Gnawing Through the Void.

There are, throughout the earth, places which are known for their unsettlingly peculiar atmospheres. Many of these are places where we store our dead, or where tragedies happened, sometimes on a breathtaking scale. These places turn up in our neighbourhoods too, not as places for the dead, but of them. These are the looming houses on hills over towns, stairwells of ancient High-Rises, thick woods on the perimeter of the district, warped trees, old fallout shelters and in the case of Glasgow, the Clyde Pedestrian and Cycle Tunnel.

The tunnel expresses one atmosphere as clearly as it is possible to do so. To enter it, especially the first time, is to experience an overwhelming sensation of dread. There are many reasons for that. First as one descends off the street, the dull grey walls on each side seem to ascend, as if to swallow you. The entrance, once gaping is now gated, with black wrought iron. One has to press a button and wait, like ringing a bell for Charon. The gate is automatically unlocked by guards above but the sense of unease is no less as it swings open. Is it there to keep you in or to stop something getting out? Neither option inspires confidence.

You step through into a descending curve, one which never lets up or lets you see more than 20 yards in front for most of your trek. This has the effect of making you endure that “something grim round the corner” moment for the almost the entirety of your journey. Combine all this with the unearthly sounds, haunting thrums and whooshes, rumbling and clanging from decrepit air units and snippets of voices and whistling from people who never pass you, it becomes quite eerie.

The rumour-history of the place does nothing to mitigate the feeling of dread either. There are tales, (aren't there always?) some good ones, too. The Whistler is a classic. A tale of auditory haunting, the footsteps and whistle of someone not there getting closer, and closer until it stops, dead ahead of you, with no one around.

There's the mad monk, who while not actually appearing to be a monk, was certainly mad. The council didn't mind homeless kipping in the tunnel for a night or two but the monk, well, the monk was making some kind of nest. So the story goes. Out of what he was making it, was the subject of much conjecture.

There were the stories of people went in one end but disappeared before coming out the other. Stories of gangs waiting to prey on whomever was foolish to walk through, like sportswear trolls hiding in an urban fairy story.

Lastly there's was the décor. In times of economic scarcity or general apathy, the tunnel was neglected, which meant for the majority of its existence it was desperately in need of redecoration and repair. For decades kids bold enough to step into that seemingly otherworldly place would mark their name in at the depth they where the fear of the place got to them. For many, if not most, that was 5 yards in. The walls were filled with graffiti; Announcements of existence, (Charlie was here) of love, (TINA+RAB4EVER) of territory (YGT!) of admiration (CFC YA BAS!) and jealousy (Sharon is a slut) and all the other trivial moments of history never recorded anywhere else.

Deeper in in there were were bad attempts at poetry amidst the failing lights, several manifestos on damp stained wallks one of which I remember was a fading Marxist polemic. Another was an odd brand of acid philosophising and sheer, multi-dimensional conjecture replete with graphs and diagrams, spirals rotating around axes. There were rages, rants, crude sexual drawings, people's thoughts and bullshit, their jokes and their horrors, all scribbled over each other almost the entire length of the tunnel. Messages spread across days, weeks perhaps, limericks, gloating about football teams, drawings of pentagrams and other symbols; the Cross, the Phallus, and a few cannabis leaves. Names and names and names. The scrawled and deliberate communications of thousands of people, deep under the earth, away from prying eyes. The sheer volume of it at one point was what got me interested in the place.

I was, at the time, twenty three year old and rather pretentious artist, I wanted to capture it all. I saw it as a communal expression, a collective howl down the echoing halls of time. A palimpsest of folk history, of the poor and the addicted, the mad and the criminal. The tunnel was acting, as far as I imagined it at least, as a type of barrow, in the funereal rather than transportation sense. It was like these people had descended beneath earth and river to speak to whatever subterranean ancients existed within its walls. I saw it as a tunnel not just beneath the earth but perhaps between two worlds. This tickled me because I thought I could use it to express infinity. I wished to capture a cross section of it, to somehow reveal it, in the way someone like Edward Hopper had captured the light.

I was not the first to set foot in this territory, not by any means. One such artist, the 20^th Century German expressionist, Hans Tiller certainly seemed on the same wavelength when I discovered his work. Tiller was obsessed with both tunnels and the concept of black holes. His great canvases are stark paintings of subway tunnels, sewers and other subterranean places. His 1913 painting, “What goes on over our heads” depicted several children in a Paris Metro station, looking at the ceiling with worried looks on their eyes. It's a great piece which he intended as a piece of Marxist agit-prop, but it's known more for how it seemed to predict events of World War Two. And I'm talking about him a bit too much, again.

Tiller was the reason I became an artist. Like him I wanted to express the infinite, he wished to present it as some kind of engulfing oppression, “ouroboros seeing itself swallowed, seeing itself from the inside” as he once put it. I, on the other hand, wanted to express the broader aspect of infinity, to try and capture slices of it. Not being much of a painter, the camera became my tool of trade but I am no less an artist for it. My work employs sets, trick photography and image manipulation, lots of it. I'm not happy with much of it, but my work sells well enough and that's enough background. After notifying the Council and asking if they had any objections, I was given the go-ahead.

I started to to record the entire length of the tunnel once a week to see what had changes might occur over a two year period. Indeed the graffiti underwent significant changes, yet some parts, like the ranting manifestos, remained relatively thin of subsequent vandalism.

At the end of the twelve months, something odd happened. My last set of photos, when laid out to see the cross section of one side of the tunnel, showed several odd and large pieces of grafitti which were at great distances to each other but made up the sentence. “Auld Wurm's Coming Back.”

The four words were painted in red, in letters roughly eighteen inches high, but the tunnel is half a mile long so I hadn't really noticed the message until I laid the images out. “Auld Wurm's Coming Back.”

My intention at that point was to create 240 total images, each a side of the tunnel as the grafitti progresses through the two year period. Sadly a young lad's body was found by some poor sod on his way to work, two days after my last set of images. The boy had been stripped strangled and butchered like a pig. The police shut the place up and the council withdrew my permission, understandably. I still had a great set of photographs but for some reason I wasn't entirely satisfied. I did the best I could with the material, added hints of a Celtic underworld and some blurb about the formation of language and Gaelic mysticism that sounded pertinent to the whole thing. It was on display along with some of my other work at my agent's gallery. People seemed to enjoy it, would spend time trying to read some of the graffiti or giggle at all the crude drawings. However almost all of them seemed dismayed by the end. “Auld Wurm's Coming Back?” one of the Critics snorted, “why did you bother with that?”

I didn't understand his question and explained the graffiti was there as depicted but he just shrugged and said it was too obvious. Others criticised it too, and there was a general suggestion that I had added it. Some considered it was in bad taste and I was baffled. It was then explained to me that the suspect in the child murder case, which had ended my photography session, said he'd killed the boy, because “Auld Wurm needed wakened.”

I had been so busy with my work that I had not followed the news and had no idea any of this had happened. I had to plead to a disbelieving and slightly offended audience that I had not added it for effect. Nevertheless it made the papers and the evening news. I was a “sick” artist now. The story died down the following day when the police had to corroborate my story after calls for my arrest. The moment of notoriety was good for my sales. I made nearly 150k profit that week, but still couldn't get any interest in my Clyde Tunnel work.

The following week I received a call from a lawyer who explained he was contacting me on behalf of the police. Apparently they wanted access to my photographs. I decided to agree. The policemen that came were both detectives. Fraser and Sharp, they were. Both were nice blokes, about the same age as me give or take a year. They explained they were looking to see if Peter Cullen, the suspect in the child murder case, had left any other messages in the graffiti. I gave them a copy of the negatives as well as a bunch of print images and they were grateful. When they were leaving, I happened to ask what they thought of his “Auld Wurm” excuse. I was half joking, half making conversation but it was clear they found it no laughing matter.

Officer Fraser looked me right in the eye and said “Aye he's aff his heid, but so wis the last wan rantin' aboot Auld Wurm”

He left it at that.

Several days later the council painted the tunnel white. This was something they done from time to time but they rushed it up after the murder. At that point I considered the project finished and decided to move on to another. I sat for weeks trying to come up with another piece of art I could get into but nothing came to mind. The police sent me back my photographs after they were done with them and I left them in a cupboard, thinking I might go back to them one day.

By chance, I bumped into my cousin Benedict who'd came along to an exhibition I had some works displayed at. He was with Sophie, his girlfriend, neither of us had expected the other to be into such things and after the show I met up with the two of them for drinks. It was one of those nights where the conversation is all over the place and somehow we got talking about electronic voice phenomenon. Benedict scoffed at the concept but Sophie wasn't to certain. She'd never witnessed it herself, she said, but her Grandmother, who came from Catalonia, swore that when she was a little girl she used to go with others to an abandoned church where writing spontaneously appeared on the walls.

That stuck in my mind and so I contacted the council again informing them of my intentions once more. This time, I'd take pictures of the pure white walls being vandalised over time. I knew this might be a long term project, something to do in the background but I liked the idea of it, like Sophie's writing on the walls. I also saw it along with my other piece as a sort of call and response. As if this one would be the dead answering back.

Losing the baleful graffiti did not lessen the grim atmosphere by much. By the time I'd returned, there were already several names scrawled on the walls, usually with another and LVS or + in between both. Romantic first adopters who'd got the jump on all the others. For a while after that it remained mostly the same until suddenly, over a period of six weeks the graffiti exploded. This correlated with the school and college holidays in the summer. There was something lacking with all the gang-tags and hip-hop signatures, it was all too anodyne, too narcissistic. Autumn brought with it the melancholy, an array of cheated girls and betrayed boys berating their former loves in the crudest terms. The Rangers and Celtic fans made sure their teams were represented every few yards. With winter the words grew bitter, angry and as the volume lessened the rants increased. This was the time of year when people took shelter in the tunnel, when the drunks and tramps used it as a base.

My pictures of some of those unfortunate people won an award. As I said the graffiti thing was in the background, a long term project. When spring came so did the penis drawings, stick women with balloon-like tits, cartoon diagrams of disembodied torsos in coitus. So came the symbols again. The Leaf, the Cross, the Penis and the Pentagram. It went on like this, almost cyclically for two and a half years. That is not to say that there was not the occasional strange and abstruse text, scribbled upon the walls but mostly the graffiti seemed seasonal. At first, that was.

After about a year and a half I began noticing some strange things. One of these was that sometimes where graffiti had been was blank. It was as if it had been painted away. At first I thought it might be my memory playing tricks on me, that I'd thought a piece had been where it wasn't but after I checked the photographs I'd taken, there was no doubt that the occasional graffito was simply vanishing. This happened perhaps three or four times that I noticed. It wasn't until other graffiti filled in these gaps that I wondered how often that had happened.

The replacement graffiti was odd to say the least. It was usually black or dark grey. The four replacements were ugly scrawls, long warped single line scribbles that looked like penises or snakes which had spiralled around and around the tip of their tail. There was something ancient and familiar about them, like aboriginal or ancient Celtic art, perhaps even pre-historic. As crude as they were I found myself fascinated by them. I took lots of shots of them, dozens. I even made a few of them into prints to put in my own home. I thought there was something beautiful and mysteriously pagan about them.

One day I was in town and decided to nip into a book-store to check out primitive art. I was not at all surprised to find similar images to the spiralled snake throughout various cultures. One book had a whole section on it. The Spiral Serpent. The text was some new age bollocks, but the pictures were nice. The only thing that struck me worth mentioning was that there was a picture of an old Scottish stone, from about 2000 b.c. The Stone of Seann Cnuimhe, the old worm. On this dirty brown rock was carved an image strikingly similar to the ones in the Clyde Tunnel, the ones in my photograph. There was nothing more about it specifically, just that, according to whomever wrote the book. The Spiral Serpent represented a whole manner of things from fertility to opening portals to other worlds and times.

My earlier intuitions about the underground nature of it having a relation to our primitive cave-dwelling past seemed to be coming true and seemed to be sending me more in line with the Artist Tiller's work. Wormholes and tunnels, the infinite within and without. It took me a while to click that Auld Wurm and Seann Cnuimhe were one and the same thing.

It wasn't until after what at the time seemed like a chance meeting with Detective Fraser that the whole subject was back in my mind. I was at Kelvingrove Art Gallery, helping my ex-girlfriend who was in charge of some exhibition of Portugeuse charcoal artists, which was apparently a thing for a while. He bumped into me while there with his kid, his daughter Katie. There were muttered apologies, looks of vague recognition then he clicked his fingers, pointed at me and said my name. I had not cottoned on and so he then gave me his, and reminded me how I knew him.

We had a brief conversation in which he said how relieved he was that the murder case had been settled. Peter Cullen got 20 years, which still seemed too little to me. Fraser agreed with my sentiment and then got a puzzled look on his face and said something which stuck with me. “Thing that always got me about it was that they never tied it intae the guy who worked on the tunnel that killed his own weans. Wisnae even three years prior. That mad bastard said he was tryin' tae wake the auld wurm too.”

I told him I remembered him mentioning something like that on our previous meeting. He nodded and said. “Aye, turnt oot he wisnae the first either. There wis young boy, a glue sniffer who used the place to get buzzed. Back in '84 he strangled a cyclist in there. Said he wis an offerin' tae the auld wurm. You get the picture aye?”

I was sure he was implying there was some link which I said seemed like the case though I said it was likely just an odd coincidence. He shook his head and said “yer no gettin' me. They aw spent a lot of time in that tunnel, jist like you. I think the place might send some people daft.”

It seemed like a warning but he laughed as he said it as if to lessen the threat. I laughed with him and joked I'd be careful but as I was doing so I began to want to find out more about the Auld Wurm. That proved more difficult than I imagined. There was little information about Seann Cnuimhe other than mention of the stone in any literature that I could find. I began to read a bit more about Celtic gods, Norse gods, Germanic and Roman and Asian gods and descended slowly into another dark and uncanny tunnel, that of mysticism. What had previously influenced the flavour of my art, over time, became my art.

I did not abandon photography, though my images relied more and more on my new learnings and worldview rather than than the real world around me. My work, it must be said ,was popular amongst a certain clientele. One of my exhibitions “Amongst The Hedgerows” involved me taking photographs of the city, usually at night. I took wide shots of dark alleys and lanes, of closes and under the pillars of flyovers, in dimmed cap-parks and empty industrial parks. To these images I had added, blurred or just hinted at in frame, figures of folklore. A goblin hiding behind a car, the reflection of a kelpie on the windows of an office block, creatures of myth melting into real life. I tried to make them as realistic as possible.

The original twelve were purchased by a publisher who wished to use the images for the front of a range of novels. This gave me enough money to work on more complex images. The next series contained a burning wicker ferris wheel at a carnival, three ghostly women standing on the Kingston bridge as cars speed by and my favourite a horde of horrible finfolk dragging pedestrians into the Clyde.

Still I returned week in and out to the tunnel. By this point I had hundreds upon hundreds of images to choose from, yet I was not sure what I wanted to do with them all, not until, by chance, it all became crystal clear. I had been looking through the photos, looking at some of the larger, stranger pieces of scrawl that vandalised the walls of the tunnel. One of them, which seemed at first to just be weird symbols turned out to be english letters, only where the surrounding areas were inked and the letters themselves left out. That it was scribbled under and over made this somewhat hard to detect but after noticing it I knew it was a message though to whom I did not know. “Give your offering.”

When I next went to take photos, I immediately made for that piece of graffiti, only to find the person who'd created it had been busy.

“Open the door.” said one.

“Release King Maggot.” another. There were more, several more but they all imparted similar themes. Here was a sacrifice point to open the door to King Maggot, to, I realised, Auld Wurm. As if to make this even clearer, there was a large black spiral on one of the walls.

I felt a shiver run through me. The amost inimical atmosphere, which had faded after spending so much time in there, returned. The eerie river noises and electrical humming seemed more ominious, more portentious. My imagination was running riot, my mind was on fire and then, then the lights went out.

This was immediate, no fading lights in the distance, just pure blackness. I guessed a power cut, since the generators seemed to have failed, the only noise was the rumbling and banging from the river overhead and the faint echoes of cars and shouting. I think my anxiety got the better of me then, I remember breathing too rapidly, frozen to the spot in utter terror. Stars began to swim in my eyes, then on the walls, then everywhere. I stood, but felt no footing underneath me, amidst an ocean of blackness filled with millions of tiny sparkling lights, they formed galaxies and as they did I felt as if I was rushing away from them, until eventually a tiny white dot vanished and again I was in black, empty space.

It was here I sensed it, something so unspeakably vast that words are incapable of capturing the sheer scale of it. It was blacker than the void it dwelt in, an obsene shadow writhing against the starless background. To call it a worm or maggot does it no justice, it bore only a similar shape. Across this empty space it moved, with rows of bells bigger than stars ringing along it's rippling ghostly form. What thing analagous to flesh or skin it wore, was covered in peculiar moving art, a animated tattoo of memories perhaps, or dreams. Its thick hissing slime glittered colours we have no names for.

To witness this horrendous glory in all its majestic insanity was so vivid, so undeniably real that everything else before and since has felt like the rough sketches of a child. I knew then mankind was trapped in a dream or nightmare state, existing in a fitful sleep, ignorant of the true, mind-crushing enormity that exists in infinity, unable to witness the thing that wishes to gnaw through the void and present its wonders to us. I knew we needed to let it through, knew it could release us, if only we released it.

So that was what I had to do. I realised the others before me, those who'd sent offerings to the Vermin God, were prophets but I would be its messiah. I abandoned any pretence at art or socialising, even eating only when it was necessary. I worked on my plan to bring back Auld Wurm. The task itself was simple. To obtain a sacrifice was the difficult part.

I was no common street thug or half-mad vagrant, I knew my offering would have to be a gesture of value, one with meaning. I would not just grab the opportunity, I would find the right fit. It took a while for me to come to a decision and when I did, I knew, just knew, that it was perfect.

The first thing I had to do was contact Detective Fraser, I had a story to tell. As it happened he was quite keen to meet me. We met for lunch in a pub in the city centre. I did not even get to tell him about my experiences before he started to tell his own story.

Fraser had been busy. After he pulled out a notebook, he began telling me he had looked into what he referred to as The Auld Wurm Murders. There had been several over the decades. The first merely six months after the place was opened by Liz Windsor. These were a latter addition to a string of child murders that had been happening for nearly fifty years beforehand, each of which took place within the older harbour tunnel underneath the now famous Rotundas. All in all seventeen children had been murdered below the river in the name of Auld Wurm. He'd even found a book, written in the mid-seventies about them. What surprised me was that the author, a Thomas Munro, linked these deaths to the old figure of Seann Cnuimhe, which he asserted was a manifestation of the ancient celtic figure Crom Dubh. According to Munro, the name Crom Dubh, the hidden crooked one, did not refer to the ancient High King as previously thought but to an older, stranger entity. He named this Old Maggot, devourer of flesh.

I asked him what he intended to do with this knowledge, given there was no seeming link between any of the murderers or their victims, to which he told me he had no idea. I was relieved by this, I did not want him getting in the way of my latest project. He had no idea that I followed him home that afternoon either.

A week later I was ready, I had everything I needed for my plan, except the sacrifice. I abducted Katie Fraser on her way home from school. I wasn't a savage, I drugged the child so that she would not suffer, nor be terrified about the fate that awaited her. The fear was all mine, I had not completely gone round the bend and knew what I was doing was both awful and yet necessary. I bungled her into the back of the car I had hired and drove from Clarkston to Govan without a coherent thought in my head.

The kid was unconscious all the way there and so I parked not far from the entrance, stuffed her inside a sports-bag which was large enough that I could almost fit in it. I zipped the bag up and lifted her. She was surprisingly heavy, though I believe this is common with dead weights . It was a struggle to get down the ramp towards the entrance but I managed it only to stand in utter shock as I looked down into the tunnel. They had painted it again, painted over all the graffiti with plain white. I panicked, dragged the heavy bag down only to find a camera looking at me and a locked gate with an intercom system.

I pressed the button with a sense of urgency which was, on reflection, clearly a give-away. The gate did not open. I began to lose my temper, to shout at them, threaten them and then, well then the police arrived and in a sick twist of fate, Detective Fraser was with them, which explained my missing teeth and broken ribs, when I was finally arrested. I don't resent him for it, it if had been my daughter I would have done worse.

This, therefore, is my explanation of the events that led up to my charge and conviction. I plead guilty, though I felt no guilt. I have been in prison eight years now and I swear that I have no other information to give you and do not know who the person was that killed the child found in the tunnel last week. I have no knowledge as to why the sky has been black and starless for the last three days. I cannot tell you how it is that people all over the city have been having nightmares about worms nor why so many are spontaneously being driven into homocidal insanity. I have no knowledge of any of this, only a suspicion that unlike myself and the others, the last murderer's sacrifice worked.