Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  …I have placed her inside the cave…

  I take the small bundle that the Headsman is offering. My fingers can barely unknot the fabric. Within are shelled nuts, a wedge of bread, fruits.

  …eat…

  I devour it all greedily, gratefully.

  The Headsman never eats.

  …tonight you rest here…

  I nod gratefully, for the very thought of having to venture back to the village overwhelms me. My exhaustion is excruciating.

  The Headsman never slumbers.

  My stomach filled, I recline on the luxurious stone and close my eyes. The surf lulls me. I feel like an infant in the arms of its Mother, Her rolling tide rocking me back and forth, back and forth…like the woman seated in the pithouse.

  Though our surroundings are arid, a garden of stone, in the distance I hear an orchestra of crickets.

  I do not dream.

  The warmth of the sun upon my face draws me back to the land of the living. I sit up, groan.

  The Headsman is nowhere to be seen. I stand and call for Him, softly at first, then at a volume to rival the pounding surf below. I climb and survey the area from many vantage points but see no trace. Am I being tested?

  I return to our outcropping and I wait. I have courage enough to start homeward, but before I do, I must inspect the final place where the Headsman might be waiting.

  With reluctant steps, I enter the cave. Once more I call for my master and the echo of my voice spurs violent sounds of movement. Startled, I stagger backwards. The firmly textured wall of the cave halts me. I feel the foul water that moistens the cave saturating my clothing. I squint to see but can discern little of my surroundings beyond mere black.

  Something shifts in the darkness. Instinct causes me to look in the sound’s direction.

  I see.

  I do not want to see.

  She is sitting up in her casket. Her stiffening body is luminous within this grim cave. The shroud we had used to wrap her remains like a gift for the afterlife is now twisted and rent. One large section is draped over the lip of the wicker coffin like flung bedclothes. The woman herself—or what had once been a woman—is like a startled dreamer who has bolted up in her bed. Her hands molest the air around her and her headless trunk twitches as if trying to see.

  A strange logy feeling comes over me. As my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, I truly scrutinize the thing in the box. I study the halved neck; lumps of muscle, knots of bone, all held in place by the gluey clotted blood.

  The whole image becomes a primordial volcano, spitting up waves of blood-lava and fledgling landscapes of tendon and of bone.

  It is as if a new world is flooding out all around me. I see it with the eyes of my heart. It is a potent land whose laws are the bristling nerve, the pulsing red caverns and the stiff digits of bone.

  Who will be the god of this grim, corporal world? What deity would dare send down creeds in the lawless wilderness of quivering skin and flowing blood?

  She leaps!

  Her escape from the casket is sloppy and awkward. Her hands swat the wicker box while her feet wobble over the cave’s rutted floor. The thing staggers about in a series of blind, brutal rings. She is as a panicked moth trapped in a bell jar. Though she has no face, the headless thing turns to face me. Worse, I know that in some way she sees me. The dark blotches upon her breasts come to resemble eyes. Horror seizes me utterly. I collapse upon the jagged stones, yet I cannot look away.

  I watch her climb the cavern walls, nimbly, like some ugly salamander. She skitters to the very summit of the cave. She contorts her body and presses her open neck against one of the stalactites. For one indescribable instant, this creature dons the entire cave as her crown. The tapered rock penetrates her throat and suddenly I can hear the cave’s long-buried song. It comes to screeching life through the woman’s flesh. Her pores open like the mouths of some heinous choir.

  The chthonic music screams at me.

  I stagger up and charge down the daylit passage.

  I would flee the area entirely, but I discover a trio waiting for me on the plateau: the Headsman stands with Matthias by His side. The boy is holding the block before him, not to boast of his appointment as the Headsman’s new Trust, but to show me that he understands his duty, that he reveres it.

  Standing behind them is the woman from the pithouse. Her face is worse than words can convey. I turn away from her, but not from revulsion. Her visage is a sun at full glare. I am awed. I am awakened.

  The headless cadaver comes bounding out of the cave. She flails about like a manic puppet.

  Gracefully, placidly, the woman from the pithouse advances. She swipes her claw-like nails at the cadaver, wielding these natural weapons with swiftness and skill. With a single slice, she ends the corpse’s mad enactment. The thing falls, goes still.

  I feel I should speak yet I can find no words. The only sound is the pounding surf and the incessant wind that creates dust-devils all around us.

  The headless cadaver begins to twitch, but only for an instant. Something is struggling to free itself from that lifeless husk. It finds the yoni forged by the woman’s razor-like claws. It erupts from the flesh.

  A shrike.

  Despite the gore that greases the bird’s plumage, I can sense the pristine shading of its feathers. It seems to carry celestial light in its down. The bird’s eyes are the silver of burnished nails. The bird takes flight.

  I see. I want so very deeply to see more. But what observes this richly shaded world is not my eyes, but my throat, my fingers, the soles of my feet. I am a vent for visionary power.

  The bird begins to sing. And I hear the music of the spheres. I somehow comprehend the wisdom of the song. It speaks of a knowledge deeper than the mind, a frenzied light that lies within the flesh and beyond it.

  The song stirs my soul while it lulls my flesh. I am only dimly aware of dropping to my knees, of resting my head upon the smooth block that the Headsman’s new Trust has set before me.

  *

  I watch my predecessor and I believe she feels no pain.

  She is now a bird, floating, soaring, singing.

  She is riding sublimated light, along with the bird that was the woman from the cave.

  They are the light.

  My name was once Matthias, but now I am simply the Headsman’s Trust.

  I turn my gaze once more earthward and I see the pair of headless bodies. Their bones awaiting repurposing. Soon I will carry them to the pithouse shelter of the horrible Woman who has already slipped away from the Headsman and myself.

  She is vile.

  She is a Saint.

  She and the Headsman have freed these two souls from the tyranny of their heads.

  Their thoughts have now become a shrieking music, a deathly birdsong that now makes these decapitated corpses flail.

  These mangled forms frighten me. They are rising and moving all around me. I shut my eyes and I shiver.

  Everywhere I hear the screaming shrikes. Everywhere is the unbearable sound of dead flesh dancing, dancing…

  Chain of Empathy

  I.

  The first link in the chain of empathy that would eventually bind Berthe to an obscure and fiery plane was forged the instant she spied the blacksmith’s nail that had been stabbed into the trunk of an oak tree.

  She’d been taking advantage of the first temperate day since October by riding her bicycle, pressing her way across the sucking mud of the lanes near her parents’ farm. Berthe was a free woman with no interest in suitors, and as a consequence she had no prospects of security, nor did she truly wish to have any. She had grown inured to simply mimicking the shiftless existence of her parents. She occupied the same narrow chamber where she’d been birthed. Her adult life had truly been little more than a protraction of her adolescence. There were the same daily chores to be accomplished, the same perfunctory conversations to be had around the supper table. Of late, Berthe began to find these rituals stifling. What had
once brought comfort now caused her to inwardly cringe, whether it be her habitual laughter at her father’s jokes or her singing ballads with her mother whenever the two of them hunched over their spindles to pull wool for the loom. Today, she yearned to feel something of her genuine roots.

  It was as if there were two distinct souls dwelling in her skin: one obvious; dutiful and calculatedly naïve and performatively virtuous; the other, a latent yet sharp yearning for something Berthe could never quite define. It constantly tested her, allowing her only a few stolen moments of contentment now and again before once again filling her mind with briars.

  Berthe had been happy to allow her superficial self to steer her. Life was much steadier this way; the lulling pattern of chores and family and rest and church on Sundays. But her latent self was forever giving hints of itself, teasing her with not only its grand scope but also how inextricably bound to her it was. Berthe could feel it stirring at the base of her spine, at the back of her skull; an iceberg showing glimpses of its drowned base when the waters are tossed. Its influence upon her had become so strong that in her private diary Berthe had begun to refer to this second self as ‘the Master.’

  Today, as she pedalled over the mud, the Master felt nearer than it ever had before. When she spotted the oak with its strange nail, Berthe was convinced that it was the Master who’d led her to this spot.

  The blacksmith’s nail had appeared to Berthe peripherally at first, insinuating itself into her field of vision, faintly but persistently, the way haints are rumoured to appear to unlucky folk in these parts. She slowed her bike and turned her head to better study the jutting black thing. The nail (which she first mistook for a sailor’s marlinspike, akin to her great-grandfather’s, which still hung by the chimney to ward off Hearth-Eaters; angry spirits who are said to crawl down the chimneys of unprotected homes and devour all family ties) had been driven into the trunk.

  Everything about the scene made Berthe morose. The oak was still weeks away from budding, so its naked limbs appeared arthritic and feeble. The way the nail had been plunged in suggested something sinister.

  She stared intently for a time. Her shallow self knew that it was best to leave things as one found them, but the presence of the Master was welling up inside her, filling her, washing away all the internal fences Berthe had always relied upon to compartmentalize her life. The Master was rapidly becoming her all.

  Entranced, Berthe was able to watch with icy detachment as her physical body dismounted the bicycle, marched to the tree, and quickly pulled the nail free. It popped out with such ease that for a moment Berthe was shocked by this hidden reserve of might. Only after she’d deposited the chunky black peg into the pocket of her trousers and had begun to pedal away did it occur to her that the nail may have been there not to punish, but to keep something contained…

  Something that had helped her pry the nail loose.

  Something awful.

  Berthe’s stomach felt foul and she feared she might pass out. ‘What have I done?’ she thought.

  She pedalled as fast as her strained legs would allow but could not place what felt to be a safe distance between herself and the punctured oak. The urge to start sobbing was strong, but she fought it nobly. After the road had placed enough twists and valleys behind her, Berthe began to feel reasonably secure. She was homeward bound now and was excited by the notion of returning to that womb of familiar walls.

  A sharp popping noise startled and momentarily confused her. The realization that it was the sound of her front tire being punctured registered only after her bicycle began to wobble and pedaling became all but impossible. She dismounted. Her heart sank as she studied the ruined wheel. Although she was no more than two kilometres from the family farm, Berthe felt like a castaway. She allowed herself a brief cry before wiping her cheeks, righting herself, and commencing to walk, dragging the useless bicycle through the clay.

  Somewhere on this journey she began to sense—palpably, undeniably—a legion of perdu companions moving at her sides, her back. The sensation outwardly scared her, summoned gooseflesh and shudders. Yet inwardly, at some remote nerve-end where she imagined the Master might be enthroned, there burned an ember of excitement, of unspeakable pleasure. Were these haints or Hearth-Eaters, Berthe wondered? Whatever they were, they infused the breeze and the fields and the empty lanes with fullness, as though the Earth itself was ballooning up, swelling to the point of bursting.

  Berthe reached a hand into the pocket of her mud-flecked trousers and squeezed the concealed nail, pressing it like a winemaker would a grape: in quest of its juice, its essence.

  “May this nail ward off the stalking fey and all sprits foul,” she muttered desperately.

  But the ghost parade remained in-step with her until the main road met with a nameless lane that curved southward, in the opposite direction of her farm. The hopelessness Berthe had felt only a moment ago was suddenly replaced with a fresh, delicious sense of everything around her becoming larger and more textured. It enthused her, made her more daring. She now wanted to explore, to do something (no matter how small) that she had never done before.

  She rolled her bicycle toward the nameless lane down which she’d never ventured. Titillated by the novelty of it all, she followed the compelling slope.

  In all probability, what Berthe saw and felt while she crept along was purely romantic, but the sky did seem to darken with her every step, and the wind did pick up and cause the gnarly tree limbs to cluck like scolding tongues. In time Berthe would come to accept that many of these impressions could have all been in her mind, but she might never, even in throes of a crisis of faith, question herself once she reached the end of that lane and witnessed the gravehands labouring in the tiny cemetery.

  Berthe had known the burial ground was here, or she’d heard tell of it at least. Her parents always referred to it as ‘the pioneer cemetery’ or ‘the founders’ graves.’ And if the headstones were any indication, these plots were very old indeed. The markers were pale and wind-smoothed, jutting up from the soil like rows of misshapen teeth. The fence of woven wire sagged and was brittle with rust. The grounds themselves were shamefully neglected.

  Why then, in a place so obviously lapsed, would there today be a trio of gravehands, wholly engrossed in their labours?

  The figures (Male? Female? Berthe could not exactly say) went unwaveringly about their task. One worked the land with a pitchfork, stabbing and turning the soil, their actions more akin to a gardener’s than a gravedigger’s. The other two walked silently in and out of the stout vault that had been built into a hillock at the rear of the grounds.

  Berthe’s grandfather had once told her that this vault had long ago been used to store the winter’s dead, when the early villagers had to wait until the spring thaw before they could bury their loved ones. Until that time the cadavers would be wrapped in linen shrouds and piled inside the vault like cut logs in a woodpile. The account had given Berthe nightmares when she was small, ones in which she would find herself trapped inside a cabin whose walls were not logs, but shrouded corpses that wriggled and moaned inside their linen cocoons. But today, standing in the vicinity of the actual vault, whose doors of corroded iron sat open like the covers of a holy book on a pulpit, Berthe experienced a sensation beyond fear. It was something richer. (Later, Berthe would struggle to accurately name this sensation in her diary. The nearest word she could conjure to describe it was ‘fascination.’)

  The two gravehands emerged from the vault’s black interior. They carried a body between them. It resembled a great mealworm, until one of its arms slipped out of the ancient shroud, flaunting its humanness, its mortality. The fingernails were black, and the flesh was livid, with blotches of pooled fluids forming a multicoloured map on the surface. The gravehands lugged the corpse toward their partner with the pitchfork. The dead arm swung like a pendulum with their every step. Berthe wondered if the body was waving at her, perhaps even beckoning her.

  Berthe’s ne
xt motions were drowsily executed. Her head felt foggy. Pins and needles coursed through her arm as she once again gripped the blacksmith’s nail and freed it, holding it up so the gravehands might see it. Though she had no idea the reason, it was very important for her to reveal what she had found.

  The instant Berthe held out the blacksmith’s nail to the moving shapes in the burial ground, a profound shift occurred. It passed through her like a wave, bringing wonder and dread in equal measure.

  The shift, Berthe then came to see, was the Master liberating Itself from her skin.

  For the Master suddenly stepped out from the shadowy trees. He spoke to her in a voice as plain as any man’s she’d ever heard.

  As to the exact nature of their exchange, Berthe could only remember faint traces. She was too fixated on trying to convince herself of what she was seeing. The Master was a protean thing, shifting in amazing ways whenever Berthe’s analytical mind attempted to pinpoint just exactly what this apparition looked like. One moment the Master was a fit young man dressed in finery, the next, a stooped vagrant propped up by a pair of crutch-style sticks. Always though, a luminous sty gleamed in one of his eyes, like an ember in a stove.

  The only aspect that remained fixed was his masculinity. He was a male soul, a counterpoint to her feminine flesh. When he spoke, his voice raised the hackles on the back of Berthe’s neck and warmed between her legs. The Master told her that he had much more to teach her and that this was only the beginning. He promised her that this entire day, from her freeing of the nail to the gravehands to his whispered counsel, would be sewn up for her in a soft pouch of dreaming. This, the Master assured her, was the safest way, for it would place the truth at a necessary distance, enabling her to return to the ordinary world, where she must hide until she was ready to experience their full union.

  II.

  The Master fulfilled his promise. Berthe awoke to find herself in her own bed. It was late afternoon, and the day had grown blustery and grey. She rose and rushed to the barn where she found her bicycle resting against its pillar, both tires in perfect condition. The only indication that the encounter had been anything more than a midday dream was the blacksmith’s nail, which remained in the pocket of her trousers. Though Berthe found this article of clothing clean and folded crisply inside her dresser drawer, as if new.