Mysterious Stranger

He was naked, all pretence gone now and no need for the adornments of mortals. As he walked towards where we lay, he lifted his hand and dragging his fingernails along the wall he smiled and whispered, ‘I’m a man of wealth and taste,’ and then he burst out laughing which curiously, was the first time I’d witnessed such a thing – usually he was in a rage, flailing out at anyone within reach, usually the Scottish press.

‘So it was all for nothing,’ he continued. ‘Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve achieved, all that effort and what did it gain you? We will lift the league trophy this season and the next and all the rest after that because you’ll be in here and your club will be confined to the history books which we will be writing and years from now people will wonder how such an insidious club could have been allowed to exist for so long and up and down Byres Road, middle class liberals will shake my hand and thank me for my part in it and when they do, little will they know just whose hand they are shaking.’ He smiled and for the first time I noticed fangs. ‘They will quite literally, have sympathy for the devil and isn’t that just the biggest joke of them all? Isn’t that just a peach?’

I looked to my side at Donald Findlay and saw the glistening trace of a single tear that had run down the side of his face, disappearing into his whiskers. I turned and looked towards Souness and his furrowed brow, probably thinking there was still some hope, some way out of this but it was hopeless, Lawwell was right. Rangers had to keep winning year on year to prevent the powers of darkness from achieving their aims and I, Graham Spiers had campaigned to stop them, I had actually strived to keep the forces of good from preventing hell on earth. I thought about this and cursed the day I’d ever shared a flat with Matt McGlone and allowed him to turn me from a semi-talented journalist with potential into a raving Rangers hating lunatic and as I cursed inwardly, Lawwell walked towards the corner of the dungeon where there sat an old gramophone player, dusty and anachronistic as all of the many grotesques I’d met over the last three years. As Lawwell placed the needle on a record and the plaintive airs of the Albinoni Adagio swept through the room, I thought of them all: Cosgrove in his bat suit, the Traynor munching on bones, tragic Purcell, port sodden Tom Devine and his retinue of sluts, King Bastard, proud Richard Gough aboard the Nautilus, poor old Stuart McCall, the Ally McCoist robot army, wily old Walter Smith in his underwater lair, Phil McGillivan and mad Joe O’Rourke hiding in their cannibal cave, Wendy Alexander covered in dust and cobwebs at Satis House, and many more. I thought of them all and wondered how could I have encountered such madness in three short years and as I thought it, Lawwell placed one burning hand on my forehead as if he’d just read my thoughts and he sighed.

‘In a little while,’ he said. ‘You will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever - for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!’

‘Strange that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.’

‘Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him…’

‘You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.’

‘It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!’

The music ended, the record player needle jumping, refusing to leave the vinyl, the static crackling from the speaker. I understood what Lawwell had said and closed my eyes, a smile on my own face now. I opened my eyes one last time and Findlay, Souness and Albertz were turned towards me; a silent Greek chorus of accusing faces. Lawwell stood in front of me and whispered, ‘It was all you, Spiers. It was always all you,’ and as he smiled for the last time I noticed something climb onto his shoulder, something un-noticed by the devil himself; it was a cricket.

The End.