“I’m going to be sick on you,” said Mr Scrab, breathing out a visible brownish vapour even as he spoke. “I’m going to regurgitate all over you.”
“I’m going to play with you,” said Craylene happily. “I’m going to have games with your little bits of meat.”
“I’m going to snap you and break you,” said Melestrina, flexing her muscles. “I’m going to tear your legs off.”
“I’m going to put my fingers inside your brain-pan,” murmured Mr Quode, rubbing his hands in anticipation. “I’m going to have a nice long feel of your brains.”
Closer and closer they came. I scrambled to my feet. But there was no way of escape. The animals remained in position, surrounding me on all sides. They stamped their hooves and baaed and mooed and grunted ferociously. There was no way of escape.
Still I wasn’t going to go down without a fight. I made a dart towards the right-hand pier of the arch. Here was the scaffolding I had climbed just a few minutes ago. There were tiny fires and smoulderings everywhere over the woodwork.
I selected a likely looking spar, where the rope lashings had burnt away. I tugged and wrenched and pulled it free. It was about five feet long, charred at one end and smouldering at the other. I held it in my hands and stepped back into the middle of the ring, under the centre of the arch.
Even the charred end of the spar was burning hot. But I hardly noticed the pain. The animals were still roaring and stamping, the inhabitants were still coming closer. I whirled the spar defiantly above my head.
Then suddenly the roaring and stamping died away. It was nothing to do with me and my spar. The animals turned their heads and whimpered. They were obviously terrified. They were all looking in the same direction, over towards the same side of the ring.
The inhabitants realised that something was happening. They halted in their tracks, looked back over their shoulders – and froze. They seemed not so much terrified as astounded. There was an indescribable expression on their faces.
Something was making its way into the ring. The animals shrank aside and opened up a passage. From the angle of their eyes I had the impression that the thing was very low on the ground. But the inhabitants still stood in front of me, blocking my view.
There was total silence. Even Mr Caulkiss’s machine had stopped its chug-chugging sound. The inhabitants were literally shivering. Then they too parted ranks and drew aside.
At last I could see. There on the ground was a large pale yellowy shape. With an eerie gliding motion it moved forward, coming towards me. It was in the form of a man…the two-dimensional form of a man, flat on the ground.
The inhabitants flung themselves down on their knees.
“O praise!” they murmured.
“O we of little faith!”
“O hallelujah!”
And then I realised. The man-shape was composed of a million million maggots.
∨ The Vicar of Morbing Vile ∧
Sixty-Five
It was the Vicar of Morbing Vyle. Not as a body, not as the reanimated remains of a body – but as a spirit, a power, an intensity. Physically, there was nothing there except the maggots. But the maggots were held together and organised, they were under the control of a supreme will. He had made them assume His own previous human shape. I know it sounds incredible, but that’s what I saw. He had made His Great Return after all!
The shape stopped about five yards away from me. For a long moment nothing happened. The fire in the forest cast its red glow over the scene. In my nostrils was the same foul smell as when the maggots had first poured out of the leather bag.
Then the shape began to change. It was like some liquid coming to the boil. The tiny grubs were all in simultaneous motion, wriggling away from the edges, piling up towards the middle. Slowly a hump arose…which became a sort of column…which kept on growing until it was over five feet tall. Then the column began to take on definition and form. Now I could see the arms coming away from the torso…the division between the legs…and there was the curve of the shoulders and head. The living pullulating swarm of maggots stood upright, three dimensionally, in a monstrous imitation of a human body. His body!
“Aaah!” sighed Mr Scrab. “I recognise Him! Just as He was! His very lineaments!”
“He conquers Nature!” quavered Mr Caulkiss. “Spirit over Nature! Just as He promised!” The shape raised an arm. A thousand maggots rippled and squirmed and crawled into position. How they defied gravity I can’t explain. But now there was a kind of hand at the end of the arm. It bent and flexed and seemed to be waiting to take hold of something.
As if in response another figure appeared, passing in through the ring of animals. It was Gambels. He approached on all fours, still dragging the chair behind him over the ground. In his mouth he held one of the tools from the Vicar’s silver box. It was the shiny steel fretsaw. He squatted beside the Vicar and tilted up his head. He was offering the ebony handle to the outstretched hand.
The Vicar received it in His pale maggotty fingers. Gambels yuff-yuffed softly. Then he trotted away like an obedient dog to join the ring with the other animals. If he had had a tail he would surely have been wagging it.
The Caulkisses and Quodes and Mr Scrab clasped their hands in delight.
“A Work of Art!” Mr Scrab murmured reverently. “The Lord is going to compose a Work of Art!”
“The materialist becomes His material!” exclaimed Mr Caulkiss.
“Reassembly! Realignment!” cried Melestrina Quode. “The first great monument of His miraculous Return!”
The head of the shape didn’t exactly have eyes, but I had the impression that it was looking at me. I tried to retreat but my legs wouldn’t move. My arms hung numbly down at my sides. I still held on to one end of the spar, but the other end drooped to the ground. I was sweating from every pore – the sweat of utter impossible nightmare.
And then the sound of His voice began inside my head. It was very quiet and gentle and sweet. There were no proper words, but it spoke to me like music. How can I describe it? It made me want to cry, it was so sad and solemn. It filled my mind with beautiful images of death. It spoke to me of the sublimity of sacrifice…of infinite surrender…of suffering for the sake of a higher intensity. My own poor life seemed small and insignificant. I felt a longing to offer it up…to hand it over in an act of ultimate worship…
My feet moved underneath me. I looked down and discovered that I had just taken a first step forward. I was walking towards Him!
I couldn’t control my own movements. The voice seemed to be ringing in the very bones of my head. Unutterable sweet, unutterably clear, unutterable piercing. Step by step it drew me closer.
But I resisted. With all my remaining strength of will I resisted. I still had a level of consciousness that knew the voice for what it really was. I knew that there was no religious offering or beauty involved, no higher intensity. There was only Him and His mad evil will – His will to murder! Desperately I clung to my consciousness of that fact, desperately I strove to escape the feelings and images that were being projected into me. I refused to become His raw material!
He raised the fretsaw to the height of my neck. I was standing right in front of Him now. Inside my head the voice took on a deeper note, suggestive of immense patience and understanding. It spoke of the sacred holiness of the fretsaw and the supreme need for sacrifice. It spoke of the beauty of blood and the sheer perfection of a long horizontal cut across the neck. I was moved as if by fine invisible wires. I lifted my head and exposed my neck to the fretsaw.
But even as I lifted my head, I saw something out of the corner of my eye that gave me hope. A flame on the end of the spar! I had kept hold of the spar as I walked, trailing it over the ground behind me. And now, miraculously, the end on the ground had ignited! A small fierce jet of intense white flame! It was just like the flame on my club when I attacked the leather bag!
The Vicar laughed. He hadn’t observed the flame. He gave a horrible silvery
tinkling laugh and brought the blade of the fretsaw slowly towards my neck.
I couldn’t move my neck but I could move my arms. With a sudden jerk of willpower, I swung the spar around. The flame was six inches long and spurting strongly. I thrust the burning end against His pale maggotty legs. They were curiously insubstantial – the timber passed right through. The Vicar seemed to shiver.
Then the fretsaw fell from His fingers and the tinkling laugh was cut off. There was a loud sizzling sound as the flame bit into the maggots. And in the sound of that sizzle, I seemed to hear a different voice, an opposing voice, a voice as fierce and harsh as the Vicar’s was sweet. It was like those voices of fire I had heard in the forest before. And it seemed to be muttering those same violent words:
“Revenge! Destroy! Finish! Revenge! Destroy! Finish!”
I looked down and saw how the maggots were writhing and dropping away. The Vicar’s whole human shape was starting to dissolve. In an exact reversal of His previous process, He lost definition and became once more a sort of amorphous column. Still I applied the flame to the place where the legs had been. The column teetered and wobbled. Then it toppled slowly to the ground.
Now there was only a crawling mass of maggots at my feet. I took a firmer grip on my spar and plunged the flame straight into the middle of the mass. The kneeling inhabitants of Morbing Vyle shrieked out all around:
“O Lord, Lord! Assert thy spirit!”
“Prove thy intensity!”
“Put forth thy power!”
“Show us thy true principle!”
Then the Vicar did indeed put forth His power. So far I had taken Him by surprise. But now He exerted all the terrible strength of His will. In spite of the flame, the mass of maggots held together and started to reassemble. With a shock of horror, I saw the two-dimensional shape of a man reforming on the ground.
And now the flame itself was starting to die down. Smaller and smaller it shrank, as though deprived of oxygen. From six inches to three inches, to two inches, to one inch. Soon it was just the tiniest brave glimmer, like a candle on a birthday cake.
The sizzling sound died down too. Instead I could hear the sweetness of His voice again. It was rising on a single note, incredibly pure and acute and penetrating. It was like the sound of a wine glass when someone runs a finger around the rim. It seemed to be slicing into the very tissues of my brain.
The darkness was winning. The whole world seemed strangely indistinct and dim. Perhaps it was the fire burning low in the forest – I don’t know, I couldn’t look up. But it was like a great universal twilight deepening all around.
There was a similar gloom in my mind, an oppressive foreboding of doom. Defeat was inevitable…Now the flame was flickering on and off, on and off. Any second it would go out altogether. All I wanted was to let go of the spar, all I wanted was to clutch my head in my hands and squeeze away that dreadful sweetness.
But I didn’t. I concentrated and clung to the spar more tightly than ever. The spar began to shudder in my hands, as though someone was shaking and wrenching at the other end. Desperately I struggled. It was His will against mine. I discovered reserves of strength I didn’t even know I possessed. I summoned up the words of the fire, I spoke them out in my own voice now:
“Revenge, destroy, finish! Revenge, destroy, finish!”
Over and over, through clenched teeth, I repeated those words. Was the flame already burning a little brighter?
“Revenge, destroy, finish! Revenge, destroy, finish!”
Suddenly the shape on the ground shifted and boiled up around the end of the spar. A thousand maggots began swarming up the wood. Like a thick viscous liquid they flowed up towards me, towards my hands.
But I didn’t panic. I wasn’t going to let go now. The flame was burning brighter! The maggots on the spar were only a distraction. I was winning!
“REVENGE! DESTROY! FINISH!” I shouted at the top of my voice. “REVENGE! DESTROY! FINISH!”
The end of the spar burst into a sudden glorious blaze. It burnt a hole right through the middle of the shape of the Vicar. The maggots mounting towards my hands wavered and halted. Then one by one they curled up and dropped off. The sweet voice died away.
“Down with the Vyle!” I yelled. “Nature forever!”
I thrust the burning spar this way and that amongst the maggots on the ground. It was like wielding a blowtorch. I divided off the legs from the waist and the arms from the chest. And everywhere I divided, the maggoty limbs dissolved into mere separate maggots, streaming blindly away from the flame. Freed from the Vicar’s overpowering will, they scattered and dispersed pell-mell.
The light was returning into the world. Now the whole scene was bathed in a lurid orange glow. I could feel heat beating against my back. The fire in the forest was burning higher than ever.
I kept on thrusting until the shape on the ground had melted almost entirely away. Only one solid cluster remained, where the Vicar had formed His head. I drew back the spar for a final thrust. But before I could deliver the blow, the cluster suddenly disintegrated all by itself. The maggots spilled open and wriggled away, leaving behind a curious patch of dark shadow.
I stared. It was a very tiny patch, only an inch or two across. It seemed somehow blurred and raggedy at the edges. It had been lying underneath the maggots in the very centre of the head. It reminded me of a small black spider.
It moved like a spider too. With a sudden quick dart, it scuttled away over the ground. But I was equally quick. I jabbed out with the burning end of the spar in front of it. The thing jumped backwards just in time. The flame on the spar flared up in a pool of white flame. The thing retreated. It scuttled once more in my direction, right beside my feet. Without a second thought, I lifted the heel of my shoe and stamped down hard on top of it.
There was a small squashy PHLUP! under my foot.
∨ The Vicar of Morbing Vile ∧
Sixty-Six
That was the end of the Vicar of Morbing Vyle. It took a moment to sink in. I could hardly believe I had finished Him off so easily. But the inhabitants knew it. Still kneeling, they covered their faces with their hands.
The fire knew it too. An almighty conflagration erupted in the forest. Again I heard a multitude of voices, roaring in the roar of the conflagration. Voices of the fire, triumphant and exultant. And now they seemed to be uttering words of victory:
“REVENGED! DESTROYED! FINISHED! FINISHED! FINISHED! FINISHED!!!”
Then the holocaust began. At first it was a breeze, which turned into a wind, which turned into a rushing raging tempest. It swept in from the forest, hurling clouds of sparks and balls of fire across the clearing. I flung myself flat on the ground, trying to dive beneath the blast.
The heat and light were unbelievable. For a moment it seemed as though the air itself was on fire. I heard the howls of the animals and screams of the inhabitants of Morbing Vyle. There was a sort of dull explosion too, not very far away.
The fire didn’t touch me though. I felt the heat, and a few sparks settled on my clothes. But that was all. I sat up and looked round.
Close by me were Melestrina, Panker, Mr Quode and Craylene Caulkiss. Closest of all was Mr Scrab – scattered here and there in little sticky lumps and black greasy blobs of human flesh. I knew it was him only because of the bits of bandage buried in the mess. He must have exploded internally. Perhaps the fire had ignited those noxious vapours he was always brewing inside himself…
As for Melestrina and Panker, they too must have taken the full force of the initial blast. They seemed to have been baked and hardened like pottery. They formed a kind of composite statue of mother and child, absolutely naked, absolutely immobile. Melestrina was still kneeling and Panker was as if welded between her breasts. Melestrina had her head thrown back in a last dramatic pose. A slow trickle of smoke escaped from her empty eye-sockets and gaping mouth.
Even more bizarre was the fate of Mr Quode. The holocaust had fried him alive. He lay in a pool o
f his own oozing juices, giving off a succulent savoury aroma. His body had turned a crispy golden-brown. It was a perfect apotheosis – of cuisine à la Quode.
I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. Incredibly, he was still alive and conscious. He rolled from side to side in the most exquisite agony. There was a strange inward look on his face. He was talking to himself in a low fatty bubbling voice:
“O quelle anguoisse! Quelle exquise! Quelle extremite! C’est de trop! Je me sens le bienroti! Un soupcon de tarragon s’il vous plait! Servir avec un Bordeaux des plus hauts crus!”
Craylene Caulkiss was also alive – but not for long. Still on her feet, she danced around and around in the holocaust. Tiny yellow flames fluttered all over her. At first I thought it was her clothes that were burning. But then I realised that her clothes had long since gone. Now it was her actual skin that was on fire. Layer by layer it peeled away from her face and body. She was like a roll of burning newspaper, crinkling, loosening, coming apart. Whole dry charred sheets of her blew away in the wind.
Faster and faster and faster she twirled. Then with a long expiring shriek, she crumpled and collapsed to the ground. The impact with the ground broke her wide open. Already she was smouldering and darkening within. The flames curled inwards, taking a new hold. In a matter of seconds they had consumed her completely.
I was still watching Craylene when something appeared out of the fiery haze, charging towards me. It was Gambels. He looked less human than ever. His school uniform was charred to tatters and his body was one great mass of swollen blisters. Behind him he still pulled the chair, which had caught alight and blazed like a bonfire. I think he was vainly trying to run away from it.
He rushed straight past and vanished back into the haze. A moment later, and another strange form appeared. This time it was Mr Caulkiss’s blood-machine. I rolled aside, out of the way of its caterpillar tracks.
Chugger-KLANK! KLANK! KLANK! Chugger-KLANK! KLANK! KLANK!
The Vicar of Morbing Vile Page 23