For many days, he-who-was-known-as-the-art-Master had loitered through those streets, far from his home and fireside family, searching - in the gruesome cafés, disused railway sidings and forgotten bins - for a sign, some scrawled communication, that art was alive and well, despite the silent ignorance otherwise abounding. I shall say no more than that he did not find it. Instead, he stumbled, one day of slanting rain, into a dark schoolroom where a teacher, with spectacles, gown and mortar board, gestured with a white cane to row upon row of upturned faces, faces innocent and fixed. Their brows were creased in concentration. The art Master took a spare desk at the back of the class, behind a po¬faced girl with golden plaids, and he commenced to absorb the room: its black walls and deep ceiling, the smudged panes set high where brown light struggled through … the exercise book resting on the desk before him. Carefully turning the front cover, but not without the slightest squeak, he saw revealed the first blank page, sharp white in the darkness. It reminded him of a canvas before the planting of paint, frighteningly empty. Meanwhile, the archetype teacher, standing before the speechless children, still waved the cane, seemingly oblivious of the art Master’s arrival. His whole being was centred on the one message he was now presumably conveying … but the string of words that flowed from his lips was very difficult to hear, let alone understand.
The art Master imagined himself at the front, in the teacher’s place, stressing to the children the value and beauty of art, perhaps explaining the philosophy of aesthetics - whether a canvas with one mere haphazard scratch be art or not - even exhibiting items of primitive carving and of classical painting. He dreamed of the lecture he would have made. He mused on his life and his family...
His dreams were suddenly dispersed, for his sullen eyes had noticed something peculiar about the teacher. There was a broad streak of blood across his brow, a deep, dripping scratch. Still unaware of the art Master’s wide-eyed curiosity, the teacher proceeded with the incomprehensible lesson that entranced the silent girls and boys.
No sooner had the art Master set his eyes on the fleshy gutter in the teacher’s brow, than into the classroom crept an old man, also spotting a mortar-board and bent like a grotesque sculpture. He shambled up to the first teacher and whispered in his ear. After a few seconds, when the words had been absorbed in his slow mind, the first teacher uttered the following unmistakable words:
“The class is dismissed.”
He grabbed a large clapperless bell from his desk and shook its silence violently. The children immediately erupted into cacophony as their shouts followed their forms through the door, leaving the startled art Master sitting at the back. At times of stress, he would often pray to Art, as poets of old did call upon their Muse … and he did this now, crushed his mind beneath Beauty and Art, those helpmates on many a previous occasion. One such, he recalled, was the period when his family was starving through lack of money. In desperation, he had stretched his supplicating hands to Art, as if it were a god, and, to support this plea, he had bent his body all night before a neighbour’s blazing log fire. The following morning, with no obvious solution to his problems forthcoming, he had made a terrible scratch across a virgin canvas poised on the easel. Need more be said than that the canvas was sold for an extraordinary amount of money to a foreign gallery.
Coming back to his present surroundings, he saw the teacher replacing the bell on the desk, meticulously ensuring that the imaginary clapper did not repeat its knell. The other, the wizened old man, slowly clearing the books from the untidy desks, gazed curiously above his half-spectacles at the seated figure.
“Who are you?” he monotoned.
“I am an artist, known in my home town as the art Master. I apologise if you feel that I have intruded, but I was captivated by this classroom as I passed.”
“As you passed?” the other intoned.
“Yes ... yes, I was roaming the streets, seeking work ... some artistic work. Perhaps I may be allowed to stay and paint this classroom?”
“Can’t you see, thicko, that we have a problem.” The old man motioned towards the first teacher, flopped in his chair and dabbing his wound. “We have no time to pander to strange intellectuals. So, yobbo, git!” The voice was cracked and twisted - like the neck.
* The cavalcade of ladies from the local Ladies Group stepped back to gain a better view, as the gallery’s guide passed from describing the intricacies of what appeared to be a blank canvas merely scratched diagonally to another depicting what looked like a black classroom with three strange shapes frozen in the middle of an intent conversation.
“I don’t like pictures with blood in it,” announced Dame Florence to Lady Dora.
(i) THE ROCKET AND THE EAP-HSW SHOULDERWITCH by Des Lewis
“His importance was in his attitude to seriousness,” said the serious young man, as he forgot to mention the errand for which he was there. His beaten brow creased - to notify the seriousness of his statement. His eyes were stern, unwavering, yet forgetful of their true concern - the fact that his legs were clamped in a huge bear trap.
His listener, a tall man, blonde and beaming, nodded assent (or was it a mere sign of not listening?) for his head was poised in the noose of a looming gibbet.
And now we drew back from the pair and could see a panoply of faces, upturned, dirty and attentive, peering at the platform.
Turning, but not before noting the import and tenure of the scene, we espied, erect beside the stage, a tapering, glistening rocket poised for the sky. It was blood-red.
Zooming back, our metaphorical camera and microphone picked up the signs of the following speech by the stern one to the fair:
“Having such an attitude, his humour, as sheer as the finest voile or organdie (fuschia in colour), was a scintillating network of wit and writhing repartee, offset by the seriousness of Socialism.”
“Lavish your praise as you may, but I will not turn my mind from the blood that oozes from your tattered limbs.”
“Your attitude I detest. My limbs may hang by a thread, but the spirit is pure, the sky is empty and I will not die.”
At that moment, the rocket’s motors roared, a gold splash of flame ribboning from the base. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the rocket lifted from the ground and surged into the birdless welkin.
The frowning one frowned the more and the rosebud-mouth of the other spewed petals of pink, a haemorrhage born from a noose that knotted.
We shaded our eyes from the giant buzzing flight above, as the frowning man fell, limbless, from the platform, his skull cracking on the edge of the BBC’s TV colour camera, but before he died, he stuttered out the following tale:
“I turned and turned again as I restlessly lasted the night. The moon glinted coldly through the hairline crack in the curtains, casting a peculiar glow throughout the room, but not enough to make any feature perceptible. From the eye of my skull, the nub of my brain, I churned, broke butterflies, like eggs, over melting cooking-bowls, sucked in gas, like sewage, through the muslin of my irritation, and blew out colourless bubbles, like beef gum, through the gentle night. Reaching my hand down, I felt (I knew I would) the crumpled form of a thickly twined manuscript, water-bottle bubbly, and I fetched it up, like vomit, from the bottom of the bed. Blowing the bubbles from the surface with my bad breath, I searched the dark pages but, of course, saw nothing in the aforementioned glow. Deciding to await dawn, however long this would take, I suddenly drowsed, soaked up dreamlets with my sponge and dawdled amid the non-Euclidean dregs of half-sleep. The bed was a boat on a sea of never. Dawn. Feelers of consciousness drifted into this substance, tentacular, becoming spectacular. Immediately remembering the pages that appeared beside my body during night’s vegetation, my hand stumbled over the coverlet, ginger-quick, quest-query, but grasped nothing. The bubbled parchment was gone. However, to entertain my attention, there was the most excruciating pain pain pain pain pain pain pain in my left (but as I speak, the memory is slightly swizzled, and right might be right) shoulder. Gurgled leaves forgotten, I rubbed at the nub of the blade and felt its garbled surface. (I do not wish to frighten you, but this I must tell...) it was as if I were rubbing half-solid tapioca, hot and moving! Shifting swiftly to mirror’s front, I turned and turned again before the crystal surface and, unmistakably, I perceived the crinkled visage of a minute, hag-like, snouted creature peering at me from the depth of my semiliquid shoulder. It snorted, silently, like a pig in soundproof placenta, words that, lip-read, meant nothing…”
(ii) LORG DAGG AND THE SHOULDERWITCH by Ab Bintiff
As the crowd dispersed, there was one who remained, expressionless, alternately staring at the disappearing glow of the rocket’s afterlight and the remains littering the blood-sputtered platform.
His name? I, Abraham, will tell you who it was not. It was not Clovis Camber of whom quaint legends are breathed. It was not Peter Jeffery that loathsome beard-like creature. It was not Desmond, the one who told of the first visit in words that were so carefully chosen. Finally, it was not the TV cameraman, since the vans and equipment had quickly disappeared to their corporate lair.
It was, in fact, Lorg Dagg, the Scandalous Scandinavian, renowned mountaineer and epic poet, who had travelled lands hither and thither, in search of tasteful mountains or long-lost scribes. He had even travelled the lands of Neb, finding not a trace of the forgotten Orlando Blueman.
His distinction, may I, Abraham, add, was not only such aforementioned skills, but the ludicrous disability of having only one testicle. May I also add that no woman had, as yet, discovered the lack.
To return to the story, as it must be told, this creepy-weepy Lorg Dagg continued staring at the two bleeding bodies draped over the stage. One, with black hair now dyed red, was clunched trunk-wise on the ground, whilst his still tattering legs twitched amid the red rubble on the wooden stage. The other, with fair hair acrew in spikes, had a corkscrew neck and a twisted death. But no blood on him.
Lorg, eyes drifting sanelessly towards the ghastly scene, moved forward, his tongue lolling up to his brow, so that he found it difficult to find his way. But he reached the stage and prodded his huge, shapeless tongue into the charnel. He sucked to suit his putrid palate. He smiled - for the meat was in no way greasy.
Suddenly ... over the brim of the other side of the stage, appeared the snouted shape of a raven-like witch, as large, seemingly, as Lorg’s head. It was (I, Abraham, must be hackneyed to convey the truth) hideous. It mouthed obscenities and its head turned a full clicking-circle. It peck-snorted on to the stage and scrubbled towards Lorg’s licking visage.
As it pussy-footed towards him, it said, “Have you any mimsy quee for my sliver spoo?”
Lorg looked up from his feast and said, “What?”
“I shall not repeat myself - I will merely peck your eyes out.”
“No!”
Lorg stroked the feather-fur of the birdpig in an attempt to placate it.
At last, Lorg tendered the following:
“Who are you and where do you come from?”
“I am Edalpo and I live in people’s shoulders.”
A momentary silence, as the torn ligaments beside them crackled. Then Edalpo continued:
“You see him, lying legless beneath your knees? I occupied his shoulder for many years. It was a good time. I was sorry to see him go - our crimes caught up with him. Ha! Ha! Ha! Our crimes caught up with him - and his friend there. Now, I have no home, no cosy muscle to wrap me through the cold, moonless nights. May I jump into the warmth of your shoulder?”
“No! Never! Never! Never! Never! Never! Never!”
At this point, Edalpo seemed to turn into a small, sharp-arrowed, rocket-like dagger. Fire ribboned from its squalid base and, like a pygmy’s dart, flew into Lorg’s shoulder.
His muscle turned jellyfishly, heated itself and churned porridge around the snouted beak. Then, speechless, he forgot his feast and clutched at his shoulder-blade.
He will never live without a companion again - not until he is dead.
You will hear of the episodes that dog his life hereafter.
In the meantime, do not forget the cameraman. I, Abraham, believe he recorded this scene from some unseen warehouse roof.
(iii) THE QUEST BEGINS? by Des Lewis and Ab Bintiff
How can you forget the one who peers at life through a TV camera? He who is a painter, photographer, bibliographer, naturalist, actor, poet and musician? How can you forget him, especially since he calls himself the art Master?
After the execution, he wandered the streets searching (in silent cafes, through the dust and graffiti of translucent windows, in strange, dark schoolrooms, under useless and forgotten bins, above rat-infested railway sidings and amid the hurly-burly of the town) for the alpine figure who had loitered beside the gibbet’s root.
So, you have not forgotten this man. Before the execution, he had had a vision of a spear of flame, a sudden fire on board, a hurtling aeroplane, huge as the sky whence it came (or was it a rocket burning and frizzling at both ends?). The vision gone, he could not even attempt to paint the half-remembered scene. So, giving the prepared canvas an angry scratch (a fibrous rip that awoke his wife and children), he learnt to make do with the photograph, instead.
* Lorg Dagg, unaware of the art Master’s avenging search, strode, weeks after the execution, along the street where ancient Orlo Blue had, many years before, spoken serious political words. It was a sombre street where one could espy faces only behind windows, if at all.
The suckliquid of his shoulder, to which he was almost accustomed, momentarily stank and excruciated, as if two bones had kissed and ground.
“Edalpo! Edalpo!” he shrilled. “Please have mercy on such a mere mortal as I.”
And from within (a disembodied hooting) so-called Edalpo turned frighteningly in the juices of his shoulder and said to his parasite:
“Number 246, that’s what we want. You are only up to 113.”
“Why? I repeat, seven times, why?”
“Because, yobbo, Tristan’s last words in his bear-trap were about Orlo Blue. He spoke - you heard this, you must have done - of Blue’s humour and seriousness. AND Blue lived at number 246 and we are going there to steal the legendary eel-brooch. Aren’t we?”
“So you tell me, feckless fiend.”
“And you know,” Edalpo continued in squashed tones, “why we want the eel-brooch? Of course you know. I have told you time and time again. It was Tristan’s ambition, in fact his only talking point when I knew him, his last words to me before he was executed. He yearned (broke china moths over greased bowls) for that eel-brooch, that symbol of union and disunion, ying and yang, curled and curling death. It will be our only pass-word and -port through The Cities of Neb (those terrible garlanded cities you will soon learn to love), over the Field of Onyx (where a birdish majesty roosts) and finally to the nerve-plains of Ka and Harchwee where our bliss will be complete.”
“Oh!”
“So, this is only the beginning (the oplade of our essence), this robbery of the twisty broochpiece. Blue (some called him Blueman, you remember, until he was snipped from life) knew what it was. Tristan knew what it was. And I know - me, Edalpo, mere badge of feather-flesh that I am. It will lead us, hopefully, through all the horrors, delights, dangers and sheer beauty of.... You must go! You cannot refuse! You are trapped around me, Dagg - you are my scabbard, mother and lover. O little Whitehead, we will stand or fall together.”
Edalpo turned fatwise between the blades of Dagg’s shoulders.
(iv) (A) THE EEL-BROOCH by Jeremy Helix and Tommy Mica
Abraham passed us the inky baton via sweet Desmond and now we relay the fourth part of the greatest true myth of all time. Rest assured - our eyes are peeled for the shuttling form of the so-called art Master with his Sunday Newspaper camera. As long as he is not around, we can tell the tale of Ample Clavinty.
* Soon after her husband dies, the widow continued inhabiting the fenced farm on the hill.
She did not marry the neighbouring straw-bestrawed farmer as many, us included, expected, but stewed amid the rough tables and chairs that Mr Clavinty had built. She chased unwanted spiders from corner to corner and finally fell ill from loneliness and bad food (squirrel hash).
As she lay twisting in pain on her squeaking iron bed, Lady Dora came to visit her. Parasol above (multicoloured) and hooped skirt below, she bustled, in a typically Auntish way, into Ample Clavinty’s chamber and said immediately:
“Really Ample, you are squirming so much I really believe you must have an octopus in your belly.”
This cheery statement brought a smile to Ample Clavinty’s bulbous face.
“You are a tonic, Dora, I am so pleased to see you.”
We apobogise, but we must cease this story of Ample’s death since we have espied the art Master shuffling atop a nearby hill. We must scat.
* Now we can continue for we have returned to Orlo Blue Street, dark and dankly quiet as it is. The lamp above splutters, about to exhume forgotten shadows across our brows. The gramophone emits French cafe music but so quietly that the accordion is a mere bluebottle. The air is still as if a sudden moth has become a frozen egg within the lamp’s flume. A floop of beige carpet is warm beneath the author’s bare limbs.
Ample died upon that ironing bed, a row of white-flesh planks starting up from her mottled breast and a snouted blister on her tongue. Dora wept beside her adopted niece’s renewed calm.
(B) LORG DAGG AGAIN by Des Lewis
Lorg Dagg and the Shoulderwitch reached 246 Orlo Blue Street at precisely moon.
“Remember Tristan. He must be proud of us now,” snapped Edalpo.
Lorg peered through the grime of the multipaned window and glimpsed the very hazy biform of giant wings in the shape of men crouched over a crinkled exercise book. One appeared to be mouthing through membrane and the other was writing with a quill.
“What now?” monotoned the bemused Dagg.
“Smash the glass. Before us stands the eel-brooch. Once in, we must pounce on to its back and let its flapping take us where it will.”
As if by automation, Dagg dealt a karate blow at the glass which subsequently shattered around him in a crystal shower. Forgetting the jagged remains, Dagg dove into the nebulous curls and feathers of the late Ample’s brooch.
He sat astride a scaly back with his shoulder by his side. Around him, curling strands of hair, splitsecond flicks of unseen membrane, the sting of glinting, twisted metals, the bobbing head of a strange proboscis that could not turn to see him ... and the undreams of lost love, failed rebellion and political execution.
This was the eel-brooch - or was it? I hope Edalpo will not be disappointed for he wants to start his quest in Neb (where Dagg has been before).
TWO FURTHER PROLOGUES
(A) THE EEL-BROOCH by Des Lewis
Two uniformed men Awaited Death in the dim death-cell: Wrigglers they were For their stomachs churned Convoluted butterflies. They knew that life offered nothing more. A turban of dimness Offered them this snailshell gift Of reverent environment: All that life offered now. One, Jeremy Helix, Remembered the past, Saw all leading inevitably to this cul de sac And wondered why be had bothered. A matt scene offered itself Soberly to the gaze of his memory: Joanna, soft-hued as chiffon, Played hopscotch with him, Helical rhythm on a pale country evening. Japanned tinges of twilight Twinkled on their gay eyes, As, hand in delicate hand, They strode the diaphanous lanes. The other, Tommy Mica, Face squashed in prayer, Saw God, a garish giant, Transilluminate the past: Diana, brown-limbed, black-haired, Opened her unsolicited love To the breasts of his urge. Deiform, their Nirvana Was the passion That ended not, an unstemmed urge Of river and sea, A Kronos bellowing at his twin. Mica’s hemisphere Was Diana’s hemidemisemisphere Of dihedral love, The ducal dilemma That yoked Mica in his prison And promised biform death. Helix and Mica stared coldly At surrounding walls. Not speaking, not thinking more. Joanna and Diana, binymphs, Now null, because unseen, Never to be seen, now infinitely little, Are figures on a converging plain, Hands stretched to each other, As plane meets plane On a hypershred universe. They died a cosmic death Because they never existed. They never received, accepted Those gifts of eel-brooches Which, theoretically, were pinned To their blossoming breasts By loving Helix and Mica In days of now unremembered bliss. The Helix-Mica duology Awaits the signal (creaking door) That will mean they will be ready To walk the bleak corridors To the blue moon death-chamber. A recurring sound, As of memories dissolving, Is the raven Who permitted the tense change From past to present: It only remembers But never understands. It squawks nervously On its post-Christian perch, ready To quack joylessly as they depart. Our vigil will soon be finished. Helix-Mica mumbles to himself But the words are lost In that coexistent silence, That pugnacious honeymoon Of two opposites. Joanna-Diana, now a vagina-myth, Is that monolith The Egyptians worship as their God, A misshapen pyramid toad. The lesbian iconicity Repels its own grim clasm. Eel-brooch aches in their heart, Its guilt vaguely remembers The Helix-Mica days of love - A squirm which is a precious eye. Helix-Mica, now wombed, Soars gracelessly from the execution To a soul-mist On which insects choke: Their one mind Is that awful clasm Which the vagina-icon Cannot withstand, cannot uphold. The eel-brooch twines, whines, Twists, twirls, spires And moves sinuously As it admits the clinging soul-fog Of the helical, mica oakapple: The eye blinks, waters And is sore at its entry. The worshipped flossed hole That Buddha-tends, Krishna pertains In Nirvanic, buckled torture, Of the Di-Jo chrism, Of ana-anna shewbread, Of the eternal prayer-wheel In desert plains, Expands its elastic skin For the cruciform Lixca To squirm its last path To the heaven it seeks. The two uniformed men, Now sacramental cirrostratus, Salute the transfigured female flesh On which they rubbed In their Life, before death Was imposed so inhumanly, Because their political views Were not in keeping with the state. The bodies, now beheaded, Of Jeremy Helix and Tommy Mica Met their graves At noon, 11 July 1971. The souls, now communion wine, Soaked like rich mist Into the fizz of the eel-brooch That had been gift From lover to loved Before revolution took their minds. Jeremy’s girl, Joanna, Lived until she was ninety-two In a crusty home for the aged She died friendless and penniless. She also found the eternal eel-brooch In the myth-converging night. Tommy’s girl, Diana, Died, heartbroken, When her Mica was torn. She never found the eel-brooch, Never tasted the Lixca elixir: She became a hole. The revolution, the cause and course Of the centripetal myth-conflux, Petered out in November 1971. The eel-brooch is still the serpent But is it only metal, And, aspirations and ideals, Are they no match For the Rational Rat of modern living?
(B) SCARRED by Clovis Camber
I am a wanderer through the cities of Neb and I meet up with many strange adventures, of which this is one.
Late last year I arrived at the city of Rull, a cluster of looming domes and scarlet towers, where the busy inhabitants scurry from door to door, shouting, chanting, laughing, talking, crying ... in their daily occupation. I entered this mumbling metropolis on horseback, immediately impressed by the huge orchid blossoms hanging like kaleidoscopic dewdrops over the streets, sometimes so thickly that they hid the sky and the scorching sun (for indeed Rull blisters under the soul-upheaving weight of excessive heat). The orchids provided a certain amount of shade and I was certainly thankful for that, having just left the hard, dry, biscuit desert where the sun is particularly remorseless.
Suddenly, from out of one of the doorways lining the avenue, burst a crowd of people crazily dressed in resonant colours and chattering as if they were inmates of Babel. This continued for about two minutes until they noticed me on my horse staring at them in wonder.
“Who might you be?” asked one particular man in green cape, scarlet socks and large black hat. This question was posed during a comparative silence, as all his compatriots stood stock still.
“I am Orlando, a wanderer of Neb,” I answered in as friendly a voice, as I could muster.
“Rull does not welcome strangers,” stated the man who had spoken before.
“I only need rest for the night and perhaps some food and drink. Tomorrow I will leave.”
“Orlando, you are welcome for one night at my house,” said the man, “but make sure it IS only one night.”
“Thank you very much, my good sir, and rest assured that I will not outstay my welcome.”
“Come with me, then.”
I followed the man as he limped to another door and beckoned me to enter. So I did enter...
Inside, colourful tapestries draped all the walls depicting events in the history of Rull - their wars, their festivals, their funerals, their heroes and their executions. The last looked particularly vivid for the embroiderer had spared no sensibilities in his realistic approach to presenting the gore and agony of torture. I quickly tore my eyes from these disconcerting scenes and thought again of my host’s activities - he had commenced to peel many juicy-looking fruits for my nourishment.
“Help yourself,” was his invitation. Smiling at him for his kindness, I filled my mouth with the bursting gourds, unconcerned about the juice trickling down the chin from my mouth and nostrils - for I had not eaten or drunk for several days.
My appetite replenished, I smiled again at my host and thanked him profusely for his goodness. He handed me a cloth to wipe the juice from my face and a sponge to clean from my robes the dark-red stains of strange luscious fruits.
“Remember, Orlando, you may rest and eat at my house for one night only,” emphasised this peculiar man who just sat and stared at me with round, piercing eyes unmoving his massive head.
“Those tapestries are very good,” said I nodding towards those coloured drapes.
“I did them myself,” he stated smiling.
“I particularly like the torture scenes ... especially that one where a maiden is being skewered like a joint of meat being prepared for the spit.”
“That is my prize work,” uttered the proud voice of this tapestry-worker of Enigmatic Rull.
During this short conversation, my mind had become hazier and hazier and the man-form became gradually a cluster of separate images (giant television lines and newspaper photo-dots in a seeming pointilliste nightmare) ... then blurring into a mass of grey, sliding slime. At first, I thought it was the heat, but then as these effects grew progressively worse, I began to fear that the fruits had not agreed with me, either because of a natural phenomenon or because the man had drugged them. Whatever the reason, the grey slime swamped my mind and I knew I was losing consciousness, subtly aware that my host, my nameless host, was smiling at my evident predicament. Assured that evil was afoot, I inevitably slipped away into a grey world where my thoughts were those of a zombie, not unconscious but completely unable to think originally. I no longer questioned my state, but took it for granted and, as the grey slime slid away, I looked at my host in a new manner, for he was now my master.
“How are you feeling, Orlando?” asked the man.
“Ready to obey,” I hackneyed, with the monotony of intonation which an automaton would tongue.
“I want you to answer this question. If you answer it wrongly, you will be tortured. But if you answer it correctly, you will be tortured even more...”
Even though I had been forced to believe myself in the power of this apparently insane man - willing to obey his every command - I still had the extreme human fear of torture and a mind aware enough to answer questions. The point here was to answer the question wrongly.
“If I said that I would alleviate your coming torture to a small extent, would you accept this offer? Is the correct answer (assuming you do not like torture) to this question - yes? That is my question.”
The man grinned and scratched his nails along the table.
At that moment, I felt foolishly trapped ... But, now, as I write this, I see that he was ludicrously insane ... ridiculously mad, just like the rest of the citizens of Rull many of whom, under the shade of the orchid blossoms, stared in at the window and gibbered.
“Strip!” he bellowed, “Yes, master.”
I laid across the table, wet and sticky with the spilt juices of the fruits we had both devoured. The lamp hanging from the ceiling blinded me - so I had to turn and look to the side. I saw the crazy, drooling man holding a huge file. Grabbing my elbow, he proceeded to rub it up and down, scraping the skin off in flakes until coming to the bone. Thereupon, the rutted metal ground away my bone and I screamed with unbearable pain feeling the file eating at the arm-joint. I could hear the gibbering of the spectators becoming louder and louder.
“Do you feel pain?” leered the man, his mouth chewing away at nothing and eyes burning with sadistic fervour.
“I do feel pain,” were the words I uttered, hoping they were the appropriate ones to his question.
He then took the file from my elbow and commenced to scrape away at my skull. First, my hair fell away in lumps and dropped to the floor, followed by the skin. He grated it up and down, scratched, sawed and ground. I could feel the hideous vibrations, reverberations stunning and splitting my head. My teeth were on edge as the grating continued, as he honed my bone. The file stropped and serrated my pure white skull. It ground and rasped. Against the grain. Gashed and scored. Etched and furrowed. Rutted. Fretted and chafed. Scrubbed and gnawed. Eroded and kneaded.
The man caught up the shreds and flakes, filled his mouth with them, swelling it like a bloated balloon until he swallowed them.
“Do you feel pain?”
“I do feel pain.”
“That will teach you come to the perfect city of Rull. Strangers are not welcome here. So, git, yobbo!”
I quickly grabbed my clothes and, forcing a path through the gibbering citizens, quit Rull - forever.
(v) THE PLOT THICKENS! by Ab Bintiff
The art Master, disguised in short trousers and purple cap, sucking a lollipop as decoy and clasping a grimy sixpence in his hairy hand, entered the local ABC’s Saturday Morning Pictures to see the last episode of FLASH GORDON - TRIP TO MARS. He thought he might catch Lorg Dagg snigger-snogging in the back row, thus ending his avenging search for him.
He was a peculiar man, this Jack of all Arts (Master of none?). He had a wisp of hair curled over his dreamy brow and a couple of molars that always ached. He carried a canvas-stained knife in his left pocket. In his right, a crumpled sheet of paper bearing a long poem which he once wrote (THE EEL-BROOCH) or did someone else?
It was this poem (based on a factual dream three Midsummers ago) that was now driving him to search out Lorg Dagg who seemed to represent in his mind some threat and poison to the building and maintenance of this and other myths.
Leaving the picturehouse (where the Flash Gordon film had so entranced him that he had forgotten to peer through the 1/4 darkness for his so-called prey), he swept down the driving road, droplets of rain cascading off his face. His little mind in turmoil, he created visions of screaming passengers being filleted by funnelled flames, of crossply wings scootering across another sky to another bridge of reality and of a medusa necklace (or is it an eel-twisted broochpiece?) that flies down and beyond the hurtling aeroplane.
You know, this is all getting a bit much. Dear Reader, I expect your mind is askew with conglomerates such as ana-anna shewbread, nebulous jewellry (seeming to be a multi-cross between Ample’s brooch, the ‘Love-ghost’ of Helix and Mica, Dagg’s steed to Harchwee and a moth-like image of a crashing aeroplane or rocket), snouted images of an inperching witch, meta-authors one of whom is myself (some old and some new, some told and some yet to come) and multicoloured characters (Dagg, art Master, Mica, Helix, Di-Jo, Ample Clavinty, Dame Florence, Lady Dora, Edalpo, Orlo Blue (Orlando) and many more to come).
Rest assured, the confusions can only grow worse.
Draw your own conclusions, draw your very own.
I am now sitting amid the debris of 246 Orlo Blue Street where Helix and Mica lived before they were snatched away for political execution. The place has been ransacked (for what, who knows). The complete works of Tristan and Clovis Camber are scattered all over the floor - pitiful to see such works as THE TERROR OF THE TOMB and SCARRED torn and bitten by policedogs.
* But who WAS executed under the burning TV lights? The authorities intended Helix and Mica to be the victims. WE know that a certain ‘Tristan’ told a strange tale after cracking his nut on a camera. And Edalpo? He said that Orlo Blue lived in Orlo Blue Street. And if Tristan lived there, Clovis could well have done, too. I am left with this picture:
Jeremy Helix Tommy Mica | | | | Tristan Camber Clovis Camber | | Orlo Blue
The downward stroke is ‘creation of’ or ‘co-existent with’ or ‘pseudonymy with’.
However, do not forget that Edalpo knows more than any of us meta-authors.
Lorg Dagg? Is he an innocent bystander to an inevitable myth convergence?
The art Master? Des Lewis? Peter Jeffery? Ample’s husband?
Do not miss the next exciting episode of ‘Flash Gordon Meets The Electric Eel’ in this theatre next week!
(vi) NEB by the art Master
Grey-green trees carry the burning breeze over the ruminated plains and the squealing sun maculates the shades with its own burnished flame.
Tuff is blown, almost sensuously, beneath the sun’s arson, far from any city’s grizzled gate.
Twisted foliage survives, incredibly, its own internal combustion.
Unseen savages, a full span beneath the citizen’s ken, make majolica in hidden caves where the sun’s auto-da-fe does not reach nor care. Subhuman, they grunt to each other’s darkened visage, unaware of the form that feeling takes.
Inelegant beasts, of perhaps every shape and design, squabble as they lurch from tree to tree. When darkness arrives, their glinting eyes speckle the orderless void and strange snouts snuffle at invisible pools.
Yes, when darkness arrives, its starless eclipse is complete and knows no homesick stranger. Subfusc liquid flows from the disappearing sky and drowns vision with consecutive orbs of blind jet. Inelegant breasts of breathing, steaming swartness. Sweating corpses enmesh with putrid foliage. Crematory peacocks peck at inurned earthnight. And then, as the last stonecurlew drops its song into sepulchral silence and as King Vulture roosts above the snoring swine, night is surely entire.
But, in the caves, ineffectual fire speaks the profiles of contemplative savages, the dying embers of exhausted kilns. Mumbles pass between them and then die, for the raven sits within their small brains and folds its dead wings over thoughts and makes of them tenements of sick clay.
Night is never eternally entire. A screaming arc of sun suddenly curves over the broken horizon and broad day is created from lances, squeals and streaks of foliage-entwined effulgence. The grey-green trees seem to stretch out for each lightning flush and play optics with the ogling eye in the sky. And, if you follow the burning branches for as many miles as it takes, if you skim through the dappled forests, brushing the priceless jewellery of light from your eyes at each unexpected turn, you will inevitably reach the great cities of Neb.
The plains end and then … walls and walls shaped into the purlieus and conurbations of Neb. Courtyards, highways and byways, yards, squares, precincts, patios, a mosaic of enclosed life and settled boundary. Dust, brick and humanity merge to make the house-number mentality.
However, Neb is not all dust, brick and humanity, for the utter heat has created the need for shade and peace … and huge orchids bend in tutelary magnificence over the crosswork streets; nodding blossoms, in a riot of multicolour, standing on the slenderest of stalks; lush ferns afforested round; turfen petals crowning and concealing the sun; kaleidoscopic carnivals and rhapsodies of leaning bloom.
But the dust, brick and humanity remain, despite the cosmetic.
Moving closer beneath the floral splendour, I can now espy the fleeting forms of the inhabitants. They dart from door to door on innumerable missions, featureless faces on insane tasks. Their vestments are crazily colourful and they bear rainbow parasols as they bob, cleverly, between the fragile stalks.
Intermittently, spontaneous groups formed, nodding and shaking in a dance of communication. But they are unaware of my interested eyes, they know not of my reconnoitring camera - for I am convinced that here is to be the first scene of an incredible story.
(vii) THE FIRST COMING By Ab Bintiff
I am an inhabitant of Neb and I would like to relate an incident that occurred at the margin of my memory many years ago.
This was when we cityfolk were beginning to forget the incredible visit from one-balled Orlando Blueman (I think that was his name). Forget, did I say? Not even now can I forget his face as he fled from our wonderful city of Rull - what an hilarious sight! At first, we had thought that old Clovis had been too harsh on the poor innocent. However, now that that lunatic is dead, we can freely say, without fear of repetition, that his choice of filing torture was almost as exquisite as planting an octopus inside an old maid’s belly.
Anyway, all this is beside the point. A couple of years after the Orlando Blueman incident, old Clovis died, leaving me to care for his teenage daughters, Diana and Joanna. These twins (for twins they were) were alike as two squids in a squirrel. Their beauty was akin to none and startled even the most dour male into a raving beast for they wore their gorgeous breasts uncovered and spread their brown limbs beneath the tallest blossoms. It was for me to preserve their chastity until wedding bells brought them worthy cocks.
To be frank, I found it extremely difficult to cope with their impulsive actions. No sooner did a project poke its proboscis into their (I must admit) backward minds, than they upped and implemented it, resulting in many a tricky situation. For example, their gratuitous taunting of one Simon Heman led to a most gruesome suicide, for he was as one-balled as the then almost legendary Blueman.
One day, their nubile bodies were shade-bathing beneath carefully nurtured flossoms and I was inspecting their relaxation from a hidden porthole in my humble house. My eye, my gentle eye, was ever upon them to ensure their own and others’ safety and this day was no exception.
Suddenly, I could see through the thick shades that the sky was gradually darkening. This is a rare occurrence in Neb during daytime, so it caused me to start and stare in quiet awe. Could it be the arrival of rain? No. God forbid!
The gorgeous duo remained oblivious of this elementary quirk, for their thoughts were with mere trivialization. However, many other inhabitants stepped from their doors and surveyed the frondy sky from beneath their parasols. Their tittering was certainly mute, as their careful projects dissolved beneath the mystery that met their wide-eyed gaze.
Could it be true, but was the sky actually flapping like a monstrous moth? No, it was fluttering like a gorgeous butterfly and there were shreds of flesh and grated bone in its chumping beak. With each huge flick of its gossamer wings, the light dimmed and brightened so fast that it was like a very old film.
The flish-flash continued as snowflesh fell in flakes of stinking legend. Then came lumps of it and as they broke on the blossom-stems or on the rutted back of our mother earth, the stodgy stuff split like matted eggs to reveal knots and knots of frantic eels mixed with what seemed squid and jellypus. I say frantic, for they beat their ends together.
Joanna and Diana were screaming, for their little minds could not encompass such scenes.
But, soon their screams were to be justified. For the eels upstarted and ran their sticky bodies up their luscious limbs, felt the floss at the top and crept into the smelly holes. The girls did not writhe - they only stared and jabbered. And me - I could not move from my hatch as I was transfixed as my beloved Christ had been to his cross.
Then, the sky brightened and the cityfolk lifted their heads from their praying palms. Diana and Joanna, mute as dead babies, seemed statuesque. Nobody, except me, noticed their bellies twitching in time to the death of the flickering film.
Normality came and the tormasma was duly forgotten by the friendly folk of the city. But, now, Joanna and Diana are mute and bedridden - and I am their everwatchful nurse, a duty for which I still suffer and decay.
In my quiet moments I compose poems and I think this one is an apt ending to my otherwise in conclusive tale, an ending which is personal (and perhaps derivative) but an ending that is certainly telling:-
Squid Christ
Plank on Plank, the T-cross Is humped along the dusty streets By Jesus Christ. Acres Of clambering faces unscrew From robes to see this struggle Of man and burden. * Christ, beard straggling, sweat-wet, Down his bearded chest, Knows that he is to die. Two sky-marked crosses Already grow from the earth, Blood-dripping from their victims, Two death-trees For the Devil to suck. * Rammed by the drumming hammers, His tree is wicked, its Very crotch insect-ridden, Its very headpiece a yellow tooth. Nail by nail, nail By bloodspitting nail, Christ’s limbs are stapled To the wooden planks. * As each limb’s pinned Another sprouts for pinning: As each foot, as Each hand is split, Another fingers forth From Christ’s streaming sides. * As the sky shudders With the thuddering of hideous fire, The wailing spectators Watch a screwing octopus Wriggling its pinned blubber And tortuous tentacles On this tall tree of justice. * Then, the squid ceases to squirm, Becomes a collapsed sac Pinned by one nail to the leaning cross. * As the crowd disperses A figure takes the collapsed bladder From the tree And throws it to the dying wind, To the earth whose loving geyser Blows gently into it: It expands steadily Till a shining balloon. This is God? * No, this is the poet’s dream, A fragile skin of air That cannot be explained By any pen, especially his. It is the web he forgets, It his way of showing That his mind is as secret As the death that comes.
INLOGUE I
WHEELS OF TIME By Cax
I knocked at the door, as the time for my visit had come. Almost immediately, it was opened by a young woman dressed in a white blouse and a pale blue skirt out of which two nicely shaped legs stood on the porch step.
“Yes?” she said, as she felt the weight of her dark brown hair, hanging long and curly over her ears.
“My name is X________.”
“That means nothing to me. What do you want? I’m in a terrible hurry.”
“I’m sorry to disturb you Just as you are going out,” - the time was about six p.m. - “but this was the only opportunity I had.”
The woman looked puzzled at first, but when I explained my presence there, she gave me a knowing look and invited me inside.
The living-room was very respectable and conventionally decorative.
“Sit down. will you?”
Did I say ‘conventionally decorative’? It was indeed except for one thing. Not owning a watch, I automatically looked up at her clock. The hands, one big and one smaller, did not move at all, but two sets of twelve numbers revolved around the perimeter, the outer circle for the minute hand and the inner one for the hour hand, thus telling the time in this way. You can imagine the difficulties in deciphering the time of day on such a device. The hands were static at ten o’clock exactly, if the numbers had been in the customary positions of an ordinary clock.
“Now, X________, read on...”
The woman smiled coldly and relaxed back into the armchair.
I took the manuscript from my inside pocket and opened it at the first page. Glancing up at her pretty, dimpled face: decked with pink spectacles and a mole on her left cheek - but ‘mole’ is not the right word, having connotations of ugliness, for this mark set off her beauty, was the focus of her female symmetry, as it were. I read and this lasted for five or ten minutes, broken only by my coughs and slips of the tongue.
“Thank you, X________.”
“Well? What do you think? Can you tell from this one example of my work…?”
“X_______, I shall be frank. You have delayed the start of my evening out. I suppose it’s my own fault - I never turn away budding writers, it’s so discouraging for them - but you have come here with absolute rubbish. The crude symbolism of the fence is trite and, may I say it, puerile. It’s one extended piece on a phallic theme, with no definite conclusion, no rhyme or reason - it just tails off…”
“Thank you for your time - I shall be leaving you now,” I said, disconsolate but unrepentant.
“No, don’t go! I still don’t want to discourage you. Have a cup of decaffeinated coffee with me - what did you actually mean to express?”
“My inner soul, perhaps. Or an ultimate symbol.”
“Oh. dear, what idealism!”
I watched her, superior as she supposed herself to be, watched her bosom rise and fall with her breathing, watched her legs crossing and uncrossing as she spoke, watched her mouth wriggle out words of supercilious benevolence, watched her mole, watched it until I watched nothing else.
“Yes, idealism is your flaw, X_______, or can I call you X_________? Try and write for the mass market - forget your principles, your INNER soul…”
She laughed. She squirmed in the armchair and laughed again. The mole laughed, laughed and squirmed on her face.
“A good detective story may suit you. From what you read tonight. I can see you have a modicum of talent, but channelled in the wrong direction, eh?” The mole jumped up and made coffee.
“May I say how enthralled I am by your clock?” I said, pointing to it with my left hand. “Where did you come by it?”
“X_________, you have not been listening to what I have been saying. I have been trying to help you, you know? The clock....? Oh, it was a present from my late husband.”
“Don’t you find it irritating?”
“Yes, at first. But after a while you get used to it. See, it is ten to ten at the moment...”
“Hum, I see. In ten minutes’ time the clock will be like any other clock in the country, will it not?”
“Yes, I suppose it will be.”
The mole sipped at her coffee. “I’m afraid you will have to be going now, X________, I’m sorry I had to be so harsh with your story, if story it was. Any way, I think you should apologise too, don’t you?”
I remained silent. I wanted to see that clock when it was ten o’clock. I just had to. It was now seven minutes to ten.
“Well, goodbye, X_______. Write something else, and post it to me.” The mole rose. The numbers moved, minute by minute.
I remained silent.
The mole grew angry. “Well, are you going? You must go now. I HAVE been very tolerant of you, as I am with all budding writers.” The mole quivered and turned red.
The numbers moved, second by second - the wheel of time. Six minutes to ten.
“Why don’ t you speak? You must go, you know?”
“No,”
“What? Please leave my house.”
“No, not at the moment. In a few minutes, perhaps.”
“Get out, or I shall call the police!”
“No.” - five minutes to ten - “no, I will not.” I placed my hand on the receiver.
She struggled with me, but I managed to hold her off. Accidentally, I tore her white blouse and caught a glimpse of her breasts, as she quickly rectified her apparel.
“I shall go at ten o’clock precisely.”
“No, no, no! Please go now. You will make me frantic ... I shall publish your piece, if you leave right now.”
The mole held my arm with her shaking hand. “Yes, you will be a famous writer.”
“I don’t want to be famous.”
She pummelled at my chest with her tiny fists. “Go! Go! Please, go!”
Three minutes to ten.
“I shall give myself to you - tomorrow night. You will be able to have me.” At this point, she stripped off her blouse, as if giving me a trailer for a film. Her pointed tits, firm and round, brought a fever in my body and a backwash of saliva in my mouth. But I withstood the temptation. She started to run from the room, but I barred the way, hugging her close, the aureoles of her nipples pressing into my chest.
Two minutes to ten. The numbers revolved on their axis, slowly, oh so very slowly.
“Oh, please, please go!” she screamed, her eyes red with tears.
I held her tight to me again, so she was unable to move. I absolutely refused to submit to my passion, though it was arising second by second. My veins were bursting with fire.
“Go! Please! I beg of you! Go! Go!” She was hysterical. Her brinkmanship had failed.
One minute to ten.
My passion rose and rose, hot and salty. It climbed, breathless and reeking with sweat. The female body nested into mine, as if into a cup of ribbed satin. My passion was on the point of complete victory just as the numbers swivelled into normality, as they circled, side-stepped to ten o’clock precisely. The clock synchronised with the world.
The mole disappeared. Not the body, but the mole on her face faded out. Passion cooled, as if with the dissolving of the very focus, the very core of her being. I was disgusted. physically nauseated by the THING I held in my arms, by the nub of the world’s venereus entropium…
As the numbers revolved out of line once again, as they embarked on their unwholesome journey of twelve hours, the mole began to appear again. It crystallized into being, but I remained disgusted. I threw her or it from me in horror, and rushed from the house, ensuring that my manuscript was still in my pocket.
(viii) THE MANUSCRIPT By Des Lewis
I had a manuscript in my pocket, a very thin manuscript of which I was and still am very proud. I was taking it to Rull so that their publishing firm, Castle Neb Associates, could consider it for publication. The manuscript was in fact one of my best short stories (or so I thought), just the sort for Castle Neb, publishers extraordinary. However, such was the adventure I had in Rull during my visit that I decided to write another story about it, a story even better than the one I carried there. And the story about my visit to Rull is the one you are now reading. So that YOU can judge which story is better, I now reproduce the manuscript I then bore in my pocket:-
* The Fence
Mr Clavinty had just painted his fence. He was very proud of the smooth, white finish. “That’s a PURE surface!” he muttered to himself, admiring the wide stretch of the fence.
He cleaned his brushes, put away the remaining paint in his shed and closed the door on the job ... but not before giving another knowing look at the fifty yards of white wood, six foot high planks, separating … what from what? Clavinty had never considered the purpose of the fence. He had taken it for granted and, even now, he did not question it.
In fact, Clavinty owned the acreage on both sides of the fence. He was indeed not a questioning man, but a true example of Voltaire’s Pangloss: everything around him, everything that happened to him, was for the best. Life was a gift of God, and all was as it should be.
The morning after the painting of the fence, Clavinty rose at about six. as the sun was peering over the rim of the horizon. His wife, Ample, would sleep for another hour or two.
He drew back the curtains, to admire the world, and his part of it. He SAW SOMETHING THAT WAS NOT HIS! It scored a furrow in his soul. He saw a huge dirty black mark daubed over his newly-painted fence. One large agglomeration of tags and pieces in esoteric blotches. They were ugly marks. They were evil marks, ungodly marks, crude and greasy, not carefully applied. but splashed with cruel spontaneity over a great deal of the pure whiteness.
Clavinty was shocked? Clavinty was ... flabbergasted, appalled? No, he was insane with fury. He was undone, unzipped! He scratched his nails along the cement wall of the bedroom, in despair.
He rushed headlong from the room to his shed, grabbed the remaining white paint and the brushes so carefully cleaned the night before. He then proceeded to paint over those evil, black marks with righteous gusto; applied the paint in thick gobs, but he found it most difficult to destroy any impression of blackness behind the white. However thickly he plastered with his busy brush, be could still see a nuance of latent darkness, menacing, lurking, clandestine. However, after a while, he was satisfied with the rectification. He surveyed his workmanship and, although the previous day’s pride was slightly dampened, he still admired the pure white fence, stretching magnificently across his land.
He cleaned the brushes, threw away the empty paint-tins and commenced his day’s work.
Clavinty had dreams and, lately, those dreams had become rather vivid. He dreamed at night of his fence, his white fence. He saw storms battering it to the ground. He saw black patches seeping through the whiteness, spreading, ever widening. He saw the wood rotting, festering, growing fungoid. And he saw little night critters, fresh from burrows of Hell, with pots of black paint. But the fence in reality stayed white, or as white as one could expect with those hideous streaks and smears craving to escape their prison.
Clavinty grew quite disturbed. He hated nightmares. he had always hated nightmares. They made him feel ill, polluted. The fence became an all-encompassing concern. Each morning, he would peer tentatively from his bedroom window to see if it was still intact, unsullied, and it always was.
Clavinty, as each day passed, became more and more proud of his fence. To his eyes, it looked straighter, higher, stiffer, it was majestic, each plank stretching out to touch the sky, rigid with noble beauty, erect, upstanding. If he had not discarded it as being too far beyond the pale of reason, he would have sworn that the fence was growing, sprouting from the ground, an integral limb of the earth. The fence was the symbol of his pride, a token of his own sturdy magnificence. Mrs Clavinty said the fence was in the way.
None the less, Clavinty’s fears started to grow alongside his pride. He thought of that ugly black stain behind the beautiful smooth white surface. There was only one solution. He would burn off ALL the paint with a blow-lamp and then repaint it with some newly-acquired white gloss.
“Why have you got to bother about that old fence?” grumbled Ample, his wife.
“Because it’s important to me,” he answered, looking disdainfully at Mrs Clavinty.
“What’s it for anyway? It only cuts straight across our potato field.”
Clavinty ignored the last remark. He took the blow-lamp from the shed, advanced towards the fence and proceeded to burn off the paint. He felt the catharsis in his own body, as the paint dripped from the wood and disappeared. Whether the wood was abnormally dry, whether the blow-lamp was faulty, whether it was an act of God … the fence caught fire. It started with one plank and soon a blazing inferno spread the length of the fence. Clavinty was helpless as he watched the planks crackle and groan in agony, as if the night critters of his dreams were squealing, sizzling sucking-pigs.
The fence crashed to the ground in flames. He could not believe his eyes. It was wholly destroyed and the ashes sank into the soil.
To say Mr Clavinty was heartbroken is an understatement beyond all imagining. Ample Clavinty, of course, wept at her husband’s funeral … as they lowered him into the hole. But we believe her grief was short-lived , for a neighbouring farmer with an eye on the comely widow and on the now fertile potato field came courting. Will the farms merge and prosper?
* Now I will relate my adventure in Rull. Entering this city is like coming upon the most disorganised pop festival imaginable - haphazard groupings of multicoloured individuals lounging beneath crazily-plumed blossom-shades and listening to onyx-bred notes of plucked instruments. Most ignored me and some scowled. They continued sucking at strange and even stranger gourds and fruits. Those who did not lounge scattered whither I knew not, but their minds were presumably stamped with intention - presumably. I thought their words gibberish, but equally they may have thought that I was a giraffe or even an octopus.
Clutching my valuable manuscript to my chest I entered the motley throng, intending to ask the most sensible-looking of the inhabitants to show me the way to the buildings of Castle Neb, publishers extraordinary. The first one I asked was a staid-looking dwarf and he gesticulated to his thumb and said:-
“Suck it, dear one, and I will tell you all, O fair one.”
I quickly approached another individual whose beard even sprouted from his forehead. His finger did not point the way but merely shot up my nostril and, chimney-sweep that it was, brought down gobbets of snot turd. Despairing slightly, I approached an aged man who was painting a fence that surrounded a shuttered house. He daubed each plank separately rather than in glorious sweeps across large and more manageable expanses. I crept up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, upon which he shot round, startled twitches winging across the incredible wrinkles of his aged face.
“Yes?” came the cracked voice.
“I have a manuscript for publication. Will you be so kind as to point the way to Castle Neb, publishers extraordinary?”
“Nope. I certainly … will not. We do not welcome intellectual yobbos in this community, so git!”
I was most certainly taken aback, for he reminded me so much of a character I had created in another story, an old schoolmaster - I forget the title of it now.”
“I am sorry if I have given the impression that I am an intellectual, but the manuscript contains a story so straightforward it could be right from the pages of a popular Sunday newspaper.”
“Mow, look, sirrah, we have enough trouble in Rull without your sort coming with your sordid symbolism and suchlike muck. Just consider, we were a quiet community until THEY came and now you.”
At the word ‘they’ he pointed to an unnoticed tower of scaffolding upon which swivelled a TV camera, overlooking the city and its denizens. The old man continued:-
“They come from the BBC and are filming us for some high-brow documentary. O, how they look down upon us!”
I must admit that I sympathised with the old man’s point of view, but I responded:-
“I stress that I am no intellectual. My story is about a simple man simply painting a fence … just like you, in fact. There is assuredly no hidden symbolism or suchlike muck.”
“Can I read it, laddie?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, return with me to my abode. Follow.”
I followed, without noticing that the TV camera revolved its eye along the path we took. I did not notice, for I was genuinely surprised to see that the old man’s abode was not the one whose fence he had been painting.
We reached his abode without more ado - a crazy Coggeshall-type house, seeming to tilt in all known directions. But more strange than that, two crones were shade-bathing in deck chairs before the charnel door. Uglier crones I have never seen - senescent locks overbrimming palsied and toothless visages and drivelling tongues lolling from withered holes.
“These are my … er … daughters, Joanna and Diana. They do not speak, so please excuse them,” crackled the old man.
I was keenly disturbed by these figures but I decided to shrug off the obvious implications. As I ruminated thus, the old man collapsed into another creaking deck chair.
“Give me your manuscript, young man.”
I did so but not without a modicum of trepidation. I passed it to his tendered claw, noticing the still visible TV camera click-clocking into position on its tall plinth. There was a peculiar huddle d man silhouetted behind it. Perhaps I would see myself on BBC2 when I returned.
…Abruptly, the old man burst out in a series of uncontrollable cackles and pointed insanely as the print before him. He spluttered some unintelligible words and unrepeatable expletives. And then even more abruptly, the terrible crones rose stiffly from their chairs, yellow pus bubbling from their mouths. They steadily approached with two huge paint-brushes in their hands.
So sudden was their unexpected action that, before I could make the appropriate reaction, they had dipped their brushes in the thickest and whitest paint I had ever seen and proceeded to slap it all over me. I spluttered and cartwheeled beneath their daubs as great gobs of white sploshed thickly over my clothes and skin, as it dribbled inexorably down my tightening throat. Eventually, I wrenched myself clear and, like a white lunatic, ran screaming down the street, ran until I suddenly froze - ALL STUCK UP!
Well, that was an experience … I am lucky to be able to tell it. A friendly BBC technician cleaned me up and sent me on the right direction home … but not before saying the following peculiar words:-
“It’s luck they didn’t do an Orlando Blueman on you - they scraped stuff OFF him, they put it ON you! Ha! Ha! Ha!.”
Anyway, I trust you have enjoyed this straightforward story … but beware - it may be even more significant when viewed within a greater story.
COMMENTS (I) by Peter Jeffery
Now, let me tell you, & let it be a terrible warning to you, that you very nearly didn’t get any remarks on your literary efforts … A sheet of paper Xeroxed on one side & typed on the other looks very similar to a sheet of paper Xeroxed on both sides … Now when the typing is headed “The Visitor ‘The Family Owned Independent Newspaper’ 1874-1974 Centenary Year” & the Xeroxing on the reverse is clearly of a boring periodical about insurance I was momentarily led to believe that the said boring periodical had included an article about ‘The Visitor’ … I have now shout the window & the room has grown amazingly quiet very suddenly … I shall smoke a cigarette, sip a cup of tea … & read your story (ies?) … the beginning of the piece is viewed & heard through ‘our metaphorical camera and microphone’ & is this metaphorical camera the same as ‘BBC’s large TV camera’ on which the serious young man cracks his skull? … I have yet to take into account the blonde man whose neck is in the noose, the actual content of the serious young man’s story & the rocket itself. ‘The EAP-HSW Shoulderwitch’, like all good stories within stories, has no apparent connection with the story that contains it … the rocket itself seems to me to be just a piece of extra spectacle thrown in to gild the gingerbread of the execution … The young man takes himself too seriously &, one suspects - no, I suspect, sees himself something like Christ crucified surrounded by thieves … bear-trap:- crown of thorns?? Spikes sticking in leg/head?, the young man has forgotten ‘to mention the errand for which he was there’ (saving the world?? :- Christ again)…
* …Bintiff, for now the author, chooses such a guise throwing aside, for a time at least, the Des-Mask … It is almost, indeed, as if the cameraman were recording the scene ‘from some unseen warehouse roof’ with a telephoto lens picking out the ‘talking head’ of Bintiff then sweeping swiftly into the two bodies, to Lorg’s head, to Edalpo (doubtless Oplade spelt backwards) … The cinematic technique is more of the nature of a television play crossed with a sports commentator than anything else. Would you not agree? … I will admit that I don’t see what EAP-HSW stands for…
* Well, the first question here arising is just who is recording the scene? For we are told at the beginning that the cameraman has just gone off searching & clearly no longer has his camera trained on Lorg Dagg … The cameraman, it now turns out, is none other than the art Master … We learn in this part that the young man in the bear trap was called Tristan although I don’t think you provide a surname, there can be little doubt that this is none other than Tristan Camber … The whole of the foul Camber family / Orlando mythos seems to be dragged in. I should not be surprised to find Clovis (whose final act was to collaborate with myself in the composition of his undoubted masterpiece ‘The Statue’ q.v.) being hauled into part IV or even the statue itself finding some place in a later part of ‘The Visitor’. More Orlandiana in the form of the Cities of Neb, of course, & who could doubt the identity of the ‘birdish majesty’ who roosts upon the Field of Onyx … With ‘the nerve-plains of Ka and Harchwee’ we are surely falling back into The Egnisomicon … It looks to me as if all of the various strands of hideous Lewisite mythology are gradually being drawn in together: The Egnisomicon, the Camber/Orlando cycle, the core mythos, the philosophies of TaM / The Fence etc.
* ‘The Eel Brooch’ … The connection with the two condemned men in the poem & ‘The Visitor (I)’ is immediately apparent. Or is it? … The Mrs Kane* is of course the wife of farmer Kane of fence-fame. I think possibly that ‘The Fence’ ought to have been included in ‘TV’ in order to make the Mrs Kane episode somewhat clearer & perhaps you will include it at a later point … The octopus in Mrs Kane’s belly puts me in mind of the sensation of Edalpo in the shoulder … & also lines 3-5 of the ‘Eel Brooch’ … Is the long poem which the art Master carries E-B? And so we go on into the involuting narrative until the author bursts in a la Barth ‘You know, this is getting a bit much’. Then we are brought to your resolution / confusion … Of this passage I refrain from comment for here the author is giving out the comments & meta-comment from me would only confuse things further … I shall mention here that a visitor to my room picked up the MS & read about half of it with some enjoyment & even (he claimed) comprehension.
===================== 2006 NOTE FROM DFL: *KANE SEEMS, FOR SOME UNACCOUNTABLE REASON, TO HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO CLAVINTY IN THE RECENT RE-TYPE, BUT I AM CONVINCED THE ORIGINAL TEXT IS OTHERWISE UNCHANGED. FURTHERMORE, THE ABOVE ARE THE FIRST SET OF COMMENTS FROM PFJ (WHO WROTE THEM CONCURRENTLY IN LETTERS TO ME WHEN THE VISITOR WAS BEING WRITTEN BY MYSELF AND WERE, AS SLIGHTLY DELAYED FROM THE TEXT UPON WHICH HE WAS COMMENTING, THEN ABRIDGED AND BODILY CONTAINED WITHIN THE ACTUAL TEXT OF THE VISITOR AS EXEMPLIFIED ABOVE) - AND THESE COMMENTS ABOVE SEEM TO PROVE THAT THE VISITOR WAS WRITTEN IN 1974, NOT 1973 !!
(ix)
LORG DAGG ARRIVES IN NEB by Des Lewis and Ab Bintiff
A solitary figure crosses the incredible Ana-Anna desert plains, his body aching from every step, his blonde hair shining with flowing sweat. This is, of course, the Scandalous Scandinavian, one-balled Lorg Dagg. He needs all the grit that he can muster to trudge towards his destination, the strange city of Rull.
He is not alone. Edalpo, squatting securely within his shoulder, this ‘old man of the sea’, periodically prods him with words of encouragement, goads him with the goal:-
“Do not fear, dear Dagg, thirst not, for when we are at Rull, the first third of our journey is complete. When we are at Rull, we can produce the brooch before the Elder and this will allow him to give us the Onyx Ticket. Bliss, yes, blessed bliss is awaiting us at the end of our days … the gorgeous Egnis will flow in our veins. Gold will map our thighs and fire will be as silver liquid to our gullets. We must suffer so that paradise can be ours. So, tread on, brave alpine lad, forge ahead.”
“I wish you would not talk so much - your beak scratches my tender bones.”
“I will keep my remarks to a minimum.”
The figure of Lorg Dagg is almost comical as it plods over dune and crevice, as it seemingly talks to itself. So comical is it, it almost becomes tragic.
Suddenly, but not without warning, out of a hidden orifice behind a giant dune came a group of desert savages who gibber and gesticulate at the approaching figure. Their fingers are caked in clay as they shade their eyes from the burning sun. One among them, however, is not negro and he does not gibber. He is white and has an enormous straggly beard and matted hair. He is short and seemingly hump-backed. His clothes look unwashed - but his skin is pink and clean. Bouncing up and down he quickly restrains his savage friends with (can it be?) words of English:-
“No! No! Do not advance. Let him be. I believe he is Orlando Blue returning to Rull to wreak terrible vengeance for the wrongs they did him. We can laugh, we can giggle, we can titter - when his work is complete. Rull will be in ruins. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
And the savages cackle with him and return to their hole in an orderly fashion, leaving the Englishman to stand and smile:-
”Go on, Lorg Dagg, Rull is yours.”
Could this strange character be that crazy commentator, Peter Jeffery? Surely not, for his words show a very perceptive grasp of the situation. Or do they? We have not heard the last of this man, I fear.
(x) The Hero Is Introduced By Desmond Lewis
I think it is time (and if I am not mistaken this introduction is belated) to introduce the central hero of this romance. He is a visitor to this world and his purpose is to tell of the myths that would otherwise remain mere figments of a strangely intertwined universe. This hero is, of course, myself, commonly known as the art Master. I am no villain. I am a hero, for it is my task to prevent one Lorg Dagg, soppy Scandinavian, messing up these marvellous myths. I am most certainly a hero and let me tell you, that huddle figure behind the swivelling TV camera is a bogus art Master, some untutored imp who wishes to record Lorg Dagg’s (and his imaginary parasite’s) swingeing, careless heresy. I am the Master of Art, no other can claim such fame. Beware of cheap imitations. I wield no lying camera.
Perhaps a good idea will be to give you a short pen-picture of myself and my life. I am six feet tall, have a ludicrous moonface, black glasses, droopy moustache and goatee beard. A mole on my right cheek and a billy that hangs between shanks of black hair. I was once a soppy intellectual until the purity of art swept such morbid tendencies from my soul. Above all, I did not go to University, did not meet the Crazy Commentator (whose name I have of course forgotten) and did not marry Denise Camber. Such rumours that I did these things are quite unfounded and, more important, are not even rumours.
(xi) THE SECOND COMING By Ab Bintiff
Lorg Dagg and Edalpo arrived in Rull at precisely moon. Exhaustion was imprinted on Lorg’s boyish face, his blonde hair streaked and bitty over his sweaty brow and his feet showing partibare between the worn leather of his Alpine sandals.
Looking gingerly at the silhouetted blooms above his head, he said: “Is this it? Have we trudged mile upon mile to reach this godforsaken place?”
“Do not despair,” whispered Edalpo, carefully cottonwoolling his beak from Dagg’s tender shoulderbones, “Rull is not the place of old, where a nasty ditty was once sung to the lilt of tuneless lutes.”
“What ditty is it you speak of, Edalpo?”
“Why, of course, you do not know. But, surely, you have, when you last sat in a chimney-corner with the elders of Neb.”
“No.”
“’Orlando went to Rull Where someone scraped his skull.’”
“Oh how nasty!”
“Yes, but Rull is different now, ever since the incredible storm that returned Orlando’s shaven shreds as snow upon the upturned faces of the multitude. It was God’s punishment.”
“But that is mere legend, is it not?”
“There’s many a truth in a squirrel’s whisper!”
As they conversed, an old man had tottered to their side, at first unseen through utter stealth, but now a foreboding presence.
He cracked out a croak that approached a question: “Are you Lorg Dagg, the One Who Speaks To Himself? If he you be, we have expected you for many decades. Come - for he you most certainly are. Come to my abode - I am the Elder of Rull, the one you seek. You must be tired and hungry - I have a bed and fruits to feed you.”
“Thank you, kind old man.”
“Do not speak - just follow.”
The crooked man immediately shuffled into the shadows and Lorg followed his quickly disappearing form. Through the pitchy shades of leaning shacks, between the lightless alleys of nowhere’s maze, beneath the hanging penumbra of chiaroscuro orchids ( their colours as black as the form behind which our hero fumbled), across the fuzzy breath-marks of unseen and bleary animals and down the sooty hills that ended in blacked out and groping nebulosity, their path took its benighted way.
After many interminable moments, the Elder reached a funereal doorway and opening its creaking hinges, he led Lorg into…
…the whitest room he had ever seen. Before noticing the crones seated sedately in one corner, Lorg blinked at the walls and furniture daubed unendingly in the sharpest white. Two screaming beacons set in the squall of the ceiling revealed angular chairs and straight tables, squat and stoutly built. Casting his gaze wider, he espied the two old, crow-like, female creatures, whose stance at one moment could be described as sedate and proud but at the next strangely demented and frothy. Their fangs (I fear I cannot depict them as teeth) were yellow and hung in mock-Dracula eccentricity. Their clothes were ragged and revealed marks and stains of life on sexless bodies.
The Elder motioned to them and said, “These are my step-daughters, Di and Jo. Ignore them … until they are ready to speak their piece. Now - help yourself to Rull’s tasty fruits and place your leaning body on a chair.”
Lorg did so and was surprised at the mysterious savour of the fruity flesh as the sweet-sour juice trickled stickily down his thirsty throat.
“Now listen,” continued the old man, “I have the inevitable words to say - those words predestined to fall from my aging lips. My life has now reached its catharsis and you, Lorg Dagg, are its only witness…”
Suddenly, a loud banging crescended from the near portway, loud and insistent, and a shrill voice came amid its tumult: “Let me in, you cretins, do not destroy … do not destroy … the … myth. Do not … or you will destroy yourselves, you will squash the very universe!!”
“Ignore him … his untimely intervention is well timed - for it was inevitable, mere destiny.”
The “I want to come in” clatter continued until, giving way, I suppose, to a further inevitability, it ceased. However, as soon as peace reigned, a face appeared at a grimy, beglassed hatch beside Lorg’s head. A muffled shouting permeated through, as the ludicrous moonface pressed its button nose on the pane - soaking through the pores of the glass, as it were. Its expression was feverish, red and bloated, and scabs revealed a covert gasconade beneath the goatee beard. Who he was, Lorg did not know nor wanted to.
Brushing aside this silly individual, the Elder stated “Ignorance is bliss” and shrugged as if knowingly.
Lorg nodded, but his attention was drawn to another lotto hatch in the opposite wall, for there could be seen the lens of a prying camera. He shivered and stuffed a hand up his bum to prevent a sudden diarrhoea from exploding ungraciously over the chair. Fruit never agreed with him.
“Now, Lorg, listen … I wish to release my beloved town of the Orlando curse. I have sat here and literally wept … yes, tears have mixed with the favourite juices of my meals. I have heard the angels chant, intoning sing-song hosannas to my guilt: ‘Orlando came to Rull / Where Clovis scraped his skull’. I can even hear it now. But the shame of it, Lorg, is that I have nightmares … that I am Orlando, that the pain was self-inflicted. And then I have even more twisted visions that he was a blasphemous effigy of my dear young brother, Tristan, who died when he was three…”
Here, Clovis burst into the most torn sobs - to which the crones added echoed hymnals.
“…I must continue, for time is short and that idiot” … pointing to the round face now beaming at the hatch … “will force his way in before long. You must give me the eel-brooch which will release Rull from its torment and me from this life.”
Lorg suddenly jumped as if an inner force were moving him and said: “If I give you the eel-brooch, you must give us … sorry, me … the Onyx Ticket. I want to enter the Onyx Field!”
“You do?” muttered the old man.
Abruptly, one of the crones started up and squeaked: “There is no Onyx Ticket … but have no fear, you will reach the Meadow and Beyond, the Onyx Field will be yours.” Tears glowed in her eyes as she continued: “We love our Father and we will die with him. Our very bodies are tortured … they are lands of blinding deserts. We thirst for death. Our breasts are straight planks. Our minds are fenced in. We are Geography, we are gorgons adrift on mountains and snakes. We are grief but, above all, we are Geography. We are beasts. Our tongues are snouts and there are stinking paws vesselled in our caverns. We have stoats and squirrels in our wombs. And our intentions are squids. We are Geography … our paths are gangrenous sores. Our execution is nigh, we will die, the two of us in slants of metal, in fences of tin and mica … we will die on our ironing beds.”
Lorg, simple as he was, was sobbing in anguish. He drew from his pocket the eel-brooch…
The room disappeared … the scene dissolved. The sky above quickly brightened and the throbbing began.
The old film raced through its lighting effects and the might fly of flies, bluebottle-moth with truculent scissors, flapped its opaque wings grandly above. In its insect-teeth, the shreds of Orlando, white as purity itself. Flicker-flacker went the very sky.
Then, between the ventricles of the wings, the two crones (strangely masculated and rejuvenated) hung blandly. Their execution had been completed and their sex was sagging. Wrinkled hands, sucked from a hintersky, seemed to squirm and squirrel around their genitals, prodding and probing … their last sex with a penis octopus or is it their dying (step-) father? The scene, silhouetted amid the incessant flashing and flapping, spiralled above Lorg’s amazed eyes.
The gibbet’s noose dug deeper into the couple’s necks. Shooting stars, crazy-seeming comets, careering rockets and dying aeroplanes criss-crossed about the welkin.
The gibbet’s noose tightened, but from the shattered arteries poured, not blood, but gushes of white pus, sheer white, blindingly white. Flow upon flow flooded … great gallons of pure mucus, creaming and puddling down. Ocean upon ocean of albumen … snowy clots … frosted slush … ivory mud … soapy ooze. It cascaded and deluged upon Rull, drifting between the screaming houses.
Buildings collapsed, children choked, blossoms derooted.
Only Lorg could float, as the tidal wave of lilywhite diarrhoea swirled him on to the inevitable destination.
Listening carefully, one could hear his words as the waves pushed him on … but what do they mean? Faintly, I can still hear them dying on the white wind: “Cuckoo-spit. Cuckoo-spit.”
INLOGUE (II)
The Core By Cax
I sighed and tilted back on his chair, arms furled behind my neck.
I looked down at the beige carpet. It was of a design I did not favour - but who cared? Having come with all the other fixtures and fittings, I did not have a wife to worry unduly about mixing and matching the colours.
I laughed to myself, for if stupidity had been dosed out at birth, then my spoonful had been as from a ladle. Why had I bought this crumbling old house at all? Not that crumbling was something which could easily be attributed to it, despite its age, unless feelings were stranger than observations.
I stood up to peer through the semi-frosted glass at the desolate surroundings of creek and marsh. I had yet to spend my first night here, tonight in fact, and I shuddered, my flesh seeming fleetingly to work loose from the bones.
Little could I afford this strange edifice but, let it be said, I had been shot through with the solidity of the walls; they gave off an earth magic I could never have explained, even to myself. The walls were standing thick and mighty, indicating, beyond too much argument, that the house had been planted at this spot in an indefinably distant past and would still be there at the end of Adam's line. The place was riddled with it. But at the back of my mind...
Folly! Folly! Rich as I might be, I would find it almost impossible to upkeep such a spread. Loneliness was not to be the only other problem, either, for I believed, I was sure, in ghosts: I did not know whether this was as the result of influences outside myself, but I suspected that a whole hive of them lurked in the upper galleries of the house ... a situation I viewed with mixed feelings.
* I was started awake by a loud scraping sound rising from below stairs. I had chosen one of the bedrooms in the top storey as master over all the other ones and I had laid my troubled brow there on the pillows plumped up by the batting-lady during one of her late excursions from the kitchen areas. The log fire had long since died away; the ashes crumbling into the grate had earlier disturbed my beauty sleep.
The noise was of someone scrubbing the kitchen's stone floor - but surely not now at this time of night! Too loud by half. I scrambled further from the grasp of dreams, for the ghastly scraping continued its growing din - chafing against a frightful grain. It was climbing the stairs! Rubbing two rough-cut granite blocks together, climbing the stairs? I tried to calm the pangs and cramps which were taking purchase of my limbs. Not yet reconciling myself to the fear that was stirring up my imagination, I heard the scraping nearer and nearer, louder and louder, until it actually passed right outside my bedroom door.
Camber House gradually retained its respectful silence. But I failed to sleep for the rest of the night, stewing, fretting, threshing...
* Morning came with the sun shafting through the open beams of the bedroom window, dissipating the final remains of night and its attendant fears. I was remarkably freshened at the sight of a golden-eyed breakfast, brought to me by the batting-lady and, as I admired the well-turned coddling egg, I asked whether she had heard any ... peculiar noises in the night.
She had slept like a log, sir. She couldn't, I felt, be stirred even by her husband's lovemaking.
She had been batting-lady to the old Camber family until they sold up to myself. The last of the Camber masters, the seventh in the line, had died unexpectedly. How? I had failed to discover; the batting-lady continued to assume an air of ignorance and indifference on the subject. I had gained the impression that the Camber family had literally fled the house. However, I could not remember whether I had learnt this before or after my commitment to the house.
The batting-lady returned every morning with stacks of crusty bread and pancakes dripping with molasses. But the scraping itself did not return ... for a while.
* In the intervening days, I researched the Camber family history by visiting the house's cellar library. The earliest reference was in "The Annals of Time" by William Mather, dated 1687. There was one particular passage which came off the page at me, telling of a certain Camembert who had built this very house. He had wanted a really solid construction and, although the book grew vaguer here, it had evidently been designed with certain experiments in mind. To this lonely marshy spot, Camembert had transported mighty blocks of stone that would have set the toters of Stonehenge cringing ... thick and solid, impenetrable, already tested by eons of undecaying. The floors and rafters were made meticulously of the most tightly grained oak. This peerless strength was shafted into the deepest foundations that it was possible to dig. How many labourers were hired remained unclear ... but they could not find billets enough for them in the nearest villages.
Another rotting volume with "War in Spain" by Charles Dipp on the spine, had within a manuscript, presumably a diary of Camembert himself, dated 1681. The words had been fading for centuries, but I managed to glean a few strings of sense from it, viz. "rock hath hardness on the Sabbath", "my wife doth not like that which I do", "the core didst suck well tonight", "there is a cuckoo which pecketh ever", and further such cryptic phrases meandered across the badly foxed pages, as if the fluid Camembert used as ink still possessed a life of its own.
Mystification on the heels of folly! I shrugged at such arrant nonsense, but the cellar library itself bothered me - it was bitten deep into profound bedrock and vaguely, instinctively, I began to think I felt the bowels of the earth pulsating beneath my feet ... as if a stony heart were throbbing.
Another disturbance of the night was to follow ... and yet another a few weeks later. I sat bolt up like an automaton at the first hint of scraping. Teeth on edge, a desultory dream of chalk screeching on a blackboard, turning into some insidious joker scratching his uncut nails along a plaster wall and, finally, into an anguished mockery of reality itself. Every nerve of my bones, every cavity of my skull winced ... and my nails were likely plucked one by one from my fingers and toes. Hideous friction within the otherwise loose-limbed fibre of my soul. Up the stairs, past the bedroom door, dying away into relative silence, scraping, grating its time-worn course.
* Then I met Tristan Camber, heir of the Camemberts. He had to be sought out in London, where he had fled following a particular fracas at the house, the superficialities of which even the batting-lady had cause to remember (but pretend she had forgotten).
I could not easily sell up. Nor could I forget the troubles of Camber House since I felt a force driving me to plumb the intrigues and unseasonable hauntings of the night. If I left without attempting to rationalise it all, and thus creating an acceptable smokescreen context to the wrenching in my very gut, a force which I had no option but to call Terror would then tread on my tail till my life's end and into death. I HAD TO OPEN THAT BEDROOM DOOR, EVEN IF METAPHORICALLY, AT THE HEIGHT OF THE SCRAPING AND I WOULD DO IT, COME WHAT MAY, WITH TRISTAN CAMBER BY HIS SIDE.
I did not have reason to like this last human remnant of the Cambers called Tristan but, not being able to put his finger on it, I trusted him. This was despite the outlandish tales that I forced from him.
Camber was shamefaced to learn that the house had not shaken off its troubles, following the departure of he whose ancestors had set it all in motion in the first place. He should have come clean at the outset. He murmured behind his hands so I could not catch it all. He called me X_________.
"I thought, X________, we Cambers were the only ones to be cursed by the Infinite Cuckoo..." Tristan touched his temples, as if to say he had the bird in there anyway, to forgive himself talking poppycock. "Yes, I must tell you all. I should have told you before you instructed your solicitors yes, I will explain myself, X________, not before time, as you say ... yes, yes, you have the right to know, I'm so very sorry. I don't know where to begin..."
The dawn chorus in London comes even sooner than that in the country, and for a time Camber's voice was hindered by the many parkland squawks.
"Yes, I'll try to begin ... the first of the Cambers made a pact with the Core of our earth. He called up the power of the Core ... the legend goes that there is an unholy force at the centre of the earth, a knot of stone needing sustenance. A sick force..."
I winced as I felt my own stomach crawl towards my throat. My toes curled, for the ground shook with the passage of a tube train.
"The core lusts for everything, to be the core of nothing, if you see ... well, legend, true, but my ancestors died for it. The Core feeds on humanity, on mineral, on anything. Soaking them down through the white stone of the earth's inner crust, to the curdling oceans of cream. The story goes that it has allies amongst humanity, like my original forebear, and it has given birth to its own allies, to provide food for it, such as the Infinite Cuckoo..." Again he lightly touched his temples.
I complained to myself that ghosts I could even barely begin to believe in ... but this was undreamable!
"I tend to agree with you and, seeing you here, has persuaded me that the mystery must finally be solved. The curse of the House of Camber must be lifted, it's my obligation."
Breakfast was stony silent, for we were in communion. I envisioned a chaos that gave birth to the cosmos. I saw the Core sucking in all in its path, firstly things on the earth, then the earth itself, turning it inside out as it were. Then gobbling the rest of the universe.
Out of the Core came life, space and time, and now it was lusting for its original nature, God to Dog without passing Go. No wonder my mind raced out of control, in paradoxicons of fear and awe. But hardly more than sub-intellectual concepts ... hardly a solution for Camber House!
* We travelled across the wild marshes, late in the afternoon. The flatness was so vast, only broken by an odd malformed tree, I chuckled at ideas that God must have entered a horizon-throwing competition when creating this part of the world, and had won it hands down. The first glimpse of the house was a travesty of such fennish nothingness.
Little to do that night ... and we retired early, not without noticing that the batting-lady had been busy peeling wallpaper in the hallway. Tristan Camber and I were as ready as we could be for what was about to unfold...
* The following afternoon, we began a systematic exploration of the whole mighty structure of the house. We ripped up floorboards, tapped the walls, including those recently stripped by the batty; we left no stone unturned, but nothing was to be found. We knew instinctively that the cellar library was a prime place to concentrate our efforts. Day after day, we chiselled at its stone floor, chipped away at the rutted wall, only breaking off to delve deeper into the mouldering volumes interminably lining its cavern walls.
Then success came. Camber, re-examining the floor more closely, discovered a swirling-shaped knot in the stone, a flaw created at the beginning of time in earth's raw material, no doubt. Wheeling his finger around it several times, he received what he felt as a touch of power, but this was soon forgotten by a fever of activity, since a part of the stone surface had slid away, to reveal a pit of white mud.
"X_______! X_______!" he shouted, forgetting formalities in the mode of address, and I came running. Glancing downward with a shudder, I saw the hole in the actual bedrock of the earth full of shifting slime, even now starting to burp and seethe as it met the air of the library.
"O, my dear God!" I blurted. "It's so ... utterly pure white!"
It heaved and twitched, put out sticky fingers and melded lumps of pink-veined fat.
"O God, please shut it! For the sake of sanity, shut it!" I moaned, turning away in disbelief from the cacky blubber.
Camber, re-tracing the convoluted knot of stone in the floor, closed the rocky cover above the nightmare albino pus. All he could say, like a visitor in a dream, was "Cuckoo-spit! Cuckoo-spit!" over and over again.
Both of us soon recovered from our shock. We simply now knew that we had discovered the power house of the building. We must keep watch over it, at all times. The disturbances had not occurred since Camber's return to the house, so one was to be expected at any time. That night, we both sat by the "hole", furnished with revolvers, a net and a heavy-duty pick-hammer. What we intended to do with these we had not the slightest idea. But nothing happened on that, the first night after discovering the "hole".
The second was a different story. Or we wished it had been.
* The hurricane lamp threw distorted shadows across the rocky walls. Then, we heard it, after a long night of diffident conversation. Very faint, at first, and still vilely slow: it was the scraping sound which I had heard on the first night in the house, initially like the scrubbing of a stone floor and then sickeningly like two ill-shaped granite blocks being rubbed together. It seemed to rise from the very soul of the earth, nearer and nearer with every gasp bursting from our lips.
"Let's get out of here!" I screamed.
"No, wait! We can only see this thing out!" shouted Camber in an attempt to be heard against the rasping din, his eyes afire with terror's orgasm of fear.
From that point on, all was very simple, so simple it more or less describes itself, with merely the lightest narrative intervention by one whose memory survived the affair.
The stone lid moved from above the ungodly scraping, revealing the turmoil of gulping whiteness below. Out of these churning separates of blinding muck, there rose a beaked head. Its huge elbows levered up the bony branches of its malformed body.
A mammoth bird, insidiously cuckoo-like, vented from the depths of its muscle-ripped chest those musical notes that usually welcomed Spring, but here meant death.
It was the grisly beak champing which was the appalling snicker-snacker of its scraping.
Congealed in its runnelled flesh was the white juice of its birth, of its hideous hatching and, although moving in concrete, it migrated from the poultry devil of mediaeval art to twentieth century's version of reality with the greatest of ease.
I screamed and screamed as the birdish thing clambered from the roiling pit and grated over the floor towards us. Camber was silent, but quivered and twitched uncontrollably,
Simultaneously, the earth throbbed apocalyptically and, many horizons away, a volcano lost its guts.
On and on came the clucking beast with stone bones, on and on, and took Camber into its beak, raised him from the floor and whiplashed his body with a sabre-rattling yelp. I saw the blood pumping from Camber's mouth and striping the creature's creamy breasts; and Camber's head, severed at the root, fell into the sickly curds of the Core.
The cuckoo sank back, duly satisfied. And finally, all I could see was the slime surging, imploding...
I could not budge, for I realised, realised that what I ridiculed was in fact ridiculing me, realised that the universe was doomed, if not already extinct; and, with an insane shriek, jumped into the virgin pit, to forget that to which I had now sacrificed myself.
“TERROR HAS NO DIARY AS TERROR CANNOT WRITE.”
(xii) ROSEMARY By Des Lewis
The year is 1900 and the scene is London. We are to enter a typically Victorian household, with the master and his wife ensconced in the plush rooms on the higher floors and a motley group of servants scratching at existence on the lower. The master’s name is Archibald Z________ and his wife’s name is Rosemary.
She is blonde and well-tooled. Her bodice is always covered with the most expensive materials and her long dresses skim across the polished floors. Her saucy ringlets bounce on a swan’s neck, her unworked hands are ever at the embroidery and her sophisticated conversation has no match (not that she seeks a match.).
He is tall and dark-haired and his well-formed features are an habitual sight in the House of Commons. The valet always irons The Times in the morning so that his master’s day starts smoothly.
“Lady Catherine to see you, my Lady,” the butler announced one day as the double door to the breakfast room.
“Show her in,” came her witty reply.
A grey-haired lady bustled into the room in an evident state of excitement. She was slightly similar to my Dowager Aunt but, of course, Lady Catherine’s style was far inferior. However, she was of good birth and her expensive clothes hid the clumsy gait.
“My dear Rosemary, forgive my uninvited visit, but had I some news for you!”
I will not endeavour to depict the following scene as you can well imagine the Lady’s excitement as she bubbled forth some petty scandal and Rosemary’s studied response and hauteur. But, I will return at night, whilst Rosemary sleeps.
The large house is silent: unseen clocks tick ominously amid the shadows. All the inhabitants are snoring in their beds, some tossing, some sedate. Rosemary is dreaming.
She wanders the deserted night-streets of Victorian London, dodging the dirty hands that grope from sudden doorways. The half-moon silhouettes the hovels that London leans around and the only sound is the interminable rhythm of her own feet.
She looks down and is horrified to see that - yes, her feet are pacing the London that night only knows, but the ankles are jointed in her neck supporting only the blonde head. No body can be seen and she is ten inches tall! How can she go to Lady Catherine’s ball in this state, as a walking head?
It was a good job she was only dreaming. But who is going to wake her? Shall I?
* I crept past her room as silently as possible, glancing down at the strip of light at the foot of the door and seeming to see ill-defined shapes crossing to and fro. I reached my own room and, as soon as I had shut the heavy door behind me, I slumped on the creaking bed, giving it my tiredness, for I could bear it no longer. The springs welcomed my body, since only pressure could give them peace and the spirals closed with a sigh.
* I crept past her room as silently as possible, glancing down to see if her light was still burning. Only darkness. I knelt and put my ear to the wood, heard her steady breathing as she slept. Standing again, I grabbed the handle and, cursing the inevitable creaks that the hinges gave, pushed the door slowly inwards. I padded in and, straining through the gloom, perceived the curled body of Rosemary, foetus-like, innocent and strangely smelly (or so I thought). Gently lowering myself on to the mattress, I lay beside her, ensuring that her lids did not shiver.
* I crept past her room as silently as possible but, I am afraid, not silently enough. The slightest, the merest creak would start Rosemary from her fragile, febrile sleep. She stood at the now open door, mopping the sweat of night from her young brow, squinting quizzically at the ill-defined shape before her. I, too, was hot for the night was a clam of forbidden oyster-dreams, and she, self-consciously, brushed the remains of last night’s supper from her dry lips.
* I crept past her room but, no need for care, the room was evidently empty. I reached my own room where my husband already slept. I lay beside him and watched his peaceful brow. The night was becoming hotter and, naked, I sighed toward sleep.
* I crept and was creeping still when the sun rose upon my brow.
COMMENTS (II) By Peter Jeffery
Why do you wish my formal permission (in writing) to use my scribblings in ‘The Visitor’? Are you thinking of publishing it? And in such a case am I to sign away my valuable copyrights to yourself? … The author of the story (‘Scarred’) is C. Camber but he chooses to write in the first person from the point of view of Orlando … This curious confusion of identities between the tortured and the torturer puts me in mind of the incident where Orlando meets his double … So Diana & Joanna (of Helix-Mica fame) are scions of the Camber dynasty & daughters of Clovis in particular … Moth covering the sky: a giant vulture moth of ‘1 +1 (+1)’ & moth of eel-brooch etc. etc. … Rull must be the sub-dada pit first sighted in the writing of the ‘Egnisomicon’ … And so to the ‘Comments (I)” of Peter Jeffery (whoever he might be). Modesty forbids me (& also good sense) from adding much comment to this stuff. The writer’s obvious genius may safely be left to speak for itself…
* …However, the identity of DFL as hero is confirmed (although I do NOT believe it). If this DFL is the art Master what of previously mentioned art Masters? Are all of them, indeed, imitations or has the genuine (?) one appeared before … I would like to bring up the question of the truth/falsity of the various authors’ accounts. Now it is a work of fiction i.e. it is false, in the normal sense of the word; & we have to approach it in a state of suspended disbelief. However, with the contradiction between the various authors (who are mostly fictitious themselves) we have to try to pick out truth & falsity within a framework that is itself a false world … In short we are adrift in a trackless swamp of a novel & the sign posts which might help us are not to be trusted. Beside the matter of inversions of inversions (a false statement about a world that is in itself false, which we might expect to be itself a true statement, turns out not to be so: something very upsetting to Aristotelian logic) the reflective reader may find himself confronted by questions as to how he is able to recognise things as being true at all. Here we are in very deep metaphysical water indeed. Even in trying to discover whether something you remember is true or not is extremely troublesome. Your memory will be formed of (i) recollection: recalling your own sense data, statements of others relative to it etc. etc. (ii) reason: suppressing constructions upon the recollection contrary to what you believe could NOT be the case, supplying chronology etc. etc. & (iii) imagination: supplying details forgotten or relacing them with those that seem more in keeping with reason, constructing events not witnessed, but necessary to give the memory any meaning etc. etc. It will be clear that the whole determination of truth in the case of a memory (& in other cases too) rests upon a network of inter-related strands from diverse sources, put together by a process of correlation. In trying to construct a fictitious truth in ‘The Visitor’, this whole process of correlation goes, I think, berserk & should we apply its implication into our ordinary existence we would be coming to the position of ‘No truth, no lie’ (Egnisomicon line 2326) … This way lies madness…
(xiii) THE ONYX FIELD By The art Master
The onyx field is a land of black rocks and white sea.
* Cliffs of deepest agate Are sheer above the churning foam; Beneath the burgeoning bubbles Flows the everflow of turning whiteness.
Blacklands are badlands And stretch without end Through the meanderings of the alabaster seas; Black as the deepest sin, The land is rutted And torn, towering and strangely craven.
White-light glares interchangeably Between the nights that know No moon nor silting star.
The shivers that the badlands feel, That the blacklands reecho Are baskets of lilies Rooted through the wicker And then through the black soil itself.
The waves that the white seas sever, That the sinuous seabeds shrink beneath Are white-bright Below the lily fire of the intermittent sky.
* These lands were just like a photograph negative. I took my powerful magnifying lens and inserted it in my TV camera (oh how unwieldy it is becoming!) to peer at the intrinsic texture of the lands. Imagine my surprise, dear reader, imagine the beam that crossed my round face as, step by step, my view passed from a flabelliform blur of pure black and white to the atomic focus of moving colour.
I suddenly realised that I was omnipotent - for I was now, with the help of my camera, gazing upon a very world of interactive figurines. Could they be minute people? Could the Onyx Field be patches of stinking humanity? Was I God? Whatever was the case, I was the purveyor of an expanse of granular citizenry. And I was convinced that here was to be the scene of another extraordinary incident, so vigilance…
* The magnific lens is off the careless camera while I rest. The negative black/white takes back its own and I sleep upon a black cliff as the cream-curdled sea laps below - I dream, dream of the Meadow and Beyond, the Field and Within, the Field of Vision, where swarm those I must grow to know.
Would I ever scratch a canvas again with this knowledge? Could I dare even sleep here on the black, black cliff?
FOUR POEMS By Desmond Lewis
(a) White Hell
Come on Rosemary He’s behind you now Rush up the stairs to the safety of my arms Climb hard Do not let him touch you as he chases you Do not let him grab your ankle Clamber the stairs Keep on going (I hear then now The pounding of fear and lust) Come on Rosemary My door is open and so are my arms The keys is ready to turn against him (I wonder if she has slipped The eternal pursuit) Come on Rosemary come on (I hear her nearer I fear her undone She bursts into the room) Quick Rosemary… (She opens her mouth to reveal the white hell Spears of white flame She grabs my neck and squeezes Froth bubbles from the corner of her eyes) Rosemary keep squeezing Tighten your fists into my jugular I deserve it Tighter come on tighter Let me retch on my lust (Then HE comes in Sees the scene Goes to open the window Where the sea-gulls play with the sky)
Rosemary wanders through the flowers Of my garden Rhapsodic Lowering her head under the tutelar blossoms Which lean and kiss her crown (Rosemary look up at me in the window - I am waving to you Look up please do Rosemary plant yourself in the pulp of my brain & sprout forth as a orchid Swept by the breeze into a carnival of colour But these are ideal daydreams Rosemary Reality will win As I see the winged crocodiles Flying towards you and me Their ugly spiky mouths gaping On a white hell Spears of white flame Rosemary take shelter in the house Don’t stay in the garden Join me at the window and watch For the world will end And we can watch from the window Where the sea-gulls play with the sky)
(b) 1 + 1 (+1)
The farmer and his crew, That’s him and one other, making two, Sailed for Hope in a craft made of gold - A brave pair they presented, strong and bold, As they tacked the waves of Desire Ignoring the inner burning fire Aroused by mermaids wrapt naked in churning froth. Suddenly they saw a giant vulture moth Cleaving the sky with its wings of coloured powder, Till the flapping grew louder and yet louder. “Help!” screamed the farmer in Despair, “The killer moth has left its grotto lair! Hope has gone, hope has fled, It looks as if it’s going to be Death instead.” “No, paddle with strength,” shouted back his friend, “God his help will send.” So on they pushed, and on they strove, Until their skin was like a red-hot stove. The vulture moth glided overhead, wide and grey, Scrutinising its intended human prey, Laughing as their faith and their Hope. For he knew that God was a cantankerous old dope - He killed those two, and they didn’t have long to wait For this was their inevitable Fate.
24 +1
Four and twenty cows and one ram Saw how it was For the twenty-second time And all was quiet as the farmer choked to his death
Cruel and swift was the blow The animals wailing to the sky And for the twenty-second time The world split in two and joined together again
Lost in cloud Taking women and washing their crutches The farmer and his animals fly over the sea To the place where the corpses grow
Four and twenty cows a ram and one farmer Graze in the Field where the gravestones talk All the bloody cows ram and farmer Stay to hear the hymn sung by the river
Let’s go to the place where the corpses grow Prune the limbs and water the flesh Engraft the genitals on the tree of lust Let’s go to the place where the corpses grow And Tear at the skin of the sky
Let’s follow the farmer and his horde Let’s see where they land Let’s show them we are not stupid Let’s land when they land
Gophers tortoises and geese Surely not such beasts But the farmer wags his toes and says no And goes to the place where the corpses grow
The vampire swoops from the blackening sky, Like a foreboding, flapping stormcloud of the night, His talons wide, a huge beaked dragonfly. The crowd shudders at this Demon of the Bite, And they howl in expectant pain, A wail of woe spiralling to the Gates of hell Which open to let fall a blood of rain Soaking their upturned faces. Hark! - The Bell! The Bell of Fear tolls, Rung by the dwarf who lurks in the church Warning the poor screaming souls Who pant, clamber, crawl and lurch. The black, clucking kite glides near, Down, down, down his knotted limbs grope, Until they clasp a baby barely past a year. The spikes in his mouth rip the head away And now he makes his meal on the mountain-slope Where young goats nuzzle him in their play.
(d) The Gathering
The infinite cuckoo sat on his mammoth throne, Elbows resting at his side, Gobbling a newly hatched human being. His guests crawled to the throne, And were duly welcomed: The eternal lynx of the onyx field, The mighty emu, the unchained of the plains, The blue gnu, The butcher bird, known as a shrike, The red ocelot, The giant rabbit, the roamer of the unroamed, The snow leopard, and many others. The purpose of the gathering Was to examine A walking human head, A giant woman’s head with feet. They came to the conclusion That it was a mutation And not worth eating. They forthwith disposed of it By thrusting it back where it came from.
(xiv) ONYX & CHIPS By Ab Bintiff
It’s incredible, but the chips I have purchased in the nearby Lancaster chippery have suddenly turned black and crunchy, like some insidious coke, nay, nettle and coke.
“Hey, Rose, my chips are horrible. They’re black and crunchy.”
Rosemary, my wife, came to the kitchen door, ladle in hand, grime on her brow, and stains on her apron.
“I told you not to go there again.”
“oh, my God! Oh, my God! “ I screamed.
I can hardly tell the tale but, at that point, my probing fork had discovered in the remnants of my meal, submerged beneath the swilling vinegar, a minute human head! A small egg-shaped thimble of flesh … with feet!
I raised my head to admit my derangement to my wife. Imagine my surprise to see a trail of light, a ski-track, leading from the tenantless kitchen door to the very space that contained the obscenity on my willowpatterned plate. It was she.
Was I the purveyor of some barmy nightmare? Could I be the John Cheese I thought I was? But where was Rosemary Cheese?
These questions are still unanswered as I parade unthinkingly the Onyx Strand. For, as the ski-line faded, so did the kitchen around me. I, CHEESE OF THE NORTH, saw the dragonfly turn from being a face in the sky (looking through a giant lens) and flap its way on cruel wings to my body (a clapperless bell that it felt). Was it fly or moth? Neither! It was bulging cuckoo! It swooped, kraken-like, and pecked tentatively at the cream cheese in my brain. It was then Rosemary - and the cheeses mixed, uncanny, into a fondant, a vol au vent, and grunchy grew, black became.
Then the changes and the turns reversed but now cheese within cheese, soundlessly knelling and swelling within the udder: Rosemary/Me, moth, dragonfly/vulture/vampire, moonface and, finally, lens/sky.
* I cannot remember anything since I sat in the white, white room sucking at the strange fruits of Rull. I can recall the old man, the dirty, dirty crones and the lotto hatches thus:-
[THERE FOLLOWS AN ILLUSTRATION CRUDELY PERPETRATED BY DFL IN 1974 (?) OF FOUR SEATED FIGURES (A LONG-HAIRED, BEARDED MAN IN SUNGLASSES (PFJ?), A WOMAN (YOUNG TO MIDDLE-AGED?) AND TWO VAMPIRE-TEETHED (?) CRONES) SITTING NEAR A LOTTO HATCH (A WINDOW HATCHED WITH NUMBERS) WITH A MOONFACE STARING THROUGH IT MUCH LIKE THE YOUNG DFL!]
Since then - nothing. Presumably bedrugged insidiously, I found myself dumped on this waste of black rock and white seas. Even Edalpo has gone - but that’s no loss.
Not a soul to keep me company … except for the strange cameraman (I forgot to mention him) whom I met a few days ago. What a strange individual he was! Spent all day staring through a popular Sunday Newspaper camera with the thickest lens have ever seen…
And there are the dreams of course - the nightmares that dog my sleep. But I will not tell you of them.
* Suddenly, through the mists of the sudden light, bound the shapes that had no end. Lorg shivered and even missed the presence of Edalpo. The silhouette of the crouching cameraman sold the horizon a pup. Could he sleep in such circumstances? The explosions were nearing all the time.
The cameraman leaves his equipment in the onyx dust, pockets his bag of greasy chips and approaches our hero Lorg. It is his words that must be recorded now … yes, his words to Lorg … and at length, for the novel is about to begin. So much for the preamble, let the true story start … and on its spine:-
“‘THE VISITOR’ BY THE ART MASTER.”
[THE PAGE NUMBERING IN THE ORIGINAL 1974 COPY OF ‘THE VISITOR’ ARE NOW IN TANDEM: PAGE 69 FOR THE WORK AS A WHOLE, PAGE 1 FOR THE ‘NOVEL WITHIN A NOVEL’.]
THE VISITOR BY THE ART MASTER
(i) Once upon a time, upon the blackened crags, sat the birdish majesty, beaked and monstrous, cuckooing to the morning moon and champing across the nervous rocks, flapping and crisscrossing above the whitest, thick-creamturning oceans.
In his nodding head - an eye. Within the sparkling eye - a lens. Upon the shifting lens - a twinkle. The twinkle is his soul, But his soul is torsoless.
To his throne came the motley gathering, the fiends of this and other worlds: Hitler, the spindly monkey-tooth. Beriberi, with head of putrescent fur. Chish, the eternal lynx of the onyx field. Pelade, he or she who knows no sex. Edalpo, the famed shoulderwitch. Ume, the mighty emu. Lovecraft, sallow face, Uncle Howard. Dondon, the bejewelled jeffer. Hugh, the blue gnu. Napoleon, the butcher-shrike. Corncraft, the unchained of the plains. Cambergrease, the horror of the house. Ita-tunk, the roamer of the unroamed. The pseudo-Egnis. The pseudo-art Master. Ivan, the red ocelot. Cream-at-the-top-of-the-milk, the giant rabbit. Sade, the gathering’s ghost. Iceman, the swift of the sky. Shed, the snow leopard.
Each was to tell a tale and the Infinite Cuckoo sat back to listen. The best tale (in the Infinite Cuckoo’s opinion) would earn a ‘ticket to ride’ - the teller would travel to the plains of Ka and Harchwee and thus to eternal bliss. Here are the tales, in reverse order, followed by old Infinite’s judgement.
(ii) THE STORY OF SHED THE SNOW LEOPARD
She stepped into the lift to go up to the twentieth floor. Her name was Ample Cheese, I think, but, no matter, she stepped into that smart, streamlined, neo-office elevator and the doors moved smoothly but sharply together. She pressed the button bearing the number 20 but, as was usual with lifts in those days, the finger did not actually come into contact with the plastic but its mere approach to the relevant button was sufficient for the number to light up. What remarkable technology!
No matter, as soon as she had activated the button, she noticed that the floor indicator beside the door was not vertical as was usual with lifts in those days, viz:-
(THERE FOLLOWS IN THE 1974 TYPESCRIPT A PEN DIAGRAM OF 20 NUMBERS IN A VERTICAL LINE, CONTAINED WITHIN BOXES RANGING FROM 20 AT THE TOP TO 1 AT THE BOTTOM, FOLLOWED BY FOUR MORE BOXES CONTAINING THE WORDS: MEZZANINE, GROUND, LOWER GROUND, BASEMENT. THE NUMBER 3 BOX IS SHOWN TO BE FLASHING).
But it was thus:-
(THE SAME BOXES AND THEIR CONTENTS BUT NOW PLACED INTO A CIRCLE, WITH THE FLASHING 3 AT THE BOTTOM OF THE CIRCLE. WITHIN THE CIRCLE THERE IS THE VAGUE IMPRESSION OF A HUMAN FACE (OR A SNOW LEOPARD’S?))
And she felt that the texture of the wood in the middle hinted at a face, but I shall not go into that.
She did not have time to be surprised for on the floor above the one which she had just left, the doors snapped open and a figure made as if to enter. He stopped suddenly and stared beadily at her, as if he had seen a ghost.
“Don’t you remember me?” he blurted.
“No, should I?”
“My name is X________ and you once threw me out your house. You know - that manuscript made me a bomb.”
But before he could continue, the doors pranged and his nose was nearly caught. The lift sped on without him…
THE MOTLEY CROWD, ENSCONCED ON PLAYSCHOOL MATS AROUND SHED, MUMBLED AS IF THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHICH MANUSCRIPT WAS REFERRED TO. HOWEVER IT IS A COMMON TRAIT OF SNOW LEOPARDS NOT TO EXPLAIN ANYTHING. THE INFINITE CUCKOO LOOKED DECIDEDLY ANNOYED, BUT THE STORY CONTINUED UNDETERRED.
The lift almost pounced from that floor to the next whereupon the doors, like a firework special, flew open to reveal, only momentarily, the probing proboscis of some unseen Beast. The doors were now flish-flashing from floor to floor, first to reveal the subtle hint of a nosy camera (TV), second the beaming moonface of some pseud, third the grinning beard of one straggly Peter Jeffery and fourth the carpet slippers, ragged as lacerated limbs, on the feet of a pair of hags (loose-lipped and foully fanged). The fifth intrusion was the worst of all - the pecking visage of a raven-like witch; but the champing doors did not allow the entry of any of these vile visions.
The shocked she cowered, before the shuttling panorama, in the lift’s corner. And now there was only darkness and no movement, no opening and, of course, no shutting.
“IS THAT THE END OF THE STORY?” QUERIED CHISH.
No, twit! She gradually gathered sense into her fevered brain. She had been stuck in a lift before, but this occasion was different - she was alone. None of the potential passengers that she had glimpsed from the corner of the lift had succeeded to beat the doors and keep her company.
After several weeks she became part of the woodwork.
“Oh, what a silly ending!” one uttered
Now, now - it’s a play on an idiomatic expression and a literal meaning. Don’t you get it?
“IT’S ALL TOO OBVIOUS.”
Anyway, I haven’t quite finished. Before she became a vessel in the fibre of the timber around her, she had a vision of a burning fence. Strange, that. She also had a vision of a Spaniard who fought in a war and, before he died, his shattered corpse became a clocktower (the hands of which were his lacerated limbs).
“A TELLING ENDING,” MUTTERED GOOD OLD INFINITE. “NEXT, PLEASE.”
(I THOUGHT 2006 READERS OF THIS NOVEL MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW THAT, INCLUDED IN THE 1974 TYPESCRIPT, THERE IS A MIGHTY BIG MAP WITH A MULTITUDE OF DETAILS THAT CAN BE FOLDED OUT (DRAWN IN REAL INK BY PFJ) DEPICTING THE LANDS SURROUNDING EVENTS IN ‘THE VISITOR’ - E.G. NEB, THE ONYX FIELD, NAMBITUR, THE FOREST OF ABOMINATIONS, BLUEMANLAND, THE ONYX GULF, THE SEA OF NEB, PSEUDO-NEB, ENGLAND, KRA, THE ANA-ANNA DESERT, LANCASTER, HEMAN PENINSULA, AND LOTS OF TOWNS AND RIVERS ETC. ETC - THE SEAS BLOTCHED IN RED BY DFL).
(iii) THE STORY OF ICEMAN THE SWIFT OF THE SKY
The scene is a city, a large, sprawling megalopolis in England. The time is long, long away and Victoria sat on a birdish throne, surveying her scurrying citizen Engs.
The dark corners (chimney-corners, kyphotic angulations, forked nooks, furcated crossways, hook-nosed cusps, V-shaped crutches, akimbo zigzags) of the city were haunted, haunted with stooping figures on ghostish paths, with unhewn statues in search of shape and with unlicked beasts in quest of lolling tongues.
I, as Iceman, flew across that frosty sky and the citizens cracked in frore dismay. I entered the alouetted mansion beside the slivering river and swept in white array along the nightworn corridors. I came to the silent door and, for a while, listened at the lotto keyhole for the breathing I knew would be there and grimly crept, insect-like, through the keyhole. Once inside, I hovered over the bed in which the two women slept, their bodies enlocked together. Their heavy breathing threw white smoke into the air, but their limbs were squashed and intensely warm and their well-formed breasts hung between the V-shaped interstices of the bed.
I knew their names, of course, and I know them now - Rosemary and Ample … and the child born from their transsexual embraces would become a mutation, a hideous thalidomide of the dark world - all head and no body, waddling over from cot to grave.
“FENCE IT IN! FENCE IT IN!” THE MOTLEY INFANTS ROARED.
THE CUCKOO LOOKED ASKANCE AND BECKONED TO ICEMAN TO CONTINUE HIS ENTHRALLING STORY.
RIFFLING HIS WINGS AND FOLDING THEIR WEBS BENEATH HIS TITTED CREST, HE SPOKE ANEW:
I, as Iceman, tucked myself into their interlaced arms and peered down into the dark chimney-corners of their bed to see if this evil act had been completed. But, of course, the cold awoke them from their slumber and the sudden movement resulting from their start, itself completed the act I was there to prevent. I glimpsed a wad of pure white spirt from crutch to crutch, so white it lit up the furcated crossways of the sheet-bunching bed. The two women sighed each other’s name lovingly and twisted me into their foul cuddle.
I uncovered my two fangs from the wrinkles of my beak and their razor tips pierced their tender breasts. But they felt no pain - their dying love was a pain greater and more pleasurable than that I concocted.
At this moment, Edalpo (who left Lorg Dagg to go to this gathering (he knew he must gain entry to the Plains of Ka and Harchwee and Lorg must be kept safe while he accomplished this feat, so he left him busy listening to a series of stupid and irrelevant stories from the mouth of some individual claiming to be the art Master (the latter is telling the tales but, little does he know, the real art Master is telling of him telling the stories))) fidgeted, for he was very bored. He could not wait until it was his turn.
Anyway, CONTINUED ICEMAN, please do not shudder. I escaped from their naughty clutches. I flew from the night-shrouded mansion and took the macroscopic path (from microminiature to mammoth sky-swift) from the granular Land of Eng to the Onyx Field (which is all land and all scapes) where you see me now. That is my story.
“But what of the mutation? Was it born? Was it fenced in for its livelong days? Tell us, pray tell us,” brayed the milling toddlers.
Horror of Horrors! The end of my tale must be told. As I flew from their sexual bed, the impregnated egg between their legs accidentally (sticky as it was) got stuck to my thigh feathers and, as I passed from microsubstance to what I am now, it became embedded in my womb! And before all our tales are told, it will out, head and all.
The Cuckoo waved a disbelieving hand and crooked his claw to the next teller of the tale.
COMMENTS (III) By Peter Jeffery
It is as if DFL has surrounded himself with the additional layers of identity as protective garb against the Core… ‘Comments II’ by PF Jeffery really needs no comments from me … You seem to have made a pretty fair job of editing what must be a pretty unwieldy bulk of comment. I especially liked the inclusion of a bit of comment on my previous comments … The white sea is very reminiscent of the description of the core (itself cuckoo-spit, perhaps, or bubbling semen) & the rutted land, perhaps, echoes Orlando’s rutted skull. A tangent from ‘The Visitor’ is ‘badlands’, possibly a reference to John Metcalfe’s story of that name & an even further tangent (to use a mixed metaphor) is a possible link between ‘alabaster seas’ & ‘alabaster genitals’ of Zeroist fame … Genitals to semen & semen to the surging white of the core: the core to the Onyx Field Sea & the sea to the alabaster of the genitals, a very neat train of thought, wouldn’t you say?…
(iv) THE STORY OF SADE THE GATHERING GHOST
Orlando Blueman told me this tale before his tragic death in my arms:
“I am Orlando, a wanderer through the cities of Neb, and I meet up with many strange adventures, of which this is one.
Four times had I visited Crane, a city in the south-west corner of the plain of Neb, but on the fifth visit I swore that I would never return. As per usual, the white flagstones bore the weight of many tramping horses, and the tiny wooden chalets glinted in the light of a cold, sickly sun, as I entered the massive iron gate of the city of Crane…”
“I THOUGHT THE SUN WAS HOT IN NEB … SO THE MYTH-TELLERS WOULD HAVE IT,” ROARED THE SQUAWLING BABES AS THEY LISTENED TO THE TALE FROM THEIR COTS AND PRAMS.
SOD OFF, YOU TWITS, AND LISTEN TO THE TALE AS ORLANDO HIMSELF TOLD IT:
“I headed straight for the inn which had become my customary abode - the Golden Helicon. I passed the gilded fronds of the Splitzer trees (very common in Crane) - they brushed against my face leaving a pale green hue in the skin and giving me the appearance of one who is either sick or envious.
At last I arrived at the blackdoor of the Golden Helicon, a largish building of blackwood presenting a bold front to the surrounding bleak mountains of Spart.
‘Orlando! How nice to see you back in Crane!’ shouted Baz, the inn-keeper, his head poking out of the top window.
‘Hello Baz! Ooh! Room for me, eh?’ I answered with a friendly wave of my hand.
‘Of course, of course,’ he shouted back.
I entered through the blackdoor and, once inside, memory flooded back: the hard tumbler-shaped chairs, the crazy pictures depicting strange, mythical battles, the thick, soft orange floor-covering and, above all, Susanna, Baz’s daughter, who rose from her chair in surprise at seeing me.
‘O, Orlando, how nice of you to come and see us again!’ she said, a slight flush seeping into her face. At this time, Susanna was 18 and was beautiful in the extreme: her soft, red, pouting lips parting to reveal perfectly shaped, pearly teeth glinting in the light of the log fire; a sensually fashioned bosom heaving to the rhythm of girlish sighs; delicate, rose-pink, blossoming cheeks; Madonna-like limbs; and golden, shimmering hair flowing in undulating streamlets down her back. She was the perfection, it seemed, of human symmetry.”
“I expect sunshine pours from her bum,” chortled some sarcastic listener.
“At this moment, Baz entered the room, and thumping me on the back, shook my hand with friendly gusto.
‘How long will you be staying, Orlando?’
‘As long as you will have me!’
‘Fine! Fine!’
* Soon, I became used to living at the Golden Helicon and, as each day passed, I grew more and more fond of luscious Susanna, not to say, in love. Each evening, it was our custom - that is, the three of us (Baz’s wife having died three years before) - to sit around the log fire and tell stories to while away the long night. These stories were, by custom, gruesome and macabre, since we took delight in that ecstatic shiver of fear that horror will send down one’s spine. On one peculiar night, it was Susanna’s turn to tell the tale. All day, I had noticed something strange about…”
“THERE WAS SUNSHINE UP HER BUM!”
“HA! HA! HA!”
“…the beauty, intrinsic in her form. It seemed marred by an intangible mist of evil or decay. A hobmadonna mask, as it were. Her eyes were blurred and the skin seemed paler than usual. However, at the correct hour, we all sat down and listened to Susanna:
‘Once upon a time there was a man and his wife who truly loved each other. They lived in a cottage near a dark, evil forest. One day, a strange man, clad in a black cape, came out of that forest, seeking shelter in their cottage. Being a kind-hearted couple, they welcomed him in and gave him plenty to eat. Whilst he was eating the luscious fruits that they had provided for him, he told them a story:
“A story of a man who continually found a corpse at his threshold every morning. Each day the corpse was freshly killed with its throat meticulously sawn through. At first he was shocked but, gradually becoming accustomed to the phenomenon, he disposed systematically of the corpse each day - by feeding it to his pet. Rabbits and cleaning the step of the congealed blood. This continued for many years - day after day he carried out the clearing up operation. But, one day, the corpse was not there!! The man ranted and raved. He tore at his hair in frustration - for he saw the sheer horror of the clean, dry, white step (dry and white as the night before) gleaming in the light of dawn. Immediately, he cut his own throat and fell on to the blaringly white threshold step. His neighbours found him thus and wondered why he had killed himself, for doubtlessly this was the case. They searched his house for evidence … and found a particular book, the contents of which made them presume that it had sent him mad. In fact, the contents were decidedly soul-upheaving, as I will show…”’
“YOU’RE HOTCHING YOUR POTCH WITH THESE LUDICROUS STORIES WITHIN STORIES!” GRINNED SOME INSIDIOUS JOKER.
Anyway
‘”It told of the story of a mother and son who lived together on the edge of a huge, dark forest. The son became progressively mad - and here is a quotation from the book:
“Josiah clutched at the grimy handle of his dagger, sweated and advanced towards her. He advanced towards her. Towards her, as she screamed her lungs out. He grabbed her black hair in his paw and pulled. He slit the skin of her forehead, sliced straight down the front of her body.
‘Do you feel pain, Mother?’ Josiah asked.
But she could not answer. She was dead. Dead as an unwound clock. The son, slavering at his mouth, chewed her finger-ends and, finding the taste to his liking, proceeded to make a meal of his mother’s corpse. For days, he picked at her bones - as he would at the carcass of a roast chicken. The remaining bones he gave to his dog…”
There were many other quotations, this being the mildest, which would have sent any stable man as mad as a castrated geeKen. The man from the forest there finished the story and the kind couple stared at him in wonder. Little by little, the man slid out of his black cape and revealed himself as a black demon with a twist of mockery on his lips. He giggled and said:
‘YOU are mother and son and you have been living as man and wife! Little did you know!’
The couple were shocked for it was true that she had lost her son to a tribe of gypsies at an early age. The demon giggled again and pounded on the woman, intent on sucking her blood. This having been accomplished, he force-fed lumps of her flesh to the whimpering son, whom the demon later sucked…”
It was at that point that Susanna finished her story. Baz and I were undoubtedly shocked - for this story surpassed in horror any that had been previously served up. We were not titillated by subtle terror but disgusted by Susanna’s perverted turn of mind, so incongruous with her angelic body.
‘Susanna, that was not a ‘nice’ story,’ blurted out Baz.
‘I am not a nice person,’ she whispered malignantly.
‘What has come over you, girl?’ cried the startled father.
‘Yes, dear Susanna, have you a demon presence within you?’ I asked tentatively.
I must have been very near the truth for she immediately pounced on her father and chopped his head off with the carving knife. His head rolled over the carpet and came to rest at my feet,
‘Susanna! Susanna! Cease this mischief!’ I screamed.
Forthwith, she pounced on me and commenced to fill my mouth with vomit that was at this moment spirting from her mouth. She crammed it in so hard that I couldn’t breathe. This I imagined was torture beyond all torture, even worse than the filing of my skull in Rull. I pushed her off me as best I could and lurched towards the door with her hanging on to my ankles. I vomited out her own vomit on her wailing face and, released from her infernal grasp, I burst out of the door into the streets of Crane. I ran and ran and ran. Am I still running, Susanna close on my heels?”
And that is my contribution to the gathering.
(V) THE STORY OF CREAM-AT-THE-TOP-OF-THE-MILK, THE GIANT RABBIT
Some have called me Woundwort but, really, I have a very sweet disposition. So please do not cower, sweet animals, for I am not going to hurt you and the farmer is not near. Graze at peace for Mother Nature enfolds you and all quakes and neo-quakes are gone forever.
THE ANIMALS GATHERED AROUND TO HEAR THE RABBIT’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE STORY COMPETITION.
Once upon a time, on the eastern side of farflung England, there was a school (and on dark days it was a dark school) and it was St George’s Primary School. It was dirty orange and towered squatly over the surrounding streets. The roofs, multi-chaotic in appearance, stepped down from the belltower which, when our hero was there, used to signal the start of morning and afternoon class - but, now, I am told, silent is. Circled by playgrounds and sharp railings, the school was, at the time of my story, about 60 or 70 years old. Down a tangential street, there was an annexe to cater for the population bulge (cause by post-wartime copulation). So, children had to walk to and fro to attend lessons in the main school and in the annexe (however, the twits were mainly kept in the annexe). Around the annexe was the school’s playing field and one further playground.
To give my story more immediacy, I will now take some famous commentator’s advice and pitch the prose in the first person singular of our hero.
The roofs looked chaotic to me as I was only a little boy and mere simplicity would have had hidden intricacies to my naïve and blushing eyes. Right angles were V-shaped and sweet companions were individuals of grim and foreboding nightmare. I always remember the day when the fire alarm erupted and it turned out NOT to be drill. We gathered in the girls’ playground and watched insidious smoke drifting from the staffroom roof (some stupid bugger had dropped his fag on the carpet). We were herded down to the annexe where we sang ‘Ten Green Bottles’ with the music teacher who lived down there (or so I thought). Another incident that remains lodged in my mind as I write this novel, is when I was accused of cheating in an exam. At the time, I sat next to my closest friend John Watts in a double desk - and I positively copied down an answer I KNEW was wrong. It was ‘Dormouse’ - I forget the question but the correct answer was ‘mouse’. I got most of the answers correct from my own volition but, as a result of my perversity and of my teacher spotting we had both the same wrong answer AND of the teacher not liking my face, my sweet soul was vigorously berated and I have never been the same since. To cap it all, amid the terrible torment of this accusation, the teacher took it into his head to tell me to take down my knees from the edge of the desk. This habit of mine was so engrained that obeying him was very difficult and, predictably, my kneecaps wandered back to their customary position. He exploded! And I had to stand on my desk for the rest of the lesson viewed by the countless upturned eyes of my ‘sweet companions’.
However, the main incident during my life at this school was the Pageant. Each April 23rd, a Pageant was held on the annexe playground to celebrate St George’s Day. All the kids dressed up in Medieval costumes except for about eight who trooped around covered in one huge piece of cardboard - this was the dragon! There was always one smart kid whom they made St George with a red cross on his chest. All the parents and local newspaper reporters came to watch this spectacle. One particular year, it was decided that the kids in the main roles did not have loud enough voices for their words to carry in the open air. So they made me - yes, me - the Herald, since I had the best reading voice in the school (I always read lessons from the Bible at Carol Services etc.) and I would shout out the story as it was enacted. I had a very large posthorn to blow (bigger than myself on which I practised - for weeks before the performance). Anyway, I, as the star turn, with my proud parents meekly sitting in a back row somewhere, forgot my words.
Pitiful, isn’t it? You must admit, dear friends, that this is a very touching story. And it is even more touching when you learn that this little boy committed suicide soon after. He left this memorial fragment as his epitaph.
A ROOTLESS THOUGHT
I am alone in the house.
Rain spatters on the parlour window like a thousand furious demons gobbing on it from the pavement outside.
Too many horrible thoughts ... I try to shake them off, but bashing one sloped-up ear with my fist does not seem to help at all. Makes it worse, in fact.
Shall I switch on the TV? I look up at its empty screen, only to find it staring back at me. It must be dark outside now, as I am no longer able to tell the ill-gathered curtains from their crack.
I suppose I could write a story for ‘The Visitor’ ... but with all my ideas fast becoming senseless morbid thoughts, not much hope of that. I cannot summon any impetus, mainly because of the lethargic doom threading my mood in the guise of these words, words that probably don't exist at all, even in my own head. And butterflies clot together in a panic to escape by the narrowing exits of my stomach ... or so it feels.
If it were not for the music on the radiogram, there'd be nothing but the utter silence around me. I assume I must be having some thoughts to prove I'm not a vegetable. If I were truly stagnant, my mind would be a blank ... like the TV screen.
A vehicle roars up the wet hill beyond the curtains, forging a path through all the loneliness out there.
* What was that? A thought just that moment careered through my mind like a distraught pet. Inevitably, I've forgotten it. There it was and there it was gone.
The music on the radiogram is now almost becoming part and parcel of the silence, not quite obliterating the knowledge that there IS a silence-in-waiting.
There it was again - that thought! It weltered inside my stomach like the rotting corpse of that pet ... and then abruptly disappeared in such an act of conjuring my mind was incapable of grasping it.
How do I know there was a thought, if I've forgotten it? I can only imagine it leaves something behind inside.
There it was again! I nearly grabbed it full square that time. I seemed to visualise a single bed, a very tidy one, with a cover neatly tucked, a lip of white at the top where the sheet must have been folded over with the use of a set square. Merely an impression, nothing more.
During this thought, I appear to have forgotten about the music. No wonder - the LP has ground to a halt and the sound of reinvigorated silence jeers at me about its victory.
* As more cars swish up the hill outside, the thought blinds me more and more with its crescendo of wordless meaning.
There is a child in pyjama trousers that are tied with a straggly cord. It must be a boy. Why is he standing by the bed ... shivering? He's afraid to get in and his breath comes out in misty jets.
The toing and froing of the thought grants me further detail. There is a strange hump at the bottom of the bed.
Amid other unknowable thoughts which interfere with the main one, I comprehend that the vision must be of my own creation. That's the way with thoughts. Something, I suppose, for me to use as a raft to escape the hissing sea of silence ... from its tittering victory over sound ... from the swishing cars which tote dire luggage in their boots ... from the haemorrhaging upon the window pane ... above all, from myself, worse than any of them.
So, if the thought is of my own volition, I can surely do what I will with it. I can encourage that sobbing child to get into the cosy bed and drift into the best dreams I can muster for him. That would warm my vitals. Clear my stomach of the butterflies and ease my concern for his well-being.
No, I won't do that. Too glib. Too easy. But what shall I do? A problem, perhaps, but a diverting poser nevertheless. I know, I'll wheel in his mummy with a carpet beater for his bottom. Serve him right, probably ... the little wretch is begging for a good old-fashioned spanking.
The thought again. This time the child was kneeling down by the bed, tiny hands pressed together, praying ... to God ... to ME? Peculiar that I should make him do that, since I've never believed in God. What shall I make him do next?
* The flowers in the Woolworths vase, which my father arranged this morning, are beside me as I think. Clustered together, a bunch of pastel colours, each petal pointing at me ... or reaching out for me ... or perhaps they're demons' tongues eager to tell me something if they were not drowned out by the bumptious silence. The cackling silence. The flowers will be good as dead by tomorrow, little do they know. Lost their damn roots, poor bleeders. But, isn't that what has happened to my thoughts? One moment almost laughing at the predicament of the flowers, the next finding myself in the very same boat.
I probably lost my root when I was born, wrenched from my mother's womb ... that's why I'm dying ... like those same flowers plucked from Mother Earth ... that's why all of us are dying.
Back to the little boy. What have I next in store for him? Ah, he appears ready for beddybyes, now preparing to fold back the lip of sheet I thought of earlier on. His tentative movements still reveal the undercurrent of fear ... but fear of exactly what? Perhaps the lump under the covers at the end of the bed gives him the jitters ... and so it should. I would not have thought of it, if it did not have a purpose in the scheme of things.
Let's scrutinise this boy somewhat closer. But, too late, he's gone - I've given up thinking of him. Perhaps I shall return to him later ... only if I want to do so, of course. Shall I switch on the TV, now? The reflection of my familiar face on the screen is very disconcerting.
(2006 NOTE: THERE FOLLOWS A CRUDELY BIRO-DRAWN TV SET (LABELLED ‘BLACK & WHITE’ WITH ON, OFF, VOLUME AND BBC2 BUTTONS) AND A BEARDED, BESPECTACLED MOONFACE IN A SCHOOL CAP ON ITS SCREEN).
No, I won't switch it on, since I yearn to show the one who watches me that I am impervious to his cold stares. I have the supremacy, after all - by merely filling the screen with the transient images of real life, I can rid the parlour of my familiar's presence. Little does he know that he is at the mercy of the faceless laughter people on the box of tricks.
Yes, he IS staring at me - I just had a look.
The little boy is now getting into the bed very slowly. He has a sweet face. His soft eyes are wide with fear, teeth clenched like a vice. What an angel he is! He gradually slides his legs down the bed ... and I realise that they are not long enough to reach the lump. Frantically, I try to elongate his legs, but to no avail.
Wait ... the LUMP is moving up the bed. Trust me to think of that. I don't believe the little boy is aware of the covers humping along towards him from the footboard. But, IS the lump moving, though? Yes, it is, never fear, but very painstakingly.
Oh, I've faded the thought out. That gives me an opportunity to invent a good ending.
Let's consider the situation - a frightened little boy in bed with a mysterious lump moving up towards him under the covers. What can the lump be? Let's make it something really nasty! The silence whispers in my ear to make it a giant beetle. It's creeping up to nibble the child's toes with its clicking pincers. What a hoot! But this does not seem to fit the thought ... something not quite right. Damn it, I must think of something suitable.
I pick hold of the bright orange cushion from the sofa as if seeking for inspiration in its loud softness. It is so bright, it is a blasphemy to silence. I hug it close as if it's a vital part of me. It feels hairy. I appear to view it as a dead cushion. But if I tore it apart, there would be no blood, no tissue, no swollen innards ... no mind, no thoughts. But one cannot see thoughts ... anyone knows THAT.
I now seem ready to complete the thought. It would be the little boy's pet cat which had fallen asleep in his bed. The child's face is to light up with joy as he pulls it out and strokes the fur. He is to cuddle it close.
The silence is quite correctly silent. The rain has stopped, no longer feeding the walking rootless ones. I'm switching the TV on, at last...
* Like a rabbit from a conjurer's hat, a yawning head reaches the blinding light of the bedroom, its long ears taking purchase one by one upon the top lip of the bed-covers to extract itself.
There is, of course, no sign of a child. Only the dead silence of God praying.
* But wait, it has not ended! The tableau of sleeping child and cat returns. What an artist I must be! The claws and teeth of the beloved pet are buried in the child’s neck and blood bubbles from the torn jugular. I fear I feel the child’s screams within my very body, scarring my very vitals … and the screams well out of my mouth, welling, welling from the depth of my stomach, spurting out in red gushes….
* But we most not end my tale on such a note. We must have a glorious climax and, to do so, let’s return to St George’s Primary School to catch a glimpse of one moment of glory. There was a game the boys played in the schoolyard and they called it Denno. The players were divided into two, one group scattered in one corner of the playground (the den) and the others huddled in the opposite corner. One by one, the latter boys ran towards the other corner and if they could run, by darting and weaving, into it without being touched, that was a successful turn. However, if he was touched, he would be trapped in the den until a compatriot actually did manage it, thus releasing all the prisoners. This successful runner would scream ‘Denno!’ as he entered the den and all the prisoners would scamper back to the home corner. Well, one day, it was the Denno game of all Denno games. All realised that this was it. Our hero was known as a fast runner - but not so good as the ace runner defending the den (a massive bloke for his age). One by one, the runners were caught by this giant and they stood awaiting the last runner, their only chance, your hero, our hero, my hero, me.
As I stood there, I realised my life had pointed to this very moment. All depended on me. To calm my nerves, I found myself thinking of pineapple and icecream. Then - I zoomed! The giant leant grimly towards me but - dart, weave, sidestep, jump, zip - I sped through. ‘DENNO!’
COMMENTS ON COMMENTS By Des Lewis to Peter Jeffery
I am glad you enjoyed ‘The Visitor (I)’ on which you made many kind comments. I will not try to comment on your comments, as I hope all will become clear over the next few months as Abraham and I continue the stories. By the way the full title* was taken from the postmark that keeps appearing on your envelopes. If it were not for those, I would most certainly have forgotten about such a Northern newspaper entitled, of all things, ‘The Visitor’. In any case, how you could think its name would appear on a xeroxed broadsheet in the City of London is beyond me!
“THE VISITOR” ‘The Family Owned Independent Newspaper’ 1874 - 1974 Centenary Year.”
(vi) The Story of Ivan The Red Ocelot
I am going to tell the tale of Peter Jeffery, the reckless beard. Sometimes known as good old Pete, the Crazy Commentator, Auntie Meat or juts plain Jeffer, I am sure this is going to be the best tale of all.
INFINITE MADE A STUDIED NOD AND BEAKED THE FOLLOWING: “PROCEED BY ALL MEANS, BUT WHETHER A STORY ABOUT ONE AMONG US, ONE OF THIS VERY GATHERING, COMES WITHIN THE RULES OF THE GAME IS DOUBTFUL. HOWEVER, PLEASE DO NOT LET ME PUT YOU OFF – I MAY CHANGE MY MIND BEFORE THE END OF THE DAY.”
INFINITE SMILES (IF BEAKS CAN SMILE) WRYLY AND MOTIONED A CLAW FOR IVAN’S INCEPTION.
Once upon a time, twice upon a time, thrice upon a time … a large beard, fanged and bodiless, lolloped down a hairy hill.
“I RECKON THAT’S A CLASSIC START TO A STORY,” INTERPOLATED A PASSING POLICEDOG. BEFORE ANY COULD REPLY TO SUCH AN IDIOTIC STATEMENT, THE SAID DOG HAD PADDLED OFF, SHREDS OF PAPER HANGING FROM ITS TEETH.
Shall I start again?
INFINITE MADE A STUDIED SNARL.
No? Well, I shall try to take up the thread. Where was I? Oh, yes, I am telling you about Juan Camembert (or John Cheese as he is known in some ‘circles’).
THERE WAS A SERIES OF HIDEOUS BOOES AND HISSES FROM THE HERDED HORDE AS THEY CHASED THE POOR OCELOT FROM THE STAGE.
====== Well, Lorg, you have just heard the first failure, the first unfinished tale in the greatest story competition of all time. No, do not despair, it is the first and last of its kind. The next is a real classic but, before that, it is time for an ‘Inlogue’, so that I can nip down to the white ocean for a quick pee.
(One could hear the cameraman chuckling as he stumbled away – obviously part (vi) was spontaneously designed for he had been suddenly caught short!)
INLOGUE I By John Cheese, in collaboration with Tommy Mica
(a) The Rock and the Dog
The clocktower silent is, Whilst the war is on fire Around Pedro’s mountain. Spanish children scamp In the dry, yellow dust, Knowing not that the war is. Suddenly, a bloom of orange, Blood-petals, Bursts its boil Over the rim of Pedro’s sombrero. The specked children Cower in their dens, Knowing not that this war is. Crushed petals, red-streaked, Float from the sky, A vice versa balloon race Labelled with the death From which it comes. * The clock-tower silent is And tolls not when the war ends. The Spanish children, Skeletal stiff in their damned dens, Know not that their end was. Staccato statues, They prick the air around With their sharpened bones. * The clock-tower Pedro is - His limbs cat-strung, Gut-tight, bone bitter, As an effigy Of the tower that was. His mind, clock-wound, Hands awry, unnumbered is. * Away to the south is A red-stained rock Where the bitter battle was, The clock-tower Spaniard, A black pin silhouetted To the misty north distance, Where Pedro’s mountain is, Is as solitary as the rock is. A Chirico humming silence Tightens the purring affinity Of pin and red rock Where a whining dog spits. * Away to the east is The accumulating clouds Of an imminent storm Which will wet the dust That deadens death’s hiss, where the war was. The dog beneath the rock is, Snarls at the black pin, At that horizon-flaw. It mourns its soldier-master, O moustached brigand That fed it red meat Before the bitter battle was. * The clock-tower Spaniard Ticks tears for his children Who uncomprehending corpses are. The dog breathes its last And the red rock glistens Where the rain of the storm is.
(b) The Killer Antelope
A square, generally yellow, windowless, stuffy attic Holds within its claustrophobic compass A stuffed, glassy-eyed antelope, rigid as the attic’s air. Of course, since windowless, the yellow and the arch antelope Cannot be seen by the visitor through the impenetrable gloom As there is no permanent method of casting yellow light In the lachrymose attic of antique atmosphere. The door stands almost perpetually shut, So, once again, the interior is as dark as ebony, And the Poet is unable to discern the form of the stuffed antelope. He is alone in the attic with this stiff, standing statue: No sound. Not even the flap of the sparrow’s wings, Nor the unseen rustle of the coming night through dusk. The tears of the air drip down the invisible yellow wall, But even they are soundless as the stiff, stuffed beast. The Poet crouches in a corner which he cannot calculate, From the tendency of the direction of his thought, Whether north pointing or south pertaining. The strong silence persists, survives its own oppression, And reaches its perfect strands over the standing air. Who knows what positively lurks in the opposite corner, Behind the central imminence of the unlooming antelope? A red tiger recently escaped from its own metaphor? A silver-suited Shylock selfishly clasping a valuable ornament Or the mirror-image of our cowering Poet? The dark makes the answer nigh impossible Unless the blood-peering Poet creeps carefully To his opposite corner, never leaving the walls’ warmth. He will not manage to pluck his courage, pizzicato prominent, To wreak this journey of wet, black, humid crawl. Suddenly, the antelope shifts in the dark! It paws the dusty floor, its muzzle panting softly. The Poet knows not this movement, For his fists cram his ears to blot out the silence. Better his own silence than that not man-made. He did not hear the antelope’s tentative exit From stuffed oblivion nor, of course, saw its progress. Only the Reader understands the Poet’s fear, Only we can see the creaking, shifting beast. Where does it shift? Where does it tend? Only the antique antelope knows, only it understands. Although unseen, we know it creeps Poetwards, But we pretend it’s the opposite direction. Ho do we, indeed, know that its direction is such? Truthfully, we can only guess, we can only hope. A sensible suggestion the Reader makes: Leave and search for a yellow torch to light the scene! Pull yourself from the Poem’s claws, Fetch weapons, guns of green, black bullets! We must save the cowering, deafened Poet! This we accomplish and return, but a shock meets us: The attic is empty, we know that the blackness hides nothing. The Poet and antelope have disappeared, The torch is now superfluous, we do not use it. Guns of green, black bullets - mere tautologies. How did the crouching, fearful Poet meet his death? How did the antelope crush its purposed prey? How did they dim into mutual nothingness? These questions point to possible answers, One being that Poet is now Reader, or can that really be? But where is the killer antelope Who was stuffed too stiff in the lachrymose attic On top of this mansion, under night’s hood? He roams the night through forests of sick silence. The gibbous moon sheds its yellow gloom Through the criss of branch and cross of leaf, Silhouettes the slowly shifting antelope. The attic now does not exist, nor does the Poet, Nor does the Reader, or can that really be?
(vii) THE STORY OF THE PSEUDO-ART MASTER
As two Lapland antelopes locked their antlers in friendly combat, the other farmyard animals gathered around to hear the odds on favourite for victory in the story competition. (Rumours were that, as well as the main prize of an all-expenses-paid trip to the Plains of Harchwee and Ka, Castle Neb (Publishers Extraordinary) would publish the winning story in their reputable broadsheet (currently enjoying its centenary year as a family-owned literatum)).
“HUZZA! HUZZA! HUZZA!,” BRAYED THE HERALDIC DONKEY (WITH LARGE POSTHORN) TO ALERT THE GATHERING THAT THE INTERMISSION WAS OVER AND THAT THE FARMER HIMSELF WAS ABOUT TO TELL HIS TREMENDOUS TALE:
Hey-Day! Alack, Alack, I must, I suppose, leave my drowsy somnolence…
“SUPERFLUITY!!” SCREAMED A PESTISH BEAST.
…to tell you all my tremendous tale.
Thomas Michael lived in London in 1974, somewhere near Croydon. In those days, home videos were not available and he travelled daily to the West End (where the entertainments were centred) to work as a projectionist in a large Leicester Square cinema. As a child, he had wanted to be a television news cameraman, his ambition to peer through a viewfinder and "steal" the scene for unseen millions. He wielded no lying medium, such as brush or pen. His art was perfection itself. If he did not manage to become such a cameraman, he would have liked to be a professional photographer. Not quite so satisfactory, but the next best thing. However, he became a cinema projectionist - the third best thing? We shall see, for my tremendous tale is about to begin.
“MERE OPUSCULUM!” LAUGHED SOME NAUGHTY NANNY.
Dodging the IRA terrorist bombs that were rife those days in that area, he used to arrive at 11 a.m. and left about Midnight to return south. He projected many films in his time, for example "The Sound of Music", "The Horror of the Furniture Removers", "The House of Whipcord", "The Exorcist", "The Hotel of Free Love", "Blotting Up The Dreams" and so on.
The job was so routine, he yearned for some other excitement. But Thomas Michael had a sense of humour - a veritable asset in that day and age. Not only did he have that quirky aspect, he also possessed what was then known as an "avant garde" taste in art. His hero was Warhol.
He decided to play a prank on one night's audience. So, the weekend before, he went into his living-room with his own home-movie camera. He emerged several hours later with an evil grin butterflying over his naughty face. Several days later, the cinema audience having just seen "Horror From The Skies", ending in a mind-blowing B-feature plane crash scene, were now settling in a good mood for the main sex film. The canned music softly hummed behind their costly chitter-chatter. Soon, the vast auditorium dimmed, the huge neo-Victorian chanderlumes faded, the tireless chatter tired and the incessant mealy-mouthed musak gradually sicked up silence. All stared up expectantly.
In the near dark, the towering pleats of the velvetine curtains hummed open on their electric rollers to reveal the empty, but horrifyingly potential, oblong tunnel-end of the silver screen. The MGM lion roared from its plinth and the film began. The quality of the image abruptly deteriorated and, instead of the sharp bright colours of typical scrolling credits and the tortuous electronics of a trendy theme, there appeared, planted in the middle of the most expensive screen in London, the flickering image of a domestic television set. Through the flishflash of the amateur film-maker's carelessness, the astonished audience glimpsed a strange hand reaching out from the foreground to switch on the set. And then, they could just discern the programme on the TV screen - one of those dreadful "soaps" which inundated the public's consciousness at that time. In black and white.
Thomas Michael, up in his little booth, grinned maliciously. Since the audience had already seen this classic of the small screen in better circumstances (i.e. on a colour TV set in the warm comfort of their living-rooms without the "intervention" of a cheap holiday-movie camera) and since they had not come to see it anyway, they began to boo and hiss violently. He continued to grin maliciously, as he heard the increasing riot below. This escapade would cost him his job, but the excitement was worth it.
Soon, he could hear the "Ee-Aw, Ee-Aw, Ee-Aw" of approaching policecars. Then there erupted the shrill whistles as the force broke into the auditorium with the concomitant chaotic yapping of snarling policedogs. Of course, Thomas Michael was not unoccupied during those interminable moments. He had switched on the houselights and was leaning precariously from his booth, as he filmed the mayhem milling amid the plush seats of the upper circle. He recorded, too, with his cheap movie camera, the torn limbs, the rabid dogs plastering distemper all over the velvet fittings, the helmetless policemen and their bleeding truncheons, the frothing faces and blood-balled eyes and, not without a growing sense of humour, he re-recorded the still flickering cinema screen, the TV upon it and the flesh-coloured hand that reached out like God's to switch it off. In due course, they arrested Thomas Michael and threw his unloaded camera into the red rubble that the auditorium had become.
COMMENTS IV By Peter Jeffery
Let me say (no I won’t, snaps Des) before venturing comment upon part (xiv) that I am shocked & appalled to find that ‘The Visitor’ (another book of the same name (?)) begins afresh on page 49 (SIC). Stories within stories are one thing & novels within novels quite another (obviously).
On Part (xiv) I will not labour obvious cross-references both to other parts of ‘The Visitor’ (rosemary, human head, onyx (chips -:- field), the flapping lens (vulture moth & probably at least a dozen other references to eel brooches, diverse flappers & lenses of TV cameras) etc. etc.) & to other pieces not in ‘The Visitor’ (e.g. the ‘For PFJ’ about Chips Auger, to John Cleese/Cheese of Monty Python (N.b. the cheese shop sketch etc. etc.)). Actually, the whole piece up to the crossed out section (SIC) (is this supposed to be read - it is still quite legible & could be intended as remaining deleted but an integral part of ‘The Visitor’?) is reminiscent of large numbers of previous passages including another dream scene…
The crossed out passage (SIC) intimates that the sub-sub-narrator of this dream is Lorg Dagg (sub-narrator Ab Bintiff, narrator DFL (Cf. Comments on ‘The Core’) & the following passages confirm it - although Dagg is not the only one who was in the lotto hatched room (crones & camber were there too), he was the only one to survive (or was he??) &, more certainly, the only one likely to mention that ‘Even Edalpo has gone’ (for obvious reasons)… (This possibility* gives rise to the question as to whether, in that case, the beings called pseudo-Egnis or pseudo-art Master could be real Egnis or art Master or, possibly, (& I quake at the possibility) some pseudo-pseudo-Egnis & pseudo-pseudo-art Master)…
*The claimant of the title of Real-DFL of part (x) (SIC), it will be recalled, was shown as the clearest internal evidence to be a pseudo-DFL … & the further evidence could have been adduced (but was not) that he mentions a mole on the right cheek whereas it is an indisputable fact that the real DFL has a mole on the left cheek. An examination of the picture // what picture? - Ed. // at the end of Part (xiv) shows a mole, or something of the sort, on the right cheek of the face. On this evidence (& on the suspicions aroused a couple of times above) it is clear that this is a pseudo-DFL &, at once, our suspicions of this claimant to the title of being the real Visitor (as opposed, presumably, to the preceding pseudo-Visitor), increase tenfold…
@@@
…On then, to the lift indicator which reminds me of the clock in ‘Wheels of Time’, only this time it seems more to be a case of wheels of space … If (& this is possible) the revolving clock of W of T refers to time revolving until the same point is continually re-reached, the indicator of the lift may be held to indicate space revolving until the same place is reached again. Digression: the solar system revolves round the galaxy at approx. 12 miles a second & the sun should, eventually, come to the same point again, but so great is the distance that the last time the sun was here (if it was ever here before) there was no planet as Earth & may (if it gets back here again) have sucked the Earth into itself the next time around - like a man travelling round the Circle Line buying & eating apples as he goes: end of digression. Parallels could, of course, be drawn with diverse circles: the Hindu wheel, death & rebirth, the wheel of fortune of the tarot, the philosophical zodiac etc. etc. … the vague suggestion of a face inside the wheel of the lift indicator is duly noted & lends the circle a kind of sentiency & possible links between the be-numbered circle & lotto hatches (with faces peering through) also come to mind. (As Shed says of the texture of the wood hinting at a face ‘we shall not go into that’ as is well for it might end up in a discussion of deity or will or purpose or something else of the kind, lying behind the wheeling of the Cosmos*).
*Or, for that matter, authors lying behind the wheelings of the story!
On, now, deeper into Shed’s story. I shall pass over the interpolations of the gathering, remarking only their ignorance of preceding portions of ‘The Visitor’ & return to the heroine in the lift. As she moves from floor to floor she seems to be revolving through previous Visitor passages & fragments of the tale flash by as if her life recalled in an instant by a woman drowning. The art Master’s prying camera, the moonface of DFL or pseudo-DFL, the grinning beard of a crazy commentator or the slippers of the Di-Jo crones & the hideous visage of Edalpo. And then - the lift stops. ‘The Visitor’ has ceased to revolve (= the break from the previous story in which this tale is told?) mayhap the point of entry into the story is reached; & she becomes part of the woodwork. One may compare this with the eating of the apple on the Circle Line, the sun sucking in the Earth (cf. THOTBL), escape from the wheel of death & rebirth (= enlightenment, the nirvana of the Buddhist system) etc. etc. … Of the vision of the burning fence I need, perhaps, only say that maybe she is now become pure = nothing (= nirvana again?). The other vision must refer to the work of Charles Dipp (the infamous) & the clock tower may refer to her own clock…
Moving on, I am very glad to see that you included a comment upon the comment on my previous comments, a good touch, this…
…on to Sade’s story … I shall say that the multi-layers of story fit in well with the general scheme of things which appears in the current portion of ‘The Visitor’ (Cf., e.g. some of the remarks near the top of p. 53 (SIC)). This multiple layer nature, already a heavy element in ‘Orlando’ is here intensified by the interpolations of the listeners plus the fact that it is now part of a novel within a novel … It is quite remarkable, I think, how much the piece gains from its surroundings … The comments, or some of them, thrown in by the listeners remind me of the way that I was interpolating in the story when you last read it to me at Easter back in Pearly Surrey…
(viii) THE STORY OF THE PSEUDO-EGNIS
(2006 NOTE: THERE FOLLOWS A CRUDELY BIRO-DRAWN IMAGE (WITHIN QUOTE MARKS) DEPICTING A MOONFACE WITH GLASSES AND A VERY LONG BEARD AND AVERAGE-LENGTH BLACK HAIR AND TWO FANGS AND A MOLE ON THE LEFT CHEEK.)
“IS THAT IT??” QUERIED AND REQUERIED THE GATHERED SHOP STEWARD AND HIS BRAYING UNION.
That’s all I really need to say, REPLIED ETEPSED-EGNIS, it is an encapsulation…
“OOOH!”
…of my potential story, a symbol of its undeniable essence…
“OOOOOH!”
However, if you wish I will give you the whole story since your small minds cannot contain the infinite strands and their inessence…
“OOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!”
The encapsulation is a symbol of the Despete union. As a few words of introduction to the story, I will explain that Des Lewis and Peter Jeffery met years ago in Lancaster University library. Trumpets blared and Royalty bowed as the Des climbed the spiral stairs to the third floor foyer where the Pete sat and waited for the most important event in literary history. The Vice Chancellor of the University opened the door for DFL and the latter, dressed as a herald with huge posthorn, recognised his goal - PFJ dressed as St George. The pomp and circumstance died away as the memorable event took place! PFJ rose and bowed before the master, they shook hands and cheers rent the air. All knew that Despete was complete and the Etepsed-Egnis / Egnisomicon mythos was about to begin. The Des drew from his pocket a slightly foxed manuscript , some schoolboy effort at literature. The dear boy wanted the Pete’s opinion! Does not the scene want to make you weep?
My entry to the story competition, humble though it be, is the schoolboy story that DFL showed to PFJ on that historic day:
PEDRO
The silver air of Christmas swirled, cascaded, eddied in vortices - through the grimy streets, the bleak buildings, the murky river, the gnarled trees - as titanic bats flapped overhead. Little children, expectant, eager, awake, stared through the darkness, peering for the whisky-bleared eyes of Santa Claus who coughs and splutters through his annual task waiting for eternity to liberate him. Childish men and women hung puffy balloons, silver -crusted tassels and globular bobbles from the groping branches of a fir-tree.
Everything was in a state of expectation, everything that is except Pedro Caillan who just existed without either remembering or predicting anything: no subtle hues decorated his one-roomed apartment; no loud colours clashed and crashed the heavy atmosphere; no light broke up the blackness, the continual blackness: the only tangible element was darkness which one could even feel. It caressed, curled around and shrouded Pedro’s lump of a body bitten into by the deep rivets of indolence. Although the sense of sight felt no change in this room, the sense of hearing could have much food for thought; moans, sickly, thick, slippery with saliva, vibrated in every corner of the room and of Pedro’s frame; scratchings, made by the filth-encrusted nails of sweaty rats, dinned through the air; and unknown sounds, hideous and with mysterious terror lurking behind them, cracked and murmured. The unwholesomeness evidenced itself through every faculty of the human body, but Pedro’s body remained oblivious of it: I say ‘body’, but that of Pedro was more like a slobby mass of red, raw meat.
Outside this house that contained this cancerous corruption, normal life rolled on its course, unaware of the contagion within. Birth and death were neighbours; love and hate; sorrow and joy; tragedy and comedy; the budding of nature when sap bursts forth and the earth baked with frost; Spring and Autumn; Summer and Winter; progress and decadence. Pedro was not a part of life or should I say he was not a part of the two lives - for this life we lead is divided into two; youth and age. Youth is replete with over-bearing joy and fertility when gay streamers and soft balloons dance in Summer breezes. But the shrill brilliance of youth gradually dematerializes and is replaced with the oily fog of age gnawing at the core of one’s being. Not far from that house, Harry Lucas bent over the sickle, caressing the smooth grain of the handle as it sliced the air with each whisk of his hand. Little did he know but he had only three days to live - three days to ‘desickle’ himself, to free himself from human bondage. Unsympathetic, unloving, unlovable, his wife froze his small insignificant body with an icy stare. Uncaring, heedless, she scratched the dying rage of his flesh, prized open each of his veins mapped out over his body. The asperity, the acerbity of the soil stung the cracks forking over his gnarled, skinless lumps of hand. Rivulets of sweat trickled geographically down his face - his face, consisting of one long, red nose, two brown sockets through which life glimmered faintly and one black hollow of a mouth. Still young, fresh, Susan Lucas shouted crisply:
“Dinner Time!”
“OK, Susan.”
The answer was muted having an air of desolation permeating its tonality. His short stumps stumbled over the sterile field, the strides having lost their youthful suppleness and having gained an aged rigidity, a near paralysis. Time is a destroyer. It destroyed Harry Lucas as he lived a normal life, but it also destroyed Pedro Caillan as he lived an abnormal life.
* The mist of memory clears away: the past, usually replete with vague connotations, is clarified and reality takes control. Harry Lucas sucks at a thin, white cigarette, consciously blowing smoke-rings into the bluey air. At this moment in time Lucas has seen twenty-five years’ hard work on his Father’s farm - which will be his very soon. Susan Lucas lets out a deep sigh, echoing within her frame, causing Lucas to follow suit. Sunday is the day and Lucas is having his weekly rest, a rest which grates against his nature. As he sits up in a large, soft armchair, his thoughts wander in other directions: ‘the pigs can be taken on but what about Fred he must go I wish Susan wouldn’t stare fields relax boy can’t you feel the mellowness of the soil cheese photographs what about my holidays none delicious stench of steaming dung remember to clear out the pigs’ 6 O’clock tomorrow relax boy relax relax cows foals…’
“Shall we go to the pictures, then?’ grunted Susan.
“Must go to bed early.”
“We never go anywhere.”
* Pedro Caillan gulped down another whisky.
* Harry Lucas spiked another haycake.
* Pedro is born. The uniform, white walls reflect the golden light spewed by the bulbous globes strung from the blotchy ceiling. White-clad humans fondle the young animal which pules and pukes at them. Skin-clad bones swim in the air of his new world. Young thoughts mass in his head, unknown by the leather-skinned humans and by Pedro: ‘blurred blurs blur my retina and undimensional dimensions from the BEYOND crag boulder pulling power the gate opens and shuts I am out ethereality to reality sense to nonsense sluice-gates I am being animalized I feel fate placing his Nemetic hand on me I will be back in seventy years or so I will follow the straight and narrow Fate’s channel breasting the sluice-gates darkness seems to be destined for me darkness and thick indolence rat-scratching silence transmigration to the BEYOND unholy dreams haycaked spikes are not for me lake parties NO joy NO life NO stagnation YES Lovecraftian literature YES…’
“IS THAT HP LOVECRAFT?”
IGNORING THE STUPID INTERPOLATION, ETEPSED-EGNIS CONTINUED THE STORY:
… ‘I feel air swelling my lungs as sounds burst from my lips formless forms and voiceless voices surround me clumsy hands clutch my animalized form I am born ready to be dragged through Fate’s scheme images from the fourth dimension and passing through the sixth sense are also born to bud later in the scheme of things.’
* Lucas sits and then stands waiting for the vital news. He hopes it is a boy as then he will be able to pass the farm on to him when death wrings the breath from his lungs in the distant future. A baby cry echoes down the stairs and Lucas remains standing four feet from the foot of the stairs for about ten seconds and then, ZOOOOOOOOOOM! Lucas runs four steps at a time into the upper part of the rickety farmhouse.
“Shh!” hissed the doctor, popping his head around the door.
“How is she?” croaked Lucas.
“Fine!”
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
Happiness mingled with disappointment lights up his face, the latter quickly disappearing behind the sunshine of joy and gratitude to God.”
“Can I see her?”
“Only for a few minutes.”
He clutched the handle of the door and gently turned it.
“How are you, darling?”
“I’ll struggle through.”
“Is that her?”
He outstretched his hand and gingerly touched the pulsing body of the baby.
“Yes, it’s real allright, and what I went through to get it!”
After saying these words, Susan fell asleep letting out a deep sigh and leaving Lucas to his own thoughts: ‘Tina Roberta or Daisy no Mary farm no son for farm Tina’s husband? Susan looks tired she’s been through a lot no housework for her for many weeks’.
* Pedro, ten years old, is dreaming: ‘trees clog the sky no light vine-encumbered trees twist and twine overhead underfoot soggy moss sucks at my toeless feet alone alone I breathe unwholesome terror filled air I live in this spectral forest in a wooden shack with my father my wifeless father my lonely father day in day out woodtasks night in night out dreamless sleep on and on no natural light one day life changes for my father a worm with a human face plurps over our floor shock changes to delight in my father’s face wetglueslimy wormbody nestles nudgingly into the sweat of my father’s palm as he strokes it glee gleams from glinting eyes bathing the wormbody in love love which my father has missed for many a stark day kiss human lips on wormbody passionate kiss passion bubbles in my father’s crisping veins every night now wormbody lies on his pillow and during the soft golden days it sleeps under the sinless bed in the corner day after day its human face leering from the unnameable darkness however one day I look under the bed: a small mound of earth has he escaped? father! father! wormdisembodied! SHOCK! Solid silence permeated by shock he shoots up the stairs 3 by 3 bed is thrown aside greengurgleglaucous shock - behind the mound of earth was a sight of cosmic nightmarishness unnameable unspeakable nameless mess - curdling, gurgling, burping, bubbling, seething, exuding a fetor reminding one of everything evil - Satan’s excrement! The metamorphosis of wormbody into the epitome of everything my father did not want in it…’ So ends the dream of a ten year old.
* Lucas laughs at the antics of his little baby daughter as she romps on the floor. The beige carpet is dented in by the lively supple limbs sprouting from the babybody, and high-pitched cries resound through the household. Joy is a vital part of every molecule in the room: the brown curtains look golden; the cracks in the ceiling represent the rivers of the world; the flaking yellow wallpaper represents laughing females waving at the gurgling, burping, bubbling baby; Lucas is God admiring his good work.
“WHAT A ROTTEN STORY!” SHOUTED DONDON, THE Jeffer, WHO HAD HEARD IT ALL BEFORE.
“YES, “AGREED CHISH, “IT WOULD HAVE PERHAPS BEEN MUCH BETTER (AND MUCH MORE CONCISE) WITHOUT THE LUCAS PASSAGES.”
“I WISH WE HAD NOT PUSHED YOU INTO THE ENCAPSULATION EXPANSION. THE INITIAL WORD-PICTURE WAS MUCH MORE SATISFACTORY. IT IS STRANGE HOW WONDERFUL THINGS GROW OUT OF SUCH CRAP (I.E. DESPETEOLOGY). ‘FLOWERS OF MUD’ AS BAUDELAIRE WOULD SAY,” SAID THE INFINITE CUCKOO.
SO IT WOULD APPEAR THAT ONE OF THE INITIAL FAVOURITES, THE PSEUDO-EGNIS, NOW STOOD NO CHANCE WHEN THE FINAL RECKONING CAME.
SUDDENLY, A TERRIBLE SCREAM RENT THE AIR. ALL TURNED THEIR HEADS TO THE LIKELY SOURCE AND SAW A MOST AMUSING SIGHT. ONE OF THE ANTELOPES MENTIONED AT THE START OF THE PREVIOUS STORY, WITH A CLAPPERLESS BELL STRUNG AROUND HIS NECK (IN CASE HE GOT LOST AND THE FARMER HAD TO SEARCH FOR HIM THROUGH THE BLACK MOUNTAIN-MISTS OF THE ONYX FIELD AND THE MEADOW AND BEYOND), HAD ONE PARTICULARLY SHARP ANTLER UP POOR DONDON’S BUM. HIS HUGE BEARD QUIVERED AND HIS EYES ROLLED. HE HAD NEVER KNOWN SUCH PAIN (EVEN GREATER THAN A DECIDEDLY NASTY TOOTH EXTRACTION) AND HE BOUNCED AND PRANCED TO THE GIGGLES OF THE GATHERING.
“CEASE!’ BELLOWED INFINITE AND HE BECKONED TO THE NEXT STORY-TELLER.
(ix)
THE STORY OF ITA-TUNK, THE ROAMER OF THE UNROAMED
Ita-Tunk, of Egnis fame, stepped forward shyly from the gathering, his famous flute strung round his neck. All knew, instinctively, that this would be the last story before the main intermission of the day (when the Infinite Cuckoo would tell his story ‘Armageddon, or the Apocalypse and The Apocrypha’ which would not be eligible for the prize, of course, since he was the judge).
I am afraid I have another Orlando story. Please forgive me but I know no others. Orlando told it this way:
‘I am Orlando, a wanderer through the cities of Neb and I meet up with many strange adventures of which this is one.
There I was, in the middle of winter, riding through the Forest of Jusoda, my horse making mist in icy air with its hot, tired breath, when I came across a tiny cottage in a clearing. This clearing I had never known existed, but there it was, sure enough, the tree stumps showing where the hewing had been done to provide the clearing. Exceedingly tired, I dismounted from my trusty steed, Retep, and banged on the small, drown, wooden door. No answer. I knocked again. Still no answer.
“Anyone at home?” I shouted. “Here is a traveller tired and hungry, seeking shelter.”
A thin, cracked, whistly voice seeped through to me from just behind the door, about two inches away.
“I am an old woman, and how do I know that you are not a villain come to ravish and rob me>” said this dry, twisted croak of a voice.
“I am Orlando, the traveller of Neb. I am as harmless as God ever made,” returned my friendly voice.
“OK, enter,” and the door swung open to reveal a tiny, wrinkled hag, squeezing her eyes tightly to see me. She motioned me with an almost fleshless hand to pass through the portal. I did so with a smile and, I don’t think I exaggerate when I say I was shocked by this travesty of a female, bent, stump-like, squat as the hewn trunks outside.’
“I BET THIS IS ANOTHER TORTURE STORY,” PROPHESIED A BORED LISTENER.
“SHHH! I AM INTERESTED IN ORLANDO’ PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTION TO TORTURE. I AM WRITING A THESIS ON IT,” SHOUTED PROFESSOR DONDON.
‘”Want food and shelter, eh,” she croaked out through her thin, blistered lips.
Now I was not sure whether I wanted to sleep in the same place as the hag, but decided that it was the only cottage for miles and therefore I would.
“Yes, if I may,” I answered.
“It will be a pleasure.” Her face twisted into a wry grin and she plucked a gob of filth from her nose, thereupon eating it with evident relish.’
“NOT ATYPICAL OF ‘THE VISITOR’!” SNEERED SOMEONE.
‘”My name is Gill,” she said.
WHEREUPON, ITA-TUNK SUDDENLY BURST INTO TEARS, WHETHER FOR GRIEF OR JOY, I DO NOT KNOW, BUT I SUSPECT HE WAS RATHER UPSET BY THE SNEERING TAUNTS OF THE LISTENERS. HOWEVER, HAVING BEEN LOVINGLY PETTED BY THE PSEUDO-EGNIS AND THE ART FARMER, HE CONTINUED:
‘”Nice to meet you,” I said, forcing a smile.
“Sit down upon yonder stool.”
I did so.
But…
She had snatched it away before I could do so…’ “…HA! HA! HA!” THE LISTENERS BRAYED. ‘….causing my buttocks to fall to the floor with a resounding crash and bring much embarrassment to my face (and the floor!).
She cackled with laughter pointing at my predicament, for my behind was stuck in a broken hole in the floorboards and I could not get up for the love of God.
She still cackled and jumped up and down, yellow saliva dribbling from the corners of her mouth.
She cackled. But I was very annoyed and spat at her, my spit landing right in the middle of her twisted face.
She stopped cackling. She went red. She approached me very slowly, obviously with evil intent.
I tried in vain to rise. She took from her pocket a little box. I wondered what it would be. Matches? For some demonic torture, no doubt.’
“I TOLD YOU SO - ANOTHER STORY REPLETE WITH ITS STOCK SUPPLY OF PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL, SADO-MASOCHISTIC AND ‘VISITORESQUE’ MUCK!”
‘…But no. Into the box she delved her twig-like fingers, a wicked grin playing on her lips, and drew out a handful of … of what?”
“TINY, INSIDIOUS, POISON-HINGED BEETLES?” SUGGESTED ONE LISTENER.
“TINY LUNGS?” SAID ONE HEAVY BREATHER.
‘…Of drawing-pins - those tin-tacks with which one puts pictures on the walls etc. She walked over to me and proceeded to push them into my skull. The pain was excruciating. A slight prick on the finger is sufficient torture, but pressing tin-tacks into the skull is … well, it is indescribable. The pain was so concentrated - that was the thing! - pain concentrated into a pin-prick. Imagine the greatest pain possible, and then imagine it acting on the area of a pin-prick! She pressed hundreds of them all over my head, until it looked as if I had on a helmet of drawing-pin heads.
I was still frantically striving to unplug my body from the floor, but to no avail. I was literally insane with pain, for I remember flailing my limbs in frothy frenzy.
She petted her cat that was licking up the blood as it dripped to the floor from the sieve of my head. I expected at any moment to see my brains dripping on to the floor, but the liquid remained pure red.
She then proceeded to undo my trousers, and gathering their innards, she took from her pocket a thin silver rod that looked suspiciously like a miniature umbrella. She inserted it into my urinal tube. I was seething with agony and my arms seemed hypnotised not to touch her, for I could have easily knocked the silly old bag away with one blow of my fist. But they were helpless, paralysed against harming her. With the silver tube inserted in my urinal straw, she opened up the umbrella device and commenced to scrape it up. I can surely feel it now between my legs - the exquisite anguish of that scraping umbrella. Scratching, tearing, gnawing, she slowly pulled it up … very slowly.
At least I was free. I had managed to pluck myself from that evil mouth in the floor, to tear myself away from the teeth of the wood. With the silver umbrella still palpitating in my urinal conduit, I leapt for the door, hearing the cackling of the witch growing louder and louder. I ran and ran. And as I sit here in the forest, I am presented with the prospect of withdrawing that silver umbrellas which at the moment I cannot close, for it seems stuck open. Perhaps she intended it never to close.’
AMID THE HUBBUB, ITA-TUNK PRIMLY STOOD DOWN. THE AUDITORIUM WAS IN A CACOPHONY. BUT SOON QUIET WELLED UP, FOR THE INFINITE ITSELF WAS ABOUT TO SPEAK UP.
=====================================
WORDS WRITTEN BY PETER JEFFERY IN A LETTER TO DES LEWIS ON 2/8/73, ABOUT A YEAR BEFORE ‘THE VISITOR’ WAS STARTED. By Peter Jeffery
Looking back now on your comments on my works, I have decided against giving you any counter-comments &, I expect, you are right in saying that one of us died in an accident in December 1966, though, of course, it must remain for future scholars to decide which of us it was. As for my reading “Pedro’; the story that I did read seems to me to be a late accretion to stories (all of them improbable, to say the least) concerning DFL & PFJ & almost certainly entirely apocryphal. Indeed, I would doubt if either of the characters really lived at all & if they did, it might as well be posited that there was really only one person & not two, as it has been posited that Homer was two & not one. It may be that the names (as they come down to us through the mists of legend) are corruptions of aliases used by some actual historical personage, such as the ubiquitous Clovis Camber…
…(According to much learned opinion these two heroes derive from a late misunderstanding of the god Despete, certainly this could account easily for the names Des & Pete. Desmond could have come from an identification of the ‘Des’ part of the name with a phallic mo(u)nd & the ‘r’ of Peter could be a feminine termination, but shall probably have to look elsewhere for the origins of such epithets as ‘Jeffery’ & ‘Lewis’ as well as ‘Francis’ which, since it occurs in the centre of both names, is generally thought to be a title of some sort, rather than a name.)
(x) ARMAGEDDON OR THE APOCALYPSE AND THE APOCRYPHA By The Infinite Cuckoo, Himself
Now, mere immortals, here is my story, hear my story, see through my panning eyes…
Reconnaissance I Reconnoitre (i)
My beak - speak!…
I sweep down from the unclimbed skies, urgent from core within core, source within source … and focus on the execution stand. First a slightest pinprick, growing into a moving - toward panorama, and I see, see the bent and broken forms twitching amidst the grim gibbets. The crowd and TV cameras hub and bub around the stage.
“Do not graph my visage and accompanying thickened lens on your retina, O Birdish majesty,” suggested a muffled man on a nearby warehouse roof. He knew I was Infinite and that I controlled his evident doom. My story may be (but should not be) about this shy moonfaced man.
Positive turns negative, black to white and obviously vice versa.
The negrow was Scandinavian.
Reconnoitre (ii)
The necrophiliac negrow searches the now unsurrounded stage (but heavy with torn corpses) with his probing and enormous tongue.
His nose sniffs out the tastiest cannibalia, but my skim across the sky was so swift that glimpses of his form mixed with other strange individuals (a passing aeroplane (on route for the premiere of Sartre’s ‘In Camera’), a twisty-broochpiece merchant sitting at a porthole in its tail with a Kodak in his paw).
I skim on and leave the negrow to his own death devices.
Reconnoitre (iii)
I hover over a neo-Victorian cinema, the largest in the land, pseudo-Egyptian-cum-Greek in its façade. I drop a newly-born schoolboy from my beak and threw his purple cap after him - a fictional plant to fool the muffled man who owns those flicks.
Great Garbo - or was it Flash Gordon? - flickered before his wondrous eyes (a pirate, refilmed edition, cheap at half the price).
Reconnoitre (iv)
Now to a seedy street, a Victorian slum of the old school. The negrow shuffles past the grim panes, searching for the twisty-broochpiece. He yearned strangely for a certain amulet … which I at that time held close to my birdish breast within a batfilled tomb. The merchant gave it me as I flapped around his head.
The negrow was nearly eaten by unaccompanied policedogs, but he escaped to another time and place.
Reconnaissance II Reconnoitre (i)
My immense flaps are burnt by the onward heat as I wing over the scorching plains and jingle-jungle. I now have the Kodak, hanging from the netherlip of my beak, as if I am some cagey tourist or something.
I witness a bearded fang prance in and out of a conch-like, lobed, whorled cave. An Englishman? I did not and do not know.
The sizzling laminae carry me inward, hinterwards over a strange bulbed, flossy city. In the middle stood a pirate edifice, an evidently recent edition of towering metal, planted on top of which was the muffled man perched behind a camera or was it some hideous effigy of a clock. Whatever, it circled, sundial-like, eyeing the timing of the day.
Reconnoitre (ii)
The negrow arrives at night, so I do not see him nor know that he is there at all.
Reconnoitre (iii)
As I lay in my batfilled tomb, twisty broochpiece pinned to my ‘Grandmother’s-armpit’ tit, I smelt the coming of the spade and heard the baying of some faraway policedog. As the earth churned above, my sleep was of course interrupted. The sticky bats turned spiderwise between my bony limbs and as day broke through the fetor of the turned and turning soil, I saw my ghoul, he who dug toward.
Reconnoitre (iv)
I cannot die as I am Infinite. Instead of death, let us have dream: cascades of white cream, religious octopi, turned and turning corpses on skyward gibbets, necrophiliac incest…
Reconnaissance III Reconnoitre (i)
Let me capture the story for the core, let me tell it and make it a prisoner of my words. The core yearns, aches, literally screams for those who carry character within the promenade of our thoughts. Fictionalise! - that’s the core’s score. Even the narrator most be scored, so let me tell the story (as I have) and now let me end it here. All must be nothing as nothing must be all.
Positive turned negative, black to white and vice versa, and amid the colours of the Earth, the negrow became the Scandinavian. Now negative turns positive, and who is who, what is what, Onyx Field or how? We are figments of a camera’s imagination. The viewfinder tells you what the lens is seeing, but I’ve lost the bloody viewfinder!
At this point, Infinite burst out into the most violent of sobs I have ever heard. However, Edalpo helped him back to his throne and all the confused minds turned their attention back again.
Reconnoitre (ii)
My Kodak lost, I swept the birdless welkin in search of Victorian London. But luck was out and all I found was the blasphemous effigy of a bloated 20th century shop elevator.
Reconnoitre (iii)
The Negrow / Viking landed Crusoe-like on the Onyx Field where I, disguised as a muffled man, told him about a story contest.
EITHER (1) AS THE LAST SENTENCE WAS UTTERED, THE WHOLE FIELD AROUND US SLEWED LATERALLY. INFINITE SHOOK AND SHIVERED ENORMOUSLY.
The Core has won! HE ROARED.
“WHAT A LOONY!” MUTTERED CHISH.
The Core! The Core! I have scored!! INFINITE CONTINUED BELLOWING TO THE WELKIN AND, GRADUALLY, ALMOST INEXORABLY, THE SCENE FADED (AT FIRST GREW BROWN, LIKE AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH, AND THEN FLAKED AWAY). ALL THE LISTENERS DIED OR, BETTER STILL, DID NOT EVER EXIST. THE FIELD CRUMBLED, LITERALLY FLOATED OUT OF EXISTENCE.
OR (2) As the last sentence was uttered, Infinite roared with laughter. Uncontrollable mirth broke out over his beaked visage.
Stop staring in that wide-eyed innocence, dear friends. It’s only a story, mere make-belief. On with the competition.
And he beckoned to the next contestant.
* (THE ART MASTER TURNED TO LORG AND SMILED. “DON’T WORRY, DEAR DAGG, IT’S A TRUE STORY AND (1) WAS ONLY MY FOUL JOKE.”)
(xi) THE STORY OF CAMBERGREASE, THE HORROR OF THE HOUSE
This story is attributed to my ancestor Tristan Camber and disfolds thus:
‘My name is Archibald Z________ and I nearly died yesterday. I shall try to relate as closely as I can my experience, but please keep your hand on your heart and read this story in the clear light of day...for you may die of fright, as I so very nearly did. Please take care, make sure my words are not those of a mad man or one who wants to frighten you gratuitously; make sure you do not put too much credit in their meaning as appreciation of their truth could have damnable effect on the mild-mannered or the nervous...but, as I write this, I genuinely believe each word I am about to devote to paper…’
“THE STORY WILL START IN A MOMENT, I SUPPOSE!!” SAID UNCLE HOWARD.
“BRILLIANT ENGLISH GRAMMAR - TYPICAL OF THIS SECOND-RATE GATHERING,” SARKED A NAMELESS ONE.
‘So much for the warning, now for the facts.
I snuggled into the warmth of the carriage as the train churned through acre upon acre of English countryside. It was impossible to view the trees and village stations we must have passed through, for the night enshrined everything; so the most sensible thing to do was to try and sleep until the time for arrival at my destination, where my uncle would be waiting to greet me.
I slept for how long and with what vague dreams? Nebulous vistas of strange dimensional cities intruded, warped visages staring and tentacles clutching, wet lips and things sucking near.’
“THIS SOUNDS LIKE AN ESSAY IN LOVECRAFTIANA,” WINKED A KNOWING UNCLE HOWARD FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE LISTENING GATHERING.
‘I awoke to the carriage, the formless darkness sliding away past me and an old man snoring in the corner. I was quite shaken by my dreams as the memory of them lingered incoherently. But I soon realized on looking at my timepiece that I should have arrived at my destination about an hour before!
It was then that I comprehended I had not seen one thing from the carriage window. True, I was travelling through a comparatively uninhabited part of England, but this was decidedly peculiar; even though there were no stars nor moon, I should have seen the distant glow of some big town or the lonesome light of a spinster’s cottage. But absolutely nothing could I see, presumably on account of the unusual blackness of the night through which I was speeding in a corridorless train. Might it be fog?
I relaxed back into the seat and viewed my sleeping companion. The fog would explain the lateness of the train, but what about its apparent speed?
I was convinced the train was travelling at a phenomenal speed, but it was now two hours overdue--without precedence on that line. I resolved to wake my companion and I stepped over to shake him. What curled from the hood of the duffel coat was an evilly scarred face and, on unwinding, gave me an imbecilic smile: a moon-face topped by a schoolboy’s cap, giggling in the depth of its rasping throat.
“Mutation” is a word too medical, too clinical, as what I saw was essentially unwholesome; nothing created by a mother on this world, but fashioned far away in dim lands beyond the galaxy we know. The transfiguration took me completely by surprise as, before my eyes, the monstrosity literally dissolved and dripping from the brown duffel coat was a green, sticky slime, forming a viscid puddle on the swaying floor.
It held all the smells which disgust man throughout the world and others completely new to his nose, recalling my dream vistas and certain other things I could not quite place.
My first thought was to pull the communication cord, but I felt the train was slowing down--presumably my destination had been reached. My mind was a maelstrom as the train drew to a halt. On jumping to the platform, I realized it was not my intended destination, but a strange station … and the nightmare train was drawing out, leaving me bewildered and valiseless. Amid the chaos of my mind, I knew I had to find a porter and share the horror I with him.
Empty tins and scraps of paper scuttled along the deserted platform, driven by the night wind. So, no fog! Visibility was excellent, but it still puzzled me why I could not see the moon nor the stars. I shouted for assistance, but none came: a forsaken station, forgotten by all who used to work there, those who, under a happy sun, waved green flags and blew whistles, carted parcels and drank tea. Dazed, I shuffled along the cluttered platform towards the station-house, silhouetted against the ceiling of the sky, ominous and spectral.
I came to a turnstile and, not surprisingly, it was enlaced with choking cobwebs, twining through the bars. The only exit I could see was through there, and so I pulled myself together to cut a path through its creeping entropy. As I entered, an over-nourished spider skittered to its lair. I wish to God I had not looked to the left into the ticket-collector’s cab, for here was not a deserted seat, but the ticket collector himself sitting, not as he used to be, but a decaying skeleton-creature with a puncher in the bones of a hand. A plump worm coiled through his skewered ribs … and I screamed … ran from that blasphemous railway station...
...into avenues of ill-lit horror, through lines of trees, black and twisted against the blacker sky, along country roads twining between untended hedgerows ... until exhaustion put paid to my progress … I saw the House; it rose out of the darkness, looming forbodingly. It was more of a castle than a house, and had two towering wings, pointing and mocking at the sky.
I should not fear its occupants, I told myself--they would probably disperse my fears and show my position on the map - so I plucked up enough courage to walk to the main door. Its massive oaken surface and golden knocker filled me with awe, but I grasped the knocker, pulled it heavily from the wood, and let it drop with a crash echoing throughout the whole house. It was such a loud noise that it startled me and put the fear back. There, I waited for what Fate would bring to the door, waiting, eternally waiting. But no one came. No one deigned to answer my call for help, so I decided to force my way in for shelter, but the door looked too mighty for entrance there. But I was mistaken as a single trial caused the door to swing open with a splitting creak revealing ... only darkness. I coughed as the atmosphere tightened in my chest and I felt for a suitable position to sleep the night out.
It was then that I heard something which I can hear even now inside my head, a funeral moan, harmonically illogical, resonant, deep but also shrill, coming from up above me, approaching down a rickety staircase, a moan carrying at one and the same time the horror of the graveyard, the scream of delight as ghouls ecstatically lift a prutrescible corpse from its resting place, the terror of a lunatic’s laugh as he carves his own flesh, and all the pain and panic of the Pit where shapeless elementals vaguely swim in fire, chewing off the heads of the human damned.
After, came a slithering and bumping above me: a thing was moving across the floor and, then, it was squelching down the stairs emitting the long drawn-out moan. The alternate slithering and bumping rode the creaking, teetering stairs, inexorably drawing closer, nearer, faster, down, down, down…
…it seemed as if I were in another world, sucked in by intangible forces to a revelation of the cosmos, a panorama of all time; stars and streaks of light reaching to infinitudes of chaos and cult, ethereal glows and fresh, unmathematical lands. I saw a city with dome-like, square buildings on plains of kaleidoscopic bubbles and, in each bubble, a grotesque gargantuan gargoyle leering at the citizens in the buildings. Those citizens themselves were immaterial, covered by jellified green slime and motivated by an ectoplasm of orange exactly in the middle of its soul-light.
I saw vague ski-runs of blue effulgence stretching for aeons from the mammoth, bubbly planet past the barrier of time and space, almost an interpenetration of two universes. I saw an enormous sled skim down the runnels, carrying those unfathomably huge monstrosities of green slime, and it looked as if they were waving and laughing, gobs of jelly forming into limb-strands and mouth-holes where the orange ectoplasm turned into a flickering tongue.
They laughed! They waved! They grew even larger! And on their interuniverse journey, they bred more and more of themselves as they neared a familiar planet...
The vision changed: I was looking at the cities of earth--London, Paris, New York, all empty except for ill-twisted skeletons littering the streets, doing exactly what they were doing when they died. Until the visions faded...
I was still in the House blanketed in darkness. The slithering and bumping grew yet nearer until I could see it!
It was a luminous blob of green pus - looking as if it had plucked itself unceremoniously from the incubating slime of its huge host monster following arrival on Earth. By turns it materialized and dematerialized as it squirmed and hobbled towards me... and I imagined I saw a crease of a wicked smile where the green fat folded and twitched. I screamed and screamed. It touched my foot. It actually touched my foot! My blood curdled as I felt it gradually creep up my body. The breathing gunge greened me over, covering my face like slobbering clay. I was then a gibbering, juddering puppet, insane with disgust, but tittering in ecstasy. I felt it enter my mouth, ooze into my throat, a seething, thickening mess of spitting, burping stew.
I found myself back in the train, watching an old man in a brown duffel coat sleep opposite me ... and out of the window the distant glow of a city.
It must have been a nightmare.
* The train was three hours late when it arrived at my destination. I feel an impending doom on our world. Nothing to be done. As I lie here in a hospital, the doctors are amazed and disturbed by my body, which is dyed a hideous green in and out. They have vainly looked in medical books for a rare skin disease … but they will never find one like mine. You and I alone know what it is. But do you think me mad: it is up to you.’
“A VISISTORY TO END ALL VISISTORIES!” CHANTED BERIBERI THE BABY GIRL - AMIDST THE UPROARIOUS APPLAUSE.
Tristan Camber, my ancestral posterity, was an Earthman then, FORWARDED THE NARRATOR, CAMBERGREASE
“LITTLE DID HE KNOW OF THE CORE, THEN!!” SHOUTED AN ANNOYED CUCKOO. “GREEN SLIME FROM INTERUNIVERSAL STICKYWICKY! WHAT POMPOUS NONSENSE!” HE THEN ENTERED INTO A WHOLE CHORUS OF “NUTS… WHOLE HAZELNUTS, C_______YS MAKE IT AND COVER THEM IN CHOCOLATE.”
THEN THE NEXT TELLER TOLD.
(xii) THE STORY OF CORNCRAFT, THE UNCHAINED OF THE PLAINS
I was a stillbirth, thresheld at the opening of a certain century. Victoria preened herself on her studded perch, surveying the rich and poor that milled at her feet, squinting, squat, from her crystal cage and bunned (hair, that is) with oriental hatpins.
Far, but far, from the fever of the slummed and silver city, there was the country, green and comely, where the peasants grew and groaned. And between the country and even more county, was a strange Farm, to where no new Lumiere fixed-camera strayed, thus unpassing the message of its contents to posterity.
But, and in this farm, there were herded those bodiless beings, that headed, handed, footed only were. One Farmer, straight and towering as usual in man and woman, was the herder, dogless, and bearing a syphonic truncheon (weapon and feeder all in one). His legs were sturdy and his body bronzed; his charges chattered round him like hogs and pigs; their troughs, mires of worthless gore.
Simple though they were (as if brains, when in heads bodiless, as also -iless), revolution stirred and, unreported remains it, their fight for freedom went as follows…
As if the fixed-camera whirred and stopped suddenly, mis mechanically, and then started equally suddenlike, mechanillogically, the fight was missed and the scene had changed.
The farm had gone and the Farmer too. In their place, another city, another metromania for us to describe.
But, and around this city, clandestine nihilists (some called zeroists) hatched plots to overthrow the city-state. Elizabeth was a mock up of a tailor’s dummy, bewigged and chanting recorded platitudes to her hubby. Shocking crimewaves swept unsuspecting suburbs. Bombs were thrown from innocent-seeming cinemas into the streets outside. Eternal economic discussions swept the airwaves, always doomwards, always cataclysmic. And few read books, let alone write them.
And if and if only the story would end there.
COMMENTS V By Peter Jeffery
Part (v), then, the giant rabbit’s story, turns out to be ‘A Rootless Thought’ wrapped up inside an autobiographical (??) passage concerning your primary school years … On the description of the school I could claim a number of TaM cross references: the TaM school, schoolteacher etc., the now silent belltower:- clapperless bell etc. etc. etc. but these points I shall not pursue…
There follows ‘Rootless Thought’ much the same (as far as I can see) as in ‘The Meadow & Beyond’ & ‘Arama’. Upon this familiar work I don’t think I’ve a great deal to add to my ’68 comments & various verbal ones since made. (((’68 comments:- ‘You also send me a copy of ‘Rootless Thought’ which, I notice, is typed while ‘Wheels of Time’ is a carbon copy. (Ain’t I observant?) This story makes me wonder - was the man living 2 parallel existences? Did he really have one self as the little boy and another as the man thinking the rootless thought? If this is so, the death of one of his existences causes his death of the other. Another possibility is that he is the little boy imagining that he is the man imagining the little boy……or does this sound too complicated? Or perhaps the man is in some way rationalising his death. Or again, perhaps by some inexplicable circumstance the facts of the man and boy are interlinked. I will hardly need to mention the possibility of coincidence. There is a number of key questions: does the boy really exist? does the man really exist? in what senses do they exist? and so on. I think the best explanation of the piece is that it is just a little caprice in the mind of Etepsed-Egnis. ‘Let’s have a joke’ thing jocular E-E and so he does….))) Is this a reflection of the pseudo-DFL or the real DFL on television or could the pseudo-DFL sitting watching it be, himself, a reflection of a real DFL in the television? Beyond this I could make various remarks to link up ART (note initials!) with other ‘Visitor’ passages - television:- television camera of art Master, black & white world of television:- Onyx Field & so on. However, I believe that these are coincidental since the story was written years ago & would have had to have influenced ‘Visitor’ details rather than vice versa… The idea that thoughts are material … in ART probably links fairly well with Visitor themes… There are also such matters as the omniscient author questions as related to the control & directing of thoughts as exemplified in ART…
Back, then, from ART to more autobiographical (???) reminiscence. The placing of these probably factual accounts in a story within a novel within a novel (a triple fiction) is very curious…
As if to let the heat off a bit ( as we term it in the literature racket) the R.O. is not allowed to complete his story. I take it that the shreds of paper in the policedog’s mouth are pieces of Camber MS which he has so rightly chewed at 246 (SIC) Orlo Blue Street…
‘The Rock and the Dog’ has a silent clocktower which makes me think back to the silent belltower of Rabbit-story-fame & also a war in Spain which may refer to the classic work of Charles Dipp.
Then the reader is jerked back … to sanity by the timely warning…
* No comment on your comments on my comments in ‘The Visitor’…
First of all, the story of the Pseudo art Master… I also refrain from comment on certain MGLesque phrases that follow shortly after the mention of the hundred year old literatum… Amid the already established farmyard scene the Pseudo art Master is referred to as ‘the farmer himself’. Can he really be the farmer of ’24 + 1’ & ‘1 + 1 (+1)’? Or the same as Farmer Kane (SIC) (2006 DFL COMMENT: FARMER CLAVINTY OF FENCE FAME?) … Your mention of the MGM lion, did you know that written about the said lion are the words ‘Ars Gratia Artis’? an appropriate motto even for Pseudo art Master…
…next we have ‘Comments IV’. I think, for the sake of moderation &, indeed, sanity I ought not to venture any comments at all but I will remark that I was alarmed (although not entirely surprised) to see that you included a comment upon a comment on the comment of my earlier comments. Ugh! Typical of ‘The Visitor’, though…
On, very quickly to the story of the Pseudo Egnis. It certainly starts well with the bespectacled moon face of a fanged beard - certainly, to my mind, the best drawing of yours that have ever seen … DFL ‘dressed as a herald with a huge posthorn’ … phallic symbol … a donkey with a posthorn earlier in ‘The Visitor’ the phallic nature of the donkey is…well attested…the writing (2006 DFL COMMENT: THERE FOLLOWS A SMALL DRAWING OF A REAL EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH WITH A NOTICEABLE DEPICTION OF A PHALLUS INCLUDED) for ‘donkey’ commonly found in Egyptian ( see e.g. Hier. Ostr. pl LXXI Irecto 13). This only heightens the case for the etymology of Desmond in Des-(phallic)mo(u)nd. The tale is a highly symbolized account of the sacred copulation which produced the god Despete… The thrusting of the mighty phallus of the god (huge posthorn) is represented by the reading of an unwieldy, incomprehensible & over-long story, the last characteristic is obviously phallic … the reading of the story does supposedly produce Despete… The mysterious ‘Vice Chancellor’ can only be Eros… The word ‘Vice’, it may be conjectured, means roughly ‘sexual’ - a chancellor was a kind of ruler & the ‘Vice Chancellor’ may therefore be translated as the sexual ruler. The point is now completely lucid…
INLOGUE II
ROSEMARY! ROSEMARY! WHO IS SHE? By Cax
X________ relaxed as they heaved the heavy door into position. He closed his eyes, thought of them heaving that door into position, spoke to the man next to him (have you a cigarette?) and silently fell asleep on the cold concrete.
He snored. They all slept and dreamt of the heaving of the door into position, of being companion to each other from now to the end, of sharing the smell of communal excrement, of tending each other’s ills, of brushing the scabs from their faces.
X_________ awoke. They all slept still, dreaming of hoping never to wake again. In his mind, he pictured Rosemary at his departure: one last kiss, one last stroke of the petal cheek, and he had gone. (Have you a cigarette?) He understood that all slept around him, one by one, leg on leg, all seven of them, him making the eighth. What a day! He pictured the lorry that had collected him, the smart attendants, peaked, chipped into condition. One had ill-treated him, but he did not care. He just endured the flails that the back of the hand gave him, for he was thinking of Rosemary. However, he will forget all, as his mind gradually decays, as day follows day, as the soldier follows the captain, as death follows life.
A belch drew his attention to the old man in the corner of the cell. In two weeks they would have to eat him, X_________ thought. Long live Abraham Bintiff! Bintiff would be happy under these conditions. He would be the martyr, captured for fighting against those who fought against justice. He would die in pain but he would die happy. The heaving of the door into position would have been the closing of the womb, of the egg: to a foetus he would have returned, a triumphant foetus. That would be how ex-Captain Bintiff saw it.
X________ tried to think of himself as a martyr. He peered into his trousers and looked at his useless sex. Pluck it off, a voice told him, you shouldn’t use it against men.
“Take away my sex!” he screamed. The other seven awoke with a start and stared crazily at their companion. Charles Dipp grimaced and muttered a defeatist “Shut up! Let’s at least die in peace!” X________ calmed himself, did up his trousers and curled in the corner.
Dipp looked at the heavy door which they had heaved into position. He watched the other men regaining their sleepy positions and he sighed. Why must they all be defeatist? Why can’t they talk together? If only Bintiff were alive, he would know what to do. He would not remain content with his lot of martyrdom - he would do something. He would try to escape. Escape! A flea could not escape from this cell. Dipp scratched the scalp of his head to eject any such that might be lurking there … and fell asleep.
The electric bulb hanging from the ceiling went out … leaving the sleeping man in utter blackness. They all awoke shifting their positions precariously. “I am blind!” screamed the old man, Simon Heman. “What the devil…” stuttered voices.
It was night. They knew this. They knew that the sun had set in the outside world, so they now could sleep in peace, without that guilty feeling of ‘What should I be doing now?’ It was night and silence pricked up its ears. X________ stared into the void around him and fell asleep.
* The electric bulb is switched on. Some hidden hand turns the button and creates day for the prisoners. At first they remain sleeping. Dipp becomes aware of his surroundings, stretches out his arms, yawns and, with sadness in his eyes, he sees the seven others becoming conscious of the room - four walls, one ceiling, one floor, all of yellow concrete, all the same size.
X_________ says “What’s the use of waking up, I ask you?”
Dipp says “What’s the use of falling asleep?”
Mica says “We should indulge in a mass suicide. What else is there for us to do?”
The old man, Simon Heman, says “I shall die today, whatever happens. I am a very old balloon and the walls are very sharp.”
Helix says “We have each other. We are not alone. We can talk, we can laugh. If we were alone, I mean, if I were alone, I might as well be one of these walls, a cul-de-sac. I would indeed kill myself. But we are not alone.”
Archibald Z________ says “It would be OK if we were queers!”
X_________ says “As a matter of fact… why shouldn’t I tell you, we shall die soon anyway… I am what you call a ‘queer’.”
Dipp says “What about your Rosemary? You were going to get married weren’t you?”
X__________ says “ Rosemary? Rosemary? Who is she? I have never heard of Rosemary, I am a queer, I tell you! I am! I am!”
Lewis says “You are no more queer than I am.”
X___________ says “I feel a terrible pain in my left side. It is killing me. Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is Rosemary? It rhymes! It rhymes! Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is she? Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is Rosemary? Rosemary! Rosemary! Rosemary!…”
The old man says “Shut up! Shut up! Give me peace in my last few hours… You know, I had a love once. Her name was Dijo. She was as beautiful as a jewel, soft, dimpled cheeks, round lips, big black eyes, flowing black hair. O yes, she was beautiful, my Dijo. Ah! Dijo! But… well, I shall tell you, she was taken from me by damned Bintiff. She went to help the movement of Common Justice…and was killed. Damn Bintiff, damn! Damn him! We would not be here now if it were not for him. My Dijo was cut to ribbons - her beautiful face became tatters, blood and gut on the fields of bloody justice! Her cheeks became a face flannel for General Blue and her legs were spitted for his meat. Damn Bintiff! Damn them all!”
Lewis says “I bet your Dijo never existed. You’re too damned ugly to attract a girl like that.”
The old man splutters, attempts to rise…but falls back in his corner. His hands, which he had made ready to strike Lewis, flopped by his side and twitched … as he died.
“Poor devil!”
“Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is she?”
Dipp stands up suddenly … as if life is now beginning to become worth living. He examines the wall closely, stroking the rutted concrete, in the frantic hope of something that would give hope. Of course, nothing!
Helix says “Let us talk about philosophy. We will become the greatest philosophers of the world … for we have time. We are the only people who have enough time to be great philosophers.”
Z__________ says “Time! Time! What time have we? We have no food. We have no will to live. We will die in a fortnight, go mad in a week and be stuck to the floor by tomorrow.”
Helix says “ Ideas are food enough for me. Material we will cast away. We do not need material. I have the greatest faith in the mind.”
Mica says “Death is the only food we need. After that we will no longer be hungry.”
With that, they all remain silent. X_________ thinks about his memories…but cannot exactly recall them. He knows he has memories but they are buried so deep he cannot grasp them. Rosemary probably died yesterday, but he does not know, does not care, does not even want to know or care.
Dipp thinks about Bintiff, Sartre… He smiles and becomes happy at the thought. He then looks at the corpse of old Heman whose white staring eyes are pointed exactly in his direction.
Lewis also looks at the corpse whose white staring eyes are pointed exactly in his direction.
Mica taps his wrist.
Z_________ muses on his toenail and realises that in a month the skin will have folded back like a lip from that very toe to reveal the stick of bone.
Helix dreams of ideas, pastes them on the wall, steps back to admire them and realises they are abstract paintings that he cannot understand.
X________, Dipp, Lewis, Mica, Z________, and Helix now watch the other remaining member of their group who is still alive and who has not spoken yet. They understand that this is the first time they have noticed him.
“Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is she? Rosemary! Rosemary! My one and only truly love.”
Someone then smashes the bulb and all is dark.
(xiii) THE STORY OF NAPOLEON, THE BUTCHER SHRIKE
The boat dipped between each wave and in the boat three figures straining to fight the sails at each gust of wind. The sea was opaque, grey-grime and was thirsty for the sky.
Are they chasing or being chased or merely leaves in the haphazard wind? They, no doubt, would deny all these and maintain that they are forging somewhere with no other excuse than their own. They, and only they, are their masters.
Being chased. Far, on one of the many horizons, emerged another dot, sky-borne and presumably flapping toward the sea-sick trio.
Chasing. Equally far, or another countless horizon, scuttled a channel-swimmer, one seeking to achieve a record.
Haphazard leaves. One of the spewing trio is looking, apparently unsuccessfully, for their only pair of oars. Each is blaming the others for the loss.
Own masters. One by one, they commit hari-kiri and drop dead into the arms of the embracing sea.
* The lonely swimmer is swimming on, despite the utter, unaccountable loss of the companion boat. John Cheese is his name (Captain Cheese of the British army) and, if successful, the first to swim, non-stop, the Onyx Gulf:-
(2006 DFL NOTE: THERE FOLLOWS A CRUDELY BIRO-DRAWN (BY DFL) MAP OF THE NOVEL’S ATLAS (AND THIS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED AS THE FORERUNNER OF THE AFOREMENTIONED VERSION MORE SKILFULLY AND DETAILEDLY DRAWN BY PFJ).)
He started at Morecambe on Day 1, hit the midway triffids on Day 2 and now, on Day 3, was approaching the coast of the Onyx Field. He had now forgotten that he had lost the companion boat (as they had now forgotten him!)
The Vampire Vulture Moth of the faraway horizon still retained his tutelary role, strangely unantagonistic and quaintly querulous.
As he approached the Onyx Coast, he ceased swimming and bobbed, treading through the eels that squirmed hereabouts. He scanned the cliffs that, craggy, black, intermittently dandruffed with the whitest sea he had ever seen, screamed gull-like at the waves’ end. Atop one were the seen-through spray profiles of two figures, but Captain Cheese floated along the coast, soon gone.
Utterly gratuitously, he continued to float along the coast westwards until he bobbed in the open The Sea ‘Where the sea-gulls play with the sky’.
“THAT’S SAD, UNACCOUNTABLY PITIFUL,” MURMURED A SERIOUS LISTENER.
“A BIT SILLY, IF YOU ASK ME. AND WHY THE QUOTE MARKS AT THE END? A TRIFLE PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL, NO?” SAID CHISH.
“THAT LAST COMMENT IS TYPICAL OF OUR FRIEND CHISH AND FIPS, BLOODY INVERTED SNOB. SO, GIT, SNOBBO!” SNAPPED DONDON.
That story, SAID NAPOLEON, STRANGELY QUIET FOR A SHRIKE, was told me by a mountain goat (a horned Lucifer).
“WHAT IS IT CALLED, NAPPY?”
White Hell
WHY?
The intrinsic symbolism is that the all-enveloping, white eternity of death, where hell is quiet and endless floating - all forgetting and queerly comatose. The Devil is some faraway, flapping presence, intangible and insidiously questioning…fire is the burning blank that blossoms, snows and whitens in your brain…and death is the black non-existence of this whiteness.
I, Cuckoo, obviously not understanding one word of this explanatory treatise, nodded frantically at the next storyteller.
(xiv) The Story of Hugh, the Blue Gnu
I wonder why I am here, here, where you gather around, ears aprick for the story that I might tell. It’s peculiar how life grabs you, isn’t it? Why me for such an honour as this? I am nothing special - only me.
“Less of this pseudo-modesty, Hugh,” said one.
“LESS OF THIS PSEUDO-INTERPOLATION. THIS STORY COMPETITION IS GOING DOWNHILL - FULL OF MOCK METACOMMENTS AND CLEVER-CLEVER NARRATIVE TRICKS,” SAID ANOTHER.
“LESS OF THIS PSEUDOPSEUDOINTERPOLATION AND MOCK MOCKMETACOMMENTS … AND TWITTISH TRICKS WITHIN TRICKS,” SAID YET ANOTHER.
(AND SO ON AD INFINITUM CUCKUM … UNTIL) HUGH CONTINUED HIS ENTHRALLING STORY.
May I say, before I continue (or should I say - start?) my enthralling story, that the last comment, ‘Less of this pseudopseudointerpolation etc. etc.’ should read, to make more sense, ‘Less of this pseudo-antipseudointerpolation and mock antimockmetacomments and tricky ‘sense-within-sense tricky narrative ploys.’’
Hugh’s critic interpolated: “May I say, before you continue (or should I say - start?) your so-called enthralling story, that you are being (‘you’ meaning all who have spoken in part (xiv), including myself) unashamedly Barth-like or (should I say?) -inspired (i.e. -like, but sufficiently -unlike not to be noticed unless I actually mention it).”
HUGH COUNTERED: May I say, dear, that you are being incredibly stupid? Barth does not and/or did not exist - this name is a corrupt epithet (perhaps ‘the-great-consonant-shift’ revolution of recent times has changed Cheese to Barth) of Juan Camembert (who, being a character fictionalises in this very book) who is a character in this very book and thus the synthesis, analy-, antithe- of its corruption. Your comment is thus apocryphal.
“CLEVER-CLEVER!”
No, triply clever, dear, for I have countered your pseudo pseudoantipseudo-metacomment with an indisputable (although modest) narrative trick within trick within trick.
“Less of this pseudo-interpolation and mock modesty. This story competition is going downhill - and it has dropped so low that it is beyond redemption.”
HUGH COUNTERED: May I say, dear, that redemption is at hand, thus: “SAID A RELIABLE NARRATOR IN CHARGE OF ALL HIS SENSES AND IN INEXTRICABLE COLLUSION WITH THE READER,” SAID HUGH.
THUS WAS THE ENTRY OF HUGH THE BLUE GNU. HE WAS OBVIOUSLY GAMBLING ON THE CUCKOO’S LIKING FOR NARRATIVE TRICKS, SINCE THIS STORY PATENTLY DID NOT CONTAIN A PLOT.
(xv)
THE STORY OF DONDON, THE BEJEWELLED JEFFER (with the permission of P.F. Jeffery)
Sub-Title: THE FOURTH IMPOSTOR Second Edition
'Well,' said the girl, 'it is done at last. We shall hurry no more on the track of the young man with spectacles.'
* PROLOGUE Now again The Young man with spectacles Burst once more before me Clearly distinct In the haze dimmed gas Whose flickers threaded the roadway. Slithering, then, he scuttled From an alleyway in that noisome quarter Of the city wherein I dwelt His feet barely bearing him Over the slick of slime Coating the cobbles Ever shrouded in fog And off down the street Vanishing in dankling mist As I plodded on with my walk Cap flapped on my jowls. * THE IMPOSTOR Of course I had not covered a dozen paces Or more before an impostor came A swirl and swoosh of flurry Skidding upon the encrusted stones To a halt before me. Rapid his questions in guttering tones Barked through the dark of the night Of the young man Whom ever he sought He wanted as much And possibly more than I knew. I drew myself up high as I could Still higher than that I would Thumped him hard on his head To set him quite straight Demanding of him a novel. My right my due I told him so And he could only nod agreement So we hied ourselves without a pause Along the streets of crumbling filth Coming at last to whence we sought The only place where we could chat In such circumstance as this I refer of course To the oolitic bread shop. There over a cup of triassic block tea We wriggled our tongues in awful glee As he related unto me: * THE NOVEL OF THE RED OCELOT. We were students at Oxford together He and I, me and he Students we were For a while seeking Those student pleasures In the nighted shadows of Oxford Town. Young I was then Young as he now and with spectacles Not the aged wretch curled before you Without a glass to his eye For you must know While he is grown young I am aged before my time. Student pleasures we sought at first And have already told you But as I sank deep Deep and even deeper to his side He beguiled me into strange paths Stranger and yet stranger I tell you. God, when I remember. By what sinking arcs He led me at last To that which I shall relate I scarce remember Or dare to recall After what came to pass. One night be guiled me Through those streets of Oxford Town That we had oft times tramped before But slowly in swirls of green litten glare It was the Oxford I knew no more. I shuddered and squealed As my eyes wrenched round To gaze on no Oxford Town Not Oxford Town by any means Was there laid out at my feet. Cyclopean masonry there was And Escher Witch House angles This I can scarce describe Impossible in places I knew: The colours that lit Were no longer seen green But none that I ever saw The architects who penned The lines of the piles Were obviously not Geometrists of the Euclidean school. Of those angles so wrong I shall say no more But you must know what I mean No mortal eye or fearful hand Could frame their desert antinomy. Desert I say But deserted it proved not As on we wandered Further still With no sign of Oxford Town We were at last met In that horrid place By a being masked and cloaked. We followed on and further on Through those streets of Onyx paved Until we came to a gathering place But of this I can barely speak. You will not guess I say That the one in the cloak Sprang on all fours And was none other than... None other, but it rends my heart, Than the Red Ocelot himself. And that a birdish majesty Would come to the throne The throne or commode That yawned vacant in that place Was clear to me As perhaps to you Being obvious to all. Rooted I was Rooted there to the spot As one by one they came A man cast of ice A foul shoulderwitch. I dare not mention them all. At last was a scraping As two granite blocks Rasping each to its core Rutted my ears Each one to the skull And now my feet could move. Move they could move they did As you will well believe As I fled headlong Those polished streets Until I slipped in a pool of blood To which I added my own. Foul was that night With cuckooing cries Echoing back and forth I have known not peace of mind - Pity me sir - Aged seventy years And several more in a single night But a single night of fear Telling me where That young man went For he and the student are one! * A PAUSE. My fist struck the table The salt peppered the floor The ketchup squelched As I raised up my voice While the waitress looked round But it was not to her I roared: Drivel I cried Drivel and worse You fall far behind your colleagues The White Powder was fine The Black Seal still better But what is this piffle You give me? He raised both his eyebrows Glanced me over end round So I thought it right to calm him: Be seated good sir Take your time and your breath A superior novel I want Rest assured If your yarn is A1 I'll tell you your wish And more... But make sure it's good For I tell you right out I'll have no core mythos hotchpotch. Tears flecked his eyes As he continued his tale But the manner of novel That flowed from his mouth You will judge for yourself, dear reader, As I repeat unto you The words that rushed in my ears: * THE NOVEL OF THE LIGHT MOUNTAIN. I left, you will guess, Oxford as a wreck My physician wagged his head Signed me off right then Tried to force a smile And advised mountain air For my health. Excesses and worse Beyond student pleasures Had drained the bulk of my purse The alps cost too dear for my fragile cash But with a loan from my granny (I shall never repay) I betook myself to the Lakes. Three months did I wander Oer fell and cross dale Till I felt much renewed Though not complete in my health Or back to my actual years; Still, I was thinking of gran And bethought myself of some work: I purchased the papers Of the region about Making note of situations and jobs The Morecambe Visitor I threw Aside in disgust And several more besides, But then in a column Of the Westmoreland Gazette I saw something I thought I might like: Wanted it said For monies quite great A private sec, with brains. I applied in person To some lonely moor A place for a poet, I thought... But I felt more unease As I approached to the height Where my would be employer Held home and had house, A mountain it was But a mountain distinct: Not grey and brown Like the others around But a luminous bright As of a myriad lights Shining there from within. The house by contrast From onyx was hewn: Massey slabbed blockes, Steps curved row on row Within aquine carven rails And here and there an avine bust Of quite another kind. Avenues of beaks laid out Brought me trembling to the door. Where a grisly porter Held forth his clawed hand. I was ushered at once (As you must guess already) Into the presence Of that young men with specs Who led me down Down interminable stairs Into the heart Of the mountain of light. Shaking he led me Through corridors of stone Twisting and turning Ever down... Finally he thrust me From the last of the square rooms Into a tube that throbbed. On, on and down I passed... Intestinal passages shook Massive organs there were For digesting food Of what kind I then could not guess. Years, perhaps, I passed in that place Eating fragments Of half digest filth Until, at last I was free. No mountain, I found Was that mass shining bright But a jelly-fish creature Of behemoth size Somehow I passed Unscathed through its tubes And was at last Flushed out in a turd. Long did I fight To gain health and be sane Not much was that struggle worth And I saw not the young man My author of woe Until it chanced so tonight. Now, please tell me, Good sir, Where I should search For I must find the rotter That villain and worse Haul him up for his crimes And give the cad his deserts! * ANOTHER PAUSE. Deserts, I mused, An excelling conception Would you now not agree? So I snapped some of my fingers Eyed up the waitress In her starchy white cap Pinafore stretched on her breasts Noted her features in bulk Upon the cloth of the table Making notes for a reference book (Not forgetting the size of her chest) Some more of this brew I said would be fine Plenty of gateaux to boot Spare not the whipped cream In my imperative tones And strawberry flan besides. Worser far worser I told the impostor Can't you do better than that? But then as the cream Bubbled and flowed I took on a mellower mood: I'm a lenient man I mildly claimed And one more chance I'll give you Speaking as well as I could for the juice I outlined my magnanimous whim. Tell me a novel to rend my heart strings And I'll guide you on to the man But fail me now and I promise you this Your imposting days are closed. So he chewed on a crumpet And blanched deathly shades Continuing on with his tale Judge again, for yourself, Dear Reader For this was the novel he tried: * THE NOVEL OF THE BLUE HARPSICHORD. You may not believe that spectacled, young man Has offended me very much Especially on hearing That since our Lakes meeting I did not see him again till tonight. The saying you will know That ill news travels fast Thus appalling tales met my ears - Singed my core to the root As soon as I returned to this town. Bare your breath Prick your ears And listen right now As I take up the tale Of how he tormented my granny to death! Saintly show A thousand cases might cite But a single one shall suffice From my myriad choice To show the mettle That ever was maintained by my gran. While I was at Oxford Wholly under the spell Of that villain of whom I must speak Some poems he sent me Of poisonous ilk To further corrupt my life. But O goodly granny As soon as she saw The poisons of word That daily blackened my heart Seized the lot Grabbed them all And burnt them before me That I might return to my sense. O would that I ever Had followed her whim All might be well today But, perfidious creature, I did as he would To the ruin he planned from the first. But I digress, I must tell you the tale At least as much as I've learned Of the terrible end Met by my gran When the rat bag had her at last. To his castle he took her As you must know Under pretence of elopement But once they were there You will see, naturally, She found a different kind of welcome Naked he bound her Spread twixt two pillars Carven of phallic design Constant there came To this vile place A legion or more of demons And each one, as he passed, Would pause a while to rape her. Pri cks multi-pronged And covered with barbs Week after week They knew her Till at last With a knife of obsidian flake They cut her down from her bondage. Let you not think That mercy was there But enough had they had Of her blood moistened *** And desired a different kind of torment. Four demons stout Seized a limb apiece To bring her before the young man A fiend he was More even than they And a knife of flint he bore He gouged out an eye, Lopped off an ear An arm and various members Then piled her parts In view of her eye And covered them up with pie crust. The pie when baked She was forced to devour But all this was a mere prelude to The horror that finally killed her. One day be played on his blue harpsichord An affair with knives and razors Having first stuffed Her beloved cat Tibbs Into the machine infernal. The sight of her pussy All jelled up to mash Completely unhinged her frail mind And gibbering froth She curled up and died And that was the last of my gran! * CONCLUSION. I gagged and spat Spat and gagged What an appalling story! I'd had enough of his terrible tales His fourth rate pseudo-novels. The first was just crap The second one rubbish But this final effort Was the worst by far And I retched at the thought of more I turned to the waitress Winked her my eye As she came over I asked her to walk On my fog-laden way Fondling both breasts, I ventured to remark That she might also come across Into my pocket I reached As she went for her coat At the back of the shop While I pulled out a coin The far-famed Golden Tiberius: This I handed the impostor Pushed down his throat Knotting his neck Till his face was blotched with crimson I tightened my grasp Until he expired Amid a mess of yellcrimson vomit. The waitress returned When I reached down his throat Thus pulled out the coin Grabbing her arm To continue on with my walk. * EPILOGUE. Three impostors stood around The smoking charred ruin Of what had been once A young man with Spectacles, Vaguely they wondered But not really caring What had become of their fourth. Their work was now done And their novels were told They repaired to the oolitic bread shop Where two matters (Both out of the norm) Engaged their immediate concern. The first was that No waitress was there To serve on their hand and foot An item to note An annoying thing Quite contrary to usual events The other was that an unusual object Was there besides salt on the floor Not an annoyance But a subject for chat Suitable if tea could be had: A gore-soaked corpse The wrecked remains that had once been A former colleague of theirs The young lady stooped down Plucked out his tongue To add to her newspaper parcel The dried blood on which Showed it to be Suitable for the doctor's museum.
(xvi) THE STORY OF LOVECRAFT, UNCLE HOWARD
I met him, encountered his fell, fleeting form, as the moon, gibbous and unquenchable, sunk low on the netherlip of the sea. The strand was ablow with the leaves and spray of a dirty night, cascades of litter and spawndrift shuttling across my mishevelled visage end his creeping physiognomy. I peered, questioningly, through the esoteric murk, mumbling at the murder I saw in his half-seen, half-seeing eyes. He drew nearer, a cold, scintillating shaft grasped in his stormy fist, the blade echoing the scum and blind-shimmer of the gibber moon and the handle bejewelled. and bedevilled by the lichen of the litten spraydrift. He raised his arm and the blade loomed large over his leaning shoulder as it sliced through the bitter air towards me and, at that moment, a baying, as of some distant hound, rose from the hinterland behind us, behind those bleak, giantesque silhouettes of trees and things. The deadly doomward movement of his arm suddenly ceased as if the terrible howling had entered his skull and snuffled, nuzzlingly, at the hell in his brain. Wet noses were noisy around and in his imagination, and his eyes dulled in blind paralysis. Nameless claws emerged from his cheeks, pierced, from inside, the fat that folded around the triangle of his inner face and scrabbled uncannily with the nightwind. His whole aspect was crawling with these tiny beaks clamouring for exit from within the skin, and his body staggered from side to side, swaying over the edge of the promenade above the churning seadrag. As I stared in helpless awe, forgetting the burnished blade that now lay dying at his feet, I was oblivious of the scurrying paws behind me, the series of canine eyes that flocked from the dark line of trees and things along the shore coming for that I carried, yearning for the amulet I had stolen from a neighbouring grave¬yard. Curse be it! I wish I had never seen that tentacular brooch, never cleft the dull sod for its tremulous, wealth-giving power. Before I am torn by the trenchant teeth of countless houndlike monsters, I must tell my terrible tale.
* I kept a shop at 246 Ormolu Street, a shop selling valuable bric-a-brac, jewellery, fine art items, antiques etc. It was dark behind the counter, but twinkling around me amid the gentle, rhythmic tick-took of the inlaid clocks was the bijouterie of my existence: embroidered fal-de-lals; bedizened tiaras and mourning rings; half-finished gem-cuttings; river-bled heliotropes; scarlet opals; moonstones; onyx-stones; chrysolites; cats’-eyes; sequinned gewgaws; knick-knacks and so on and so forth. The brown light that managed to struggle through the overhanging buildings of Victorian London and then through the lottoed hatch (sole aperture in the room) above the counter played freckled toiletry with the haphazardly piled bijouterie. My assistant, Bartin, sat mutely beside me in a creaking wicker- basket, his gem-cutter ever chipping end sculpting at the rocks before him. Few words, if any, passed between us for we were unspeakably satisfied with our lot. Our jobs were unutterably and indisputably self-contained.
No customer, or very, very few, ventured through the latch-door, no budding client sounded the ever-mute bell above the door-jamb. No interruption spoiled the polished concentration of our arabesque and baroque scrollwork. No shaft of light from the dirty street entered the chiaroscuro domain.
Then, dissatisfaction seeped mysteriously into our minds, troublous dismay and an inexplicable yearning for an unknown goal. It all started with the insidious, indescribable flapping noise from the shop below our bedroom, As we lay awake we heard butterfly wings scuttering from corner to corner and our stomachs churned the very convolutions that they conveyed. Night by night, our torments increased, our neurosis grew as the touch of wing on wing became louder. We saw the undreamable silhouette of a giant moth at the bedroom window - it hovered there all night, insidious and. Pseudo-communicative. The yearning in the very root of my stomach took form as, night beyond night, the shape shivered in shadow outside the bedroom window. I dreamed of an amulet, a twisty broochpiece, peculiarly entwined and tentaculous, made of onyx, black as agate and ebony, smooth as the finest ormolu or marble. And I knew I had to travel far to obtain it for the shop which, as an exhaustive repository of beautiful stones, must contain this ineffable piece to complete its perfect essence. I knew the very tomb, the very graveyard that contained it and I turned to Bartin, sleeping beside me, to convey this all-important knowledge. But, he slept not! His corpse - that which remained of what used to be a physical presence - was putrid, a couple of huge, sticky, membranous wings folded together between the sheets, his head a sightless pro¬boscis and his heart the space of pus between the scales. He was dead, he had died so that my stomach could receive the message, the ultimate knowledge, and I literally sucked in the fetid aroma of the membranes, kissed the wet proboscis and thanked God for Bartin’s demise. As I curled my tongue between the thighs of the wings, I heard, afar, the baying as of some gigantic hound, he who guarded the sacred amulet (as told by the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred and hinted at by the even more dreaded. Egnisomicon of the insane Despete).
* Spade in hand and after many days of irksome travel through the saltmarshes of New England, I stood above the mound that was the grave of the late Orlando Blueman. No crucifix or tombstone ornamented this ghostly patch.
I raised my eyes above and shivered at the sight of the black, twisted trees rustling in the starwind around me. Utter solitude and intangible fear were intrinsic in this almost indefinable rustle - as the cold cut of the sliced moon scintillated, topaz- and gem-like, through the moving branches. My churning stomach almost bristled, twitched and nerved up as I lowered the spade-blade to the ghastly dankness of the sod. As its crimson-lined edge met the very dirt, countless bayings were horrifyingly set up around me and even below me from the very depths of the grave. However, nothing could prevent my frantic digging as the yearning for the cursed amulet was all and ever,
Wedges of earth were snatched from above the tormented tomb. I say tormented for, from within, the faint baying had grown louder and was mixed with the grinding of birdbeaks, the shocking riffling of countless feathers, the champing of canine and birdish jaws and, above all, the frightful, rhythmic tick-took, cook-coo, click-clock of some strange timepiece or welcomer of Spring! Bats flapped annoyingly around my concentrating head … but mere skips of my hand shooed away their droves ... but not before receiving several malicious tweaks in my neck from their goldfishesque mouths.
I neither knew nor cared about that which would greet me when the gravelid was finally lifted. But when my inexorable pur¬pose-reached this important point in my life, there was horror and outrage beyond all I had feared and guessed from the premon¬itory noises. There was nothing, absolutely, purely nil within the dark cavern that opened before me ... except the yearned-for eel-brooch! This was unutterably horrible for I now knew that the horror was outside, around and, perhaps, over me - not safe within a. fixed space below my looming form. THE HORROR WAS SCATTERED! The birddog clamour was granular and atomic, NOT fixed and fast within my power! The empty space was therefore truly terrible and my utterly butterfly stomach imagined my stoneless shop, my tenantless shop, my blank and never-to-be-filled canvas of well-being.
I pocketed the crazy amulet and ran frantically through the intangible and scattered night ... and I was he I met on some far-off strand!
(xvii) THE STORY OF UME, THE MIGHTY EMU
Well ... er...Clovis Camber and Cax told me this story some time ago. You know what fantastic writers they are, so it doesn’t matter too much that it is another story about Orlando Blueman...
‘BOO! BOO!’
‘HISS! HISS!’
‘UGH!’
UME CONTINUED :-
‘I am Orlando, a wanderer through the cities of Neb and I meet up with many strange adventures - of which this is one.
I sat by my camp-fire on the Desert of Neb, warming my hands from the cold blast of the night air which, as you probably already know, is so particularly bitter in this area. The flames licked the sky and cast a friendly glow in a circlet around me. Beyond this was the impenetrable darkness that had forced me to dismount and rest.
Then, unexpectedly, I heard the crunch of footsteps approaching. Who could be living within this desolation? What a coincidence to meet someone out here in the realms of nowhere! The crunching came nearer and nearer until a figure loomed from outside the circle of firelight - a figure that filled me with such unutterable dread that I swooned momentarily. THIS WAS AN EXACT RESEMBLANCE TO MYSELF!’
‘A BIT FARFETCHED, NAY?’ WAS THE OBVIOUS COMMENT FROM A PESKY LISTENER. BUT NO, THE SOLE INTERPOLANT WAS UNCLE HOWARD :-
‘THIS SOUNDS LIKE A BIT OF A COPY OF ONE OF MY STORIES, I.E. ‘I WAS HE I MET ON SOME FAR-OFF STRAND’ - I THINK IT WAS CALLED ‘THE OUTSIDER’ OR SOMETHING...’
Well, since c.c. and c. wrote this story long before you, Uncle, was born, boo to you! ‘Every feature was duplicated. It was as if I was looking into a flawless mirror … the effect being so real that I was surprised that he moved not in accordance with any movements.
He stared at me, not an unbelieving stare, as mine was, but a stare of hatred. His round, piercing eyes bore into my soul, forcing me to turn away my head to pluck my eyes from his. I looked into the fire for inspiration, as if searching in the feathery, crazy flames for an answer to this uncreditable phenomenon.
I looked up again and my retina retained the impress of the flames end I saw my double enveloped in the hallucinatory flickers of the fire...as if he had lately been snatched from the Inferno itself. I managed to splutter out some words.
‘Who are you?’
He did not answer. He sat down, opposite, on tother side of the camp-fire.
‘O God! What are you?’’
A RECENTLY ARRIVED BBC TECHNICIAN APOLOGISED FOR INTERRUPTING ...BUT COULD UME STAND NEARER THE MICROPHONE AS HIS EQUIPMENT WAS NOT REGISTERING.
SO, SHOUTING, UME CONTINUED : ‘I feared I was tormented. By some devilish vision or some desert mirage...
...He scratched his ear. It was from this point onward that I found myself forced to follow every movement that he enacted. What torture! I was not looking at a mirror, FOR I WAS THE REFLECTION! Can you imagine a greater torment? This would have been enough, but he did things to himself, things that I found unbearable. He put his hand in the dancing flames of the camp-fire. I followed suit, impelled by some unspeakable force … until both our hands were cindered crisps. I had to restrain the pain ... so that my face would match his! What torture - to keep within my soul the singeing anguish of the demon flames in which I had previously found so much comfort. He poked his little finger in his eye seven times until the eye-ball turned to a pulp of blood and fat. He carried out many self-inflictions that are too dreadful to mention. And I had to follow suit. My agony churned through my breast and I swooned into a deadly sleep.
I awoke to find my tormentor-double departed. My hand which I had burned was fresh and new. My eye was wholesome and seeing. I had fallen asleep by the light of the fire and had dreamed everything. What a dream! Or was it a dream, for the form of his body was impressed in the sand, opposite, on tother side of the dead camp-fire? Was it an impression, though? I say not, for the wind must have ruffled the sand. Or had it?’
‘I HATE STORIES THAT END WITH A RHETORICAL QUESTION,’ SAID NAPPY THE SHRIKE.
‘IT IS SYMBOLIC,’ COUNTERED DONDON, ‘OF THE FULCRUM IN THE TORTURE/REACTIONARY CYCLE, THE QUESTION-MARK OVER THE BRAIN?, THE WHETHER AND WHEREFORE OF THE WHOLE VISITORINESS WITHIN ORLANDO’S PERCEPTION.’
COMMENTS VI by Peter Jeffery
We have here the story of Ita-Tunk... Indeed it was I who sugge¬sted the drawing-pin torture, inspired in turn by the collage/ noticeboard of our study playroom in fun-loving Lonsdale College with its plethora of tin-tacks.
* (x) The tale of the birdish majesty... The negrow = Scandinavian, the two are opposites but one… link up between this & the fre¬quent camera images of ‘The Visitor’ - the negative black and white world of the Onyx Field… Just as the negative & positive photos are two aspects of the same & dependent on each other (the negative being the more basic = the core?) so the dualities inherent in each individual (good/evil, material/immaterial etc.) are dependent on each other & it may even be that it is the inter¬play of opposites that are the prime cause of all events … the source of life & the result of their interplay is that of diffe¬rentiation & thus it will be the root of individuality as such (N.B. that this word actually contains the word ‘duality’)... shall, in conclusion, suggest that the negrow is the art Master ... & the Scandinavian, Dagg: the two of them as interconnected as an object & its mirror image...
...Reconnoitre (iii) two endings, a device used by Fowles’ TFLW (so I believe I haven’t read the book) ...it is a fiction very conscious of its nature & making continuing & increasing play on it, or is it, after all, true & our world a delusion or are they both competing delusions or, indeed, is it this fact/fiction duality which is the source of events & thus the prime mover of a reality transcending both?...
…To (xi) Cambergrease’s story … The figure (with schoolcap) in the train is reminiscent of other ‘Visitor’ schoolboys & the house has a vague feel of that built by a certain Camembert…
...And that brings me to (xii) Corncraft’s story except for a postscript to the H in the H to effect that the title of Tristan’s descendant might imply that that worthy wrote his tale concerning Cambergrease - that Cambergrease is the monster described by his demented ancestor. The syntax of Corncraft’s tale, I will firstly note, is not that to which we are accustomed & neologisms are there too...
…As I expected, you included my comment on a comment upon a comment on my comments on my earlier comments, what Visitoronomy!...
…Inlogue II ... I will note that Lewis’s statement ‘You are no more queer than I am’ does not exclude him being queer, as I always suspected (it says right near the end of ‘The Egnisomicon’: ‘Despete is queer/ O don’t leer/ It’s true/ Just watch them in the loo/ What an evil crew!’ - Eg. 11 4290-4294) ... They are like Kane (SIC) & the farmer of ‘1+ 1 (+1)’ they are full of ideals with no relevance to reality & they will die, for this is their inevitable fate... They are serious, like the ‘serious young man’ of ‘The Rocket’ & their seriousness is futility…
(xiii) The Story of Napoleon, the Butcher Shrike … Captain Cheese (of Rosemary fame - a mutation of Captain Webb, who lacks a torso on those match boxes?) is foolishly swimming the Onyx Gulf ... a feat that is clearly impossible ... The sea-gulls playing with the sky bring us back to Rosemary...
(xiv), then, the story of Hugh the Blue Gnu... This is the most obviously Barthian passage in ‘The Visitor’ so far & is very inaptly called a story, to my mind, for it has no story… the contrast between this passage & the generality of ‘The Visitor’ emphasises the non-Barthian nature of the bulk of your novel. Yes, I think, the thing works & is amusing for two pages, but I am glad that you didn’t make it longer … As for your not including my magnificent prose covering for TFISE ((xv) The Story of Dondon (ed.)) I shall say that it’s your own funeral: missing such brilliant Visitorisms. It would certainly have been the making of the book.
(((PFJ’s misguided suggestion for intro and epilogue of part (xv) is as follows:-
The Infinite Cuckoo banged with a chunk of granite (or was it a torsoless head?) upon his dais in a vain attempt to restore order. The animals were all attempting the noises of other animals as several farmers circulated amongst them, periodically mashing brains with the huge cudgel which they habitually carried. At last one of them burst the head of a Stegosaurus who had been something of a ringleader & in the comparative quiet that followed, the bejewelled Jeffer was able to make himself heard by shouting at the top of his voice. ‘Contrary to general practice’ he began, ‘I wish to sing my epic in the manner favoured by Homer & other suchlike, old-time poets. It is complete with a headquote...’
‘A head floats…’ screeched a baby salamander.
‘Without torso...’ added the Snow Rabbit amid general cheering.
‘A headquote’ continued Dondon, seemingly unperturbed ‘from the famous author Arthur Machen.’ There was a general chorus of ‘oos’ & ‘ahs’ from the audience. ‘This narrative is set in the general framework...’
‘General who?’ queried a dormouse.
‘General Blue’ Edalpo erroneously responded.
‘A general framework,’ the Jeffer persevered ‘of Arthur Machen’s ‘The Three Impostors’, but note that it doesn’t quite fit...’
‘I’m not quite fit either’ interposed the silliest interlocutor so far.
‘Not quite fit into that framework & is thus a fiction within its fictitious setting.’ Without more ado he picked up his lute & began to sing a strangely moving poem to a background of silly remarks & vulgar noises which shall not be recorded here.
(Here should follow the text of the poem.)
Dondon placed his lute aside & bowed to his ill-mannered list¬eners, The birdish majesty wiped a concrete crocodile tear from his murky eye &, passing only to crunch another ringleader of the increasing interruptions, mildly cooed ‘next please...
-- You see what I mean! Ed.)))
(xviii) THE STORY OF EDALPO, THE FAMED SHOULDERWITCH *
(2006 DFL NOTE: THERE FOLLOWS A METICULOUSLY DFL-PERPETRATED BIRO-TRACED ILLUSTRATION OF THE CINEMATIC MGM LION AND ITS SCROLLS AND MASK AND ‘ARS GRATIA ARTIS’ LOGO.)
Above his desk was a beautifully wrought plaque with this motif emblazoned on it. But he was no Eternal Leopard of the Snow Meadow and The Field and Beyond - he was a hack-writer, an escriber of pulp and petty comment, a literary critic in fact. He was purely a literary parasite, a lexic cancer - one who could only write if others wrote before him.
Sheaves of honest endeavour arrived on his desk by the lorry- load, reams and quires of utter Creative sweat. He took his carefully sharpened quill and metaphorically scored, insensitively, through every page. He was a thalidomide grub in the dirty ear of a coprophagic centaur. Before destroying his entire work in one glorious game of pyromanic ‘Scrabble’, I present to you, as a typical example of his ‘art’, one last work of literary criticism from his pre-death quill:-
THE UNRELATED AND UNRELIABLE - AS SEEN IN ‘THE VISITOR’ by Captain Abraham Bintiff
I do not write this humble piece merely to examine the virtues or otherwise of a literary work, nor merely to pick out a phrase here and there for special comment end analysis … nor merely to follow in the incomparable traditions of Sainte-Beuve, Hazlitt and Barthes. I write it not only for the above factors but also predominantly to extricate my NAME from any connection with it!!
‘The Visitor’ - shall I be kind for a moment? - is a compilation of short pieces so designed as to use all the narrative trickery that can be squeezed into one work. To be truthful, ‘The Visitor’ is a humdrum hotchpotch of self-gratifying horror stories - all loosely strung together by a narrow ‘quest’ theme that midway through the book is completely forgotten. To call it a novel is surely blind ... to call it ANYTHING is unquestionably a waste of time. No doubt, D.F. Lewis - whoever he is - has predicted such criticisms from the outset for he has used the ludicrous idea of peppering his text with comments about it. (These are usually assigned to an actual character in the book, Peter Jeffery - if he exists, I pity him!) . But such predictions, far from ‘spiking my guns’, urge me on to stress the utter truth of the criticism I have and will make in this article.
The text is brimful with narrative trickery, as I have already intimated, viz, unreliable narrators mixed with reliable, stories within stories (even a ‘novel’ within a ‘nove1’), collusion with the reader and self-internal comment. The ‘author’, amid these childish efforts to stun and confuse the normal reader (if any actually deign to open the covers of such a book), has actually employed some of his own old and discarded works to fatten out the text, thus not bothering to create new. AND HE SINKS TO THE ULTIMATE DEPTHS WHEN HE ACTUALLY APPENDS MY NAME TO SOME OF THE PIECES.
I formally state that at no time have I contributed pieces to this despicable compilation.
‘The Visitor’ is the outward sign of a demented spirit, a token of a twisted torment that should be institutionalized, the evidence of the wild ravings of a fractured mind. Moreover, it is badly written, ill-conceived and probably never to be finished (as I write, the second volume has yet to be Published.) Finally, it is undeniably dangerous, indisputably barbed for the unwary, naive, impressionable youths that will unthinkingly flock behind its pseudointellectual banner,
Here is a typical extract:-
“However, to entertain my attention, there was the most excruciating pain pain pain pain pain pain pain in my left (but as I write, the memory is slightly swizzled, and right may be right) shoulder.”
Here, the word ‘entertain’, usually connoted with pleasure, is used about an ‘excruciating pain’. This exemplifies the insidious brain-washing with which the book stinks … and any weak soul would end up believing that horror is pleasurable! The repetition of the word ‘pain’ shows the author’s inability to express himself without this silly device. The bracketed piece is surely evidence of the trickery that I have already mentioned, viz. the narrative collusion and unreliability, the parenthesis obsession, the ‘item within an item’ ploy, the fractured ‘mind within a mind’ and, once again, the atrocious style of expression,
Believe me, this extract is far from isolated and typifies all that I have said about ‘The Visitor’.
In conclusion, what horrifies me about this book is the possib¬ility that the writer may even include this very essay in the second volume. If he does, you, the reader, will know that it does not in any way subtract from the truth of my incontrovertible thesis about D.F. Lewis’ disgraceful ‘The Visitor’.
* Let me give it to you straight from the shoulder, I have killed Abraham Bintiff, Captain and Gent. Let me tell my tale.
As he placed the final full-stop to the essay that I have just read to you, my hag-like, snouted, ravening visage peered into his study-bedroom. Called by some unseen and inexplicable force, taunted thither by irresistible powers, I came to his abode in Dark House Lane. My imagination swelling with the furor and fetor of some esoteric faction, I crawled, twisted shape that I was, along the cobbles of Victorian London. I scrambled up to the aforesaid hatch … and now I saw the bent, concentrated silhouette of he I knew to be Bintiff and the strange lion motif above his head.. Then … I suddenly saw standing beside him a muffled form, a man wrapped and wrapped again in countless scarves and duffle coats. As Bintiff put his pen down, he turned to this figure and I could just about hear him say the following:-
‘I am pleased to enrol you as a fully fledged art Master in the order of Ars Gratia Artia, the More-Great-Men uprising. This is a proud moment for you but it is also the start of an important and toilsome task. You have undergone the standard operation for all our art Masters - a secret camera embedded in your right shoulder. As a secret agent, you will roam the lands searching out the hidden locations and the ridiculous circuses of the pseudo-art Masters. You will flash their top secret plans and strip bare their silly works of art. The Scratch-Be-Art Group must be hounded., chased and exposed. until they are destroyed and shown to be mere nothings in a world of Great and Classic Art. You will exert yourself to the ends of human endeavour to spoil their visitoresque escapades and vile visitorisms. And above all you will seek out the original manuscript of ‘The Visitor’, you will stamp on it, cry out the name of Abraham Bintiff, chant Ars Gratia Artis and pray for more great men. You will film the burning of this book for posterity, you will record its reeking and diminishing paginated corpse, Will you be the one out of all our art Masters who will have the privilege of reaching such an orgasm in your quest? In any event, I welcome you and pin this device to your glorious breast.’
At this point Bintiff took a. badge resembling the motif above his desk and clipped it to one of the muffled man’s scarves.
Sickened by this sight of two men clasped in the cause of what they called great art, I jabbed my beak into the glass, immediately¬ shattering it. Bintiff turned and, in the light of the spluttering lamp, I saw naked fear cross his military features. The muffled man shuffled as quickly as he could to the door. But Bintiff was frozen and, pouncing from the sill, I landed on all claws across his unguarded chest ... whereupon I dug severely into the flesh. He strived frantically to tear me from his body but I was fixed sure as an Homunculus. I sucked at his internal juices and gnawed his still, palpitating heart ... whilst the other escaped down the creaking stairs. Was I the monster and was it good?
I cannot remember. But I hope you enjoyed my little story.
(xix) The Story of Pelade the Sexless
AS EDALPO WADDLED DOWN FROM THE PLATFORM, THE GATHERING CHEERED UNCONTROLLABLY. EVEN THE CUCKOO SMILED WRYLY AT THE FATE OF THE DOUBLE-CROSSING BINTIFF. BUT, TRUTH TO TELL, ALL WERE SLIGHTLY WORRIED AT THE IMPLICATIONS OF SUCH A TALE, AND THIS MIXTURE OF RIGHTEOUS VENGEANCE AND SUBTLE INSIDIOUSNESS, OF OUTRIGHT HORROR AND CHURNING FEAR, OF COMIC SPEECH-MAKING AND TRAGIC CONSEQUENCE MEANT, UNDENIABLY, THAT THIS WAS NOW THE FAVOURITE TO WIN (WHICH IS ONLY RIGHT SINCE EDALPO IS EXPECTED BY YET UNINTRODUCED FIGURES IN KA AND HARCHWEE).
BUT THE COMPETITION HAS NOT ENDED. PELADE WADDLED, UNNOTICED TO THE NOW INSTALLED MICROPHONE. THE BBC PRODUCER EFFEMINATELY WAVED HIS HANDS FOR APPLAUSE AND SIGNALLED TO THE CREATURE TO START.
I have two tales, completely unconnected one from the other, for the price of one...for I have fearlessly decided to break the competition rules in a desperate effort to win by sheer bravado. They are stories I have heard today, unbeatable and unsurpassable. How can I hope to win? Only with this startling gamble.
HITLER SIGHED FOR HE HAD ALSO PLANNED SUCH A GAMBIT FOR THE CLIMAX OF THE COMPETITION.
Story One, then, like the second, was told to me by C.A. X_________.
The hillside was alive with sunshine and all the car-owning townsfolk, it seems, were thereto enjoy a Sunday out in the fresh air - nibbling at sandwiches, playing ball with their children, soaking in the sun, listening to pop music on their transistors and, in general, enjoying themselves. The hillside, grassy with green, rolled downwards to the beach where more air-starved citizens were doing similar things, as well as dipping their hot bodies in the cooling sea.
Little Beriberi pulled irritatingly at her kite, which flopped beside her at each attempt to get it air-borne. No wind, darling, says her mother. Beriberi still pulled and stared wonderingly into the deep blue of the sky. If only I could be up there, she says, her eyes agleam with childish fantasy. The kite lay limp. Beriberi placed her body beside it.
On the beach, a family were building sand-castles - the parents supervising smilingly; Ian, the teenage son, sneering at the two other children having enormous fun as they let the fine sand trickle through their fingers. The sperm of the breaking waves crashed on the beach and remnant strands of salt-white meandered playfully amidst their sand-castles. Look, a river, says one boy. No, the town, is flooded by a storm, argues one girl.
Nearby, Mr. Lewis, an insurance worker, splashed in the sea. He had come here on his own to feel the virgin thrust of the fresh salt, to bask in the goodness of the warm sun and to watch others enjoying themselves. He waggled his toes as they delved deliciously into the soft pulp of the sea-bed. He continued swimming from nowhere to nowhere. …As if on some mock channel crossing! ...On some ludicrous marathon swim across fantastical gulfs! ...A lone hero swimmer with no boat nor horizons!
Suddenly all was quiet. Silence muffled the excited cries of prancing children and all faces were turned to the sky. Nobody stirred. Up they stared - those in the sea stood up and shook the wetness from their limbs; the children ignored their sand-castles; Beriberi no longer saw her limp, unsatisfactory kite; transistors were switched off. A tableau of silence and expectation - all waited with their heads bent back and searching the empty sky. Even the waves seemed mute.
Then, gradually, a quiet humming was heard by everyone, almost a buzz. It grew louder and louder until it was deafening - rather like the roar of throbbing engines. The fun-makers still sat and stared, as the crescendo approached. From over the top of the hillside came the low-flying form of a jet-liner, huge and wide. It almost touched the grass. The hum had turned into the intens¬est of whistles, the whistle-screech of an imminent bomb ... but much louder. One engine was a mass of flame ... and it plunged into the sea with a great fountain of froth. The mammoth metal-machine disappeared from view and the crowd stared at the place where its nose had met the silent waves. But these waves were now a. turmoil of wheeling eddies.
The crowd continued to stare, dumb, as the low, insistent moan of tortured humanity hummed insidiously in the air from the depths of the surging sea.
Story Two...
‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH,’ TITTLED EDALPO, JEALOUS OF THIS PLOY.
O.k. O.k., COUNTERED PELADE, listen and then you cannot deny my second story. I will destroy your rules with one flick of a verbal whisker. Hark!
...from the depths of the surging sea. Then, Beriberi’s Daddy told her the following story a- ….
‘A STORY WITHIN A STORY, WHAT A CLEVER TRICK!’ SARKED NAPOLEON.
...Daniel Swift rose from his bed, stepped down the stairs, opened the front door of the house, looked to the right up the hill and saw a large furniture lorry turn into a side-road at the top, about 300 yards away. Daniel Swift then proceeded back up the stairs, after shutting the front door, settled back into his bed and awoke from the dream. He rubbed his eyes, forgetting all about the furniture lorry and everything else in the dream and spent that day as he always spent it.
But the dream recurred. Every night, Daniel underwent the same experience, that is to say, his mind did and gradually he became aware of the memory of his dream. However, he was not disturbed as the dream was not at all disturbing. Night after night, the large, brown furniture lorry turned into the side-road at the top of the hill on which Daniel’s house was situated - a neat terraced road, very respectable and unremarkable. Morning after morning, Daniel dismissed it from his waking self with an uncon¬cerned shrug.
Then, one day, Daniel saw a. replica of the dream 1orry turn into the side-road. Inquisitive, as one can easily imagine, he ran up the hill to … well, he did not know exactly what he was going to do. He turned into the side-road and saw two ‘On The Move’ type men, overall-clad, lifting items of furniture from the lorry and carrying them into a house. He just stood and watched until he saw them carry a large chest of drawers. Hanging out of one of the half-open drawers was a human arm, dangling and bleeding. ‘Wait!’ he shouted. But they did not hear him or did not want to. Daniel ran up to them ... whereupon they hit him on the head and stuffed him into another drawer. ‘A lot of bloody dreamers about today, Fred, eh?’ But Daniel was not dreaming now.
PELADE LEFT THE STAGE AMID UPROARIOUS LAUGHTER AT THIS HILARIOUS BUT RESTRAINED TALE (AND IT MADE A CHANGE FOR A STORY TO BE RESTRAINED). IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN WHETHER HIS TWO-TIER GAMBIT WOULD WORK.
(xx) THE STORY OF CHISH, THE ETERNAL LYNX OF THE ONYX FIELD
‘London is a big, big city with big, big men Who sit in offices and count to ten.’ (A famous author)
The City of London is contained within one square mile just north of the River Thames. Thousands of bestriped, bepinned and bespatted businessmen troop, almost militarily, across London Bridge every morning thinking, of course, of important financial deals and of Rose’s favourite morning tea (brought in steaming urn on trundling trolley).
Money gapes from every doorway and swells with capitalist pride. Urns and coffers of swilling tea flow down desky pass¬ages. Telephones trill and flustered clerks answer as best they can - though obviously not truthfully.
The fund. of the City: stocks and stares in terrible trove; indices and assets that expand and cohere; caves and. troughs of beer and sandwiches; telephone memo-pads melted down for the silver in the paper-clip; copperbottomed banks that bend sedately over the river; piles of pension schemes crawling with hollow ants and creepish aunts in diapers; exchange and martyrs on pyres of flaming cant; trustee banks and brackish papermoney, crisp to the ear; line upon line of individuals gulping bubbly liquids from countless and uncounted public houses.
One such I speak of. A pub, a boozer, an excuse for not living, call it what you will, Many would call it a ‘coffee house’ in the old Victorian tradition.
In this pub, milling crowds of burbling, high-style young men, talking finance and fun, yawning bourgeois hiccups and staring side-glances for their unknown and, until known, unfriendly co-drinkers. Unseen by them, an old Charlie Chaplin film flickers on a side-wall, merely a decoration, a quite unnecessary extra. And this is true.
Also unseen, in a corner of this pub, a man with a huge beard and teeth, writes wildly on A4 paper (probably stolen from the office). He seems often to refer to a typed sheet headed ‘London is a big, big city…’ before him and his name? It is Peter Jeffery.
(xxi) The Story of Veriveri, the Putrid Baby
How long the chess tournament had endured is not for this story to tell. However, when we enter to record the scene, twelve faces peer pairly down at six boards ... and the quiet ticking of the six specially prepared chess clocks. Utter concentration was the message of the day and their knitted brows and slit eyes told this message with unsurpassed acuity and style.
Now, the narration takes its first deviation from the norm. One side of six (alternately playing white/black from board one downwards (as is the custom with chess-team competitions (a toss of the coin deciding who would play white on board one))), were muffled up to the nines. Scarves, ties, coats, jackets, blazers, pompoms, bowlers, trenchcoats, overcoats, commando jackets, balaclavas, wellingtons, leggings, yellow macs etc. etc. festooned and garlanded their bent forms, in such a way that their very physiques and physiognomies were completely hidden from the narrator’s and their opponents’ view.
Their opponents were a motley sort, a group of six in ord¬inary clothes, probably representing an insurance company or some other financial institution.
Could the rhythmic ticking of the chess-clocks be hiding the exactly synchronized, unison whirr of hidden cameras? Could they be concealed between the extricate and intricate folds of the mysterious muffles?
I will not answer these questions. I will only state that when this story competition is over and Iceman’s rigmarole has reached its inevitable conclusion, the war of the arts will commence. Classic versus Scratch. Stylized versus Spontaneity. Restraint versus Visitoric Abandon. Muffled art masters (hordes and hordes swarming art’s ever and never plains) versus other pseudo art Masters (scratch designs across their hippy visages, swarming over and towards those plains). Utter holocaust and combart. Then this Bible’s Visitor will come. The Coming will be described. THE art Master will Come.
1 know, for I am his daughter; and I gave him immaculate conception.
That is my story.
That is THE story.
=============================
Veriveri toddled from the stage amid the puzzled looks, the angry stares and the startled faces. The story competition was surely reaching its terrible climax.
Chish was already having brain fever at the margin of the gathering. His blood vessels were swollen and some were even seeping blood. His moans were as if coming from the very belly below his shitstained chest. Napoleon’s feathers were furled like apple strudel around clots of black blood, even Cuckoo’s beak was limp, his eyes unseeing and bloodbombed. Dondon’s beard was freckled with droopy maggots and his tail was aloft like a. pustular member. The gathering grew sick, as if on its last legs. One more story to be told and then - who knows? Surely not Veriveri’s prediction, Lorg, for we know that Edalpo has to return to you and prepare for the last and most important part of the quest. In. fact, CERTAINLY NOT Veriveri’s foreseeal, for the war is over and here I am, the victorious Visit finished, the strife replaced and ready to send you safely on your route.
…as if on its last legs. Their limbs, in effect, were feeble and frore. Moles expanded their brown expanses and smelly hairs sprouted slowly from them. Gangrenous toddlers flopped down (previously, as we know, eager faces around the jolly storytellers). Screaming in frenzy, shaggy animals shat steaming turd-dinners around their dying farmer. The Field was putrid, growing as corrupt as the story that told of its very existence. Iceman, as was earlier predicted, now began his confinement. The winged thing of ice-drift and -floe suddenly shuddered and fell like frostbitten timber to the ground. His vulturine visage creased and diddered to the throbs of the uterine throes. His fledged limbs bicycled uncontrollably amid the startled onlookers. Using his own beak as forceps, he leant forward and prodded into the opening between his own bony legs and pulled from the sweaty-haired orifice a clucking human head on legs. To prevent the even more hideous afterbirth to emerge, the recently arrived midwives thrust it back as cork and stopper, The first birth would now die and rot between the lips of Iceman’s opening, would become veined and hard with encrusted hair and juice. Its little legs still kicked like tiny members, until even they had to cease and became part of the death that already stank. Like this book, a lesser horror fenced in a much greater and far more meaningful horror within the vile flesh and craggy ice of Visitoric bulk. A kaleidoscopic, biblical edifice towers gauntly before the squinting eyes of uncounted and unaccountable hordes. The Beast within is unseen, unheard, but they still squint, shade the burning sky, to He who Comes, to glimpse the explosion of ice and death. ...on its last legs, as even they had to cease and become part of a stinking finale.
Hitler stepped forward to begin the last story. But before that…
INLOGUE III by Peter Jeffery and Clovis Camber
Lurid beyond belief, the statue kite was afloat the Only Field, above the dispersed gathering as some shuffled off amid their own corruption ... they limped and lolled to various ends. The mighty cuckoo lay amid the litter of its own unuttered judgement - he was dead but none seemed to know. The ground steamed. The weeds twisted and twined through the corpses as each creature dropped. The remaining creatures wallowed. in the morass.
‘Dondon! Wait! …Wait!’ screamed Veriveri. ‘My legs are being sucked away. I can’t move. Wait!’
‘Pull them out. I can’t atop ... forgive me, but time is out of focus. The lens must not come closer. It must not. Veriveri, leave your legs behind.’
Dondon clawed at the mud, now red with the passage of the crea¬tures before him.
Veriveri pulled out her long, silver blade and placed its razor sharp edge in her groin. Pushing gently through the flesh, end a sawing motion for the bones, each leg in turn was severed from the body to remain forever growing out of the abysmal morass. Insane with anguish, nausea and despair, Veriveri gibbered a plea to God and scrabbled after her companion, his stunted trunk worming through the green mud.
Dondon, aware of Veriveri’s presence behind him, was shocked at the sight of a human stump clawing after him and pulled out his revolver and shot her dead. The wail lingered for a few seconds, and then there was silence, except for the laughter of time.
(xxii) THE STORY OF HITTLER, THE SPINDLY MONKEY-TOOTH
How can you possibly see me through the ingrowing skin of your eyeballs? How can I tell my tale when my mouth is chock-a-block with broken teeth and nerve-raw stumps? The land is swaying, swerving ... as the solitary zebra crosses the distant, disappearing horizon...
My tale? HIS TEETH CLICKED AS THEY WENT IN EACH OTHERS’ WAY, NERVE SCRAPING NERVE. My tale is in fact no tale at all but an
EPILOGUE Orlando Blue has become a ravening beast, one who tortures… a victim of his being tortured. His scarlet whites of eyes pierce the gloom as he nears poor Rosemary. She screams, screeches as the flopped and festering creatures of the gathering play with the non-existent pigeons of the sky. And the old Charlie Chaplin film flickers and slowly-motion dies upon the wall of our author’s mind.
And in glorious stereo and full colour TV, the war is afoot…
THE END
======================== (xv)
WAR IN SPAIN OR THE VISITORAL AND MESSIANIC ANNALS by Charles Dipp
(a) Apocrypha
‘War in Spain’, they say.
And as Hittler (the spindly monkey-tooth) stepped down from the platform, his story told, the Cuckoo remained fallen and was the most perfect rose (all bud and dewdrop) in Christendom.
And he wilted, his judgement of the competition staying silent and never to be told, except, perhaps, in some obscure and unremembered apocryphal tome.
If booes and hisses sounded at this silent judgement, then booes and hisses sounded.
But none sounded. For only flowers decked the only field in Spain around the only rose.
And then there was war, but first:-
(b) Cinema Land
The world was nothing but cinemas. Nobody lived anywhere but toddled from film farm to film farm (using the cinema loos and washbasins for cleanliness and the cinema-foyer confectionery stalls for sustenance). The sad thing was that since everybody did this, no new films were made, so each film was watched countless times throughout a life time.
Economics is the sorting out of limited resources for unlimited resource-wanters. So how such a world?
The MGM/AGA organization ( made up of many so-called art Masters) fought fictional wars on Spanish plains against fictional enemies (the SBA/Hippy/Messiah/Visitor hordes or Scratch-Be-Art/HMV for short, who lived in strange caves far from the Cinema lands). They brought back hatched up booty for the ‘economics’ of the land. And so the faction continued. Until there was war and armageddon, retribution and crucifixion.
(2006 DFL COMMENT: THERE NOW FOLLOWS A CRUDELY BIRO-DRAWN PLANK CROSS (+) WITH A MAN’S FIGURE NAILED TO IT, HIS FACE BEEN MOON-SHAPED, BEARDED, BESPECTACLED, A MOLE ON THE LEFT CHEEK, WITH A BUBBLE SAYING ‘AND IN (C), IT IS TOLD. THERE ARE NUMBERS AT THE END OF EACH CROSS-‘SPOKE’, 12 AT THE TOP, 9 ON LEFT, 3 ON RIGHT AND 6 AT BOTTOM.)
(c)
WHAT IS IT? WHERE ARE WE? WHITHER HAS THE DREAM SNATCHED US? TWILIGHT, RAIN, FILTH. FIERY GLOW OF THE OVERCAST SKY, CEASELESS BOOMING OF HEAVY THUNDER; THE MOIST AIR RENT BY A SHARP SINGING WHINE, A RAGING, SWELLING HOWL AS OF SOME HOUND OF HELL, THAT ENDS ITS COURSE IN A SPLITTING, A SPLINTERING AND SPRINKLING, A CRACKL¬ING, A CORUSCATION; BY GROANS AND SHRIEKS, BY TRUMPETS BLOWING FIT TO BURST, BY THE BEAT OF A DRUM COMING FASTER, FASTER - THERE IS A WOOD, DISCHARGING DRAB HORDES, THAT COME ON, FALL, SPRING UP AGAIN, COME ON. - BEYOND, A LINE OF HILL, STANDS OUT AGAINST THE FIERY SKY, WHOSE GLOW TURNS NOW AND AGAIN TO BLOWING FLAMES. ABOUT US IS ROLLING PLOUGH-LAND, ALL UPHEAVED AND TRODDEN INTO MUD; ATHWART IT A BEMIRED HIGH ROAD, DISGUISED WITH BROKEN BRANCHES AND FROM IT AGAIN A DEEPLY FURROWED, BOGGY FIELD-PATH LEADING OFF IN CURVES TOWARD THE DISTANT HILLS. NUDE, BRANCHLESS TRUNKS OF TREES MEET THE EYE; A COLD RAIN FALLS. AH, A SIGNPOST! USELESS, THOUGH, TO QUESTION IT, EVEN DESPITE THE HALF-DARK, FOR IT IS SHATTERED, ILLEGIBLE. EAST, WEST? IT IS A FLATLAND, IT IS THE WAR. AND WE ARE SHRINKING SHADOWS BY THE WAY-SIDE, SHAMED BY THE SECURITY OF OUR SHADOWDOM, AND NOWAYS MINDED TO INDULGE IN ANY RODOMONTADE; MERELY TO SEE AGAIN, AMONG THOSE RUNNING, STUMBLING, DRUM-MUSTERED GREY COMRADES THAT SWARM OUT OF YONDER WOOD, ONE WE KNOW; MERELY TO LOOK ONCE MORE ON THE SIMPLE FACE OF OUR ONE-TIME FELLOW OF SO MANY YEARS, THE GENIAL SINNER WHOSE VOICE WE KNOW SO WELL, BEFORE WE LOSE HIM FROM OUR SIGHT. (from ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann)
A pre-First World War calm beset the French and Spanish fields. No strategic trenches, but row upon row of nodding blooms and petal sprinkling the breeze and aroma. No uniformed and lice-ridden men asentried around the wastelands The peace was essentially bird-twittering and pax-halcyon.
If some solitary shepherd were strolling through some under¬growth, if some bookwormy hermit were lain akimbo and concentrative within some overgrowth and if our narrator (the one whose narrative led us hither), pencil chewed between contemplating teeth, were cowering asquat within some ingrown birdhide, then, indubitably, they all would hear the gentle hum of some gentle hum. If they all remained hidden and still, they all would hear this gentle hum crescend, become more then hum, for it grew in militant volume, became much more than hum. If they were still there, unfrightened, sweated within the corner of their lair, they all would stop their ears from tremendous roars and unmitigated pandemonia. If they now, with incredible foolhardiness, lifted their bloodshot eyes to the now birdless welkin, they would see countless metal beasts soar more than ominously, more than loomingly, more than forbiddingly, over the hedgerowed horizon plane.
These aeroplanes, from a future age no doubt, screamed in countless hordes across our fictional ‘if’s’. They spat fire end shat ploding clots. And the trenches, men-filled, below, were splashed in uncontained blood. Grim-visaged war was afoot.
On one side of this incredible vastness of polluted country sat the allies in balaclavas and incredible muffles to protect them from the shearing frost and knife-whip ice. The snow casc¬aded around them, splattering the already shed blood.
On the other sat the enemies amid martial music and decked with nodding plumes. A nifty tucket was the ticket...
Overhead and overheard, as we have already more than hinted, roared the confused aeroplanes, none knowing to which side he belonged, none having thought to decorate the sides in recognition.
Both sides attacked each other, continuously opened fire but rarely received any in return! And so the war bore on.
* A war which was intended to last three weeks, endured for seven years. The mortality was mammoth and its magnitude shocked even the most warlike of the proponents.
‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ reiterated many a pacifist.
‘Beneath the mountainous corpses, drawled a gloomy one.
Then there came One. A strange man (some have called him a gospeller, others a narrator, others a storyteller, others a bibliophile, others only a mere clerk of hand, others an insurance salesman, others a saint and yet others even e captain in some strange army). I, even I, would like to call him by a modest title - Messiah is too grand, too all-embracing, too Godlike; Comer is too small, too sexual, too anthropomorphic - I would like to call him a Visitor. This contains all the transience and modesty needed but also the deserved welcome and the space-age, man-of-the-future, alien side of his nature. It even contains the necessary dark side, i.e. The Visitoresque element (if I can be eponymous for a moment!)
* He stood between them, held up his hand and shouted ‘Stop, please. Please, stop!’
‘Who is this nincompoop?’ questioned one bloodied soldier.
‘Git, yobbo! We will have no pseudointellectual , yobbo pacifists here!’ sneered another.
‘Out of the way,’ effeminated a BBC producer from a near-by tree who was doubtlessly filming yet another ‘World at War’ or ‘Great War’ documentary.
He retaliated :- ‘O.k., you mean buggers, but history will show me as hero!’
At that, a mighty crepitation, a hefty cannonade blasted this pseudo-Messiah, crushed Him against the near-by tree in which the aforementioned BBC man now shook his fist at the squashed corpse below him.
‘Who did He think He was, bloody Jesus Ohwrist?’
(d) Back in Cinemaland, the starving masses awaited the longed for booty, But, little did they know, the so-called art Master had confused themselves in their own machinations, tangled their small brains with petty intellectualisms and warped their sensory per¬ceptions with strange and inchoate aesthetics. They were lost, lost in forests of narrative mazes, in labyrinths of countless and unaccountable signposts and amid verbal icons and linguistic tortures. Their opponents, the hippy hordes, were no longer opponents (in fact did not know that they had actually been opponents) for they were drafted in as soldiers in a real war. They were taught to kill.
So, the cinemas crumbled. Their fantastic facades crashed into the deserted streets. The wailing masses stretched imploring hands to a forsaken god. They scat to the countryside, away from the errant edifices. There, they were shooed from pillar to post by angry farmers who chased them from their previously quiet and uncluttered farms.
Then, after much wandering, they reached a horrible Field. It was strewn with creepish corpses and decapitated aeroplanes. The very place stank. They sank up to their knees in mud and gore, but they continued to wade through the sucking, black (always black) quagmires.
Suddenly, one pointed. Wordlessly he pointed, but all turned their eyes.
Embedded in a mighty oak, part of its very fibre and texture, was a face. Its moonshape stared down at the astonished masses lifelessly. Then, they made out the rest of his body, LITERALLY GROWING WITH THE WOOD. It was a plant-like corpse expanding with the tree as its bloodnourished roots made it soar welkinwards.
The uncounted masses bent their heads in reverence, then kneeled and chanted spontaneous hymns. Satisfaction and sheer spiritual joy were alive over their starving visages, as they enacted worship on this Field, on this Black Field, on the Field Where The Corpse Grows. Since then many a strange story has grown about this legendary Field.
INLOGUE III
Etepsed-Egnis By Des Lewis
(2006 DFL NOTE: THIS EPIC POEM WAS FIRST WRITTEN IN 1967 AND THEN LATER THAT SAME YEAR IT COMPRISED THE FIRST PART OF ‘THE EGNISOMICON’. THIS POEM WAS SIGNIFICANTLY ADAPTED (IN 1974) FOR ‘THE VISITOR’ - AND IT IS THE LATER VERSION NATURALLY SHOWN BELOW. (AT THE END OF THE WHOLE NOVEL OF ‘THE VISITOR’, BY THE WAY, I DO PLAN TO WRITE A LONGER 2006 NOTE WHICH WILL ACTUALLY COMPRISE AN INTEGRAL PART OF THIS BLOG-SHOWING OF THE NOVEL. OTHERWISE, THE OVERALL 1974 TEXT HAS BEEN LEFT MORE OR LESS INTACT THROUGHOUT ALL THE BLOG PARTS OF THE NOVEL. QUITE A BIT MORE TO BE BLOGGED BEFORE THE WHOLE NOVEL IS FULLY BLOGGED, HOWEVER, SO I HOPE YOU’RE ENJOYING IT!)).
A galactic struggle on an astral plain A cosmic conflict under a sky of black A monochrome of sunless sky Emanating a sunless heat Kissing a grassless clay Scarlet-winged bats flap their hideous wings In the half*air half*water of the sea*sky
An innumerable unmathematical horde of hell*dwellers A countless undimensional swarm of fish-flies Come to witness the eldritch display Here come the Etahs from Evol The turkey*men of Tareemay From the fourteen corners of hell From the untalked of blisters of tulip Dareen From the orderless tumors of Gar From there from here from everywhere Purple hag*demons twisting their tongues in a cluster Blueberry dibbuks in a swirl of limbless cacodemonism Chocolate merfolk in a sexual haze with werefolk All to see all to sade all to cheer All to witness the hellish farrago The Stygian struggle between good and evil Between the Avernal art Master and his own creations
All is set The infernal audience nibble their noses in masochistic delight All is set Fuggerhugger Muggerjukka The chant is taken up Fuggerhugger Buggervukka Rug rug hug bug mug dug vug Sax vax daxer wax fugger hugger kukka Gagagagagagagagagagagagagagagaga
All is set Day has come dying the sky an even deeper shade of black Weird birds flutter to the music of incomprehensible flutes Godless walrus*cats gnaw their still wombed young Pillars of hell’s marble glint in the light of no light And all is quiet beneath the habitual hum The babel of bubbling anti*altars All is set The art Master and his own creations Step into the Cerberean arena The die is thrown Today a victor will be found!!
The germs cease to fester The wars cease to war Jeffer ceases to comment Helix and Mica are about to be executed The Cambers may commit suicide Lorg Dagg stands in suspenders Edalpo is Edgar Allan Poe All wait with bated breath to see if their side will win
The art Master slithers from his ragged hole A transparent mass of yellgreen phlegm Snakes over the grassless clay A sharp elastic reaction as his length leaves the hole One eye in front dribbling with his lair’s floculent semiliquid One tail behind writhing under a swarm of treacle hell*bugs
The pseudo-art Master floats from the cloud*crack Amidst a golden retinue of cherubim and sarabands And a host of Visitor characters The sphery chars from Eden Lunisolar Garwomen from Heaven’s hareem Cometary Laks from heliocentric Lleh Zodiacal Ratmen from Eseek The storycompetition Gathering from the Black Field Where The Corpse Grows A cosmogonic wave of light and joy A fluorescent digs wags his bowery tail On his pink fur lie a myriad of pearly wings Heavenly lice bugging a heavenly body
The hyacinth battle is about to begin
The art Master flicks and winks his bloodless eye And from his black*rimmed mouth Oozed out by his jaundiced tongue From the steamy bowels of his feet Pour an indistinguishable mass of twitching spiders Blue green black orange brown Eight legs multiplied by infinity The magnet body of the pseudo-art Master picks them from the air
And once pink now polychromatic Fuggerhugger Muggerjukka The pseudo0art Master flaps his aesthetic tail And instantaneously his pearly bugs Swallow each clucking bacteria Within the translucent skin of these One frantic spider spewing a spotted liquid which means death Digestion means disappearance One splash of abdominal acid and evil dissolves
The art Master flicks and winks his bloodless eye And materialized above his head in unholy splendour There stood Uncle Howard Lovecraft Howard dons a gruesome mask and stretching out his woglike hands Grasps the Greeklike neck of pseudo-art Master He squeezes and squeezes Chanting ghastly citations from Necronomicon Fuggerhugger Buggervukka The pseudo-art Master flaps his aesthetic tail And from his teethy mouth Float toy angels hymning to Abraham Bintiff Each grabs one hair on Howard’s body And fling with godly might Down down down he flies into his own created bottomless pit His scream of Yog Sothoth echoes through Hell As he melts in stinging bubbles of boiling excrement The art Master flicks and winks his bloodless eye And … before owt is done The pseudo-art Master flaps his aesthetic tail And horror of horrors Laughing Abraham Bintiff stands above his head The art Master cringes in fear belching up clots of terror His phlegmy mass twitches in a rite of prayer to Despete Bintiff takes his skits and his parodies His grief and his horror Holds out his disintegrating palm Grabs his own distended skull and prays to Dog He prays with the fine words of a saint His body melts into a polyp of gunge Tent*like it sails through the bloated air Blown up by the off centre crescendoes of Nam Teiv The art Master grovels a vortex of swirl*gorbellies Praying to Despete with words of fervor The tent is essentially a crosswork lattice Of the pseudo-art Master’s penned mutations Of the art Master’s novel Each character grins uncharacteristically As the myrrhy tent drops on to their own creator Who is now a bulk of fevered corruption Emanating thousands of inorganic azoic numb*fish The tent envelops the fungiform of the art Master The art Master who suffocates squirms under the rayfish of Bintiff
Meanwhile (back at the ranch) In the grimy caverns of Lancaster And the Southern Mysteries of Purley Despete listens to the frantic pleas of the art Master Sympathetic he decides to send…. Who? Yes who? Despete presses a black button and says ‘Come forth O creature of the seven deeps Move aside the lofty door of your lair Come forth O Emperor of all Come and rescue your spawn The art Master is wriggling under the polyp of Bintiff Come forth and twist your scaly tail’ A swirl of cascading arteries A tornado of star*spangled cockatrices A hail of unborn witches in a dance of fire A whirlpool of eyeless ghosts in an orgy of gangrene And from their midst From the midst of this raspberry glue Comes the creature with nine aureate heads Each twittering nine incomprehensible tongues Etepsed-Egnis Gagagagagagagagagagagagagagagagagagagagagagaga
The art Master wallows in the Bintiffian gunge In his own Visitoral narcissism Spluttering out worms and embryonic larvae Choking with the gas of his smoking bowels Retching with the stink of Bintiff The art Master dies Erotic wing-nugs howl through scabs of jelly
A flash of pur*red light And silhouetted against a glow of lewisian luminosity Etepsed-Egnis A body of fire interlaced with material blemishes A perpetual interchange of body and unbody A green fire licking the air Legs of pulsating metal fashioned by frogs in the unoccurred past Metal softening and hardening His seven arms groping as they emit all that is ‘bad’ A mass of intermixing limbs and fire With colourless antennae spraying a fetor of Basak This the fiery figure of Etepsed-Egnis He eats He eats the shapeless orgasms of the sex within his body He eats the flesh of his progenitors He eats through a holeless gap in his bulk the plankton of the air He east Abraham Bintiff He gnaws the creamy cloak that is matted in the art Master’s slime He nibbles the delectable titbits of the polyp Fuggerhugger Muggerjukka The strawberry spaghetti dribbles from the holeless gap Bintiff moans as he is sponged up Fuggerhugger Buggervukka The pseudo-art Master howls and scampers away Rug rug hug bug mug dug vug Etepsed-Egnis chews and emits a blaze of fire A wail of ethereal joy Sax vax daxer wax fugger hugger kukka The art Master crawls from beneath the dead tent Now able to tell the Egnis myth In its true essence Uncluttered by avernal schisms
Germs start again to fester Jeffery takes up his crazy pen Dagg and Edalpo take the Egnis path To Ka, Harchwee and further Helix, Mica, Bintiff, Cambers, Gathering creatures, all are gone But perhaps one day we may witness another galactic struggle Between the avernal art Master and his own creations But until then we can only hope
A Quiet Interval By Archibald Z______________, a Victorian Gentleman
(a) A dark drawing-room, gorgeously draped And clock quiet For the pianist to enter and play. A shudder of Chopin Is drawn in mature tendrils From the fibre of his flowing fingers As they soldier on. A sweet Victorian girl, dimples Face cast in shade By a self-conscious chandelier, Listens delicately but mysteriously To the decadent notes As they march on. Prim but hiding sensual ancestry In the poise of her beating body, A willowy lady sips liquid Through the purse of her purple lips, Lush to the day coming night, Darkness clashing music and light. Candled flickers Dance a doom For the age to chew and fear, Think of and spit At the dogs that whine In camps of waiting day and fight.
(b) A dark, rich-clustered room Has diamonds embedded in its silence, A book by Theophile Gautier On a dumb, polished table, a Forgotten piano, shrouded By its glorious past, medals Of dust clinging solidly To the ghetto of notes, a broken, Blue, flower-incised vase, Delicately fern- and bud-less, And in this room of quaint quiet And glinting curio, a sudden Flicker of movement startles The mind of the arched poet: It is the fall of the pen from his hand.
(c) One Victorian day, when my window Was eight panes and dirty, The sweet girl passed outside And waved: 'Mercy!!' I cried, 'How’s your father today?' Mercy answered by a smile And tripped on with a second smile.
A four-horse carriage, stylish But not the best, passed, Madame Pintiello in grogram Fresh from crimp at Mrs Tardew's. I saluted as it rolled obliviously To a future not mine nor yours, Especially not yours, for you live now. I hope you receive mercy When the petrol chokes you My friend, the seventh pane on the oiled window be your hope for the eighth might be clean, might not.
(d) An almost unnoticeable shift Of shadow in an almost silent Room; a dilettante wisp Of candlelight played on the piano In near gracelessness, near Immobility, but almost definitely A play and sway of soft light. From the richly decorated ceiling Hung, pendulous as ripe fruit, A great, evidently unlit, bulb, Nearly filling a cone of shade, A yellow, or is it green, encasing, To shield the incivilization Of the blatant bareness of glass, This breast of potential light. Unnatural though it would surely be, This room that does not even tick With time in its throat Might welcome the swathe of vision This filamented gland could provide; Bones of sheeting Are at present in its half-darkness. Wide arches straddle to doors And introspective windows, Recalling architectural ages Only almost dead windows remember: What is the good of jewels As eyes, even though priceless And as beautiful as the silence In this room, this Sunday Of a week not lived, not worked? The slow movement of a concerto Is heard almost in the room, A quiet tinkle of dusty cutlery And voices in whispers dropping Words half- Heard, half- Remembered: can we return this? Can we smash the bulb And lose the light for which ages Have fought and died? The mysterious occupant sighed, Lifted his finger, almost ringless, And passed away, almost alone.
(e) Shafts of a brighter sun, staring As a wide-eyed girl, drifts lazily Over the lifting lawns Where dotted figures linger In croquet and half-heard conversation. A very proper house, extratensive In its beingness, unlooped By years of light, gaiety and grief, Stands prominent at the centre Of these lawns and loitering loins, A master of the sun on grass, Sky on blue, lace on love: Latimer seeks the darting hand Of his diaphonous loved one Behind that shrub that shrugs In the decisive but defenceless breeze. Rosemary, strands of future Glinting mischievously in her eyes, Dodges a carelessly aimed ball As it zips through her words: 'Can we see the spire … Oh!' Latimer and lace, a doodle Of intermixed emotions, are Sentinel to the coming Victorian night. In those days, darkness Was an edge, today a shroud: My name is Rosemary, once Bright-eyed as a bird-swept sun, Now in age, in coming death, A lady who sips her tea As the petrol lorry heaves up the hill Outside my parlour window.
(f) Rosemary, the darling dumpling Of a large Victorian family, entered, With a shaky pink hand over her mouth, The room she had never hoped to brave. From dusky days of even further youth She knew from vaguely remembered Finger waggings that the room, This blue door that had to lead to a room, Was strictly out of bounds. Her Father, a past figure to her, Was the inevitable barred gate To a room where secrets were sighs. Now, she entered, her moon of a face Peering like a baby toddling Into its first room. Gold drapes swept over invisible windows Whilst dust besmirched chairs Stood centurion to a squat, But expensive, table of smoothest mah- Ogany; its covering half hung To a beige carpet where dust was clouds. Braver, but nevertheless curiously shocked, Rosemary Latimer tore the lace from her bodice The veil from her pique And strode into this room Where 'never' was a word that died And became the ever in her eyes: Tears and lace Scattering a sky, And the sun set over some distant moor.
(g) I slid the purple curtains aside And espied a yellow butterfly, A patch of filament Over pied fields, hawthorn- Dripping Scapes and slopes. I could not touch This feather of my soul As the hard glass came between, The chrysalis of the world. A web of nature, Nurtured sweet by panting children, Floats, a craft hover-steady, Over the silky surface Of an aching lake Like a silver Swann. A peal of orange bells Blossoms almost silently To my sight, as the last lad, Fair curls, doll-face, Mysteriously, painfully Beautiful, skips to the water's edge And watches the web, Idle's idol, hover ever on.
(xvi) AN EXCERPT FROM ‘A CONTEMPORARY CRITIQUE OF PETER JEFFERY’ (1972?) By Des Lewis (A fictional prelude to the Ka-Harchwee papers)
Before discussing ‘The Egnisomicon’, one should first consider the events of Summer 1967, during which Jeffery and myself sent poems to each other through the post, I being in Hastings and Jeffery in Southend. Beforehand, we had come to a kind of understanding that the word ‘singe’ would represent evil, Stan etc. whilst the word ‘mellow’ would be Singe’s antithesis. During the period I wrote a poem called ‘Town Honours Its Teenage Bird-Doctor’ in which I shouted ‘Singe forever!’, that I was in fact Satan himself as he was lurking inside my chest. A poem called ‘Etepsed’ produced the word ‘Despete’, a poem called ‘Ka’ instigated our motto ‘Etepsed-Egnis’, which is ‘Despete-Singe’ backwards. During this time Jeffery wrote the poem ‘Poem to Despete’ - (this is now included in a collection of poems entitled: ‘’The Poetic Manuscripts of 1967’ and other poems’ written in the interregnum between ‘The Seven Volume Trilogy’ and ‘The Egnisomicon’…) …Returning from the Summer holiday, I wrote a poem called ‘Etepsed-Egnis’ in which Dog (i.e. God) has a galactic struggle on an astral plain with Natas. Dog appears to be winning with the help of such figures as LBJ, until Despete ‘in the grimy caverns of Lancaster’ unleashed the singeful power of Etepsed-Egnis, described as an intermixing of fire and limb eating the orgasms within his own body. (DFL 2006 COMMENT: IN RETROSPECT THIS VERY MUCH DERIVED FROM THE STYLE OF WILLIAM BLAKE IN HIS COSMIC EPIC POEMS OR FROM THE BLACK SATIRICAL FABLES OF JONATHAN SWIFT ETC. AND THE GOOD / EVIL CONUNDRUM IN MILTON.). He rescues Natas from the polyp of LBJ, and Dog scuttles back to the palatial heaven. The poem was influenced by Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and thus gave birth to ‘The Egnisomicon’. The title was based on ‘The Necronomicon’, a mythical book which Lovecraft created…
Thus, the poem ‘Etepsed-Egnis’ turned into our own personal mythology, Jeffery writing ‘The Book of The Gods’ in which the mythology was set in motion. He introduced many new characters and even drew a family tree of them. The gods were one of two kinds, either fighting on the side of Mellow or Singe, their names usually biblical names inverted but not always…
This is a very indecisive list, as some characters changed sides halfway through the book, and some are more singeful or less singeful than others, Carkesomee being excessively singeful to his detriment - E*E could not bear anyone more singeful than himself. These beings are the base of the mythology, taking part in galactic struggles, voyages from abyss to abyss, cosmic copulation etc. Jeffery’s style reaches a hellish pitch and, sometimes, I believe, attains the sub-dada abyss (DFL 2006 COMMENT: CF. THE ZEROIST GROUP (1967)), for which he was striving. Jeffery takes the Lovecraft ideal (the ‘unmentionable’ cataclysms of hell and sticky dread & dream) and wallows in it, twisting his own originality on to the Lovecraftian ethos, transforming it into the ultimate of perversion, ‘singefulness’, ‘sub-dadainess’ - the writhing pit itself…
…evil, goodness, Mellow, Singe were all inextricably mixed up: the Mellow creatures were bad, evil because they were so good, heavenly; the Singe creatures were good because they were so evil, abysmal. This entanglement of ethos, perhaps unintended (DFL 2006 COMMENT: CF. WIMSATT’S ‘INTENTIONAL FALLACY’) resulted in the Egnisist religion, of which ‘The Egnisomicon’ is the Bible (or ‘Elbib’). Jeffery was the propounder of this religion, and it is best explained in one of his poems:
‘Thou shalt not lie: All the time. Thou shalt not tell the truth: All the time Thus E*E commands it. Tell a mixture of Truth and lie Tell a mixture Of literal truth and allegory Untill no one Not even you Can tell one from the other. Is Etepsed-Egnis real or imaginary Actual or symbolic? Etepsed-Egnis he commands That you shouldn’t know For that is the way of singe. Next, once you can not tell What is true and what is not What is symbol and what is real You say: There is no distinction Between one or other? They are just the same. No truth, no lie You gladly cry For singe has abolished them both. Good and bad twixt and turn Intermingle and interlock Until at last We can see They’re both enveloped by singe. Such is the singeful poxed-up universe And such has it been commanded by Etepsed*Egnis.’
The implications of such a philosophy are frightening to say the least.
(DFL 2006 COMMENT: AND MAYBE, ALL THESE YEARS LATER, I HAVE DISCOVERED THAT THE PHILOSOPHY IN QUESTION IS ‘FICTION’ ITSELF, HIDING AWAY ALL INNOCENT-LOOKING!)
(xvii) THE ROCKET AND THE EAP-HSW SHOULDERWITCH By John Cheese
“The importance was in His attitude to seriousness,” said the serious young man about the prophet who ended his days as a tree and, perhaps more importantly, as a Messiah. The speaker’s name was St. Lorg Dagg, one of the Messiah’s disciples - now, as you can see, considered a saint. (The art Gospeller had departed or had the teller become the told?!)
His listener, a voice in St Lorg’s right shoulder, uttered assent (or was it just a twitch of muscle that spoke?).
((‘Talking to himself?’ I thought as I attempted to get closer with my camera and microphone. I squatted behind some handy gorse and my recorder picked up the following words…))
“We need only wait for the inevitable resurrection, for such perfection as He can only Come again.”
((My lens focussed on the saint’s beaming face and recorded its very sweaty pores, as he continued to mumble unintelligbly, kicking haphazardly at the stones of the wilderness.))
((Little does he know, but the so-called saints he is watching is filming HIS beaming face! I have a secretly embedded camera in my right shoulder which, as he watches me, is focussed on his very pores. I am surprised he cannot hear the whirring.))
At that moment, the present and the past tense which these two respectively inhabited met in a sudden conflux. This was represented by a screaming rocket that careered giantly across the sky. Both glanced at each other for their mutual discovery was now inevitable. But before either could utter remonstrance or truce, the rocket returned, this time emerging in mammoth proportions TEN INCHES ABOVE THE GROUND. It seemed to float, in slow motion or some ambiguous form of action replay, a beauteous buzzer, a cantankerous form of bumblebeery, inexorably churning the desert sands like sea on each side. Although slow, the speed was superhuman and it swept the fear-paralysed pair from their feet.
As it soared into the birdless welkin, any neutral bystander would have to shade his eyes from the remorseless sun to see the disappearing rocket carry the silhouettes of our heroes away. Away? Away to another narrative ball-game, another game with a different ball and a new set of rules.
COMMENTS VII by PF Jeffery
Lovecraft’s story, then. At once, obviously, I am put in mind of the Infinite Cuckoo’s story with its fusion of the eel brooch - butterfly episodes & ‘ TheHound’... The sea front encounter puts me in mind of MRJ’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (The famous hound plot story). Moreover, the end of the story puts me in mind of ‘Orlando Meets His Double’ (not so far included in ‘The Visitor’.) ‘I was he I met on some far-off strand’ must surely mean that the narrator’s assailant at the beginning of the story was the narrator himself either in the form of ‘a double’ or as some kind of time loop victim... I think the first mention of Bartin in ‘The Visitor’ is to be found here (he has been axed from ‘The Core’)...
* I note in passing that you are so Visitorian that you include a brief comment upon a comment on a comment upon a comment concerning my comment on earlier comments, this I note & then ignore... Quickly on to Edalpo’s story. A curious one this. I am put in mind, of my comments upon ‘The Core’ - the author wrapping himself up in layers of meta-author to protect himself from the horrors about which he writes. Here we have a critic slain by a fictitious character from the work he criticises, a parallel case would you not say, Desmond? ... the complexity within a kind of simplicity overwhelms my frail pen, I would start diagrammatizing but the arrows would knot themselves until the diagram choked on its own vomit. I am astounded, if anything it is TOO Visitorian haps even a clever parody of the kind of thing ‘The Visitor’ labyrinthinizes itself with... The element of the Secret Agent, the More-Great-Men uprising links the tale with ‘Inlogue II’ where Bintiff seems to be mentioned as a hero of an uprising. We are brought back to the Helix-Mica political executions & the execution of the serious young man at the commencement of the work. It has hitherto been unclear exactly what these people are revolting against, now it seems that the object of their venom is ‘The Visitor’ itself... In the light of these reflexions the bulk of The Visitor’ may be seen as a struggle between the author & his characters (& subordinate authors such as Bintiff) to conform to his will while they battle for their freedom & individuality... But I feel since the author is omnipotent in his own book then these struggles are useless as those of the farmer & his crew - the naughty characters like these two (& also the Harchwee rebels) will come to their inevitable fate, in fact the author IS their fate for he predestines his characters’ existences... On, on, on, then - to the story of Chish. I like the way that the headquote is attributed ... it is indeed a famous quote from a famous author & is the only passage I can recall from the poem from which it derives... The device of having the crazy commentator scribbling his comments in a London pub is obviously inaccurate as to geographical location & equally obviously a typical ‘Visitor’ trick...
* Of how I had been beguiled to the Onyx Field by a young man with spectacles I shall not write, nor shall I mention the manifold terrors I found therein, suffice it to say that once I trekked through the abominable wastes of Yondo & compared with this glittering Field that hideous fastness was like unto the brows of the blessed. But to this place I was guiled & long did I journey to discover an egress. At last I reached the coast & the loathsome city of Meadow Port from whence, I had heard it whispered, unmentionable craft sailed to the Meadow & Beyond. Of the inhabitants of this detestable city I cannot force a wholesome pen to write & of their vessels I shudder to think, but upon one of these craft I was determined to stow away & leave those shores forever. It chanced that a ship of prodigious size was being loaded with crates of livestock bearing labels claiming them to have originated in Victorian London. Well I knew Victorian London for I had long sojourned there & knew it for a wholesome region. Thus did I light upon the idea of secreting myself in one of the livestock crates. Would that I had never prized open its lid for there were no wholesome cattle or fowl inside but human heads with feet growing from their necks and without sign of a torso among them. A myriad of these abnormalities nestled in each box - I opened another & another in search of wholesome beasts but none such did I discover. At last I fled shrieking back into the interior of the Onyx Field - I would not travel to the destination of such vileness & neither could I ever bring myself to return home, for one originated in the very Cheeseford of my birth and in the very last crate I opened or shall ever open I chanced upon a head bearing my own unmistakeable features!
* I’m glad that you like my map. My source for Grath Grisp’s cottage is Comte d’Erlette’s ‘Manuel du Nebbe’ which takes a different view from D. Camber & states emphatically that the witch Orlando met was none other than the infamous Grath Grisp… As to Meadow Port, I can only assume that you have not read Azdureth’s ‘History of The Harchwee Conspiracy’ in which it is revealed that Meadow Port was built by traders from Harchwee & named by them ‘Meadow Port’ thus. It was subsequently seized by the Egnisists who renamed the town Meadow*Port’. With the Harchwee rebellion, the traders sided with the naughty gods & overthrew the Egnisists, renaming the port Meadowport as you put it. I believe that this version is still used, as you seem to know, but I have eschewed it as being associated with the Harchwee rebels & have preferred to use the original form of the name. (I might have used Meadow*Port, but this form was only used for the three years which separated the fall of Meadow Port & the Harchwee rebellion.) You will understand my reluct¬ance to use the form ‘Meadowport’ if you realized (as Azdureth avows on p984 of his work) that it was in that city that the meeting between the rebellious gods & Dog (see the Egnisomicon 11. 4017-4035) took place, & may perhaps hope that you will, in view of this, recoil from this tainted version of the name. (Baertuna in his ‘chronicles of Pseudo Neb’, states that after the fall of the kings of the Harchwee a satrap from Pseudo Neb ruled the city for eleven years & thereafter it passed once more into the hands of the Harchwee merchants, but neither of these cared for names & allowed the version to remain. One of the fragments in the Egnis collection (‘Facsimiles’ vol. 398 p1. 724), a diatribe by an unknown scholar of the Meadow & Beyond (probably Beyond), argues that the name during the three years of Egnisist rule was not Meadow*Port but Trop*Wodaem, but as far as I know this view is not found elsewhere.)
* The story of Beriberi (SIC), the Putrid Baby. What have we here? Six heavily muffled figures playing chess against six normally dressed. Why should the figures be so bundled up? Perhaps they are Scandinavians ...or are icemen... However, if the other team look as if they represent an insurance company, could they not well be an assemblage of meta-authors. If the coats DO hide cameras they could well be up against a team of art Masters... Beriberi says ‘I am his daughter who gave him immaculate conception’ which seems to me to mean that she is both his daughter & mother. If the real DFL is THE art Master then Boriberi IS his daughter since she is wholly created by him & if she is setting him down now as a character in the book she is in a sense his mother, giving him immaculate conception by using him as her character. A conception certainly immaculate since it does not involve copulation involved in the begetting of Iceman’s offspring... ‘The Statue’ by Peter Jeffery & Clovis Camber completed - but who completed it? It has been told elsewhere (but not in ‘The Visitor’) that Clovis Camber died after writing the ‘k’ which is here restored to ‘kite’ & I am sure that Peter Jeffery had nothing to do with the completion of the epic... ‘War in Spain’ which is surely not the diary with that title mentioned elsewhere (although it has the same ostensible author, but we already know, do we not dear writer, that the ‘War in Spain’ in ‘The Core’ was not really written by Charles Dipp but ‘The Camembert Dynasts’ by Simon Heman which was really not by Simon Heman at all, but a diary of Juan Camembert dated 1681)... it is hard to be sure with ‘The Visitor’. It is possible that the apocalypse was apocryphal & mayhap even this apocrypha will take an apocal¬yptic turn. But, on I shall go, to (b) Cinema Land, without a pause. I shall not attempt to correlate the cinema & film farms with the many other references to farms, film & cinemas in ‘The Visitor’ so many are they my arrows would spin in ever decreasing circles until their points penetrated their feathered ends…
* Farewell, then, Desmond, for I am fading fast in the flickering images that throng the cinema screen of this once-white sheet of paper which will terminate very shortly. There is, however, room in which to send you ebon*blade*wishes & my love, Pete.
(xviii) KA AND HARCHWEE By The art Master
“A Kaleidoscopic, Biblical edifice towers gauntly before the squinting eyes of uncounted and unaccountable hordes. The Beast within is unseen, unheard, but they still squint, shade their eyes from the burning sky, to see He who Comes, to glimpse the explosion of ice and death…” (A famous author)
The sun is weak and watery. The black bladder of the sun seems to be always setting in insipid array over the plains of Ka, Harchwee and Toons.
One such plain is in Harchwee, unmapped by those topographical flunkeys in Lancaster, dubbed the Plain of Beyondo by some undiscussed tomes beside me now and the Shift of the Infinite Steps by others. As I draw nearer, the third part of my novel unfolds before me, each nook and cranny of its story, all the dark corners (chimney-corners, kyphotic angulations, forked and furcated crossways, hook-nosed cusps, V-shaped crutches, akimbo zigzags) of its narrative intricacies, every labyrinthine and mazy catacomb of its tortuous tale.
* dream wending to its ending crosspath bending around the fingers of the fingerpost reaching paths that ask the way away to themselves. noisy pylons and sexy fences border the way to the way that leads to the Plain of Steps a mere moaning mileternity from the dry sea and thankless is your badcome. dream blending through creepish crossways and dim and dimming dingles if you are deaf turn left or you are dead!
silent Plain perching over the arid waves once a clifftown where its denizens did shade red eyes from the forking sky to the fore and the screeching streets to the hind. bind your sheaves! weave your thatch as thick as summer growth! for lo! The winter winging crow wings of wind and beak of flaming fork skin of darkest sin!
dream ending its crosswork toppling from stitch to stitch clifftop tipping into the dying sea. how could they appreciate that you came through crosswinds on screaming feet to save them from this end? how can you express the words that even now are dimming on your bleeding lips? how can you? the crow’s on you and the crowd’s a crew of sunken craft of novels and suppurating crosswords.
* The Shift of the Infinite Steps is a plain beneath the bruised sun of Harchwee; it is a plain of non-Euclidean, Escherine, non- and pseudo-geometrical, promiscuous, indiscriminate, untopographical STEPS. As far as my eye can see, there are the ups and downs of steps and stairs, ladders and runged gradients, calibrated hills, scalar ramps, graded dips, hierarchical slopes and skewbacks, herringbone escarpments…
As far as my eye can see is this nightmare of endless steppery. Some lead down, some lead up, but none join each to each or seem not to do so. Therefore, my considered conclusion is that both the going up and the going down are perfectly pointless. A problem with no solution for the mountaineer or alpinist. A descriptive impossibility for the careful writer or the careless hack.
However, my eye does not drift endlessly over these ascents and descents, does not frisk forever with these flighty stairs. For towering at the centre of some horrid contamination of steps in the distance is the edifice, the tall and leaning, many-hatched erection, the broody brickwork containing that which must be hid from your eyes until the dream has ended. It efforms, in standfast incubation, from the deserted steppery, looms, in carven but inchoate genesis, from the massive slopes, rears, almost beastlike with many eyes, over our next scene.
The next scene? A scene from some B film, no doubt.
The rocket zooms over the bestepped plain and drops our two heroes to a particularly large and unwieldy ladder. Dazed, they skim the nightmare around them with peppered eyes. They shiver under the powerless sun and draw closer to each other.
Lorg Dagg, the mountaineer and epic poet, looks wanly at his blonde-haired flunkey, Ed Alpo, and shrugs.
“Is this death?” he asks.
No answer, for Ed is mouthing lunatic platitudes to himself.
* Far from this plain, the rest of those lands sat in motley forms: dim pastures, Pyrrenean rucks and crags, cracked meadows, thrilling waterdrops and cliffedge hamlets.
(…secret farms, hanging towns, bedewed fens and fells, shivery badlands, arable fields, granite and onyx escarpments, silver shores and strange inland seas.)
How, then, the Shift of the Infinite Steps? How did it become? Many a Harchwee merchant will take you aside to some dim chimney-corner in an overgrown drinking-place, and he will hiss the following words:
“There was a cliff over a great sucking sea and there was a thatched town upon this cliff. They built a tower upon this cliff to house a certain thing. And then – only steps would do.”
These bizarre mouthings hiss into silence and Ed, far off on this very Shift, sleeps beside his one-balled master.
* Far from Harchwee, Ka and Toons, far over sharky seas, past Bluemanland (that may not even exist), there is the antimeadow snowlands of Egnis. Only snow whispers and nothing is silent. I will not continue this description for not even abominable snowmen grace these icy and worldless wastes.
* Before leaving this set-scene arama, I must posit here a piece of traditional poetry that a Harchwee merchant has tongue enough for repetition. (Please excuse my hasty translation.):-
THE SONG OF THE MERCHANT
We sell the songs That we heard in the Meadow – A penny a piece, A halfpenny for their shadow.
We sing the songs, The meadow songs, But we cannot dance, We cannot dance.
We die, we live, The forests are afire, The heat is in the kiln And our hymns are in the mire.
Have you heard this Meadowsong Before you heard its tune Have you heard the wings above – They are coming much too soon.
We sell the songs For your body and your heart But before a note is struck The Meadow is our tomb.
* Strange be it, the labyrinth of our last scene, but, be assured, the skein is not as untrammelled as you think.
(xix) LORG DAGG’S FIRST DREAM By John Cheese and Charles Dipp
And what was the Scandalous Scandinavian’s dream? But, first, his name? The One-Balled? St Lorg Dagg? Abraham Bintiff? Desmond Lewis? Ed Alpo? The Shoulderwitch? The art Master? Simon Heman? Lord Dog? Juan Camembert? Daniel Swift? Jeremy Helix? Tommy Mica? Peter Jeffery? Clovis Camber? Tristan Camber? Mr Kane? Or pseudo-all-the-aforementioned? Or even John Cheese or Charles Dipp? Bartin Camber? One of the Gathering? Etepsed-Egnis? All of them? None of them? Some of them? Or pseudo-all-the-aforementioned? Or pseudo-all-the-aforementioned? Or pseudo-all-the-aforementioned?...
And that was his dream. His silly dream.
* And what was Ed Alpo’s dream, Lorg’s blonde-haired flunkey, as he lay beside his master on the ‘Battleship Potemkin’ steps. He did not dream.
* Strains of a Mahler symphony, expressing the end of Romanticism and the decadence of Germany as it was about to enter two disastrous World Wars, was mellifluous and flowing, a corrupt adagio exquisitely beautiful, a rank stream flowing into stagnant and sublime lakes. The collected works of Thomas Mann lined the bookshelves of a Victorian-style drawing room and around them hung the staring visages of gold-embossed oil paintings. As the symphony drew to a quiet end, the insistent ticking of a walnut-cased clock ominously kept the silence at bay. A bunned and golden-robed lady sat sedately beside the downward-hung drapes of purple curtains, closed and impervious to the outside. Suddenly, a well-dressed gentleman strode through the oaken and brass door.
“Rosemary, that’s it! War has been declared. The Balkans are afire and our men are to be bog-dwellers on some foreign field! Those Serbo-Croat pigs! That Kaiser, that thalidomide maggot! Those German cretins! Peace is to be denied, my dear.”
As his red and worried face worked over these tragic words, the clock continued its pregnant rhythm, its unrelenting tick-pause-tick.
“I never had it nor ever will,” was the lady’s considered response. She, carefully but energetically, rewound the cumbersome gramophone and placed another record upon its renewed wheeling. Beethoven’s Ninth aptly-paradoxically was heard beneath the hideous wearing of the old record.
The oxymoron was not lost on Latimer and he smiled as he sat beside his mistress.
“Open the curtains, my dear,” smiled the staunch Rosemary.
Latimer rose and pulled the gorgeous lengths of royal-purple curtains across the crisscross window. He peered through the lotto of panes. He drew in a sharp breath as his eyes drifted over endless expanses of Escherine steppery.
(xx) THE SECOND DREAM By Des Lewis
(In which s.s. believes himself to be The One-Balled)
Lorg Dagg the epic poet and renowned but renounced mountaineer, strode into the hall, fixed attention on himself by waving his hand at the blushing princess who was trailing yards and yards of organdy and fur.
Hunched heads whisper and gesticulate excitement. The froth and fury, colours hinting at colours, of a Strauss waltz climaxed expectedly to allow Greek God and Fairy Queen to bow, kiss and tender courtesy.
…Fixed attention on himself, but his knee suddenly buckled and he collapsed, an inglorious heap on the stretched floor. Unnoticed, but soon to be so, Lorg’s dagger had accidentally, in the treacherous fall, pierced his right shoulder. (Or was it his left testicle?)
* Latimer turned from the window and the sight that had presented itself to his dull eyes. He turned and saw that the record had ground ingloriously to a tuneless slowth and to an even more tuneless halt. Blood was gushing from its speaker and splattering over Rosemary’s putrid corpse.
The clock tack irreproachably.
He cannot quite remember when he first heard the distant baying of champing policedogs but they suddenly pounced into the sedate room and snarled menacingly around his blushing face. Three truncheoned policemen followed and arrested him for harbouring an unsanctified corpse. They bustled him off across the steps, to the war where he would end his days continually dying for his country.
Lorg did not see the bowed head of Latimer escorted from the leaning tower across the steppery by the police-dogs and -men … for he was asleep and dreaming.
(xxi) THE THIRD DREAM By Charles Dipp
(In which s.s. believes himself to be St Lorg Dagg)
I dreamt of a strange, chaotic sea that was white as the land was black.
I dreamt of a teller whose elephantine muffles blurred the telling.
I dreamt of a comer, a sexual spirt of white pus.
I dreamt of a black war where the dead were black before they were red.
I dreamt of a visitor who came at precisely moon.
I dreamt of the telling of several stories woven into a crown of thorns.
I dreamt of one who did not tell his story and was eel-like or octopoid.
I dreamt of a sign and a wriggly swastika.
I dreamt of a huge bird who leaned over my corpse and pecked.
I dreamt of a saint and he made me saint, too.
I dreamt that I followed him through several fictional mazes.
I dreamt that he led me kindly by the hand and set me down.
I dreamt that he told me to write and this I did, to tell that which must be told.
I dreamt that I was back on that cliffedgy, chiaroscuro land but the wave were steps.
* Latimer did not die in the First World War. He continued to die in the Second.
The Germans captured him at this very beginning and such was his treachery, he became Adolf Hitler’s batman and had his ear. In fact such was his influence, the true Fuhrer was he. He fed the brain of the Chaplinesque figure with the crosses and intertwinements of progressive despotism.
He, the Victorian (DFL 2006 COMMENT: VISITORIAN?) Englishman that is, stood astride the gas chambers and watched corpses accumulate. And, on his brow, beside the MGM device, twitched a new device, a new tune, a wriggler, a comma, a hiatus, a symbol of a new fiction, viz:-
(DFL 2006 COMMENT: THERE FOLLOWS A CRUDELY BIRO-DRAWN IMAGE OF ANOTHER HUGE ‘PLANK’ CROSS, THIS TIME IN THE SHAPE OF A SWASTIKA REVOLVING (DENOTED BY ARROWS) IN A CLOCKWISE DIRECTION) AS IF USING ITS ‘FEET’ TO TRAVEL ACROSS A LEVEL SURFACE (OR STEPS?). NAILED BY HEAD AND LIMBS TO IT IS A MAN’S BODY, WITH MOONFACE AND BEARD, BUT NO GLASSES OR MOLE.) AT THE END OF EACH ‘FOOT’ OF THIS SWASTIKA CROSS ARE NUMBERS, 12 AT THE TOP, 3 TO THE RIGHT, 6 AT THE BOTTOM AND 9 TO THE LEFT).
INLOGUE IV THREE POEMS FROM ‘THE EGNISOMICON’ (DFL 2006 COMMENT: WRITTEN 1967)
(i) UNNAMED
Charred skeletons frozen in prayer of the sky On plains of Ka and Toons Infinity upon infinity Of sky-stroking bones Laughing crying and wailing The cacophonous tittering Rides the gusts of gore and gangrene Chanted in praise of Etepsed*Egnis Scream overlaps scream in the cacosong of pain Surging and seething in time to the pulp-pulp of the mud And indefinable bog-beasts slither And splash as they frolic in the sickly soup Ugeemen and pogeemen scratch each other Caking their claws with yellow crusted blood
A swirl of light splits the sky in two Illuminating the waving bones in a lurid hue And sending a thrill of ecstasy Into the spongy fibres of the bog-beasts What a demonic blast of unholy effulgence! The horizon bristled by the sky-stretched bones Is laced in crushed varicolours And inexplicable rainbows stream from sky to earth A black twisted tree like a hand sexing the sky Twists and groans in pain As it burns in a crackle of fire till a black scab on jelly From the ash-heap of decay Leaps a swollen bird flapping its useless wings And it falls to the mud as its feathers are spat out by the fire
Ka and Toons The plains of evil and singe Pulse eternally like a human heart freshly plucked from a body Ka and Toons Fevered abysses the playpen of our great EE Here we might see the condemned cormorants Being licked from the sky with his fiery tongue Look! See them squirming on his palate! Look! See him gnawing on sensual thrill! Look! See him swimming in his blood-bath Filled from the veins of twelve million goats! Look! See him romp through the plains Trying to crush as man skeletons as he can! Not sights for you or me But remember when you die Yes when you die You will be one of those skeletons Scratching the belly of the sky for mercy and warmth You will eternally be one on the plains of Ka and Toons That is until you are crumbled to dust by a playful romp.
(ii) THE FALL OF THE KINGS OF HARCHWEE
The oceans are in turmoil Bubbling and seething over the lands Once ice Now molten lead They drown and scorch all in their path In one fell swoop They swallow humanity from the earth’s face Till all that remains is a maelstrom Eddy upon eddy Whirldrag upon whirldrag The titanic swirl sucking at nothing Pulling at the abysses of the thousand skies Spilling over into chaos
* “Look at it sputter and seethe” Remarked Kakir to Pelade who was having a hot bath With his socks on “Look at it indeed” Returned Pelade fondling Lived’s toenail And wishing that he was alone Natas there too suggested “The work of our master Etepnis?” “Doubtlessly” muttered Yog Sothoth with a terrifying grimace Here on holiday from the moon “I’m getting mighty fed up with him” Stammered Skruk in his typical muddy voice “Aren’t we all” said the rest of the gods in unison “Aren’t we all” they repeated Or maybe it was an echo – we shall never know Or perhaps we will – rather unlikely though “Don’t you think it is time for a revolution” Said Saduj cringing under the weight of a five-ton foot A resonant “yes” thundered through the abyss “He is tyrant beyond all tyrants” “Without telling us he floods Htrae” “Isn’t it called Earth?” “You pagan! Take your blasphemy elsewhere” “Htrae is ours to tend and taunt not his” “We shall rebel” cried Skruk the obvious leader Let it be known that not all the gods were present And let it also be known that these will not succeed And let it also be known, dear reader of the hundred skies, That this is (obviously) a satire on the biblical story Where Satan & Co. rebel against God And fall to a Hell where they singe and turn to serpents That is a myth – this is true Let’s name these naughty gods so that you can boo whenever mentioned Skruk forever to be called from now on – Kurks Pelade Lived Kakir Saduj Natas Yog Sothoth & Lionel Blair
* The oceans are in turmoil See it turn and writhe Filled with snakes and toads See it squirm and swirl
* Meanwhile Etepnis an abbreviation of our leader Watched and grinned He watched and he grinned He grinned and he watched He laughed He laughed to see the futility of their wrangling “They think I do not know their mellow plans” We all know that Etepsed-Egnis is the greatest And the only way to pierce his unpierceable armour Is to use the forces of mellow There is no singe greater than E*E There is no mellow greater than Dog Therefore it is pointless for Kurks and Co. to wrangle further But we shall oversee their futile plans
* The oceans are in turmoil See it turn and writhe Filled with snakes and toads See it squirm and swirl
* Mellowed beyond recognition Natas wallows in cool blood Stroking the anus of Kakir Dog seeing a chance to one up on our EE Visits the plotting crowd and says “My friends Lend me your ears I come to bury EE not to praise him At last you have seen the mellow light Take your high spears Your black trees of pain Take your lofty mountains And squash to a pulp the tyranny of EE” All roared in assent And Kurks answered choking on a jelly baby “Thank you Dog for these words of wisdom How do you overcome the might of this neo-Hitler” “It is simple As bombing a Vietnamese village with napalm Mellow his singe Melt it so it drips like the mud of a swollen river Be good follow Dog and his singe will be overshadowed” Therefore:- Natas Kurks and Pelade Transmogrified into three old men decrepit as the oldest hills of Babylon And they took gifts To a puling baby in Bethlehem who was to be the essence of mellow Lived took on several names and wrote a book They call it the Bible today But in the nameless circles it is still Elbib What mellow they did perform! EE did cringe and shudder His singed up body began to melt Gobs of amber grease tore away and fluttered through the cosmos EE was in trouble
* The oceans are quiet Gentle ripples flop around stone piers And humanity praises its ugly mellow head
* EE was not however defeated He lit a gigantic fire licking the very sky And he let it play around his body Till once again he was a mass of limbs and flame A continual singe of flesh He glided through countless abysses A boeing aeroplane spinning ever onward singeing the air An awesome sight Kurks and Co. stammered a prayer to Dog But he was fled with his truculent scissors They saw the right of their ways And were sorry They prayed for mercy to EE “O Great One of the seven deeps We were misled We recognize your omnipotence Wrap us in your wings of fire And singe us to cinders” “No” thundered the voices of our master “No” thundered Edas by his side “No” thundered Dnomsed “No” thundered Retep “No” thundered all the singed up beings of all time EE took the mellow gods And gave them the greatest punishment thinkable He threw then into the hall of mellow Heaven! Where amidst sirens and harps They turned into angels Dog kissed them all A fitting punishment We must never mention these shocking creatures again Condemned with eternal bliss Kurks Natas Lived Kakir Pelade Saduj What a holy bunch! Once singeful now forgotten EE reigned in turmoil once more But he forgot the oceans the cause of all the trouble
* The oceans lap Humans play The oceans rest For the time being
(3) THE EGNIS EGRESS
Repulsive beasts of a sadder night, Scarecrows of an earlier dawn, Ill-shaped grotesques of a graceless noon Peer around the corners of our doors To see us in our material nudity, To sex us with their hulky eyes, And all we do is blink and blotch In watery embarrassment for our shame. Both the aunt and uncle of our life Plop into an insignificant bucket Splashing, only slightly, our well-rubbed boots With worthless water and watery blood. Suddenly grabbing our ego with both hands We try to shoo the blotty shapes away From the corners of our widening doors And from the space that sits in our souls. However, the asymmetry of the day Is darker at the play of our so-called will, As more and more grim-visaged forms amass At our tiring feet and blotted boots. The defacement of our considered pose Is purely pitiful to watch, but watch we must As it is that should be pitied, it is us Who beckon the shapes to go and go. Then, to surpass the harridans that are here, Arrives the top toad of them all, Creepy and gargoyle-gorilla tall: The Egnis, the haggard blot of a darker night And even darker space, withers on to our stage And scowls and almost seems to age As we watch, as watch we truly must. Orderless botch that he is, One can see he was carefully created When he was young and fresh from fertility, But now he is a going thing, A trend dooming towards a slouching end, A wrinkled piece of rotting eel, Scar, splotch, smut, wen, wart: Words race and die inwards. Inbred, he dies inside out, with all the tubes Hanging out, dribbling on our floor Recently carpeted by the Wilton man, And we are so annoyed we forget Our shame, our blame, in fact, And deposit the few and fewer remains In a handy matchbox on the mantelpiece. The forms have done their act And now they fumble off, hyacinth quiet, To the garden from where they came – Garden O of circularity fame Where the fence is round and dirty brown. Sit still, sit quiet, friends around, You cannot hear, now we are alone, The baying as of some gigantic hound. .
(xxii) THE COLOUR OF THE STEPS By The art Master
I have only been concerned with shape, symbol and form in my description, so far, of the Shift of the Infinite Steps. I will now hint at the variegated colours that deck the steppered ways: apple-cheeked, buff, rubescent, snuff-hued, dapple, oyster-grey, mauve, violaceous, flaxen, honey-pale, incarnadine, crimson, sandy, brinded, moiré, pied, old gold, coppery, livid, azure, skyey, saffron, bloodshot, rufous, auburn, bricky, tawny, chocolate, collied, pitchy, bleached, snow-capped, ash-blond, off-white, strawberry, rouged, damasked, grey-green, grizzly, heliotrope, creamy, fulvous, glaucous, leafy, avernal.
Dagg dreamt of a thousand colours that were so diffuse in their manifold machinations, that blurred oyster-grey they seemed.
Dagg dreamt of footèd wheels clanking across the endless hierarchies of the plain.
Dagg woofed and wagged his dreaming tail, as he snuffled in the dirty angles of the steps.
Dagg took his truculent scissors and chopped away one stinking testicle from his own body.
Dagg awoke from this and other dreams.
* Dagg shook Ed’s shoulder to wake him from his snooze.
“Go away,” gritted Alpo, “I’m not getting up at this bloody hour. This is not a frigging health farm, is it?”
“Come on, Ed,” coaxed Lorg, who knew that his valet was still dreaming, thinking he was back in his Mum’s shack in Scandinavia.
Gradually, Ed shook himself free of vain delusions and he rubbed his eyes as the plain of steps appeared before him.
“We must get to that tower before night falls,” urged Lorg Dagg. “Be it fact or vision, it is our only hope for shelter. Have you got the ropes, picks and climbing-pins ready? We shall need them before this day is out.”
“I did not bring them, Mr Dagg, since our recourse here was so sudden. There we were innocently watching the execution of political recalcitrants and, then, what a whopper! A rocket! Swept us off our feet and landed us here! What can the meaning of it all be?”
“You can repeat that question, Ed,” Lorg replied. “I seem to remember many dreams – nothing tangible, you know – and here we are in yet another one – although this seems real, since the others I know are dreams and if I can say ‘this seems real, since the others I know are dreams’, this can be no dream but what is actually happening. Do you agree? However, I will probably regret saying ‘this seems real, since the others I know are dreams’ because, if this be dream, I will be inextricably confused and you will have to comfort me.”
Ed, aghast at such meaningless argument, shrugged and said: “Worry not, sir, we have a goal – that tower. Surely we will find help there.”
“Count not on such vain delusions, Ed, for I fear that that edifice is but mere mirage in this desert of – for want of better terminology – steps. However, arise, valiant flunkey, and let us tread a wary path.”
They arose and stepped, up and down, up and down, for hours of Alice-like frustration until Lorg made the following comment:
“Damn!”
“Lost not your perseverance for, if that be lost, then we may as well sit down and die.”
“Die? How can we die? We have no weapons. We have no thirst – seemingly. We have no hunger. (Had you noticed?) In fact, we have no tiredness. So how can we die? I fear we will never even sleep again…”
“We have our fists. You fought off those crones with them, remember?”
“Crones? What crones? I remember no crones,” shouted Lorg.
“’Crones? What crones? I remember no crones.’ What a dippy thing to say. You know, sir, you look highly silly when you are indignant.”
“Silly? But what crones?”
“Those in Rull who claimed to have some sort of incestuous relationship with geography or something. Remember now? Years ago now we met them – this place reminds me of them. They lived in caves with some bearded Englishman and claimed to be earthmothers. They were cultish about dirt and scrabbled in it in some sort of mystico-sensual way. Lawrencian, I think that’s the word, Egypto-Cosmic beetlewomen. You know the sort of claptrap. Well, they came at you with paintbrushes daubed in sticky white paint. Remember? …What’s the point of this story? Oh, yes – our fists – we can beat each other into pulpy puddles and thus die. Ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha!!”
Ed’s laugh echoed luridly across the plain and then died away into silence. Lorg shrugged and plodded on over the colour of the steps.
(xxiii) THE OWL CREEK COMPLEX By John ‘Ambrose Borges’ Cheese
They could not rest as rest they did not need. How can one rest when neither standing or sitting are resting but merely standing or sitting in unencumbered essence? Their initial sleep seemed to have been fat for their hump and fed their sub- and pseudo-conscious Owl Creek complex (HSW-EAP and all the other paraphernalia and portmanteau fal-de-lals).
As they stood in their unrest, Dagg spotted some peculiar written devices (incomprehensible (to him) glyphs of an esoteric lore) embedded in one spoked ramp nearby. He bent nearer and concentrated his vision on the following strange, inchoate circle:
(DFL 2006 COMMENT; THERE FOLLOWS A CRUDELY DRAWN 12-SPOKED, WIDE-RIMMED, SUBSTANTIALLY HUBBED CIRCULAR DEVICE (LIKE A WAGON-WHEEL OR HOROSCOPE?) WITH THE 12 ZODIACAL SIGNS (AS ASTROLOGICAL SYMBOLS USED ON NATAL CHARTS) IN ORDER AROUND THE RIM, CAPRICORN AT THE TOP.)
“Look, Ed, there’s some writing and a funny circle here.”
Ed rushed forward and crouched beside his master peering at the tokens carved into the steppered plain.
“This mystery should not delay our journey, sir. I fear a storm brewing.”
At that moment, a pitchy cloud covered the insipid sun and, amid the intense gloom this caused, thunder rolled and farted across the birdless welkin. A shaft of crackling light lit up the Shift momentarily and silhouetted the crouched pair against a ranked and sole-towered background. Then, sheets and swathes of rain swept uncontrollably across their plastered faces. Plaques and shields of water buzzed between their cringing forms and bounced up in giant splatters from the now almost flowing steps. Fearing floods, the startled duo began to scamper but, once again, Carroll-de-sacs were their only reward for effort.
“We will never reach it,” screamed Dagg through the frenzied flurry of the elements.
And we leave them, for the time being, as they crawl on fours between the gates of the very tower.
(xxiv) THE FIRST ROOM By Charles Dipp (our war correspondent)
As the gates closed behind them, for a moment they were blinded by the many ceiling lights. However, as their pupils grew smaller and their eyes accustomed themselves to the contrast between the dark, foreboding stormclouds outside and the brilliant unnatural scintillations within, they raised themselves from the animal poses of their entry and cast naïve looks at their surroundings. I will not bother you nor spoil your clear image of these surroundings, by the authors’ factory, of which I am a member, but the dénouement, the climax, the lead down will remain in your imagination, only yours. The interior of the tower was an archetype, a hall of the collective unconscious and thus by me, a conscious being, indescribable.
Suffice it to say (and to say it very quickly) that I never saw it, but I know (know it intuitively, know it archetypically) that it was septagonal.
The impulse, the Self that did the driving, I also do not know and somehow do not care. But the heroic pair, completely complexical in their now symbolic interaction, did not talk. Talking was over, as a full-stop once put it. They opened the first door and entered a realm that was (you will be relieved to hear) definitely not symbolic. Within was light which was quickly extinguished. Within was silence which quickly gave place to whirring. Within was a resultant darkness which was again quickly deposed by a flishflashing square of light on a far wall. Blank was this light until images flickered too and interacted with resultant noises and meaningful sound-waves. They saw a chaplinesque figure throbbing on the screen of images and saw it raise its right arm from its jointed shoulder, right from the root of the shoulder, in salute to a mass of glassless faces. Beside him stood the lateral figure of a muffled and enveloped man, a right nutter. They heard chants and compulsive hymns. They saw a footèd wheel carrying corpses and broken limbs. Then they saw nothing for the images faded into numbers, which in turn faded into darkness (giving darkness back its own darkness).
Still not knowing the relevant impulse (so I will not attempt to explain or depict), the unsurprised pair left the room and later entered the second.
INLOGUE IV By Des Lewis
(a) Stockwell Shed
The carved ornament That rests on the square, oak pedestal Glints in sparkling, watery reflection. Ribs of light, shimmering and rippling, Make the wall baroque. A well of music, Giant and rhapsodic, rapes the carnival In a sex of light and coloured sound. Spins of cotton-air, Weaving insects in its lattice, Warps reality by its dream of net. The door opens, The black, massive door opens Into this room of fiesta And Shylock strides in, Bow-tie, silver-studded suit, Polished stepping shoes: Clean, crisp statured walk Into this room of Stockwell Shed.
A redtiger sleeps in the darkcorner, Snoring, and snorting a red vision. How can Shylock see it? The window shows the day bare, Stripped of its mist of dawn, And gulls peck at its glass, White swoopings in intermittent push And pull, cream waves on glass foil. How can Shylock see them? He sits in the chair by the black pedestal And paws the carved ornament, As if his aesthetic Was an antithesis of aesthetic, But beautiful nevertheless. The carved ornament, With delicate ridges and hard curves Tightens in its knot of creation; Having been made, It moves in its beingness, its bare Erection, squeezed, squashed existence. Shylock licks its very crevices.
The redtiger, taunting belief Beyond any conceivable credit Is a net of nightmare In Shylock’s semi-subconscious. It snarls in its corner Of dark bitterness and chews Its thought of coming night. It has blood on its mind. The baroque building curls Softly around its own special image, Its redtiger metaphor, And becomes a snarling Beast With a carven idea. Shylock weeps, his head resting On the pedestal, and he weeps, His hands frantically searching for juices in the ornament.
The music ceases without notice, Leaving an empty head Save for its carven image. A jocular face, a country face, Peers in at the window, looking in At the ribbed scene, The carnival feats of Shylock and Statue. The Tiger Rhapsody Is playing its last Wicked Waltz And Summer softly ends.
(b) Das Klagende Lied
Das Klagende Lied The ladies spoke amid the ballroom Amid the music and the mist Of past time, not forgotten But unremembered – there Lies the difference; war Is unremembered, not forgotten; Not missed, but unseen.
Das Klagende Lied As the ladies spoke amid the ballroom, Half-heard trumpets, Braying horses offstage, Silent screams of bleeding men, Threaded the webwork Of the dance music with war, War unremembered, not forgot.
Das Klagende Lied One lady, contralto, appassionata, Dug her nails inside her cheek, And spat at the glorious dresses Rustling around, Fabrics hooped away from their skin, So sensitive, that never forgot, So clean, that never ever forgot. She spat with nails inside her cheek.
Das Klagende Lied The other ladies amid the ballroom Stared in wide-eyed awe, Smoothed their ruffles, preened Their utter bosoms With nippled delight, and wondered Whom she was, this lady, Contralto, appassionata, pathetique.
Das Klagende Lied The lady, fortissima, pathetique, Dampened her mouth To see if the blood were real – Her mouth was her Christ And the war had been her cross, Remembered and never forgot; The dance music was her wine Sour as nails inside her cheek.
Das Klagende Lied The musicians ceased their play As they heard the offstage sound. All froze like statues beside a lake, Half-hearing the almost silent, Wreathed, panting, clashing war. Hair-line bugles announced The ragged, wilting retreat To the milling ladies on the floor.
Das Klagende Lied The ladies wreathed the solitary one With questioning eyes And darting, forking tongues, But she, the urgent one, Saw not their questioning panic. They could see, if nothing else, That the blood was real.
Das Klagende Lied The musicians stood at their stands, To overpeer, perhaps the scene, This milling ballroom Where the ladies saw a Messiah As phlegm in her mouth, A molten form of green and yellow pus Twitching in her mouth.
Das Klagende Lied The ladies heaved at their breasts To ensure they were still in place But imagine their spitting shock When they saw their glorious dresses All torn and half-revealing. Their breasts drooped like bulbous onions With thick, blackening nipples.
Das Klagende Lied Das Klagende Lied The war was lying on their face And the bugles were amid the ballroom. The strongest lady, the one That laughed at the staring musicians As their batons rose uncomfortably Within their ragged suits – Huge reddening pokers, Their weapons of this utter war, And she could see that the blood was real.
Das Klagende Lied The blood was certainly real And the horses shrieked As they were spiked By the weapons of utter war. A shy lady produced her crucifix, Waving it frantically At the green and yellow mouth; But the war was back And now they would never forget Its stinging memory, The Das Klagende Lied, Its utter Egnis Essence. Put away your crucifix By nailing it in your arm.
Das Klagende Lied Your cross is now syringe, now swastika, Madame, Mesdames, Messieurs, And Messiah has become woman.
COMMENTS VIII by P. F. Jeffery
Cinemaland could be an image for modern England with everyone being in a cinema - i.e. constantly bombarded with television in their own homes - television presenting a distortion, of reality... (Indeed the kind of limited fantasy, with its seeming plausibility that I have mentioned may well be the greatest factor of all in subverting reality. This kind of reality manufactured in a studio gave rise to the Situationist / Neo-Dadaist slogan ‘Storm the reality studio, retake the universe’)... To turn, now, from the tactics to the strategy it will be right to look at ‘The War in Spain’ as a whole. I think, and I have been preparing to say, that the whole concerns reality versus unreality versus pseudo-reality. The MGM/AGA organization are the ‘reality studio’ of the creators of a materialistic pseudo-reality pur¬veyed to the masses of Cinemaland in the cinemas (or TV-laden houses) where they live. The SBA/ Hippy/ Messiah/ Visitor hordes are the rejectors of this pseudo-reality, who escape into the avant garde/ mysticism/ supernaturalism/ fantasy rather than accept the pseudo-reality laid down for them. The war between these rival factions is itself a piece of pseudo-reality for consumption in the cinema - as is shown by the TV cameraman at the battle. BUT ‘Men shall be taken over by their own mythologies’ & the pseudo-reality of the battle becomes strong enough to destroy the cinemas & thus the source of power for the ruling pseudo-reality, which must then col1apse to be replaced by an alternative reality - the corpse-tree of the Visitor - akin to the cross as a symbol for a new religion... The next piece, I must admit, did not grab me very strongly but perhaps, being ‘A Quiet Interval’ it was not meant to... Archibald Z_________ , the author, was the husband of Rosemary (of whom whether her surname be Z_______ , Cheese or, as here, Latimer, I think that only one character is meant) a figure of drawing room respectability, Lesbian delights & plagued by torsoless heads. In my belief she represents the female side of DFL - a hypothesis which would fit the different aspects in which she has been represented. The respectable Rosemary might represent the desire for the vanished or vanishing gentility of a London suburb, where a Rosemary could passively let the world pass by & wander in the garden of ‘White Hell’. The Rosemary that Iceman encountered is the reverse side of this image - the desire to feel the sexual passions of a woman &, in this respect, the les¬bian aspect avoids homosexuality, paradoxically, by entering into female homosexuality. On the third hand, the torsoless head which has been linked with Rosemary represents a human body with the principle sexual characteristics (breast/lack thereof & genitals) missing…
* ...But the rocket arrives to end the contention – a parallel to the gigantic crow of Tweedledee & Tweedledum fame. Is this rocket the one that takes off at the beginning of ‘The Visitor’? Is it perhaps a symbol of the narrative taking off? …((NB: No comment on PFJ’s comment on a brief comment upon a comment on a comment upon a comment concerning PFJ’s comment on earlier comments))) ...I also note that you include a few items not directly in comment on ‘The Visitor – the ‘For DFL’ story… the discussion on variations on the name of Meadow Port & the termination of a recent letter. A lot of good solid stuff here Desmond. ...(xviii) ‘Ka & Harchwee’ ... ‘Ka’ derives from the title of a Summer ‘67 poem, next, I think, occurs in ‘Unnamed’ … as plains of Ka and Toons (= car¬toons? = cinemaland??)... I don’t, however, recognise the origin of the quotation from ‘A famous author’... The poem: ‘noisy pylons end sexy fences’ - the second half is of obvious reference but does the first refer to pylons in the original sense of gateways or to the modern English countryside kind of pylon,? A pylon, meaning a gate, refers only to massive monumental entrances, as in Egyptian temples, quite different from an English country gate. There is a strange double image in this line of ... pylon studded farmlands &… avenues of cyclopean masonry. The ‘way to the way’ - a metaway – very Visitorian ... The ‘winter winging crow’ a similar crow to that in ‘Tweedledum & Tweedledee’???... Then we have our ‘B film’ (= cinemaland again??) science fiction (Flash Gordon, perhaps???) rocket entering. Edalpo has moved out from Dagg’s shoulder (replaced by a camera?) to become his science fiction sidekick Ed Alpo… (xix) Lorg Dagg’s first dream… My guess is that his dream repres¬ents the ‘certain thing’ attempting to suck in all of the meta-authors, like the core... (xxi) ‘The Third Dream’… the wrigglers wriggle the cross into a swastika & the twentieth century advances towards the real author…
* ...a certain Dee-Ef-El a fiend of many years standing (& still more sitting), dissolves & I decide to invent another character for my unpenned novel ‘Rotisiv Eht’… I shall call him Grol Ggad, the many-balled ; I shall make him a saint & a meta-author & I shall place upon his head a crown of swastikas. I shall write him long letters commenting upon my novel & telling him of the part which he is to play & when he disobeys I shall scrap him from my imagination as easily as I scrapped Dee-Ef-El. Then he’d be sorry, except that he wouldn’t exist to be sorry. Neither – dammit – can that wretch Dee-Ef-El be sorry, since he no longer exists. I shall reinvent him & then send out a horrible & inevitable fate to make him sorry. But what? Who shall I send? I have it – I’ll make him write a novel called ‘The Visitor’ as a sub-plot to ‘Rotisiv Eht’ (‘Rotisiv Eht’ spelt backwards – get it? – very clever touch that). Then, I’ll get him to invent a certain thing housed in a tower on the Shift of the Infinite Steps – the thing will be the causation of the steps. The thing will pull him into itself --- What’s Grol Ggad spelt backwards? Dagg Lorg – better make it Lorg Dagg – I think I’ll use that inversion to snare him…
(xxv) The Second Room By Archibald ‘Chuck’ Zoroaster
A journey can be made in one second or it can be made in one light-year. The journey I speak of now is neither and both, a micromacro step that leads from the first to the second room.
* As Abraham Bintiff has expressed this so well before me, I can only quote his masterpiece on the subject:
THE ITSYWITSY COSMOVERSE
This is a tiny poem As short as my second knee; It is itsywitsy microverse Pretty poetry for you and me.
This is a longer poem, Half the length of my second leg; It is rolypoly introverse A yellow Humpty Dumpty egg.
This is the biggest poem, Stretching to the sky; It is kamikaze cosmoverse Plummeting down my second thigh.
* May I append one gigantic overall ‘SIC’ to the above poem, apt and beautifully tooled as it is for, compared to the present work, it is mere ad hoc hackery, ludicrous pelts of pulp, a humdrum hotchpotch of helterskelter hurlyburly.
The double doors of the second room swung wide to the scandalous pair and they entered to feel its warmth. The interior was certainly very plush, row upon row of padded, leaning arm- and leg-chairs with great curving, sculptured folds for the torso to nestle and nuzzle in, like shaggy lap-dogs. The overall décor was subtle shades of pink and gold, so insidiously gentle that the very air was in love with it. At the far end were long, straight, pleated curtains in electric blue that hid what one would expect to be the gleaming expanse of white cinema screen. Seated in all but two of the cushioned seats were a motley array of dummies, dolls, puppets and scarecrows, all craning their necks in great and silent expectation. Not a murmur. For each had a hushing finger up to his pursed lips – the show was about to start!
Quietly, for fear of disturbing this disturbing crew, the Scandinavian and his sidekick slid into the vacant plushery as the infatuated light dimmed and the electric curtains hummed aside. Revealed behind them was not the screen as our readers would have ridiculously anticipated, but a stage, a theatre, a play, a variety house, a wooden O.
Seated on the stage is a whirring camera facing the strange audience and behind it the squinting cameraman (who momentarily cannot find the viewfinder). For ten minutes, he films the craning faces (having now belatedly discovered the secret chink in some uncomely crutch of the mechanism) before him, and then the curtains swing together.
Applause? Yes, but only twofold.
After the interval, the curtains move aside again, revealing (no, not a white screen to show the film just filmed) eight actors in torn and dowdy uniforms, sprawled across a cell set. The play as theatre buffs would immediately recognize, was the masterpiece ‘Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is she?’ by Cax. The stage suddenly goes dark and then:-
* Scene: a cell, with no windows and one solitary electric bulb. Characters: X_______, Charles Dipp, Simon Heman, Jeremy Helix, Tommy Mica, Archibald Z________, Des Lewis and a muffled figure, the sex and nature of which is unseen. All are ordinary young men except that Heman is very old. All except the muffled figure are dressed in torn and dirty uniforms.
All are sleeping, except X_______. The stage is in complete darkness, after initially showing the audience the lighted stage beforehand.
X: Have you a cigarette?
(No, reply, only foreboding silence).
X: Have you a cigarette?
(No reply, only foreboding silence).
Heman: (Belches)
X: (Muttering) Long live Abraham Bintiff!
(Long silence)
X: (After insidious shuffles on his part) (Screaming) Take away my sex! Take away my sex!
Dipp: Shut up! Let’s at least die in peace!
(X crawls into a corner, of course unseen by the audience).
Dipp: (Whispering) If only Bintiff were alive, he would know what to do. He would not remain content with his lot of martyrdom – he would do something. He would try to escape. Escape! A flea could not escape from this cell.
(The bulb suddenly lights up, revealing the scene dimly to the audience).
Heman: I am blind!
Other voices: What the devil!
(All fall asleep) (Ten minutes of sleeping)
(The bulb goes out, leaving all in darkness again)
(The sounds of waking)
X: What’s the use of waking up, I ask you?
Dipp: What’s the use of falling asleep?
Mica: We should indulge in a mass suicide. What else is there for us to do?
Heman: I shall die whatever happens. I am a very old balloon and the walls are very sharp.
Helix: We have each other. We are not alone. We can talk, we can laugh. If we were alone, I mean, if I were alone, I might as well be one of these walls, a cul de sac. I would indeed kill myself. But we are not alone.
Z: It would be allright if we were queers!
X: As a matter of fact … why shouldn’t I tell you, we shall die soon anyway --- I am what you call a ‘queer’.
Dipp: What about your Rosemary? You were going to get married, weren’t you?
X: Rosemary? Rosemary? Who is she? I have never heard of Rosemary. I am a queer, I tell you! I am! I am!
Lewis: You are no more queer than I am.
X: I feel a terrible pain in my left side. It is killing me. Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is she? Who is Rosemary? It rhymes! It rhymes!
Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is she? Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is Rosemary? My one and only truly love. Who is Rosemary? Rosemary! Rosemary! Rosemary!…
Heman: Shut up! Shut up! Give me peace in my last few hours … You know I had a love once. Her name was Veriveri Latimer. Ah, Veriveri, how exquisitely beautiful! But … well, I shall tell you, she was taken from me by damned Bintiff. She went to help the movement, and was killed. Damn Bintiff, damn! Damn him! We would not be here now, if it were not for him. My Veriveri was cut to ribbons – her beautiful face became tatters, blood and gut on the fields of onyx! Her cheeks became the face flannel for General Blue. Damn Bintiff! Damn them all!
Lewis: I bet your Veriveri never existed. You’re too damned ugly to attract a girl like that.
Heman: (Spluttering and attempting to rise, of course unseen by the audience) (he dies – unseen but heard by the audience).
Helix: Poor devil!
X: Rosemary! Rosemary! Who is she?
(The light suddenly returns and the seven uniformed characters are found to be staring at the muffled eighth. Love-Wisdom abounds, unseen by the audience).
* The curtains drew together amid the booes and hisses of the slow clapping audience. They, of course, wanted to know whom the muffles hid. Most argues that it was Rosemary. Some that it was Bintiff. Some, a frightful twinning of the two. Some even thought it could be General Blue or Beriberi Latimer. The hubbub did not last very long, however, for the effigies soon returned to their hushed and hushing poses.
* Second and last scene.
(As the curtains move aside there is revealed the same scene, but the eight characters are now paired off in embraces across the floor, viz: Mica and Helix, Z and Dipp, Lewis and the corpse, X and the still muffled figure).
(Words of loving and petting flow intermittently between all – the actors may improvise here).
(Gradually, the audience see that the bodies are growing quieter until there is silence. Also (using the suitable theatrical device) the bodies gradually are stained red, very gradually, almost imperceptibly, until the red liquid literally pours off them from every surface and crevice).
(The finale depends on each producer’s discretion, but the author advises that the following are NOT used: a vision of a bleeding Messiah on a cross; the actors arising and giving the Nazi salute; the muffled figure arising and revealing him- or herself; a speech from the producers etc. etc.)
* Dagg and Alpo arose and gave the Nazi salute. Or so it seemed. They left the second room and entered the third.
(xxvi) THE THIRD ROOM by Des Lewis
Lorg and Ed entered the third room and before them in a 1970’s style room sat the shape of the author himself. Des Lewis smiled at them as he scrawled, and, as they left the room for the fourth, continued writing these words & ‘The Visitor’ is evidently nearing its inevitable end perhaps frightening conclusion.
(xxvii) THE FOURTH ROOM by John ‘Monty’ Cheese
To pass from the tight form of a carven ornament in some South London shack to the very cosmos itself, limitless and unlimiting; to pass from the hard and knotty beauty of shaped onyx to the battlefield of the turning and formulating stars; from the aesthet¬ic intricacy and finite essence of a twisty broochpiece to the astrological egoterica of uncounted and unaccountable solar systems; from the hideousness and tautness of some necro-amulet to the cosmogonic fevers of the many skies - is a journey of such short duration that the heroic pair’s passing from room to room would seem eternity. But... and I repeat, but, as the door of the fourth room opened before them, the journey was forgotten since the cosmos itself, limitless and unlimiting, seemed to be before them. Stretched out below, beside and above, were stars and deep night. Fluttering their very clothes were apparent starwinds and seeming planet-shifts. However, this was doubtless some earthmade planetarium, some immodest attempt to conjure up the cosmos for our bewildered pair.
They stood in reverential awe of this vastness, not realising its synthetic nature nor the ‘camera obscura’ operator behind the flimsy canvas on which the stars were so realistically painted. The hyacinth show was about to begin.
At first a distant speck could be seen, slowly getting bigger and bigger. A beauteous buzzer? A cantankerous form of bumble-beery? Cantankerous is the right word, for the speck grew into a floating mongrel Dog with a bowery tail and a pair of large-bladed scissors that made an awful snicker-snacker, a truculent snip-snap. He looked angry as his paws beat time within the loops of metal. His woof was, however, light and silly! He floated past the staring spectators - not even deigning to give them a glance.
Next, there came an image of the world, an earth metaphor, a carven image of our globe bobbing along the vortices and schisms of space. It appeared to be tied to the strange Dog’s bowery tail and followed him like an ungainly balloon. Next, bobbed along the three crosses of Golgotha each with a symbol pinned upon it (the cardinal squid, the fixed brooch and the mutable puppet Lorg Dagg himself, all in blasphemous effigy). Finally, came a boatload of Harchwee merchants singing a dreamy song. Dagg and Alpo rubbed their eyes in disbelief as the trinity passed along in almost carnival array.
Then, suddenly, from the opposite distance to that in which the first speck appeared came a skein, a shield, a plaque, a swathe, a woof, a weft, a warp, a loom, a gullet, a wing, a folding door, call it what you will, of fire. This ultimate Singe of Fire, this smouldering and inner-burning, many-petalled Lotus of Egnis, inessentia1 but cosmic, fleshless but arranged around a point of light, loomed beside the wagging canine pup. Vortices of gas sped the maelstrom on as force met force.
Then… untold, unbeckoned, Lorg took it upon himself to urinate over the whole show. Extinguished the fire and drowned the silly Dog. Swamped the toy earth. This iconoclasm shocked even Ed Alpo and he remonstrated with his careless master. Howe¬ver, as the water continued to gush from his loins, Lorg’s skin began to blacken, his tongue to blister, his eyes silted up, his ears fell off, he literally wilted arid became huge lumps of blackened cinder on the fourth room carpet. The water slowly died away. The stars had disappeared and only peace reigned around the spellbound Alpo. Only he, the flunkey one, only he would see the three remaining rooms. He made faithful obeisances before The dehydrated remains of his dead master and left the room.
(xxviii) THE LAST ROOMS LAST ROOMS By D.F. Lewis
Pre-Time, Post-Time, all the Times that have ever or will ever or still do endure, lead up to (or from) Victorian England, the First World War, the Second World War and now (or then)… Economic Collapse of Western Earth, Seismic Collapse of East World and a general drift to decay, maze and false beginnings.
As Ed Alpo, the unthinking Sci-Fi Sidekick, the feckless flunkey, he who archetypes this phase of the novel, drifts ignorantly through the last three rooms unaware of the significance, he glimpses, but does not appreciate, a panorama of those who read him: you and me, him and her, them and us, statuesque as dead sculptures in a ultramodern style, stone books clasped in our (or their) stone palms. This the Beast Within? Or Beasts? Bliss?? This a reading competition (a complement to an earlier literary contest), a rat-race over stone words (verbal icons), stone gaps, stone commas, stone comers, stone chapters. Who shall win? Only the rooms will tell: the first, second and third phase of the last phase. Our Visit is well and truly over.
DFL 2006 COMMENT: AND SO ENDS SOMETHING I WROTE IN 1974, INCORPORATING A FEW THINGS FROM MY WRITINGS IN THE SIXTIES. I WAS BORN IN 1948. JUDGE FOR YOURSELF HOW YOUNG OR OLD I MUST HAVE BEEN THEN. HAVING REVISITED ‘THE VISITOR’ TO BLOG IT HERE, I WONDERED WHAT THE HELL! IT’S REALLY BAD, JUST AS BAD AS I RECALL IT. BUT, EQUALLY, IT IS BETTER THAN I REMEMBER IT. IT ECHOES FORWARD TO LATER THINGS. I HAVE KEPT IT MORE OR LESS UNTOUCHED … DESPITE AN URGE TO REWRITE AND REFIGURE AND MAKE MY VISIT AN INTRUSIVE ONE. I AM A BELIEVER IN SELVES AND THE JUDGEMENT OF AND BY SELVES (PROUSTIAN?). WHY SHOULD AN EARLIER SELF OF MINE BE DICTATED TO BY ONE OF ITS FUTURE SELVES (IE. ME!)? ALL SELVES ARE CRAZY. AS ARE ALL COMMENTATORS. WHICH BRINGS ME TO PFJ WHOSE ACTUAL 1974 EPISTOLARY COMMENTS YOU’VE JUST READ PIECEMEAL IN THIS EXERCISE OF RE-LIVING. I HAVE HAD A LONG CORRESPONDENCE WITH HIM WEEKLY (I GUESS) THROUGH THE POST FROM 1967 – AND A VALUED FRIENDSHIP (LESS FREQUENTLY IN PERSON). FURTHERMORE, HE CONSTRUCTIVELY COMMENTED IN LETTERS ON LOTS OF MY STORIES IN THE LATE EIGHTIES AND EARLY NINETIES, FOR WHICH I (AND THE WORLD?) ARE ETERNALLY GRATEFUL. DFL THE WRITER WOULD NOT EXIST WITHOUT HIM. NOR WOULD DFL EXIST WITHOUT VARIOUS DFL SELVES THROUGHOUT THE DECADES. TOGETHER WITH RO'C'S 1980/1990S' CONSIDERATE VIEWS OF THE DFL PUBLICATIONS AND HIS ADVICE RE READING SF ETC. I AM PLEASED BY THE MEMORY-BREAKING EXERCISE OF RE-TYPING THE WHOLE OF ‘THE VISITOR’ TO HAVE BEEN PART OF THOSE DFL SELVES AGAIN. I HOPE I WAS WELCOME.
THE VISITOR