The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller

A novella.

You remember Alfred Tesseller — the quiet one who arrived, all those years ago, in our decrepit country classroom. He had that accent that was so strange and yet so enchanting. We thought his family were ancient gypsies and the tales we told about him rivalled any myth performed around immortal fires. You must remember him!

Surely you remember the dark breads, strange meats and exotic fruits he would bring with him in his battered metal lunchbox, and how, once, and only once, he shared the small squares of cake — of spicy syrup, or honey, and ground nuts — his mother would make him. You recall how we gathered around him that day, like we were old friends, and how he laughed, and we did too (although we laughed like dogs at the hiding we would deliver him that evening in the back lane).

Ah, good, you do remember. I thought a little taste of blood would bring it all back!

I come to tell you he is dead now. Alfred Tesseller is dead.

It’s unnerving, I know, when you hear of those you knew as a child — however distantly, and however cruelly — now cold and packaged for the ground, the crypt, or the flames.

But Alfred Tesseller is not content with the ease of death. He has many places left to visit, and many decades to dismantle. I do not wish to unnerve you, merely to pass on the few lines I found in his notebook as I rifled his corpse before his metamorphosis, or should I say resurrection, began.

Since then — since reading those few lines — I see him everywhere, and (as though dreaming) in every time, amidst the turmoil of the centuries. Great cathedrals are burning as his silhouette strides towards me — no, to us! In a blasted ballroom, whose vast cracked windows look out upon a fast flowing river dotted with debris, he crouches over a young woman as rose-fresh with lust as he is pale with death. He reads history from a palimpsest of dusty maps — no more than burnt fragments — that he caresses like Braille. Sensing us he raises his decaying head and his charming rictus — horror and bliss — beckons. I will follow.

I. There shall be nothing but you.
II. Tomorrow is a cinder.
III. Beware the dust!
IV. You have nothing left to give.
V. There are caverns in the firmament.
VI. If only there was not here.
VII. Your skin will fold like memories.
VIII. Love was once a law.
IX. Before the aphorism came the platitude.
X. Places vanish, like your names.

D.P. Watt is a writer living in the bowels of England. He balances his time between lecturing in drama and devising new ‘creative recipes’, ‘illegal’ and ‘heretical’ methods to resurrect a world of awful literary wonder. Recent appearances with Ex Occidente Press include his collection, An Emporium of Automata, in 2010, and tales in both Cinnabar’s Gnosis and The Master in Café Morphine. His first fiction collection, Pieces for Puppets and Other Cadavers (InkerMen Press) was first published in 2006 and reprinted in 2010.

The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller is a sewn hardcover book of 100 pages with dust-jacket, silk ribbon, endpapers and a full-colour frontispiece. Edition limited to only 100 hand numbered copies.