Going On Passed Judgement

Goin' on passed Judgement - has been removed from this blog, as it has been submitted to the MIDNIGHT ON A STAGECOACH anthology.

Choices

In the sky, it is making a horrible sound
But if I block my ears and just look down
The Black Sun has not birthed yet evil rays
The day has yet no awful aftermath.

Then again, the ground,
Is heaving with the rising of the town
Of bones, and with the buried murmured lays
The former dead are raised to awful wrath.

And fingers in ears: blocks from all around
The cries of warnings now insistent grown
As nature's self her green cursed fruit displays
To turn me from the left or right-hand path.

Perhaps by sea, oh no that's now icebound
The coming back of aeons once long known,
Half hiding things released as ice-shelf frays
From each a horror's glacial holograph.

And they are everywhere, as hare to hound
Am I to them, they wear the dreadful crown,
One crown on many heads, as the Play says
Many and singular both, defying math.

Unless of course, just in my mind the sound
The bones beneath my feet my fear alone,
The warnings, frozen sea, the dreadful gaze
All just my own subjective epitaph

The Price

By their own will and their sworn vow

Since the blind cock on dunghill crowed

It was too late for them now

For all that they had come to know

They'd pledged a soul unto St. Toad

By their own will and their sworn vow

Since first they'd read 'The Golden Bough'

And walked the spiral winding road

It was too late for them now

Omens were seen, the farrowing sow

Birthed wizened piglet things that glowed

By their own will and their sworn vow

They'd seen the red-eyed white-winged Clough

Perched on the roof of their abode

It was too late for them now

The weakest one, whose power was low!

Would be the sacrifice they owed

By their own will and their sworn vow

It was too late for them now.

Providence issue 4 - a review

Robert Black has a lovely chat with the Wheatley's (Waitleys) and learns though he does not understand how their son (and his brother) was conceived.  In the process we learn a lot more about geometry, the universe, and the redeemer...and Robert takes one country road too many.

The tenderness with which Warlock Wheatley (Wizard Waitley) interacts with his daughter, perhaps redeems their incestuous union, especially when he doesn't remember it - and was acting as a syringe for the cow - with Yog Sothoth as the globes/worlds of the tree of the Kalaballa (the universe itself) forming a halo around his head as he sires his grandchildren/children.

We learn that the redeemer narrative always has 'the crazy grandfather, the white faced mother and the ugly boy'  here Willard (Wilbur) is speaking of himself, but we recall that H P Lovecraft was always told by his mother that he was ugly, and we notice that the Stella Sapienta's 'redeemer' has been a plan in motion for just about as long as H P Lovecraft has been alive in 1919.

So, I think we are going to see, as discussed in my review of #3, the middle ground between the evil cultic 'others', and the evil racist 'normative humanity' in a child born to be a cult force, raised as a racist, who yet harms no one (as Lovecraft did not). If I'm right this is an incredibly hopeful, yet difficult  path for the story - but it's so much *better* than my feared third rater's version (Robert Black meets Lovecraft who rips off his stories and adds racism) that, even though I'm only imagining the through line I'm giving this 9/10.

It deserves 9/10 in its own right for the account in the commonplace book material at the back of how Lovecraft's/Leticia's 'vision' (new horror) is a masterful creation of art, and for the section where the hideous yet always compelling figure of Willard (Wilbur) demonstrates how easily he can manipulate hypergeometry as a child plays with bricks, and Black mishears his age.

[Added if the core of the Colour Out Of Space didn't 'really' evaporate, maybe this is the source of the 'shining trapezium' at the centre of the Starry Wisdom sect in the story 'The Haunter Of The Dark' in which Robert 'Blake' - dies.  Dies I now recall, *after* the death of the Lovecraft analogy in Robert Bloch's story, 'The Feaster From The Stars'. This potential thread perhaps contradicts my thoughts above, but then - redeemers have to die...don't they?]

As I say 9/10.

PROVIDENCE - Issue 3 - a review

Robert Black continues his investigations, has deep dreams and finds his hosts kindly to 'this herald fella'.

Caution Spoilers

Robert sets off for the Bloggs' gold refinery in Salem - passing through the theatre strike and the start of prohibition, as background. All nicely done, and a bit of history (the clash between the theatre owners and the actors union's, of which I was unaware.) It's the 1st July 1919 as the issue starts.

Who are the woman and the child on the train, as he goes, I don't know, but they may be significant or they may be chorally raising a theme that is coming, fear of the unalike, racism in its weakest form, they're going to stay with grandma while the child's father whom we do not see, looks for  'somewhere where there are more people like us, wouldn't that be nice.'

The Oannes look (the Innsmouth look) of those who have cross-bred with the Deep Ones (Sunk 'ems) is prevalent in the folks he meets in Salem, who also include the old man from The Terrible Old Man - who keeps the souls of drowned sailors in bottles, and the unusually youthful giant, from The Picture In The House - who preserves himself by more straightforward cannibalism. He is treated with every courtesy and shown the tunnels from Alan Moore's neonomonicon which already have their orgone accumulation aspect and their obscene graffitti.  It seems obvious that when his hosts speak of him as 'the Herald' they arn't referring to his role as a newspaper man (formerly of the Daily Herald) but of a future role as a 'bringer of the (their) word' the John the Baptist (as it might be) of the Christ (Cthulhu).
[This is the role played by Johnny Carcosa in the Neonomicon, who is also in an earlier dream of Robert's reported in the text of the coomplace book at the back of the issue.]

 The fellowship of Oannes stands in for the Order Of Dagon, as Athol to which he is travelling at the end stands in for Dunwich and Misery maybe stands for Devil's Reef.  The names of the characters echo Lovecraft's as before. This has the same problems as per previous issues, so I won't harp on that again.

The Robert Black = Robert Block(Bloch) link is made text rather than subtext in the hotel, and Robert has a many leveled dream, which conflates future history (the holocaust and the gas chambers) with 'fictional history' which is still in his fictional future (the FBI raids on Innsmouth, here on Salem - as Alan Moore confessed he misapplied the correspondance in the neonomicon, but continues with it here) and the fictional elements of his past (Chambers' 'gas chambers! and exit gardens).  The use of the fill-foot (swastica) as the symbol of those opposing the Oannes cultists reminds us also of the (real) horrors to come.

 I enjoyed this issue most of the three so far, and I liked the other two.  I'm giving this an 8 rather than a 7.

I still have concerns that the ah 'final solution' as to where good and evil lies 'under' Providence will be hard to depict without making a tonal mistep.  On the one hand cultists and bodies of men dedicated to esoteric works, who are clearly shown as being willing to sacrifice innocent victims, on the other hand a movement against them which is tainted with racism and ignorance and violence.  (For another take on this my own: The Temple of Dagon which covers some of the same ground is still available as an e-book from amazon, or for free elsewhere on the net.)  There are two evil extremes of danger here: (1) saying 'well say what you like about racism but it's okay against deep ones' before realising you're going to end up including Jews and Gypsies and Homosexuals as 'sinister cultists' or (2) saying 'well of course human sacrifice, cannibalism, rape-in-orgy, and childhood mutilation* [see the leaflet at the end] are fine if they're 'in the course of a magical/cultural tradition'.  I remain hopeful that as a humanist writer, Alan Moore will show a path through these two horrors and show that the path is 'love', but how he will do so, we will have to wait to see. The love between Zeke Hillman and Negathlia-Lou (and Alan Moore's coinages for Deep One names are marvellous) *could* have served such a purpose if it weren't undercut by Zeke's casual reduction of their interaction to a sexual one in his nudge-nudge comments about 'them island women' to Robert. [Which if it's intended to entice him into the cult is falling on deaf gay ears.]

*That leaflet at the end is a weakness in a supposedly mimetic text, to my mind, in as much as clearly it could never be safely handed to an ordinary human. Of course Black is thoroughly 'surrounded', but even so - it would if taken seriously invite exactly the kinds of reprisals against the Deep Ones mentioned at the end of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.  It's a joke in a metasense (and it is very funny), but it can almost only work in the context of the fiction itself as it its also a joke on Robert Black, specially printed for him, with the others being all 'normal' church business.  It's depiction of a baptism for infants at ten, at which the 'sex-stick is shed' could depict a instar change in the human/deep one hybrid stock - but as a ritual its hard to think Moore does not mean it to chime with the Jewish bar mitzvah at 13, and with more widespread ritual male and female circumcison. 

PROVIDENCE - Issue - 2 - a review (updated)

Robert Black recovers partially from the death of Lily, and - makes two possible discoveries about things that might lie beneath.

Caution Spoilers

Robert takes leave from the Newspaper telling Prissy he'll be back, and still playing slightly on her affection for him, but - he may be taking his leave completely of journalism to try to seek something deeper, to write his book. In the light falling on him in the first illustration he seems older, perhaps greying at the temple. This is not true of any other depiction of him.

He meets Tom Malone, in Red Hook (the police detective and protagonist of H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Horror of Red Hook'  Thomas F. Malone - who if that story comes true within 'Povidence' is fated to be physically and mentally affected by what he finds under the 'several old red brick buildings after a raid' in Red Hook, when he investigates, more deeply, the case of Robert Suydam.) Here the detective is friendly, kindly, impressed by Robert's erudition, interested in esoteria, and perhaps also gay.  (This is the first concealed thing.)

He (Malone) shows RB the Church underneath which Robert Suydam conducts occult classes - in the background the man going into the church by the upper door may also be the man with the peacock feathers outside Suydam's house later, and the short squat woman with the two men by the lower entrance looks very like the bodyshape of Johnny Carcosa's mother from 'The Courtyard'/'The Neonomicon'. There is an issue about the depiction of the inhabitants of Red Hook to which I'll return in my comments at the end.

Malone describes himself as a 'dreamer' which agrees with his wide interests in Lovecraft's story, and also perhaps suggests a possible link with Randolph Carter and Lovecraft's dreamland cycle.

Re; the Horror in Red Hook - in Lovecraft Suydam, may be the victim at first becoming 'archfiend and adversary' only when corrupted by his contact with the strange cults, here he may already be victimising others, or no one - it all depends on the nature of the second concealed thing...

That is - what does RB see under the cellar of RS's basement flat?

A psychological vision brought on by 'gas' - foregrounded by RB and Malone's discussion of Jung and the subconsciousness as 'caverns' -

A real experience of something like a ghoul (although its skeletal face, hoon hoon cry, and luminous flesh is not a staightfowardly meeping ghoul of the type in Pickman's model, though there are human bones) -

A supernatural experience of a different kind, there is a black lake with a pier whose wooden pillars are carved with marine suggestive curves ? Lilith is mentioned and the guilty RB might still imagine himself chased by a dead vengeful Lily. RS is also self-confessedly interested in the fourth kind of the defeating of death, the revival of cadavaers - and the formula used by Herbert West glows with a phospher like the creatures, at least in the films.

RS seems sympathetic, keen to stress the gnostic rather than satanic nature of Yezidi belief, openly discusses the Book of The Wisdom of The Stars - and its author (who has attributes in common with Lovecraft's Abdul Al-Hazrad, and Bierce's Hali) which would make the book equivalent to the Necronomicon, and yet avuncularly smooth evil is an obvious possibility and the reference to 'more unripe fruit' having arrived in Parker Place with its suggestion of 'fresh innocent victims' made by Corneilia together with her hesitancy and RS's rapid whispering escorting of her away, casts a shadow that remains as yet.  (But it is not 'conclusive' and if we were not as readers, perhaps in a continnua already containing 'The Courtyard'/and the 'Neonomicon' in its future, we might be inclined to give Suydam the benefit of the doubt.)

Japeth Culwen is/suggests Joseph Cuwin from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.  Does RS drop these names to see what RB already knows? Heziakiah suggests the witch from The Dreams in the Witch House.

The statue to the left of RB (our right) in all the scenes where RB and RS talk, is never shown face on, and its head is always concealed, but its body could be that of the cellar creature again.

The scars on the face of the seller of peacock feathers at RS's door could have been made by claws with a spread like those of the cellar creature, and yet he seems happy.

The commonplace book at the back maintained by RB is becoming like Lovecraft's a home for possible horror stories - and the notes as you might expect from Alan Moore are very interesting suggestions for stories - as well as a diary.  RB = protolovecraft?

The leaflet at the back will have to wait until I have a physical copy as comixology won't resolve the typeface for my eyesight. I'll return to this.

What do I think?  I love it - yet I doubt.  All the strengths and weaknesses of issue 1 are still here.
I'm interested in RB, but I'm less interested in him being 'lovecraft-lite' or worse a means of conveying to Lovecraft, material Lovecraft then is (in the world of the comic) given less credit for tranfiguring as art than he deserves. [A story in which, for example, RB eventually meets L, and L rips off his accounts and adds extra racism, would be profoundly unfair and unsatisfactory to me, and while I trust this isn't what Alan Moore is doing, in the hands of a lesser writer it would be a greater worry.]

I'm also still concerned that there is an issue with the pastiching of racism in background depictions of minorities of as grotesques, and of positioning the true defense of minority belief in people (Suydam) who are also 'framed' by the implicit story as perhaps villains/sacrificers of children (in Lovecraft the bones in the cellar as those of children, in the present art the sizes are less clear).  (It might be argued there's no more grotesqueness in their depictions than in the depictions or anyone or in real life, but
it creates a gap between what the narrative says and what the images depict which I am wary of.)
Nevertheless, the lightness, and the shading this casts on the world Lovecraft depicted on the one side, and the real world on the other is still good.
7/10  [I have adjusted this down from 8/10 on a re-read for the expanded reasons above.]

Not seen but never out of Mind.

As I went to the Folies Bergère
The King In Yellow wasn’t there
Nor hovering above the Moulin Rouge
With streamers on his pointy shoes.

As I went to the Eiffel Tower
I did not see Carcosa glower
Across the waters of the Seine
I haven’t got it on my brain.

I do not see the vast dark lake,
In every piece of gateau-cake,
Nor is my thought a running sameness,
That always returns to the nameless.

I do not see the two moons move,
Over the colonaded Louvre,
I do not hear Cassilda's Song,
Played in a tempo somehow wrong.

I did not see The Queen in Red
eating jam tarts in the Bed.
I do not see anything surprising,
Since the play’s curtain's awful rising.

I did not see the second Act,
When to the drownings, they react,
I left when Princes failed their quest,
My heart felt heavy in its breast.

My brother stayed to watch it all,
The doom that on them all would fall,
I do not see my brother now,
Save as the warders may allow.

PROVIDENCE - Issue 1 - a review

Providence: Issue 1

THE YELLOW SIGN

Issue #1 covers the events of 5^th June 1919.  Robert Black interviews a Doctor Alvarez for his newspaper, and later learns that a Jonathan Russell has committed suicide. 

Underneath these surface events lies a hidden world. In Alvarez words: ‘it lurks behind our pretences. This truth, it is a land sunken beneath many fathoms. Were it one day to rise and confront us all, what would (we) do?’ 

In terms of the Mythos, Doctor Alvarez’s hidden secrets stand for the sunken city of R’lyeh, which rises to make men mad, and madness is already signposted by the train of ‘imaginary destroying books’ – The King In Yellow – mentioned explicitly and attributed to Robert Chambers (hence the ‘short stories', and not 'the play’), and its predecessor Sous le Monde attributed to Claude Guillot which Black interviews Alvarez about (and which seems to be fictional, in our world, although Alan Moore’s knowledge of French sensational literature may be greater than my googling skills) and the Kitab Al-Hikmah Al-Najmiyya mentioned by Alvarez which translates as The Book of The Wisdom of the Stars.  The Starry Wisdom is of course the heretical church investigated by Robert Blake in H P Lovecraft’s story The Haunter of the Dark (written November 1935), as well as the (real) anthology title in which Alan Moore’s Lovecraftian short story ‘The Courtyard’ appeared.

Robert Blake is a form of Robert Bloch, a writer and friend of Lovecraft, but perhaps we are supposed to think him also a form of Robert Black – our protagonist. Doctor Alvarez, is obviously Doctor Munoz from Lovecraft’s Cool Air (written March 1926) with his body slightly better regulated at this time, and his housekeeper differently named and portrayed sympathetically and without Lovecraft’s racism.  Is Lovecraft then, later to be channelling (or reporting / writing up) Robert Black’s account of Alvarez, Robert Black’s own death?  If so this seems a little reductionist (like those bad Doctor Who stories where H G Wells is too stupid to invent (the idea of) a time machine unless he’s had an adventure with the Doctor). However this would be to prejudge, perhaps Alvarez is 7 years ahead of Munoz’s researches, perhaps something else is going on. (Most simply perhaps he changes his name and moves after Seniora Ortega's death, which as he says would 'see him go to pieces' - Doctor Munoz in Cool Air claims to have been preserved for 18 years, which would mean - if he is the same man Alvarez has been 11 years dead.)

The footpints of the Jersey Devil, just mentioned in passing, are not unlike the footprints of the Mi-Go, hooves or claws.

In terms of emotions : what is hidden is that Robert Black is both Jewish and Gay (both of which become apparent in issue #1) – his name may be a pseudonym to conceal the former.  We learn the latter from his reaction to Jonathan’s death. That the letter written to Jonathan (12^th April 1919) is in Robert’s handwriting we learn from the commonplace book entry at the end.  That Robert is ‘cold’ we learn in Jonathan/Lily’s own words, in Robert's memories – but I think we would know it from the letter ‘it was the most wonderful fun yet’ is not a sentiment that befits a letter of deep love, but is rather a shallow, rather distancing response to love making. That it already meant more for Jonathan we can I think safely deduce.  12^th April to 5^th June is less than two months to get from ‘wonderful fun’ to ‘suicide’.  Even so Robert is shaken by Jonathan’s death.

That Jonathan is also a transvestite (or a gay man who prefers to present as a woman or perhaps as we would say now a non-cis woman, or 'a woman') which enables us to ‘see’ him/her obliquely as ‘Lily’ in Robert’s memories – and reminds us that, much was/is hidden even in the hidden world.  (Is Charles' 'Vera' the same? Perhaps.)

In terms of society: what is hidden is, perhaps mostly visible to us, by the power of history: we (the readers) know, that prohibition will come, we can see how patronising the newspaper men are to their typist/secretary ‘Prissy’ Hunter.  We can see that she holds a torch for Robert, and that – perhaps Mr Freddy Dix, who seems to fail to impress her, holds one for her. 

In terms of departures from our world: there are suicide chambers in New York parks were the lonely and the depressed and the heart-broken can go and be gassed while listening to music.  These, as Robert Black notes were predicted in Robert Chambers King In Yellow (specifically in the future set story: The Repairer of Reputations which is set in 1920) – one wonders if, in less than a year’s time Robert Black will need to apply to Wilde for the Repair of his Reputation.  Have others of Chambers' weird predictions come true? The history of the war and prohibition seem to be as per our world - rather than the German/US War Chamber's wrote of in which German troops are beaten in New Jersey - but we see no black faces on the streets – have they all been moved to Chamber's great Negro Free State, of Suanee?  Or is this a flaw in Burrow's art (or part of a long plan of Alan's - Lovecraft's unfortunate racism is part of his fear of the Other, which makes his horror effective and disquieting, and may be up for discussion, as it was in part in Alan's other Lovecraftesques). [Note: my friend Philip Purser-Hallard suggests to me that, part of the absence of 'black' faces (see above) might be addressed if Freddy Dix is a black man, 'passing' as white. This is historically quite possible and might explain the stress that makes him so on edge.]

So: Issue #1 has much potential, and a few possible pit-falls. The art is clean and Jacen Burrow’s standard work with Alan Moore, which is to say the faces are sometimes less expressive than they might be for the subtlety of the text, and parts of the background are occasionally so understated as to make it seem like a possible subtext (the shop windows having neither reflections nor visible contents, make the town streets seem like movie scenery). [It's only fair to say that Jacen's depiction of Robert's growing grief is very very well done.]

I did really enjoy this – but if I am wary it is because the main pitfall is precisely that into which Moore’s earlier The Courtyard (which I liked a lot) and Neonomicon (which I didn't like as much) - both of which may or may not be set in the same world - fell, namely making a setting so allusive that it overpowers the audiences’ mimetic identification with the narrative by drawing attention to artificiality.  (Why *are* people either named after a Lovecraft character or playing a specific role from a Lovecraft story, why not write a 'new' story set in the same world? When a character called Warren dies and another is told, "You fool, Warren is dead" in Neonomicon - yes it echoes Lovecraft's Statement of Randolph Carter, but what does it add to the current narrative, or does it distort it?).

Neonomicom had other problems also, that so far the stress on ‘love’ is doing much to address here!   Doctor Alvarez is not (yet) in a horror story because he is loved, Doctor Munoz is (will be) because he is not.

As a first issue :  8/10,  as a series so far 7/10 because that flaw is still built in and if its not foregrounded in some way later it may reduce the overall effect.

Oh, and it's not yet set in Providence, despite the end-papers but New York, so when Black says 'If Providence permits' he really is referring to God / Fate, and not the city's readers: and yet of course H P Lovecraft, is in 1919, in Providence - whatever that may imply!

Note: amended review slightly on a second reading, and to include Philip Purser-Hallard's insight.

I will also make a prediction:  Robert Black has not yet realised that he has met a man, who claims to be aware of a technique of "reviving cadavers", just as his lover dies.  When he does...

I HAD TROUBLE GETTING TO UNKNOWN KADATH - part 2

He tried to dissuade me, he offered me cake,

He offered me chips and choice fillets of hake,

He offered me scones and pronounced them just so,

But I sat in his temple and just wouldn't go.

So he told me the fable of Banzi the Wise,

Who offended the gods and fell into the skies,

And only for wanting the merest of glances,

At that lesser, known peak where the gods held tea dances.

For the weak gods of earth, they are petty and spoilt,

And so far up themselves that their icons get soiled,

But dreamer beware of the Dark Other Gods,

That they call when they want to be absolute sods.

"So what then," he asked, "would the punishment be,

if an infinite fall came for peeping at tea,

For those who intruded on Unknown Kadath,

which amounted to crying 'go on show your wrath!' "

His council was cogent. his council was good,

He lived up to the name that he had in the wood,

but still I sat there in his temple, in slippers,

sipping his tea, and devouring his kippers.

At last he grew angry and puffed himself up,

He took back his kippers and took back his cup,

And he said, "On your head be the end that you've got,

I did not advise it, oh no I did not."

And he went on to speak while I stood there and gaped,

of the selfie the gods left which the censor escaped,

Carved on the rear face of the peak of Ngranek,

And he wished me good day and that I'd break my neck.

But I must have looked stupid, or vague, or surprised,

For he slowly explained what I should have surmised,

That the face in the rock had unearthly oddities,

I could use to look out for demigods and goddities.

For in lands round Kadath, if genetics ran true,

I would find the offsping of maidens the gods knew,

And spotting the features they shared with the face,

I would know I was getting quite close to the place.

So I rode on a yak down to old Dyath-Leen,

Where the traders all come and the sailors are keen,

Where the wharfs are filled up with the bravest seafarers,

And you can get a free tea from its free tea, tea sharers.

But oh - what I found there - what fear and dismay,

For instead of the tea ships from distant Carthay,

Black galleons whose oarsmen had no kind of uses,

For Dyath-Leen's many bars, its restaurants or massueses.

Had come into the harbour, and traded for gold,

And for slaves - with the rubies so large and so old,

That were offered by men whose turbans sat askew,

On their heads as if hiding what nobody knew.

Oh the troubles I had on the way to Kadath,

At the city of Leen on the River Dyath,

Oh the sinister secrets implied by the feat,

Of the oarsmen who never bought viands to eat.

I HAD TROUBLE GETTING TO UNKNOWN KADATH - part 1

I HAD TROUBLE GETTING TO UNKNOWN KADATH

I dreamed thrice of a city, but when I got close

My lamp-stand would slip and crash down on my nose,

My sheets they would tangle, my quilt slipped a lot

I never got near it, oh no I did not.

In my dreams it was sunset, and the city shone,

In the light of the rosy sun sinking and gone,

But as I approached there was such a palava,

As I dreamed I was wrapped in a wool balaclava.

This headgear it itched, and to get to the brunt,

It cut off my vision – ‘twas turned back to front -.

And waking I found that it was but my cat,

Who in jest had mistake my face for her mat.

So I prayed to the gods who look kindly on dream,

Such as Cheese-rind the Mighty, and also Sour Cream,

Cocktails-for-Nightcaps, and Lobster-on-Toast,

But those mighty powers failed, my dream gave up the ghost.

So then I resolved I would go to Kadath

It’s a fearful long journey – you just do the math,

Kadath where the gods live, to beseech them at home,

To let me enter my City and n’er again roam.

But where was Kadath?  Now I asked it seemed true,

We had all forgotten, though before that we knew,

It wasn’t in Booklyn, it wasn’t in Yonkers,

It wasn’t in the Atlas, it just drove me bonkers.

I descended the steps to the cavern of flame,

Where Nasht and Kaman-Thah so awful in fame,

Proceded to dun me for funds to repair,

The terrible wear on the sixty ninth stair.

They called me ill-fated, they called me unwise,

They shook their forefingers and narrowed their eyes,

“Young man go no further, this is no safe path,

The eyes of a mortal may not see Kadath”.

I pooh-poohed their doubts, though I shook both their hands,

And delivered their mail from the dull waking lands,

For they get Readers Digest to liven the hours,

When sleep-drenched young maidens are not bringing flowers.

And leaving them there I went into the wood,

Where the trees were enchanted for evil or good,

Their bark it was gnarled, being knotted and rugose,

I spoke to a Zoog – standing there in his Zoog clothes.

“Oh tell me friend Zoog, for the help that before

I gave to your kin, at the Gugs’ vast stone door,

Which way should I go in the search for Kadath?

And the Zoog said “Oh man, you’re just havin’ a laff”.

“We Zoogs do not know of the High and Holy,

We can just spell our names if we spell them out slowly,

But if you go to Ulthar – then Atal the Priest,

It is said knows the gods, from the fast to the feast.”

From the fast to the feast? From the bottom to top!

I vowed if he knew them that well, I would stop,

And pester and question, and ask, and implore,

‘til he’d say what he knew,  to get me out the door.

THE CATS IN THE HATS IN THE WALLS

Reading and enjoying these a lot, I thought - sauce for the goose, and so...

http://www.daveexmachina.com/wordpress/?p=1121


THE CATS IN THE HATS IN THE WALLS

The son of the scions of old de la Poer
Was never afraid of a mew nor a purr,
Until he alighted no more for to roam, to settle in his aboriginal home,
Now old Exham Piory, had rooms, it had grooms,
To tidy the stables, and fabulous tombs,
It had in its graveyard all marble and cold,
It had arms o'er the fireplace, all noble and bold.
It had butlers and sutlers, and hatstands for hats,
But oh what the wizz was it troubled by cats!
They mibbled and mubbled, they doubled and dribbled
They pibbled and pubbled, they troubled and tribbled.
But worse than their spitting, their spooking, and splatting,
Was when every jack one of them got into hatting.
They strolled out in bowlers, they popped up in toppers,
They wore tiny hats, and the wore some were whoppers,
Wished good day in bonnets, they doted on Boaters,
They boated in hats when they found some were floaters,
They howled out in hombergs, they affected the Trilby
Tore feathers from Gainsboroughs, which fact didn't thrill me.
And worse than the worst, there was something so new
For every hat came with Thing one and Thing two.
That's two things per cat, all a making a fussing,
And two things per cat is a double purr-cushing.
A clashing of cymbols and kettling of drums,
A horrible rumbling of rumpity tums.
So in the end what could old de la Poer do?
He bought him a hat, saying, he'd go mad too.
They found him at last crouching there, in the dark,
His teeth fixed at last in a Milliner's clerk,
Who'd failed to appease him, with Fez or Pork Pie,
Such minimal style meant the man had to die.
And still in the walls, and the rooms, and the tombs,
Still chasing the butlers, the sutlers, and grooms,
The wild whirling ride of the Cats in the Hats,
With a thing on each shoulder, went silent as Bats,
To mourn for the soul of the lost de la Poer,
Who'd boasted he fear'd not a mew, nor a purr.

The problem of evil revisited

Oh hail, ye mindless daemon sultan, hail
Whose febril writhings in the netherspheres,
Set branes a tremble, impacting, so those,
Vast multispacial planes, thus clash and spring,
Apart to birth the Universes' fires.

This is your icon, look,
Painted in brash, and lead-based, poison tones
The clockwork chimpanzee, under a fez,
That clangs its metal cymbals,
While a spring, runs down, eternally.

What other unknown god,
Amused by you,
First wound your clockwork
Limbs to thrash and curl,
About the heartlands of the hidden worlds?

Nyarlathotep, perhaps?
Your hidden soul,
That mocks and taunts, the feeble wits of earth?
Or were you wound up by the Fourth Wise Man?
That Al Hazrad, who penned in Bethlehem,
How please the babe was to receive his gift,
And coo'ed to see the Blind Ape of Truth,
Ring out the pains of all created things.

THE HORSES IN THE STABLE.

THE HORSES IN THE STABLE. (Part One)

[Apres, Clarke Ashton Smith]

When Paris gets too hot in August, as it does in one sense for the law-abiding, and in at least two for thieves, the former and the latter flee. 

In the year of Our Lord 1485 in England the sweating sickness was on the rise, and the armies of the Red and the White Rose were polishing their armour for Bosworth. In France it was too hot even for semi-annual rising of Brittainy versus the Crown, and the truce signed on the 9^th of August was as much about the stifling heat as it was about the failure of Louis D’Orlean, once again, to capture the King, in his increasingly desperate game of military chess.

The peace signed for the nonce, the Lords and Ladies of Court peregrinated to their country domiciles to sweat out the latter part of the month: the clerks trotted on donkeys to the coolth of the cinq ports; the monks attached as confessors to the nobles returned to their stone cloisters with a feeling of fervent relief; and the thieves scattered into their summer boltholes and residences.

The notable thief Armaud d’ L’vey : black haired, scowling, clad habitually in leather jerkin and scarlet hose, save for his disguises, turned south where – praise the good God – he was insufficiently known for his twisted lipped smile to appear on many artistic renderings of the sort that appeared with an amount beneath them.  He passed through the Country of Never (deliberately avoiding the Duchy of Orleans) and came to rest at last at the end of August, in the forests of Averoigne.

The squabbles of the North had not intruded here, it appeared, and the dark, lush, luxurience of the great oaks and the rustling fabrication of the sky of leaves, brought an unlooked for solace to his rogue’s soul as he slept back against one of the King Trees.  This solace ended with the thunder.

Void Secrets, A Lemon Cohen song.

The whisper bears the message of the secret of the void
There is no god who watches you, impatient or annoyed,
But you may wish there was because the reason doesn't flatter,
You're just a speck, a fleck of dirt, upon the face of matter.

So mad poet, take up your pen, write what the voice dictates,
There are no special benizons, no privileging fates,
All that lives, rat, ape or king, goes down into the dust,
And no one cares about the pain, the murders nor the lust.

No more than the fat drunkard, in the toilet of a bar,
Feels any strong concern about two ants beneath his car,
The black ant has the red ant pinned in formic acid pain,
The turning wheel kills both when he drives off into the rain.

Images of the future, which the poet barely grasps,
Convey the emptiness immense, the nightmare of the gaps,
His broken mind attempts to fill the desolating chasm,
With names that make no sense within a churn of protoplasm.

Cthulhu, Yog-sothoth, and all, are broken, turning shards,
Attempts to fill the emptiness behind the falling cards,
Al Hazrad knows the whisper which destroyed his poet's mind,
When you remove the pallid mask, there is no fiend behind.

Nothing plans to seize your soul, nothing craves your fear,
Nothing wants your worship, nothing isn't even there.
In Azathoth the only truth, is no truth can endure,
Around its core of mindless flesh, the daemon pipes encore.

Terzanelle: "Cthulhu"

Beneath dark ocean currents, silted spires
That Twist and embody strange geometries
Like fruiting fungi, like refined desires
Like things wrought weirdly from corpse-candle trees
That House whose Windows look in, into Sights
That Twist and embody strange geometries
Outside of time, where otherworldly nights
Fall like black infinite dominoes away
That House whose Windows look in, into Sights
Quite unsuspected by the surface day
Is what it contains, evil? All our rules
Fall like black infinite dominoes away
No moral utilitarians or their schools
Can confine Him, who is Housed in Drowned R'yleh
Is what it contains, evil? All our rules
Are but a sheen we fein, that's passed in play
Beneath dark ocean currents. Silted spires,
Can confine Him? Who is Housed in Drowned R'yleh
Like fruiting fungi, like refined desires.


Simon BJ

Pickman's Mottoes

Uncovered a small, leather?, bound note book proporting to contain the thoughts on art of one Richard Upton Pickman, most seem to be distortions of other artist's thoughts.

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, yet.

Classic painting paints the mask, modern art the face, I the skull.

There is no greater enemy to art, than the armed policeman in the hallway.

Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend. Must start using conventional pigments and brushes.


Simon BJ

I was never cut out for a Shoggoth.

Clearing out the shed today found a cache of old writing:
here's a poem dated (literally at the bottom of the sheet)
9th and 10th May 1986.

I WAS NEVER CUT OUT FOR A SHOGGOTH.

I was never cut out for a shoggoth, I don't have my hearts in it quite.
All this viscous and pusstular writhing, prevents me from sleeping at night.

I don't like injesting you humans, no matter how you've been prepared.
It gives me the heartsburn and collic, if they left it to me you'ld be spared.

I won't hear a word 'gainst the Old Ones, but their offspring can be such a pain.
And when you've changed the diapers on Dark Young, you won't want to do it again.

They say they'll be murder and mayhem, when Cthulhu and the gang escape,
I'd rather say shaped like a goldfish: I'm not partial to scrimmage or scrape.

The fact is I can't see the purpose in all of their bluster and shout,
If they wanted R'lyeh on the surface they should never have pulled the plug out.

***

The Other Gods give me the willies: the very thought gives me a stammer,
My spawner remarked that I look like a jelly being strummed with a small wooden hammer.

Nyarlathotep rarely makes house calls, for his formshifting can lead to trouble
I once mistoke him for a foot-pedal bin and had to retreat on the double.

Azathoth is no musical chaos: the flutes of his chums make me ill.
It's rather like being played Benjaamin Britton, in a drum, being rolled, down a hill.

Shub-Nigguarth's visits are welcome, though it once took me almost 'til dawn,
To get all the ick off the wallpaper that had been left by the slime of its spawn.

They boss you about something chronic, they always decide what you do.
It wouldn't surprise me to have to fill forms in for even dividing in two.

So all you young proto-shoggoths, take council from me when I moan.
Stick your pseudopods up by the fireside and three cheers for the pleasures of home.


Simon BJ (Age 21: 9th and 10th May 1986)

Iris the Outsider

"Wretched is she to whom memory brings only the bitter taint of lost loves and the sorrows of unhappiness. Desolate is she to whom childhood has only echoes of parties held in wastelands, and the constant mutter of the invisible sisterhood. Such a lot was mine, the lovelorn, the bittern, the twice-shy, the wallflower. (Do you see what I did there? That’s a very clever pun on bittern, a mournful calling bird, and “once bitten” which precedes twice shy.)

And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other, and the gin and splash runs low.

I know not where, or whether I was born, save that the Castle nursery was infinitely pink and infinitely vulgar, full of stenciled passages from Mother Goose, and having high ceilings where the eye could find only mechanical mobiles that shrieked and clattered. Flabby and detestable, the pigs and sheep in these mechanical torture-devices, grunted and baa-ed for the slaughter-house.

The plastic sheeting in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up socks of dead generations. It was never light, so that I used sometimes to set fire to the curtains and gaze steadily at them for relief, nor was there any sun outdoors, since the giant and terrible toadstools, fenageek, and herbs grew high above the topmost accessible towers.

There was one pink tower, curse what I now know of symbolism, which reached above the toadstool-trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone.

I must have lived years in this place, but I cannot measure the time. Beings must have cared for my needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself, or anything in the form of the living, but the noiseless plush toys and cuddlies. I think that whoever nursed me must have been aged indeed, since my first conception of a living person was that of somebody mockingly like myself, yet shockingly unstylish.

To me there was nothing grotesque in the bone masks and shadow-gear that strewed some of the stone crypts deep down among the foundations, nor the rooms of costumes, and the portraits with their blank obsidian eyes. I fantastically associated these things with everyday events, and thought them more natural than the coloured pictures of living beings which I found in many of the nursery books.

From such books I learned all that I knew. No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in all those years - not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud, although I often tried to sing, and found the results pretty.

My aspect was a matter equally unthought of, for there were no mirrors in the castle, and I merely regarded myself by instinct as akin to the youthful figures I saw drawn and painted in the books. I felt conscious of youth because I remembered so little, and of beauty because of the ease of which I moved in my own skin, and in the tattered ball-gowns of the great wardrobes.

Outside, across the manicured grey-green fungus lawns and under the dark mute Toadstool trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests. Once I tried to escape from the forest, but as I went farther from the castle the shade grew denser and the air more filled with the cloying scent of lavender fear; so that I ran frantically back lest I lose my way in a labyrinth of fragrent silence.

So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light, grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single pink tower. I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse society and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.

In the dank twilight I climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till I reached the level where they ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds leading upward. Ghastly and terrible was that dead, stairless cylinder of rock; pink, deserted, and sinisterly mottled, but more ghastly and terrible still was the slowness of my progress; for climb as I might, the blank darkness overhead grew no thinner, and a new chill assailed me. I shivered as I wondered why I did not reach the light, and would have looked down had I dared. I fancied that night had come suddenly upon me, and vainly groped with one free hand for a window embrasure, that I might peer out and above, and try to judge the height I had once attained.

All at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless, crawling up that concave and desperate precipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and I knew I must have gained the roof, or at least some kind of floor. In the darkness I raised my free hand and tested the barrier, finding it stone and immovable. Then came a deadly circuit of the tower, clinging to whatever holds the wall could give; till finally my testing hand found the barrier yielding, and I turned upward again, pushing the slab or door with my head as I used both hands in my fearful ascent. There was no light revealed above, and as my hands went higher I knew that my climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was the trapdoor of an aperture leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the lower tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber.

I crawled through carefully, and tried to prevent the heavy slab from falling back into place, but failed in the latter attempt. As I lay exhausted on the stone floor I heard the eerie echoes of its fall, hoped when necessary to pry it up again.

Believing I was now at prodigious height, I dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I might look for the first time upon the sky, and the moon and stars of which I had read. But on every hand I was disappointed; since all that I found were bulky vehicles of red, bearing numerals, and cryptic destinations in archaic lettering, as it might be, Golder’s Green, Putney, Marble Arch, or most odious of all Tooting Bec. I shuddered at the image of the desolate and whistling marshland this name evoked. What these vehicles were and how they found their way, without evident wings, to abide in this high apartment so many aeons cut off from the castle below, I could not conjecture.

Then unexpectedly my hands came upon a doorway, where hung a wooden door, rough with strange markings that I could not discern in the half light. Trying it, I found it locked; but with a supreme burst of strength I overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inward. As I did so there came to me the purest ecstasy I have ever known; for shining tranquilly down in through a iron-grated door at the end of a short passage was the radiant full moon, which I had never before seen save in dreams and in vague visions I dared not call memories.

Fancying now that I had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, I commenced to move through the door; but the sudden veiling of the moon by a cloud caused me to stumble, and I felt my way more slowly in the dark. It was still very dark when I reached the grating - which I tried carefully and found unlocked, but which I did not open for fear of falling from the amazing height to which I had climbed. Then the moon came out.

Most demoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable. Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied. The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of toadstool-treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on the level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground of a deserted thoroughfare.

Half unconscious, I opened the grating and staggered out upon the white pavement that stretched away in two directions. From here I could see the wide and corrugated doors through which the red vehicles would have their ingress and their exits. To open them, somehow instinctively, was the work of a moment: my mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic craving for light; and not even the fantastic wonder which had happened could stay my course. I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost. The controls of one of the red vehicles were simplicity itself to me, and I recognised it now as being an omnibus, a device which I knew from my latin texts to be capable of travelling anywhere in any manner. That this was not always true, I was to learn to my cost.

I knew not who I was or what I was, or what my surroundings might be; and consequently I wasn’t the safest driver, though as I continued to roar along I became conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory that made my progress not wholly fortuitous. I passed under an arch that was low enough to scrape the paint off the roof, and took a corner on two wheels. Soon I was out in open country; sometimes following the visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to smash through haystacks and barns full of chickens. Once I swooshed across a swift river where crumbling, mossy masonry told of a bridge long vanished. I swear the wheels of the omnibus did not break the miniscus of the water.

Over two hours must have passed before I reached what seemed to be my goal, a building in a park, maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness to me. I saw that the castle of my memory had obviously been burned completely to the ground and replaced but never the less I recognised its identity at once. But what I observed with chief interest and delight were the open windows - gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry. The words of an ancient chant imploring that the brown earth mother, raise her hallowed knees, reached me.

Advancing to the windows I looked in and saw an oddly dressed company indeed; making merry, and speaking brightly to one another. I had never, seemingly, heard human speech before and could guess only vaguely what was said. Some of the faces seemed to hold expressions that brought up incredibly remote recollections, others were utterly alien, particularly that of the white haired man in the frilly shirt to whom I took an instinctive liking.

I now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realization, and pausing only to brush broken glass off my dress. The nightmare was quick to come, for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived. Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended upon the whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity, distorting every face and evoking the most horrible screams from nearly every throat. Cries of ‘Not again,’ And ‘Who let the dog out, who, who, who, who’ resounded, although I later learned that that latter was a chorus in a popular hit of the time.

Flight was universal, and in the clamour and panic several fell in a swoon and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions. Many covered their eyes with their hands, and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their race to escape, overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they managed to reach one of the many doors. The cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and dazed, listening to their vanishing echoes, I trembled at the thought of what might be lurking near me unseen. At a casual inspection the room seemed deserted, but when I moved towards one of the alcoves I thought I detected a presence there but it was only a blue police-box. Then my eye fell on a hint of motion beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another and somewhat similar room. As I approached the arch I began to perceive the presence more clearly; and then, with the first and last sound I ever uttered - a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause - I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives.

I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is uncouth, shambolic, half-made up, slovenly, and detestable. It was the mutton-dressed-as-lamb shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world - or no longer of this world - yet to my horror I saw in its flea-eaten-away and corset-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.

I was almost paralysed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort towards flight; a backward stumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless, voiceless monster held me. My eyes bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into them, refused to close; though they were mercifully blurred, and showed the terrible object but indistinctly after the first shock. I tried to raise my hand to shut out the sight, yet so stunned were my nerves that my arm could not fully obey my will. The attempt, however, was enough to disturb my balance; so that I had to stagger forward several steps to avoid falling. As I did so I became suddenly and agonizingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the foetid apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch.

I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the nightwind shrieked for me as in that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory. I knew in that second all that had been, the bloody Doctor had left me in a stasis crib, with amnesia just so I’d miss the UNIT Christmas party, but more than that I recognized, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own.

But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is strong drink, perfume, cheap sex, and sheer, sheer gall. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to my bus, I realised how unerringly I had picked my true vehicle from where the Doctor had concealed it (in some purile version of Poe’s the purloined letter it had amused him to leave my time-ship in a disused bus station). Bah, I swore he’d have reasons to hate bus stations after this!

Now I ride with the windows down and friendly traffic cops, wave as I steam passed, and I play by day amongst the jet-set and the novae rich (and that’s not only a bad pun, all the best parties are at the end of the world) yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.

For although these things have calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still tied to primitive ideas of fashion, beauty, and sexiness. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass."


© Simon Bucher-Jones and HP Lovecraft 2004
Iris Wildthyme © Paul Magrs

SHOGGOTH FUNSTUFF(tm)

I suppose we can all remember when we first saw them: with things turning out the way they did. Whether they came free with breakfast cereal (in the second phase they had their own breakfast cereal) or taped in a bag to the cover of a magazine (in the second phase, they had their own magazine, and tie-in TV show) they just oozed cuteness.

They were itzy bitzy blobs of huggable colour that sparkled and glinted and rolled along as if they were alive. They could be pulled like taffy, and spring-back, you could press them to windows and they’d stick there, making a sound like cats or wind-chimes. Some would repeat a brief phrase: these were highly prized because naturally they could be made to be amusingly rude at the expense of teachers, and parents.

They were tradeable like stamps, - there was a catalogue showing all the basic forms and rareties (in the second phase of course nothing stayed really rare) -and needed care like tamegotchi, the regular infusion of Leng-juice(tm) and petting.

After a while some child-genius figured out a way to get them to fight like Pokemon -although even their fighting was so clumsy and cute that it was voted adorable by all the news-feeds. They even had an exotic foreign name - not in Japanese, but in the native tongue of the newest Indochina ‘high-pressure’ rising-economy: Tcho-tcho.

They were the top children’s Christmas best seller two years running. By the third year all sorts of cunning viral marketing techniques were being used to push them. Rumours ran wild through the schools that if you put your Shoggoth Funstuff(tm) in the fridge for a week, some of the rareties would ‘give birth’ to young. Parents smiled at this conceit naturally, even though some - I know I was - were concerned that their child (daughter in my case) might be disappointed when after the seventh day, all that was to show for the scam was a frozen blob and the intense need to pester-power the cost of another one out of my wallet.

Well, I guess, we aren’t smiling now, not now the third phase is upon us.

Simon BJ [21st May 2009 post, catching up albeit with old material]

Last Night I Dreamed Of My R'yleh Again

There are four puzzles that stand out:
What are the second Mrs De Winter's names and background?
Whose is the first body identified as that of Rebecca De Winter?
Why in his last encounter with Rebecca did Maxim have a loaded gun?
Who set fire to Mandaley?

Summarised from "Where Was Rebecca Shot?"
By John Sutherland


From the Scarlet Records of Raebek-Ra

I have opted for a revenge worse than fire, although fire will be part of it. I have taken the child growing in my womb and dedicated it to the treader of dust, so that it will grow swiftly and be open as a portal to my own spirit.

I have pushed it mewling in its weed-strewn perambulator passed the long gallery in which every painting has the face of my betrayer. Its quick childhood will lie lightly on its mind; a murmur of forbidden books, a passing memory of insane chattering behind the locked and bolted iron doors. When it is two, and seems ten times that age in growth, I will loose it into the world, and blank eyed, innocent, it will hunt him for me. I will see through its eyes, hear its muted broken thoughts around the hard kernel of my revenge.

***

What did he think? The snivelling bridegroom as he drove up with his new wife in the screeching clanking hideousness of their car, to see the blood red fires of his beloved home burning against the sky: the tiny vampire-flames dancing at my behest?
Did he think of me, dreaming under the waves? He should have.

I will have my revenge.

Oh, I have read the nauseating account of the affair by that hack its waterlogged pages bloating into pulp. How closely she hints at the truth and yet departs from it. She has him say of me, "She was not even normal" as if some simple lesbianism or mere rejection of his body should give carte blanche to his heroic murderousness.

Perhaps I'll publish my story too then in some out of the way place. Just to right the balance. My kind is long-lived, my story will wait its turn.

Maxim De Winter claimed I had betrayed him. That I had taken lovers.

Oh, as the sea is my witness it was not that easy. I had not wronged him then.

Oh I had sat with Jack, in that little hut, staring out at the sea, and no doubt longing had come into my voice, but not longing for him, oh never that. The shark does not long for the lion, nor the eel for the viper. I was never unfaithful. Not in any sweaty, mammalian way. Jack was kind to me, for someone of his upbringing. He knew I was not well - as he chose to view my changes, when the wind blew cold he would bring me a tasselled rug and sit beside me with it about my shoulders. The sea-spray would bring me ease. I could abandon my gloves with him; show the changes in my hands, discover some tenderness. Although, I knew it couldn't last.

Unable to make him understand I told him I was leaving, not as he thought because of the cancer he believed I had - the sea-cancer that comes to all like me in time, nor need he have dreaded contagion except in his ignorance. Instead I was returning to a home he could never share, changing in ways he could not..heh..fathom.

It was Jack and I that Maxim expected to find in the cottage that day; but instead he found my maid and myself; she who had grown old in my service long before I had embarked on this doomed marriage. She had warned me no good could come of it, but I had been young then and apart form my family. Now older, and much changed, she could visit me only infrequently when the tides permitted.

It was unfortunate that Maxim De Winter found us together. Maddened with his jealousy, assuming I had some other man or woman, some other human playfellow besides him to warm me, he burst into the hut, a rifle crooked in his arm. From the look in his eyes I know he had always intended to kill.

Oh how he screamed to see her. Her eyes bulging; her skin a green shimmer.

By his standards no doubt my maid was startling, still despite his panic I believe he knew what he was doing when he killed her. I think I hate him for that more than for his attempt upon my life.

He tried to shoot me through the heart, little knowing that in our kind the organ is displaced, the rib cage soft and turned to cartilage. I dropped, cold, not breathing, mimicking death; weeping inwardly. As he hefted our bodies into the sea, he swore, to see on me, as in miniature, those distortions and departures from his normality that he had been made to face full blown in my handmaiden.

Later when her body, further gone as it was in that great change which must comes to all of us, blew ashore he hailed it as mine, whether in ignorance or by design rejoicing that no signs of violence marred its bulk. How I cursed him for that, for keeping her body from its natural rest in the deeps.

It was then I started to crave revenge. To kill a woman was easy, to find one like I had been was harder, but not impossible. I suppose I regret that now, a little. She hadn't done anything to me, except to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Deep sea bathing in winter. Cramps would have got her if we had not. A pity our science doesn't run to guns, I had no way to make the marks he tried to make on me. Still the finding of her body wearing my wedding band, that was hard for him to shrug off with my maid buried in the De Winter mausoleum. I have to smile thinking of the lively awfulness, the putrescent remains of my maid, which when exhumed proved too horrific to prompt more than a rapid and lawless burning by the magistrate. A fate the Dauphne woman merely hints at in her narrative.

It shook him, the second body.

Made him confess to her, to my nameless afterbirth. My alter-ego: my huntress.

I'm glad I burned his house. I'm glad I have worse yet in store for him.

I wonder where they'll live. I wonder what he'll do when he finds out why she's nameless. Why she has no background, except the epistemological void. There are more things than flame-vampires, Deep Ones can conjure up. There are worse fates than fire.


Simon BJ [19th May 2009 post]