Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  —Tony Peacock, “Defining Elemental Sound,”

  Modern Faery Studies, June 2008

  After the lecture tour and all the controversy that bubbled in its wake, it was suggested to Wynn by his colleagues that he leave England for a time. Not surprisingly, he embraced this advice and made preparations to visit the Tychonic Institute in Denmark. Before he could leave, however, came the announcement that was to open a new door for him, one that would lead to so many captivating insights and the promise of lasting good relations between humans and merfolk. Had he lived longer, history might have followed a very different course. But whatever did happen to Elijah Willemot Wynn? Previous biographers have latched onto wild conspiracies, but in the light of cutting-edge new research, the facts speak for themselves. We are now entering a darker chapter in his life: the academic alienation and the increasingly bizarre theories leading up to his disappearance—but alongside that, the unorthodox personal life, and at the start of it all, New Year’s Day, 1880.

  On that day, it was announced that at long last members of the public would be able to buy tickets for the Great Ice Train. Wynn was among the first to book his place. It was the moment he had dreamed of all his life: the journey to

  the moist star,

  Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands1.

  The train departed on Friday the thirteenth of February—a date now infamous in history. Horace Hunt, who was also on that fatal journey, recorded it in his memoirs:

  We stood shivering in our thick coats on that desolate Northern platform… the train rose out of the water like a ghost. We stood, gaping idiotically at it—but not Elijah. He mounted the step and strode into the carriage. Emboldened, we followed—several slipped and fell on the frozen steps, but at last we were all aboard. I had followed Elijah into the first carriage. Directly before us was the captain’s car, completely filled by the intricate engine, pipes connecting jars and tanks of strange half-substantial things. The sea glowed all around us…we gazed up through the ceiling to our destination and felt a queer tug as the Moon opened her pores. A watery clicking came from the engine; the enchanted molecules of unfrozen water thrummed through the sides of the train as it was lifted with all its captive passengers into the heavens. We were utterly silent, awe-struck by the sight of the Arctic sea beneath, the vast starry expanse above, all seen through the pipes and gears of ice in the glass-green walls of this glacier shaped so much like a train.

  We gathered speed and were soon moving faster than the fastest locomotive on Earth. The rattling was just as loud as any train at home, so loud that I thought the carriages would splinter and leave us in the void above our darkened planet. To be sitting on the thick silver fur that lined seats of ice with all that space and darkness in every direction was beyond belief. I suppose I sat gaping at the sublimity of it for some time, but I eventually roused myself and had started to form some great thought that might have changed the course of philosophy and religion, when I saw the Lunar surface was growing closer and closer ahead—why was the captain not slowing us down? He paid no heed to the shapes so frantically dancing in the engine’s bulbous jars—the smoke in one tank had materialised into a tangling of cuttlefish which all turned jet-black—the captain had gone as pale as the Moon’s face, staring as if he could not comprehend where he was…2

  Hunt and Wynn were among a small handful of survivors. Many were killed by great shards of ice as the train shattered; many more when the wet lunar air entered their lungs. Before Kristoffersen’s successful refining of sailor’s stone, the only way mortals could survive on the moon was to receive a kiss from a merwoman. An explorer of those early days recalled “a row of sirens, lovely naked bodies with hideous scaly legs and flat disk-like eyes, waiting on the platform to bestow their briny kisses of life”3. The train crashed outside the city’s dome, with no platform and no waiting merwomen. As the moon was soaking up seawater, however, several merfolk were appearing in their moon-forms nearby. Some noticed the peril of those still living and rushed to plant kisses on the men who held their breath.

  Wynn was reached by a young mermaid who had been gathering sea-flowers for her garden, who

  Bedecked with microscopic nacre scales

  Outshined the galaxy’s starry spray4.

  Dizzy and bruised, he let her take him into the dome.

  The city, until six years before, had been mobile, washing between moon and sea with the tides. Since the construction of the dome, the merfolk could enjoy the same permanence there as in their enchanted sea-palaces—but the moon-form of their city was then a tight cluster of palatial seashells and nothing more. This would remain as the centre of the new town, but the settlement that Wynn crashed in front of was at that time still a network of industrious, rough-cut hamlets and villages around a gilded heart.

  Wynn’s rescuer and her family lived in an isolated crater by the dome’s circumference. He limped badly across the short distance, his feet lacerated by the fragmented train. Thus it was that he arrived at the setting of his most vivid passages: permanently crippled and leaving a trail of misty blood in the air.

  They are citizens of Melzun, a family of gardeners toiling to make this young city beautiful. They live in a hollow fringed by thick multihued polypi, surrounded by glimmering rock-pools and pearly boulders that serve as anchors to the long-tendrilled flowers that caress this strange, moist, salty air.

  At the bottom of the hollow, lined with living sponge, my pretty little saviour and her sisters laid out food in silver bowls. They eat lying down on their stomachs, which appears uncomfortable—but I think they are used to grazing on their bellies. We ate elongated mushrooms that reminded me of oysters, and some of the polypi from their garden—gelatinous and red; I was apprehensive of them at first but they were delicious, although it is impossible to describe the flavour; they tasted bright—and fruits rather like oranges, but turquoise, with a taste something like spiced rum. It seems everything that grows here takes on a subtle salty taste, but it is not unpleasant.

  I spoke very falteringly in the mertongue, trying to somehow explain that I needed to find the RAEI [Royal Anthro-Elficological Institute] building. They insisted that I rest till I have recovered from the accident—they will take me to the town when I am better. So here I sit on a bed of slowly beating sponge, gazing out of this hole at the sky where sleeping nautili float weirdly in the starlight, writing this—though I don’t know when I’ll be able to send it…

  (Letter to Robert Creschen, 1880)

  His wounds healed well, “with the aid of an unpleasant, squirming unguent,” though even then the long journey on foot to the gilt shell-buildings of central Melzun must have been painful. Wynn forgot his discomfort as they drew nearer, becoming wildly excited by the symptoms of mer-human cooperation he saw around him. Man-made streetlamps held blue mer-conjured fire and drew “silent fish on gossamer wings to kiss their own reflections.” He was equally impressed by the old shell-buildings and the newly built ones in more human styles—in particular, the water-house, stocked with “great tanks of clean water that we mortals may drink, but securely sealed so no merman will touch it and dissolve.” He got as far as the first step leading to the RAEI and stopped, enraptured, at the sight of an omnibus rounding the corner, “exactly like a London ’bus, but with wheels encircled by delicate anemone fronds and pulled by a beast rather like an overgrown mackerel in the shape of a horse” (Letter to Nellie Bell, 1880).

  The Institute, however, was a bitter disappointment, stuffed to the top with stuffy government scholars who squinted at fins through lenses and made futile attempts to render merish architecture on paper. They did not warm to Wynn, regarding him as an amateur and his ideas dangerous. He endured their old-fashioned methods and their comments on his lack of alchemical knowledge for a month, before deciding that he would make more progress living amongst the merfolk and observing the routine of their lives. He returned to the family that had shown him such kindness on his arrival.

 
; Wynn reports that they were just as welcoming the second time, even building him some sort of room out of fine yellow coral in their now-thriving garden. Why they were so keen for him to stay and study them remains a mystery. It was there that he wrote his most celebrated works, uncovering a great deal of information on mer-culture in conversation with his hosts. Not long after his arrival, he witnessed the event that inspired a series of writings eventually to be collected in Festivals and Rites of Passage among the Merfolk:

  The youngest daughter sat at the heart of the house, her hair entangled by tentacled flowers that writhed from the limpet-starred ceiling and her face scintillating with fins plucked from countless scarab-like fish. She was given a bowl, into which her sisters placed various lunar fruits. She ate these sitting upright, an awkward position for her species to eat in. Her family stood around, holding censers filled with a bladderwrack-like plant that smelled, when burned, like a summer’s sea-breeze, singing songs that appeared to ripple through the smoke in colours never seen on Earth.

  When she had eaten, she joined in the song, at which the woman of the house stepped forward with a silver tray holding fish-bones strange to the eye, as if they were of mercury, flowing inwardly while keeping their outward shape. The tentacles from the ceiling gripped the girl’s arms as the woman pierced her back, between the spikes of her vertebrae, with these unearthly bones. The child cried out, and the air around the holes was coloured by red spray.

  I observed the parents’ own piercings, quicksilver spines which seemed part of their flesh, significantly larger than the girl’s ornaments. After the ceremony, which ended with more singing and the drinking of a heady liquor made from pearls, the mother explained to me that they are a part of her. After piercing, one tidal cycle between mortal moon-form and elemental sea-form transforms the jewels first into a part of the merman’s soul and then of his living body. From what phrases of their singing I could glean, I believe this is somehow connected to their longevity, an area which still demands meaningful research. A merman can live for an astonishing three hundred years, yet no established elficologist has provided a convincing study of this. I submit that my discovery of the piercing ritual is a possible key to understanding it.

  (FRPM, first edition, 34)

  The dig at the RAEI did not pass unnoticed, but by the time complaints were aired, Wynn had quite different matters on his mind. In his essays and books, he continued to call his favourite subject for observation “the youngest daughter of the house,” but in letters to friends, as the years went by, the descriptions of her changed. From “my pretty little saviour,” she was transformed into a variety of whimsical creatures, including “the bright pearlskinned flower-enchanting heart’s light of this cold moon” (Letter to Catherin Northcliffe, 1882). By the time she was eighteen, he had a name for her: “Opal,” which he claimed was wonderfully similar to the first syllables of her merish name (never recorded). It is hard to miss the Shakespearean connotations here, especially given her love of flowers and a curiosity about humanity that prompted him to travel to Earth and back just to bring her books—including the plays of Shakespeare. By all accounts she was a charming and innocent girl who loved to sing—Wynn would have lost no time in imagining her part in the favourite play of his youth and naming her after the “mermaid-like” Ophelia. Perhaps “Opal” herself embraced this association, uncommonly enamoured as she was of human poetry.

  As her womanhood bloomed, so did their romance. This is largely documented in the poems of Catherin Northcliffe, who controversially gained the title of Lunar Laureate in 1885, and treated Wynn’s adopted household as an idyllic writing retreat for some time. Two years previously, Wynn had written to her (then still in England) about Opal dancing,

  in a splendid squid-silk tent all sewn with dusky pearls. Since she came in on the last tide her arms are encrusted with the tiny peaks of silver barnacles that flare in the deep blue lamplight, like sequins or perhaps armour. Her tiny peacock-scaled feet twist in ways that jolt my eye, suggesting, in the corners of my vision, that they are not tiny at all. I never used to think of my feet, and if I do now it is only to regret their condition. What must it be to have toes that are really the fleshy, scaly shell of a vast, unworldly tail-fin? There is a subject for you! A mortal, upon seeing a mermaid dance, yearning to have such legs, such power, such strangeness. I will await the poem, sealed in a mottled glass bottle, on the next tide.

  (Letter to Catherin Northcliffe, 1883)

  Northcliffe was captivated. Their correspondence from then on focused on little other than the merfolk and their culture. When she came to the moon she stayed with Wynn for long periods of time. The mermaid figures in her poems are doubtless almost all Opal. The mortal lovers are often a version of Wynn.

  How far Wynn allowed the physical aspect of the relationship to progress is unknown. Some poems from Northcliffe’s “Siren” cycle hint at bizarre debaucheries, but one of her unpublished poems, apparently narrated from Wynn’s perspective, is far more frank:

  A mortal maid and an undine

  I spied amidst the coral ferns

  And knew not if I greater yearned

  To kiss the pink-lipp’d or the green.

  “Twin cups of rarest love I see”

  I cried—“I cannot choose my way”

  Twin bosoms, scale and skin, laughed “Nay,

  Love can full fill these vessels three!

  Think you we two would willing part

  That only one should take thy hand?

  Come lay here on this lucent sand

  And learn to share thy brimming heart.”5

  However, better-substantiated accounts of mer-human sexual encounters6 are harrowing enough to suggest that Wynn would have reacted far more strongly than he did if the poems were true; they are clearly Northcliffe’s fantasy, fuelled at once by her jealous desire to compete with Opal in Wynn’s estimation and her own repressed lesbian attraction towards Opal.

  It is far more likely that Wynn kept Opal at a physical distance, enjoying an idealised, non-sexual—yet always deeply passionate, in its way—romance.

  But even that was no match for their ultimate incompatibility.

  My Opal has come back from the sea wearing living beads in her hair, bubbles of light clasped amongst her locks, winking red, yellow and mauve. I have seen this on other merwomen, a sign of yearning for children. I have been feeling not dissimilar pangs myself. But what can we do? I cannot carry her eggs in my belly and she could not nurture my seed in her womb. Oh, if I could only change that!

  (Letter to Robert Creschen, 1887)

  Of course, he could not. But he grew obsessed with the idea, returning to the RAEI and bombarding its professors with wild new theories. A doctor there, one of the first to notice the adverse effects of the Lunar atmosphere on the human brain, kept notes on Wynn’s behaviour, from his initial visit as “a pseudo-elficologist raving about how he would become a merman if we gave over our valuable resources to his lunatic scheme” to the letters the RAEI started to receive from Wynn after his return to Opal’s family:

  He wrote again yesterday, saying he had undergone a version of the merfolk’s ritual piercing. This, he supposes, would transform him over time into one of them, if we were to help him travel between this plane of being and another over and over again. It seems the mercury in those bones has only been fuel to his insanity.7

  After several fruitless months of mimicking every aspect of merish life and repeatedly asking the RAEI for various forms of aid, Wynn went suddenly quiet. Very little is known about his activities over the following year; the next record of his movements that we have is a final letter to the RAEI in October, 1888, stating that he was leaving and knew he would find better help in England. What was he up to in the meantime? In all likelihood, he wrote: friends that he spoke to upon his return to Earth report that he mentioned a work-in-progress entitled ‘This Too Solid Flesh,’ the manuscripts of which are lost. Robert Creschen was one of those Wynn met, and thou
gh Creschen only gives a cursory mention of their meeting in his diary, it was not long after that he penned his first literary success, horror classic The Mermaid Wife (1894). If this work was influenced by Wynn’s experiences, as it undoubtedly was, some disturbing conclusions about his final months on the Moon can be drawn from it. The passage wherein Creschen’s fictional Wynn-figure, William Elverson, relates his misfortunes to the narrator is particularly chilling:

  “You think you know things, that the concrete world and the aether are mapped in formulae by your alchemists.” He leaned close, gin and nightmares rank on his breath. “If you had seen a shadow, a mere reflection, heard a whisper of what I have, you would not set foot on that train. Your eye would flinch from the sight of the moon in the sky. The night and the sea would be devilish to you, and you would not walk another easy step in your life. She ruined my mind, Crescent, and even that was not enough. She wanted to spread her corruption into our race, wanted to debase my humanity and my bloodline; she would have—good God!—shared me with a merman so he could carry the demons we created.”8

  Underneath Creschen’s melodramatic association of merfolk with demons, there is conceivably some truth in the suggestion of a surrogate father, and it is not unreasonable to conclude that such a demand would be sufficient to drive Wynn away for good. Once on Earth again, he became much calmer, and deeply absorbed in study.

  And that is where Opal’s story has ended—until now. But in February 1889, something happened to change Wynn completely. From then on his friends noted “inexplicable strangeness, prolonged waking dreams, frighteningly alien movements and utterances”9 which increased until the time of his disappearance. What was it that sent those first fine cracks across the surface of his sanity?