Celebrant

by Cisco, Michael

  The Bird of Ill Omen:

  There’s a landscape, there are buildings. It’s not rural, it’s not a city or a suburb. It’s night time. Mild weather. People colored like precious stones are congregated together there. They’re spending their energies on something other than work, for a change, and to show it hasn’t got them licked. Musicians are playing, everyone who can is dancing. Constellations play over the facets of their bodies and run like combs through their hair. Certain night birds are attracted by the music and stimulated to song by it. They form a dense, jagged wreath around the square, just outside the light. One can see the glint of their eyes and beaks, their seething movement.

  The birds stir en masse as someone homeless approaches, and seem to part for him as he goes toward the dancers. He selects one and draws near. Too close.

  This one makes the mouth smile. Then makes the body shiver. Trying to steer it against its own current.

  He doesn’t feel himself doing these things. That mouth’s smile isn’t his smile, although he may be smiling, if that means anything in his rarefied condition. Each smile reflects the other, but in mirrors that are alive and trying to reflect, not just passively reflecting. The same with the movements.

  Horror at what he’s doing comes over him, and he stops making these trials. At once, the body springs up lighter and lighter. Now this one realizes it’s a kind of game. Gross manipulation is his cruel prerogative but it comes with horror in equal measure with the haughteur, while the released body only springs up more and more lightly the more firmly down it is pressed.

  This mnemosem is not animating the body or occupying it. They’re held together by the rhythm; the emphasis falls on the fifth beat of an eight beat meter and the gap preceding and that’s what holds the two of them. Arms outstretched, the dancer begins to swoop in and out among the others, eyes round and blank as two full moons, all the teeth bared in a baleful grin. The other dancers scamper out of the way, to avoid the touch of bad luck; those who are similarly affected ward off the sweep of the arms with supercilious gestures of repudiation, disdain, warning. This mnemosem feels the distance between himself and the dancer filling up rapidly with invisible force, a whirling globe covered in wisps, like the planet Jupiter, a steady tug in his phantom entrails of its telepathic gravity wan and blue, siphoning out of its great rotational momentum and nearly sweeping him along. The dancer feels it, too. The nostrils expand, the eyes open wide, the spinal cord takes over and leaves the mind wailing with a clear transparent light and delicate stationary rushing. This mnemosem can see that any attempt to control this, by either of them, would be to force something, crudely to jam something, and disrupt a fragile, entirely adequate, fresh something. Crush and slash, ruinate. The rhythm can’t be so stiff, constipated, choked off, it has to flex within a range it sets for itself.

  Somewhere in one of these towns someone sits under a tree and recites.

  The billows of magical darkness rage in the arid sky, boney sky. One by one those numberless bones slip the length of his plumage. Emptiness. Chaos. The gaping namelessness. Black radio.

  What is perfectly still is the easiest thing to move. There is a pure stillness beyond all movement. The darkest place is the most easily lit. There is a perfect darkness that is beyond all light. The wildest chaos is the most pregnant with things. There is a primordial chaos that is the incestuous void, perfect annihilation, where nothing can be discerned. The more complete nothing is, the more liable it is to erupt in something. The perfection of nothingness builds an intolerable tension for there to be something. There is a nothingness to come which cancels the future entirely. The most terrible disaster is the easiest thing to improve. There is a catastrophe so total that it can only be the end. We watch. When a thing moves, can it be said to move? Which is in motion? What is the difference between dark and light? If what comes into existence must cease to exist, then being created is being doomed. But then isn’t that doom also doomed to come into existence again as something different?

  Exhaustion sets in. The voice peters out, mumbling the gaping namelessness, resorting in dogged fatigue to an insistence on the hole in the middle, the central hole, which is still a positive thing and a center. One has to have stamina, and keep running, above all. deKlend picks up the motion of the gravity wave as it swells slightly in the distance, an invisible hump over the jungle. It’s rolling this way, over that thing like the Arc de Triomphe, where men wave to a naked woman on a balcony, a very voluptuous, very pale blonde with braids, and as the wave rolls on thickening the present, giving it an erection, a kind of awkward, embarrassing, ambiguous hard on, the sort that the word tumescent was invented for. The present is getting a hard on as the gravity begins to lean in toward the oncoming wave—then with leaden smack the wave heaves in. deKlend leaps onto its crest like a grasshopper, as insubstantial as a soap bubble in the gravity froth at the wave head, through it to the dull, steely margin he can run on.

  I am the Bird of Ill Omen and I spread for the last time my white wings. Fledged in black letter I bear my curse steadily to you. If you don’t remember, I will bring you an untimely reminder. Then you will see the sky above you blotted out as I spread my wings, like two indelible stains, the sky smashed against my wings—

  The Bird of Ill Omen delivers an equivocal warning that’s hooted and croaked and leered, and leaves a spiral wake of precipitate self-destruction behind him.

  (You are the one to be sacrificed)

  Me?! Why?!

  (You’re chosen)

  Who chose me?! the voice trembles as it demands to know, suspecting already, residually incredulous, trying to put up a show of defiance

  (You did)

  ...says the silent voice, and whether it registers something that is true or causes it to be true, with the depth of its emphasis, is unimportant. The worst has come.

  Catastrophe strikes—a whirlwind, earthquake, fire, epidemic. Vengeance against the elements isn’t likely, so the victims blame themselves, punish themselves, and are destroyed again. Beat the rush and destroy yourself. If everything I value is so perishable, why not destroy it all myself? Why not destroy all I value?

  The Bird of Ill Omen doesn’t cause ruin, just announces it. But he does roam the world sharing out his own proper luck to modern cities that have long since ceased to exist for any other reason than to be self-destroyed.

  After my self-ruin there will finally be quiet. Silence means no sound, tends to, but quiet means sound without noise. There will be sound, vision, human tissue, the mighty wind. Gurgles down in the mud. Frenzied calm. Frenzy is only a problem when it isn’t sufficiently energetic, which is usually the case. When it has enough energy, it turns into a quiet current that whirs inside and out like the torus of a propeller, at once solid and porous and might bat your hand to pieces with a casual touch.

  Like the owl, the Bird of Ill Omen can’t shift his eyes in their sockets. There are times when he adopts human disguise, but all shape-shifters have their giveaway traits and the Bird of Ill Omen is no exception; he can’t move his eyes.

  There’s been some rain in Votu, but the cloud-wall has crumbled and its fragments hurtle in all directions. People are shading their eyes against the gradual rewhitening of the day, and fill the spacious streets to do what they put off during the rain. The white-haired mathete with the one black lock crooks his finger and summons a little homeless girl, bending forward to bring his face down to her level. Too close. There’s something strange about the way this man does his looking. The girl suddenly gets the sickening impression that his face is a living mask, that another face moves behind it like a face at a peephole, turning this way and that. The eyes don’t quite move naturally; instead of rolling back and forth, they lean this way and that.

  Without a word, the girl dissolves into the schooling crowd.

  A huge black bird rises from the alley. Its shadow mingles with the shadows of the clouds, but those who see it shooting along the ground toward them lunge away to avoid being t
ouched. Pigeon girls all gather safely beneath the awnings—their luck has been good lately and they are determined to keep it that way. Rabbit girls rush to their passageways, except Kunty, who sits on the rim of the fountain devouring the remains of a lettuce with gusto. The shadow sweeps right over her and she throws back her head as it does, her eyes shoot a sharp, furious tear-arrow at it, she hisses through a mouthful of leaves, then she lowers her head again. She doesn’t turn her head to follow the bird in flight as it veers on behind her, but applies herself to her lettuce.

  Fucker! (she snarls)

  It wasn’t at all hard to see the shining particles and the dark ones rise and fall alternating in each others’ places across the membrane. A moment later it is as if nothing had happened. A man crosses before the fountain, walking slowly, either tired or lost in thought, all bundled up in shawls. Kunty watches him, chewing absently. The sight of him, or maybe it’s the smell, stirs something in the middle of her.

  What’s with him? (she wonders)

  As she watches, he stops and folds his hands behind his back. His eyes are fixed on an unremarkable piece of Votu’s pavement. He sighs deeply, and as he does, a plume of smoke slides from his mouth, through his moustache and hangs in the air like a long feather. Without moving his eyes, still preoccupied, he lifts one hand and takes from the cloud a weird metal implement, like a short two-handed saw with no teeth. Two swords joined at the points. Holding this against his body, the man begins walking again.

  He’s not sleepwalking (she thinks)

  The man coughs twice, clearing the smoke away, and vocalizes in his coughing.

  He’s heading for one of the shrines of the natural robots. Kunty puts two and two together.

  Just another fucking mnemosem (she thinks)

  The man passes the corner of the shrine, which bristles like a porcupine with the black and warping swords of pilgrims.

  She’s still thinking about his profile, and virtually remembering something that has yet to happen because she can’t shake off the lingering impression made by his voice.

  deKlend:

  A cart rumbles past hollowly grinding like a millstone with ZAMBODHCHIDNET OF V—painted on the side, the last word chipped all but completely away.

  Votu (deKlend adds ruefully)

  Bitter irony (he thinks)

  But then (he looks around)... this could be Votu. There is surely a resemblance. He recites sourly, city of streets free to the wind. City of bright awnings. Mountain city.

  Perhaps everyone is right, and I need only decide that this is Votu for it to be. Maybe it is just a symbol.

  Gazing this way and that, he says—This is Votu.

  He sighs through his nose.

  No, it wouldn’t be so simple. I suppose I’d hoped that saying it, and giving up (or pretending to give up) wanting to appear in the actual city itself, would really take me there, like a spell. Just once I’d like to make a spell work. What would it be like to make it work? I think that would make it all worthwhile. I honestly can’t seem to find any exception. Look at that little girl.

  A stream of pigeon girls has swept by. They are all so much like each other. But this one happens to pause a moment, her attention evidently riveted by something in the sky—a cloud, or a bird or something. deKlend can’t see what it is from where he sits; there’s a building in the way, and he doesn’t want to approach the girl, doesn’t want to alarm her.

  She is a typical specimen of those girls (he thinks) How intently she’s watching! The way she moves her head, it must be a bird she’s looking at. It’s too early for bats.

  The girl, oblivious to him, takes a few dainty steps to one side of the way and crouches with her arms around her knees, her back to him, watching. A slight breeze swats at her hair like a cat playing with a fringe.

  So I sit here, watching her. And she sits there, watching whatever it is she is watching. The Bird of Ill Omen, maybe.

  deKlend’s eyes and attention wander.

  He is waiting for enough will to accumulate on the other side of the scale, tip him up off his behind and set him in motion again. Back en route to Votu. And looking for Phryne. The Bird of Ill Omen. Inadequate leaps go on inside him, jumping up and falling back, but an adequate one won’t be long in coming.

  The girl, when he looks back in her direction again, is standing once more. She has pulled the lid off a rain barrel and lifts water to her mouth in a cupped hand. Slurp. Slurp. A glance up, toward the sky. The light makes streaks on her wet profile.

  There’s something admirable about that girl (deKlend thinks) Intrepid. Unusually coordinated and deliberate for a child. If her parents had possessed the imagination to conjure her, this really wonderful little girl, would they have discarded her, as a baby?

  If I were a father (he thinks) I’d want my daughter to be just that way. I’d cherish a little girl like that one.

  The girl glances in his direction as she takes off, following the others, gone all but silently, like a flash.

  Heroic girl! I won’t forget her (he thinks)

  [end]

  About the Author

  Michael Cisco is the author of novels The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press, 1999, winner of the International Horror Writers Guild award for best first novel of 1999), The Tyrant (Prime, 2004), The San Veneficio Canon (Prime, 2005), The Traitor (Prime, 2007), The Narrator (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010), and The Great Lover (Chômu Press, 2011). His short story collection, Secret Hours, was published by Mythos Press in 2007.

  His fiction has appeared in Leviathan III (Wildside, 2004) and Leviathan IV (Night Shade, 2005), The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (Bantam, 2005), Cinnabar's Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink (Ex Occidente, 2009), Last Drink Bird Head (Ministry of Whimsy, 2009), Lovecraft Unbound (Dark Horse, 2009), Phantom (Prime, 2009), Black Wings I (PS Press, 2011), Blood and Other Cravings (Tor, 2011), The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Homage to Mikhail Bulgakov (Ex Occidente Press, 2011), The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (Harper Voyager, 2011), and elsewhere. His scholarly work has appeared in Lovecraft Studies, The Weird Fiction Review, and Iranian Studies.

  An omnibus edition of his work is to be released from Centipede Press, and new short fiction is scheduled to appear in Dadaoism (Chômu Press), The Weird (Tor), and This Hermetic Legislature: A Homage to Bruno Schulz (Ex Occidente).

  Michael Cisco lives and teaches in New York City.

  Praise for The Great Lover, also from Chômu Press:

  “It seemed as if The Tyrant was the biggest monster Cisco could make, but The Great Lover is now his new masterpiece. Brilliant, light-years beyond … Cisco has an identity as much as any writer I’ve read.”

  Thomas Ligotti

  “...Cisco is simply operating in a sphere that most weird fiction writers never reach, or attain only rarely, and is doing it effortlessly.”

  Weird Fiction Review

  “The surreal narrative [of The Great Lover] is something like a 400-page T.S. Eliot poem: otherworldly, lyrical, deeply philosophical, and supersaturated with extraordinary imagery and ideas.... Fans of stylish and thematically sophisticated weird fiction should seek out this mad testament to Cisco’s visionary genius.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Cisco’s imagination is the most monumentally Tartarean of any dark fantasy writer currently writing.”

  Rhys Hughes

  Also from Chômu Press:

  Looking for something else to read? Want a book that will wake you up, not put you to sleep?

  Here Comes the Nice

  By Jeremy Reed

  The Orphan Palace

  By Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Jeanette

  By Joe Simpson Walker

  The Great Lover

  By Michael Cisco

  The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children

  By Brendan Connell

  The Secret Life of the Panda

  By Nick Jackson

&n
bsp; For more information about these books and others, please visit: http://chomupress.com/

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