Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  Only the original artefact was shown any degree of respect. It was preserved under glass in the British Museum of Antiquities, where tourists gawked and snapped photos and made light. There it remained…

  Indeed, there it remained, Professor. Until last week…when you stole it.

  You smuggled it all the way here, to your private bungalow on the shore. You didn’t think that anyone or anything would hear when you stood on your deck and blew into the whistle’s ancient slit and unleashed the ungodly scream.

  The sound ripped across the snow-piled shore of the beach, now abandoned for the winter. It stabbed through your lavish bungalow as well…the bungalow that had been vacant, but now held me.

  I want to thank you for leaving behind all these notes about the Death Whistle. They’ve been a great aid in explaining just what I am, the power that now lives inside me. Since you dug up that whistle, I felt I’d been living in one prolonged nightmare, but now I have entered another.

  All dreams are quests. I undertook mine, and as my prize I found my portal out of Mictlān. You did that for me. You gave me a signal to follow, you gave me back my voice. Along with a new body I could use to once more roam the mortal world.

  I hope these words I’m now adding to your notes are legible to you, and that they help as you move down there in Mictlān. Your notes have certainly helped me. I hope this confession makes you understand, though judging by your face when you saw me crawling through your living room wall (me being all pungent smoke and clattering, carbonized bones) it did not look as though you were able to understand anything that was happening.

  Can you hear me down there as I call to you with this fresh, screeching voice your stolen Death Whistle has given me? I hope you’re able to appreciate what the Death Whistle has done for me…and what it made me do to you.

  [Police were summoned to Professor Somner’s private beach house on the morning of 31st March, after the hired groundskeeper discovered the shorefront door of sliding glass had been shattered and the white sheers were flecked with dark stains. Detectives entered the homestead to face a grisly scene; the entire study was coated in blood, a glass case containing many rare Aztec artefacts was smashed and the relics destroyed beyond repair, and numerous papers were torn and left to fester in the pooled blood around the study. Police are reluctant to confirm that the blood was that of Professor Somner. Though presumed dead, his body has yet to be found.]

  Headsman’s Trust: A Murder Ballad

  “Life is flesh on bone convulsing above the ground.”

  — E. Elias Merhige, Begotten

  Just how the Headsman trapped divinity within His axe blade is a riddle I am not destined to solve. But I have borne witness to the Cut-Lord’s miracles. They evidence the power of both the blade and the hand that wields it. This is sufficient to keep me in servitude to Him.

  Once I shared a stout daub house with my Mother and Father. There was stew in my bowl daily and mown hay to bed down on nightly. If such an arrangement constitutes happiness, then for a brief time I was happy. But then Father abandoned us, forcing Mother and I to till the land and re-wattle our drooping roof and lay shivering in our cistern, hiding from the bands of highwaymen that stalked the trails near our land.

  Mother seldom showed emotion, but I was not afraid to cry or curse my Father; which I did often at first, more rarely as the seasons passed.

  It was on the very night when the Moon first pulled blood out of my body to stain my nightdress and thighs that the Headsman darkened our door.

  The moment Mother spotted His monumental frame plodding toward our house she began to plead. Mother’s fear of death ran deep. I see now that she could never have let go, could never have properly received the Headsman’s lesson.

  So instead she struck a bargain with Him: her life would be spared and in exchange I would become His charge, His Trust. With horrifying ease, He wrenched me from Mother’s ankles where I clung, screaming. He whisked me off and chained me to His wagon. I have been at His side in the many Moons since that night.

  *

  We emerge like the spawn of the forest that encloses this village. As if aware of our destination, the mares draw our carriage to the clearing. Once they reach the execution platform, they halt. I tie the reins to my footrest and leap down from the driver’s bench. Our carriage is a slight but ominous thing, canopied in midnight-blue leather and fastened with thick iron bolts. The whole contraption appears to my eye as a grand foreboding book, one that holds fast to its secrets. I move to the back and unlatch the iron grate.

  The Headsman climbs out from the wagon. He is looming and lanky. His arms, while thin, are sure.

  He is already hooded when He lumbers into view. His hood is dun, and the eyes that stare through its only openings are citrine and intensely focused.

  We have been travelling for what feels to be a ceaseless summer, an interminable span of swelter and insects and sweating peasants. Of late it feels that we are wayfaring to the very edge of the world. We have nearly reached the sea.

  Our rituals rarely deviate, so the fact that we have not yet collected a coffin for today’s victim troubles me. When I inquire about this the Headsman tells me:

  …in due course…

  My duty is to tend to the block and I see to this as soon as the Headsman passes me. The block is stored within the wagon. We employ it for each beheading. Its surface has been smoothed by the blood that voids out of His victims. This human grease softens the woodgrain. The block now has the silken texture of a woman’s thigh.

  The Headsman stores His implement in an oblong box of stone that is lidded with a nameless tombstone.

  Once the Headsman has inspected the scaffold for today’s task He returns to the carriage and uncaps the oblong box. The gravestone lid groans as He pushes it from its mount. Trapped air flows upward. It is heady with apple and pine, poppy and sage. On the eve of the first execution where I served as the Headsman’s Trust I watched Him prepare entanglements of these and other flora with great care. He’d sowed the dank bottom of the trough with them, making a fragrant bed upon which His unwieldy axe reposes. I do not ask the Headsman about this practice, though I believe that the indwelling spirits of these plants bless the weapon. Never have I witnessed the Headsman burnish it nor lean it to the whetstone, yet the blade has lost none of its lustre or its edge.

  A drum begins to beat.

  The ceremony is commencing.

  I could list the minutiae of these proceedings—the vengeful accusations of thievery or wortcunning, the mock trials, the prayers for the condemned—but a greater picture can be painted without such trivialities.

  The drum lures the villagers from their hovels and huts. They congregate before the platform as the guards drag out the latest woman to be convicted. She squints, for the sun undoubtedly pains her after such a long span in a windowless cell. She does not utter a sound, not even as she is guided up the scaffold steps and her head is pressed against the block.

  The drummer goes still, and the mob falls silent in anticipation of the Headsman’s song.

  The Headsman assumes His stance, adjusts His grip on the handle of His weapon. It is customary for the Headsman’s Trust to avert their gaze out of respect for the condemned, but something, some impelling force, inspires me to lock eyes with the woman on the block. I know the blade will fall at any moment, so I wring every detail I can from the sight of the woman’s wide, lunatic eyes. Her lips are peeled back over her misshapen teeth. She trembles, though not from fear. Her body quakes with silent, mirthful laughter.

  Then comes the Headsman’s song: the crisp flit of the axe swinging downwards, the briefest of squawks from the victim before her neck is parted, the muffled thump of the wetted iron edge sinking into the block. The crowd gasps.

  Along with its song, decapitation has its scent, one that chokes the air like a swollen cloud. It stinks of copper and mud and yeast.

  The head lops forward, like some sluggish creature. It wobbles down into the ba
sket. Wordlessly the Headsman reaches down and grips it by its mane. Like Perseus, He holds this morbid trophy aloft. The drained face has already assumed a ghostly shade of white. Gore dangles from the halved neck like ruby pendants.

  Occasionally the heads manage to retain a wisp of their original awareness. The eyes will shift and blink in frantic confusion, the tongue may wriggle as it gropes for speech. However, this does not happen today.

  The Headsman drops the spoil back into the basket, pushes it to the edge of the scaffold with His boot.

  Like crows, the villagers swoop in to grasp at the carrion. There is arguing and shoving as they slink back into the village in a messy procession. The dripping basket is held above them. Different villages put these ruined heads to different uses. Some give them a burial in alignment with their native faith, others preserve them in brine where they are said to become a divination tool.

  What they do with the head is of no concern to me or the Headsman. Our mission is markedly different from this.

  A boy named Matthias worms his way to the headless corpse. He holds up a stone bowl to the raining neck.

  Not far from this village, at the hem of the forest’s shade, there stretches a broad heath. There the heathgrass sprouts as tall as men, and even on the stillest days these blades sway under strange winds from elsewhere. Upon this heath is a cluster of standing stones. How long they have stood no one knows. The winds that bully the heathgrass also erode these stones. Occasionally large pieces are lopped off. These pieces are often fashioned into bowls, as today’s villagers have done.

  Matthias has followed us dutifully throughout this scorching season, skillfully gathering the precious blood and then feeding it as offerings to the gods of certain hidden places that the Headsman regards as sacred. Matthias wanders off, his bowl brimming. The blood will be meticulously borne to the heath and poured upon the standing stones, food for the power that pulses inside them.

  Matthias was born to serve the standing stones. He has shared with me the methods his parents employed to groom him for this role. As to why I was recognized to the role of Headsman’s Trust I do not know. Perhaps the Headsman perceived some shift in my soul, a quickening that has transformed me alchemically into something purer than I was before. I do not sense it myself. But just before the season turned the Headsman informed me that I was no longer to collect the blood offerings, I was to tend to the block.

  Today I am to be shown yet another step in this sprawling ritual.

  The Headsman lifts the carcass from the block and sets it upon the platform. It is like a morbid enactment of the bridegroom laying his love upon the marriage bed.

  We disrobe her.

  “We should wash her,” I say. My request is met with a rigid denial.

  Instead the Headsman hands me a crude map that reveals a path to the hovel of the casket-maker. I am to collect the custom coffin for the recently fallen. He attempts to bolster me for what I will witness at the casket-maker’s hovel. He orders me to make haste.

  The midday heat swells the veins in my hands, causes my breathing to become laboured. I yearn for the shade of a glen but my path snakes through open country.

  The casket-maker dwells and works in a pithouse far from any village, far from any burial ground.

  The sight of her homestead steals my breath. I am impelled to lower my tired frame, to cross my legs and sit in contemplation of this mound-like structure. Being a pithouse, the dwelling is a bored-out hole in the earth that is roofed with a rigid entanglement of bones. Fibula and femur, scapula and tarsal; they all nest into one another as if Nature Herself had forged this skeleton, the remains of some fabulous arachnid that had skittered across the plains with the mammoths. The bones are the colour of old wheat. They nestle so tightly together that no view of the pithouse’s interior is possible.

  After a respectable amount of time has passed, I rise and approach. An odd sound creeps into my ears.

  Crickets.

  To hear one or two of them chirping in the daylight is not uncommon, but what I hear is not the thin creaking of a few stray bugs, it is an orchestra. Their serrated song gives the afternoon a nocturnal pulse, a rhythm ill-suited for raw light and heat. It is instead the cool, murky rhythm of twilit mires, of waning embers, of the charm hung above the bed before slumbering, of secrecy, of dim potential.

  Their song passes over me, through me, and I imagine that my heart is altering its beat to match this pulsation. I move closer to the pithouse, the womb that houses the crickets. My face is practically pressed against the spiky mesh of bones. I can see precious little through the weave, but I can hear the chirping fully now and I can smell the heady stench of mud and milt. It is sickening and arousing at once.

  There then comes a sonorous creaking which joins the cricket orchestra like the faint rumble of distant thunder. The creaking pulses low, then high, low, then high. Its pace is measured and patient. I press my eye to one of the few slits in the bone shelter.

  Within the pithouse, something shifts. I can almost discern the shapeless form. It reposes in the centre of the shallow hole. Needles of sunlight manage to pierce the darkness through the tiniest of apertures, pressing in like unwanted seawater through a ship’s hull. These bright threads form a luminous crosshatch. As my eyes grow accustomed to this, I am better able to spy the figure in the hut.

  I can only presume it is a woman, for the figure is dressed in a luxurious gown, one that suggests nobility. The hair is piled hectically upon the pale head. I cannot discern the face. If woman she is, if human she is, she is seated in a frame chair, one that rocks slowly back and forth, creating that measured creaking. The chair is composed of pale wood. Or is it bone?

  Instinct presses me backwards. I scuttle back from the hut. The crickets continue to chirp.

  Leaning against a warped, canker-laden tree is the coffin. It is a wicker casket. The thin branches that form its woven body are the grey of morning fog.

  Suddenly remembering my task as if newly woken from a dream, I scramble to my feet and creep over to collect the casket. I am glad to be ignorant of whatever arrangement the Headsman has with the casket-maker. I simply take up the coffin and flee.

  My load is mercifully light, but its shape makes carting it a chore. I lug it on my back and can feel the knots of its branches pressing into my flesh. I do not offer the pithouse a backward glance. Soon the only cricket-song I hear is the one that stains my memory.

  *

  The light is already fading to a late-afternoon shimmer by the time I return to the scaffold, where I find the Headsman waiting in what appears to be the same standing position as when I departed. I plunk the coffin down and begin to breathlessly explain what I have seen.

  Unconcerned, the Headsman simply goes about His task. He removes the wicker lid and from the inside of the coffin He produces a length of fabric. I aid him in unfolding this. The long sheet feels coarse against my palms. It is a shroud, dyed midnight blue.

  We begin to wrap the headless body. The shroud is a sullied thing, woven with many kinds of thread and soaked in the waters of the Moon. Or so the Headsman tells me. When this task is complete, I help the Headsman lift the swaddled body and deposit it inside the coffin.

  Once we replace the lid, the Headsman orders me to step away and turn my back. This I do, all the while trying simultaneously to both hear and not hear the words He mutters over the casket. I wonder what gestures the Headsman makes, what substances He might use to anoint His victim.

  Eventually He announces that it is time.

  We take up the casket. I am at the foot of the box, following my leader as He marches steadfast through the forest and across the great heath whose stones seem to study us as we pass and whose billowing grasses urge us to hush…

  The Headsman does not utter a sound and I dare not break our shared trance by asking any of the thousand questions that swim in my brain, foremost of which is where our destination will be.

  We move west, further and further. Ev
en the sparsest of villages are now behind us. Eventually we three are crossing a terrain that no hermit or even beast would occupy. We are nearing the sea. In all my years, it is a sight I have never seen and the prospect of it fills me with exhilaration, with dread. Rocky cliffs jut up all around us, like the grasping fingers of a great hand. They strike me as being the parents of the heathstones, which now seem tiny and frail by comparison. Between the rocky spikes of the cliff I catch my first faint glimpse of the sea.

  “May we stop?” I ask.

  When the Headsman does not reply, I ask Him again, and yet again. I want so very much to race to the cliffs’ edge and take in that boundless green expanse, to hear its roaring surf, feel its cold spray against my skin.

  Our path suddenly juts in a sharp incline. I feel the cadaver shift in its box, placing all the weight on my end. My exhausted arms wobble as I struggle to keep our cargo aloft.

  When I spot the mouth of the great cave that yawns at the end of our path, I somehow intuit that it is our destination. After a few more paces the Headsman proves my hunch correct.

  Once the casket is set down upon the stony ground, I am only able to take a few steps nearer to the sea before my body betrays its exhaustion. I collapse against a boulder. My arms and thighs burn with pain. In the distance the Moon paints a gleaming stripe across the roiling sea. I am only dimly aware of my hand as it grazes the surface of the stone that braces me. Have the howling winds of this plateau smoothed it? It feels like taut silk beneath my fingertips.

  Faintly I hear the steps of the Headsman. He holds His hand out to me.