by Paula Guran
After that, it was time to go. When we returned for the next visiting session, two and a half hours later, Dad was surrounded by several nurses, all of whom were focused on preventing him from leaving his bed, which he was trying to do with more vigor than I would have anticipated from a man who had just had his chest cracked open. Mom talked to him, as did the rest of us as we came and went from the room, but though the sound of her voice, and ours, calmed him slightly, it wasn’t enough to make him abandon his efforts. This led to him being given a mild sedative, then put in restraints. For the next two weeks, he struggled with those restraints daily, pulling at the padded cuffs buckled to his wrists. His features were set in a look of utter determination; if any of us spoke to him, he regarded us as if we were strangers.
My mother was afraid he had suffered a stroke, one of the possible complications of the surgery about which she and Dad had been warned. In the notes to his chart, the nurses described his new condition as a coma. Neither diagnosis seemed right to me, but where was my medical degree? All I knew was, he wasn’t there, in that writhing body—or maybe, we weren’t there for him, he was seeing himself in surroundings foreign and frightening. Finally, at the end of fourteen days of watching him wrestle with his restraints, one of the doctors realized that Dad might be having an allergic reaction to a drug they had been giving him (we never learned which one) and ordered it stopped. With the cessation of that drug, he returned to normal within a day. The restraints were removed, and although he only left his room for follow-up X-rays and further surgery, at least he was himself.
Those symbols, though, I had not forgotten. The most likely explanation was that they were an early product of my father’s drug allergy. Had any of my siblings, my mother, asked me about them, I would have offered this rationale, myself. Yet on some deeper level, I didn’t buy this. He had exhibited too much focus in writing them. Had he ever been well enough to be removed from the ventilator, I would have asked him about them. Since that hadn’t happened, they remained a mystery. I might be transforming the scribbling of a mind frightened and confused into a coded message of great import, but I could not forget the expression on my father’s face as he showed me what he had set down.
After all, during the surgery, his heart had been stopped, and although a heart-lung machine had continued to circulate and oxygenate his blood, who could say what state he—his self, his soul—had been in for that span of time, how far he might have wandered from his body? Sometimes, I imagined him, waking from his surgery to find himself in an unadorned room with a single chair and a single door, and being told by a man in a drab suit that this was where he had to wait until the operation was completed and the doctors found out whether or not they could restart his heart. I imagined the man offering him a newspaper, its headlines the row of symbols he would copy for me.
To what end, though? I recognized the scenario I had invented, the speculation that prompted it, as magical thinking of the most basic kind, driven by longing for my father to have been involved in something more than the slow and painful process of his death. In his writing, I hoped for clues to another state of being, evidence of the place he had entered when he died.
I sat my book down on the nightstand. I eased out of my bed and crossed to the large window that gave a view of the Clyde and its far shore. In the late light, the river was the color of burnished tin, the Trossachs purple darkening to black. My father had not lived in this house—one of his mother’s cousins had bought it for her after my grandfather died. But the river it surveyed had shaped his life as definitively as it had the land through which it flowed. The shipyards on its banks had brought my great-grandfather here from Ireland. A younger son of a farming family, disqualified from inheriting the farm by his order of birth, he had booked passage across the Irish Sea to find work as part of the industry building the vessels with which the British Empire maintained its quarter of the globe. Beyond that, I didn’t know much about the man. I presumed he had obtained my grandfather’s job in the shipyards for him, which I knew had consisted at one point of painting the hulls of ships. I wasn’t sure why my father hadn’t followed him in turn, unless it was because my grandfather (and probably, grandmother) had wanted something else for him, an office job, which he eventually found with IBM. All the same, Dad had courted Mom on the Esplanade that ran along the Clyde on the eastern side of town, and he kept newspaper clippings about the river that his relatives mailed to him folded and tucked within the pages of his Bible. I wasn’t any closer to knowing what I expected from this trip. But gazing out at the river, the hills, felt strangely reassuring.
VIII
That night, my dreams took me down to the Clyde. A chain link fence kept me from a flat, paved surface above which cranes rose like giant metal sculptures. I turned to look behind me, and almost toppled into a chasm that dropped a good twenty feet. The gap ran parallel to the fence, to the river beyond. Maybe ten feet across, its walls were brick, old, blackened; although its bottom was level—a road, I realized when I saw a white, boxy van drive up it. At once, I knew two things with dream certainty: my father was in that van, and there was something at my back, on the other side of the paved lot. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled at it. Old—I could feel its age, a span of years so great it set me shivering uncontrollably. I did not want to see this. I shook with such intensity, it jolted me from sleep. Awake, I could not stop trembling, and wrapped the bedclothes around me. I took a few minutes to return to sleep, and once I did, it was to a different dream.
IX
Once he was home from work the next day, Uncle Stewart made good on his promised tour of the area. Mackenzie came, too. The three of us squeezed into his car, a white Nissan Micra whose cramped interior lived up to its name, and off we went. A soft-spoken man, Stewart kept a cigarette lit and burning between his lips for most of the drive. He worked for a high-tech manufacturer who had moved into one of the old shipping buildings. He was what my parents called crafty, which meant he had a knack for artistic projects. Fifteen years before, when he’d been laid off his job at the shipyards and unable to find another, he had turned his efforts to building doll-sized replicas of old, horse-drawn travelers trailers. He’d gifted one to my parents, who placed it in their bedroom, where my siblings and I went to admire it. The detail on the trailer was amazing, from the flowered curtains hung inside the small windows to the ornaments on the porcelain horse’s bridle. (He bought the horses in bulk from a department store.) Stewart had sold his trailers, first to family, then to friends, then to friends of friends, then to their friends, the money he earned helping to keep his family afloat until he found a new job.
He was also a repository of local knowledge, some of which he shared with Mackenzie and me as he steered the Micra up and down Greenock’s steep streets. He showed us the house our father had grown up in, the apartment where our mother had been raised by her mother, the church where our parents had married. He drove us down to the river, to the Esplanade, and along to where a few cranes stood at the water’s edge like enormous steel insects. He drove us east, out of town, towards Glasgow, so that he could show us Dumbarton Rock across the Clyde, a great rocky molar whose ragged crown stood two hundred feet above the river. A scattering of stone blocks was visible at the summit. Nodding at the rock, Stewart said, “There’s been a castle of some sort there forever,” the words emerging from his mouth in puffs of cigarette smoke that his open window caught and sucked out of the car. “Back when the Vikings held the mouth of the Clyde, and the islands, that was the westernmost stronghold of the British. Before that, the local kings ruled from atop it. Like the castle in Edinburgh—Sterling, too. There’s a story that Merlin paid the place a visit, in the sixth century.”
“King Arthur’s Merlin?” I said.
“Aye. The king at the time was called Riderch. They called him ‘the generous.’ King Arthur’s nephew, Hoel, was passing through, and he was injured. Fell off his horse or the like. King Riderch put him up while he was h
ealing. When Riderch’s foes learned he had King Arthur’s nephew under his roof, they laid siege to the place. Riderch had a magic sword—Dyrnwyn—that burst into flame whenever he drew it, but he and his men were pretty badly outnumbered. There was no way he could get word to King Arthur down in Camelot in time for it to do him any good. It looked as if Arthur’s nephew was going to be killed while under Riderch’s care. So was Riderch, himself, but you see what I’m saying. It would be a big dishonor for Riderch, alive or dead.”
Stewart steered toward an exit on the left that took us to a roundabout. He followed it halfway around, until we were heading back toward Greenock. As he did, he said, “This was when Merlin showed up. He’d been keeping an eye on Hoel, and he’d seen the trouble Riderch was in for his hospitality to Arthur’s kin. He presented himself to the King, and offered his assistance. ‘No offense,’ says Riderch, ‘but you’re one man. There’s a thousand men at my front door. What can you do about a force of that size?’
“ ‘Well,’ says Merlin. The King has a point. He is only one man, and although his father was a devil, there is a limit to his power. ‘However,’ says he, ‘I have allies I can call upon for help. And against them, no force of men can stand.’
“ ‘Then I wish you’d ask those friends for their aid,’ says Riderch.
“Merlin says okay. He tells the King he needs a corpse, the fresher, the better. It just so happens that, earlier that very day, Riderch’s men caught a couple of their enemies attempting to sneak over the castle wall. He has his men bring them before him, and right on the spot, executes the pair. ‘There you go,’ he says to Merlin. ‘There’s two corpses for you.’
“ ‘Good,’ says Merlin. He has the King’s soldiers carry the bodies right outside the front gate. It’s going on night time, and Riderch’s foes have withdrawn to their tents. Merlin instructs the soldiers to dig a shallow grave, one big enough for the two dead men. Once it’s been dug, he has them lay the corpses in it and cover them over. Then he sets to, using his staff to draw all manner of strange characters in the soil. He was a great one for writing, was Merlin. If you read some of the older stories about him, he’s always writing on things, prophecies of coming events, usually. King Riderch watches him, but he doesn’t recognize the characters Merlin’s scratching into the dirt.
“When he’s done, Merlin steps back from the grave. Pretty soon, the earth begins to tremble. It moves from somewhere deep below them, as if something’s digging its way up to them. Over in the siege camp, a few of Riderch’s enemies have been watching Merlin’s show. As the ground shakes, more of them run to see what’s causing the disturbance. The soil over the grave jumps, and a great head pushes its way through the dirt. It’s a man’s head, but it’s the size of a hut. The hair is clotted with earth. The skin is all leathery, shrunk to the skull. The eyes are empty pits. The lips are blackened, pulled back from teeth the size of a man’s arm. The arms and legs of the bodies the King’s men buried hang out over the teeth, the remainder of the corpses inside the huge mouth. It’s a giant Merlin’s summoned, but no such giant as anyone there has ever heard tell of. It’s as much an enormous corpse as those it crunches between its teeth. It keeps coming, head and neck, shoulders and arms, chest and hips, until it towers above them. You can imagine the reaction of Riderch’s foes: sheer panic. The King and his men aren’t too far away from it, themselves. Merlin touches his arm and says, ‘Steady.’ He points to the siege camp and says to the monster, ‘Right. Those are for you.’
“The giant doesn’t need to be told twice. It takes a couple of steps, and it’s in the midst of the enemy fighters, most of whom are trampling each other in their haste to get away from it. It leans down, sweeps up a handful of men, and stuffs them into its mouth. It stomps others like they’re ants. It kicks campfires apart, catches men and tears them to pieces. A few try to fight it. They grab their spears and swords and stab it. But that leathery skin is too tough; their blades can’t pierce it. Soon, the giant’s feet are covered in gore. Its lips and chin are smeared with the blood of the men it’s eaten. There’s no satisfying the thing; it continues to jam screaming men into its mouth. In a matter of a few minutes, Merlin’s monster has broken the siege. In a few more, it’s routed Riderch’s foes. Some of them flee to the ships they sailed here. The giant pursues them, smashes the prows of the ships, breaks off a mast and uses it as a club on ships and men alike.
“King Riderch turns to Merlin and says, ‘What is this thing you’ve brought forth?’
“ ‘That,’ says Merlin, ‘is Corpsemouth.’
“ ‘Corpsemouth,’ says Riderch. ‘Him, I have not heard of.’
“Merlin says, ‘He and his brethren were worshipped here many a long year ago. He was not known as Corpsemouth, then, but what his original name was has been lost. He and his kindred were replaced by other gods, who were replaced by newer gods than those, and so on until the Romans brought their gods, and now the Christians theirs. All of Corpsemouth’s fellows went to the place old gods go when men are done with them, the Graveyard of the Gods. Corpsemouth, though, refused to suffer the same fate as his kin. Instead, he lived on their remains. If any men stumbled across him, they were his. As later generations of gods came to the Graveyard, so Corpsemouth had them, too. Down through the ages he has continued, losing hold of everything he used to be, until all that remains is his hunger.’
“Riderch watches the giant crushing the last remnants of his enemies. He says, ‘This is blasphemy.’
“ ‘Maybe,’ Merlin says, ‘but it saved King Arthur’s nephew, and it saved you, too.’ Which Riderch can’t argue with.
“Once the last of the enemy fighters is dead, the giant, Corpsemouth, turns in the direction of Merlin and the King. Riderch puts his hand on his sword, but Merlin tells him to keep it in its sheath. He points his staff at the hills behind Dumbarton Rock. Corpsemouth nods that great, gruesome head, and walks off in that direction. That’s the last Riderch sees of him, and of Merlin, for the matter. I don’t suppose he was too upset about either.”
Stewart’s story had taken us all the way back to his front door. He pulled the parking brake and turned off the engine. “And that,” he said with a grin, “is a wee bit of your local history.”
Mackenzie and I thanked him, for the story and for the tour. While we were walking up to the house, my sister said, “Where did Merlin send the monster—Corpsemouth?”
Our uncle paused at the front door. “The story doesn’t say. Maybe north, to the mountains. That’s where many terrible and awful beasts were said to dwell. I’ll tell you what I think. A few miles east of Dumbarton Rock, there was an old burial place unearthed in the 1930s. It was the talk of this part of the country. I remember my father speaking about it. The fellows who dug it up said they found evidence of an ancient temple there. ‘Scotland’s Stonehenge,’ the papers called it.”
“What happened to it?” I said. “Can you visit it?”
“They put a pair of apartment buildings over the spot,” Stewart said. “The war interrupted the excavation, then, when the war was over, another group of scientists said the chaps who’d discovered the place had overstated its significance. There were a few rock carvings that were of interest, they said, but as long as they were removed and sent to the museum in Glasgow, they saw no reason not to build the high rises there. So the men from the museum came and cut out the pieces of rock to be preserved and the rest became part of the foundation for the new construction. My father was upset about it, about all of it, but especially about the carvings being taken away. ‘There’s folk put they things there for a reason,’ he says, ‘and yon men from the museum would do well enough to leave them be. There’s no telling what trouble they’ll stir.’ I suppose he had a point. Although,” Stewart added, “I’ve yet to see any giants prowling the hills. But if you ask me, that’s where Merlin told Corpsemouth to go.”
X
That night, I lay in bed thinking about Stewart’s story, wondering what my father would have m
ade of it. Mackenzie was sleeping over at Stewart and Aunt Betty’s house, or I might have asked her. My mother was long since unconscious. I was sure Dad would have enjoyed Stewart’s tale as entertainment. He was a great fan of adventure stories of all stripes, with a soft spot for horror narratives, too. Mostly, he watched them as movies and TV shows; although he might read a book like Firefox or Last of the Breed. Whenever he saw a new movie, especially if it had been on TV too late for me and my brother, he would describe it to us the next day, in a scene-by-scene retelling no less detailed than the story Stewart had told. In this way, I knew the plots to most of the Connery and Moore James Bonds, a number of Clint Eastwood thrillers, and an assortment of films focused on mythological figures such as Hercules. He would have appreciated the way Stewart’s tale blended the historical with the horrific; though he might have preferred a different, more dramatic end to the monster, blasted by Merlin’s magic, say, or set alight by King Riderch’s fiery sword.
I was less sure how he would have dealt with the story’s pagan elements, especially, the idea that gods came and went over time. I knew he’d been interested in mythology. Exploring the basement as a child, I had found stacked in the shelves near the furnace a half-dozen issues of a magazine called Man, Myth & Magic, whose title had appealed to me instantly but whose pages, full of reproductions of old woodcuts and classical paintings, not to mention, articles written in a dry, academic language, left me confused. I’d wanted to ask him about the magazines, but had the sense that I shouldn’t. There was a reason they were in the basement, after all. Plus, puzzle me though they did, I didn’t want to lose access to them, which I might if he realized I was paging through them. So I kept quiet about the magazines, but I noticed that, whenever I brought up stories from the Greek or Norse myths I was reading, he usually knew them, though he tended to downplay his knowledge.