Ring Bang Skoosh

So what you do is get a 60a bus over to Duke Street from the City Centre. Keep going right along Duke Street until you get past the remaining houses and the industrial park. The bus will eventually take a second right at a large roundabout. You'll not be able to miss it. It's beside another industrial park. You'll want to get off the bus at the next stop and then wait for the 257A. They're not common, one every half an hour (if you're lucky) and only between 8 A.M. and 5.30 P.M. If you've missed it and have to wait you could do worse than Babs Café across the road. Go get something delicious to eat. Don't get me wrong her cuisine is part of the cultural dietary pandemic that's reduced life expectancy in the areas of the east end to that of cavemen, but her deep fried pizza slice on a roll with chips is well worth the fucking risk.

Anyway, once you're on the 257A you'll head south east along an empty area for about three quarters of a mile. The bus will then take a sharp left out of that onto Howard Road, a narrow street bordered by a long line of tenement houses with an equally long line of abandoned shops underneath. As far as I know those shops have always been shut down. At the end of this street the bus will come out on top of a hill overlooking another. This is an area known Murcroft. On that other hill you'll see another large spiral of dirty tenements and a small modern looking church. That's Grimry.

Get off the bus at the next stop. That's close enough. You do not want to go to Grimry. Trust me, it is, as its name implies, not a pleasant place. No one wants to go to Grimry. Christ, the people who live there tend get the hell out as quickly as they can. No one even wants to stay in Grimry.

So when you stand looking across the hill at the place it might think that it doesn't look that bad. In fact when you ask people what's so bad about it they usually couldn't tell you or just give you vague, half remembered rumours about some horrible crime they might have been told about as kids.

That could be true, Grimry is not immune to Glasgow's violent nature but it's not an exceptionally dodgy area. You don't hear about pitched battles with cops or firebombed houses or pubs. Butchered thugs don't turn up in the back of abandoned cars in the local Supermarket car park. The place is quite unremarkable in that respect. From a distance it looks like any other region of Glasgow and in many ways it would be, if it was not for one thing. One tiny bit of cancer that spread and metastasised throughout the larger city long ago.

That tumorous growth is 29 Keller Row. A single tenement block that lies at the southern edge of Grimry and stands alone on an empty street, like a solitary red brick fang. The other blocks either collapsed or were burned down in the last century and a half.

If you were daft and did not heed my earlier advice you could easily go down the concrete stairs that scar the hill at Murcroft and navigate your way into Grimry. If you were the kind of person that has to see for themselves, you might even negotiate your way through the manky kids and the stray dogs and arrive at Keller Row. The first thing you would notice was that the place is particularly empty. There are no cars parked on that street, no birds chirping in the wires. You might also notice, if you were paying close attention, that though about half the paving stones are cracked and broken, no grass or weeds spring up in the fissures. Nature seems unwilling to reclaim that abandoned place.

If you go that far you might also feel a sense of trepidation looking down that long empty street. It looks out of place, almost like a predator disguised as a street. If you were braver than most you may even talk a walk down it. Perhaps you want a closer look at the ugly mausoleum that is Number 29. Close up it becomes apparent that most of the windows have been boarded up with metal. One on the top floor has a broken frame containing no glass nor splinters of wood, just a solid blackness. Only the top right floor has windows that remain in tact. Behind the filthy glass you would see curtains, once red but now almost indeterminate in colour.

If you are lucky, or unlucky, you may see those curtains move. You may even come to the conclusion that the house remains occupied. You might be curious as to just who the fuck would live in such a midden.

Only someone who was a bit mental might choose to step up the stairs into that close. You definitely should not but if you do, you will know instantly that you made a bad choice. Step across the threshold and you'll feel the sharp chill that seeps into your bones and brain. You can't help being affected. There's imagined whispers that echo from behind the metal barricades in front of those empty and gutted remains of homes. Hissing and threats leak out from behind the doors. You may hear the weird toneless piping and the chanting of worship in alien tongues. You may even wonder if those metal doors were there to prevent squatters from getting in, or from something getting out.

That would be a good question.

By this point, if you have not turned and ran, you might as well consider yourself as having gone totally mad. No sane human would think twice about turning and running from the close after enduring such initial dread. Anyone with half a brain would be out of there, not thinking about climbing up those stairs. Its dark up there, it stinks like a mortuary and creepy as fuck. By the first landing the blackness looks tangible. Why would anyone choose to go further? I mean, come on.

I don't know, perhaps you're one of those adventurous types that chucks themselves out of planes and can convince yourself that increasing cold and thickening darkness is not in and of itself dangerous. You might decided to press on. Ignoring the awful cramping dread that balloons and crunches in your stomach, fighting against the animal instinct to run, you might slowly, cautiously climb upwards to the second floor.

As you do, you will reach a moment of infinite dark, of a cold so sharp and piercing and total that you will feel as if you have gone into death. There will be an external stuttering and an internal fluttering and then a shift occurs and once more you will begin to see, and feel. You will think you've gone through something profound and uncanny. Perhaps you have.

Perhaps also, if you're lucky, you will not see the giant flabby child-thing on the ground crying blood from eyeless sockets. If you are not that lucky, beware. Do not focus on its mouth, it is a meaty whirl of mandibles and suckers and sharp teeth. Also don't let it grab you. That is important if you do not wish to have your memories flayed from you and devoured by the vicious, mindless maggot-spawn it sweats excitedly through bubbling boil-like pores.

If you manage through that remember, you still have a choice, you don't need to keep going, you could go back down stairs. No one will think any worse of you. What do you think you are going to get at the end of such an endeavour, given the weird shit you've endured so far? What are you trying to prove? It might be you have a moment of clarity, if so, use it, go down the stairs, go home, forget about all of this.

If you don't, if you are driven, compelled beyond reason to keep going to the second floor then be warned. The second set of stairs leading up from the landing are narrow and steep and as you ascend they give way to mud and bone and flesh which remains alive somehow, and squeals in agony. This screaming abattoir mountain must be climbed. There are heads with mouths that bite and arms that still grab and scratch. There is an ecosystem of skittering black bugs with bright sharp stings and poisonous fangs within the stinking hill of filthy cancerous meat. It is a great hive of their making and they will be only to happy to add you to it. Remember, they swarm.

If somehow you survive that and make it to the top you will see a great vast plateau stretch out front of you. You will need to walk for miles and miles. Eventually you will make it to the centre of this charnal plane and will spot a great marble doorway. It is an endless black, and highly polished, as reflective as a mirror. You must push it open and proceed, if such a thing is still available to you.

From there you will walk through a dimension of non-linear geometry and non-causal event. You will hear your words before you speak them, feel the pain of stumbles yet to come as you try to traverse stairs that even Escher could not have imagined. Great vast pillars will slide and collide in all directions in front and behind. You will navigate through a forest of thrumming black pylons that seem to bend to the will of other physical laws. You will feel like an insect in some unknowable machine, like some experimental creature on a set of infinitely bewildering stairs being observed by unseen numinous horrors.

Keep it up and one day you may finally unfold onto the second floor of Number 29 Keller Row. An empty corridor on a building that should have been long condemned. Two iron doors and a set of stairs going up and the set behind going down, just as it should be. There are no noises or chattering from those houses, no thickening blinding darkness, even the air will feel as it should

If it comforts you to consider it what came before a fleeting psychotic episode, that is probably for the best. The possibility your experience was real might further unsettle your flimsy grasp on reality.

Just go up the stairs, it's why you took the journey in the first place, right?

On the second landing before the top floor there is writing all over the ceiling floor and walls. It looks as if written with a black felt pen. and if you can manage to make it out you will see it is a list of names, thousands and thousands of names, each one punctuated by a tiny iron nail hammered into it. The walls and floor bristle with them. You may wish to see if your own name is there but it won't be and it'll take you days to check.

Just go up the stairs.

And finally you'll be on the top floor of number 29 Keller Row. The poisonous heart of Glasgow's psychic corruption.

Here you will see, to the left, the void. Gaze not into that abyss. Instead turn your eyes towards the right and focus on the brown painted frame and the black door covered with dust. Upon it is a name plaque but the letters are not in any alphabet you've ever seen. You may even suspect those glyphs are of ancient inhuman languages. You might finally take stock, finally decide you've been a fool and run down the stairs and out back into the light and fresh air.

You might but then again you might not. You've came all this way, why would you not find out what is behind it all? You could decide to knock on that door. As from behind it you hear a heavy thumping, coughing noise followed by a wet and hungry growling, you might choose to steel yourself, to witness the unearthly horror that is mere inches away. You might wait until the door handle turns, you might even see what terror answers.

If you do, tell me would you? Because I shat it and ran before it opened the door.