunate death was placed at the feet of Nigel to explain his anti-social reverence for the fantasies of a crystal life. In truth, the fleeting life of Lady Katherine Happerlyn, adventurer and brawler, had originated in a penny dreadful collection, the last one distributed three years after Nigel's birth. The series had been such an infamous pandemic that rumors of the unfortunate Lady Katherine, Kate to her friends, of which there were many, delighted and obsessed multitudes in the gathering society. The few who knew her literary origins forgot the books in the recollection and repetition. Nigel's attempt to dissuade the worthy gentlemen and privileged wives from her praises yielded the consequence of Nigel entering the fiction in the form of a duel where he lived in shame. All in all, Nigel Thorne did not hate his infamy as the man who killed Lady Kate, even if her last novel had made it distinctly clear that she was living in the Moors of Scotland, happily retired after a nasty fight with the king of the vampires.

[Free Subscribers who want to read further can either buy Spectrum: An Autistic Horror Anthology or subscribe below.]