by Unknown
“Well, I’ve always enjoyed our correspondence.”
I inquired as to whether he’d found the time to read my doctoral thesis on the Musical Goiters of Lapland.
“No, I’m afraid not. But I did read that bulletin on Cyanofixative Veneral Yeast. Most informative.”
“Oh, that.” I screwed down the lid of the vial. “Uh, sir. I believe this is hashish oil.”
“Well of course it is. That’s what Eulalia’s been smoking. But no amount of cannabinol accounts for the trance state. Eulalia’s been a hash head for years. No, the question is, what does her dance teacher use to taint this goop? I’ll bet you a dollar it’s a vegetable hypnotic native to India. Has your pharmacy got Internet access?”
I drove the doctor to the campus labs. We spent all night pulling apart the resin sample. Then he concocted an antidote, or what he hoped was an antidote. I never did find out what became of Eulalia.
But we had a fascinating conversation that night. Which is to say, Dr. Lambshead talked, and I listened. He covered a lot of ground. He spoke of the infants recently born at the Gila Bend Indian Reservation with the heads of grasshoppers. He discussed the iatrogenic spread of Poultry Rash and Rainbow Glaucoma in the Third World. He even touched on the ghosts of Bali, which are pictured in that island’s folklore as body fragments—hopping feet, rolling heads, and creeping guts. By morning light I drove him to the airport and put him on a jet bound east.
That concluded my regrettably brief encounter with Dr. Lambshead, the colorful founding father of this indispensable pocket guide.
2002: DR. RICHARD CALDER13
(THE OPHIDIAN MANIFESTO OR, HOW I MET DR. THACKERY T. LAMBSHEAD)
I stood on the isolated mountain—Qal’at al-Mishnaqa, as it is known in Arabic—on which Machaerous had stood, and looked out over the ancient land of the Hashemites. With Masada, Hyrcania, Alexandreion, and Cypros, Machaerous was one of the fortresses that Herod the Great had inherited, a stronghold of the Jewish state’s defense system in the eastern province of Peraea. Herod had improved the roads connecting Machaerous to the Dead Sea; the tracks were still evident and, seemingly, much in use; but of all else that remained the only thing of note was the view.
“The walls were razed to foundation level,” said Huntingdon, seeing me scan the scorched earth of the high plateau. “Absolutely nothing is known of the Hasmonean fortress beneath.” Huntingdon led the dig: the first exploration since that of the Duke de Luynes in 1864. Work had been slow and, so far, had yielded few results. I took out my pipe, placed it between my lips, and began to suck meditatively on the stem. “We’d like you to oversee work on the lower city,” he concluded.
My disappointment was keen. In London, I had expressed a wish to be assigned to the upper city and its remnants of the palace-fortress. There, the crazed, necrophiliac child who had so obsessed me had performed her dance of death.
“We’ve unearthed some late Hellenistic jars, along with bowls, lamps, and Hasmonean coins,” he resumed. “But what we’d like you to take a look at is the cistern. It may provide access to a huge rock-cut water reservoir.”
“Very well,” I sighed, thinking only of the princess Salome.
I had been given a house in the nearby village of Mukawir. Here, women of the Bani Hamida tribe are famed for weaving rugs of exceptional beauty. The house was in poor condition, and I had hung several such rugs from the walls in an attempt to hide some of its native ugliness. In addition, I had hung engravings. Chief among them were Moreau’s “The Apparition,” so beloved by Huysmans, and Toudouze’s “Salome Triumphant,” which had caused such a furor at the Salon of 1886.
Toudouze’s likeness of Salome—an adolescent sated with crime, as a child may be with comfits, or toys—enjoyed, in one respect at least, a degree of historical accuracy. In Mark 6: 22, 28 and Matthew 14: 11, the daughter of Herodias (it is only Josephus who calls her Salome) is described as . The exact meaning of is uncertain, but it is a diminutive of meaning girl or maiden. If John had been beheaded sometime between A.D. 29 and 32, Salome would have been born between A.D. 15 and 19 and thus would have been 12 to 14 years of age at the time of John’s death.
The twilight deepened. My houseboy, Youssef, lit the lamps. In the half-light, Toudouze’s virgin-whore—the little goddess of immortal Hysteria—who, in Flaubert’s words, had “danced like the priestesses of the Indies, like the Nubian girls of the cataracts, like the bacchantes of Lydia,” stared back at me, unimpressed.
There really had been a historical Salome. A Salome whose ancestry was traceable all the way back to Esau the Wicked, whom biblical tradition regarded as the forefather of the Edomites, the most hateful of all pagans . . .
Antipater, an Idumaean (that is, an Edomite) conspired with the Roman General Pompey the Great to resolve the conflict between Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, both heirs to the throne of Judea. When the kingdom of Judea became subject to Rome in 47 B.C., Antipater was established as procurator. Herod the Great, his son, became king in 37 B.C.
Herod Philip, the son of Herod the Great by Mariamme, the daughter of Simon the high priest, had married Herodias. Salome was their daughter. Later, Herodias would divorce Herod Philip and marry his brother, Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Paraea. Salome was not to die (as she does in Wilde’s play), but marry Philip, Tetrarch of Trachonitis, who was both half-brother of her father, Herod Philip, and half-brother of Herod Antipas, her mother’s second husband. After Philip’s death in A.D. 33-34, she married Aristobolus, her first cousin. The Emperor Nero appointed her husband king of Armenia in Asia Minor. A coin that exhibits the profile of Aristobolus on one side and Salome, his queen, on the reverse, offers proof of Salome’s real-life existence.
But for me, of course, it was the legend of Salome—and not facts gleaned from the historical record—that exerted abiding fascination. It was the legend—the same one thousands of nineteenth-century poets, artists and musicians had made their own—that had brought me here.
Youssef knelt at my feet and proceeded to pour my coffee. I stroked his hair and began to hum the 32-bar waltz from Strauss’ “Dance of the Seven Veils.” I closed my eyes. It was an odd fragment of music, curiously evoking the image of a girl at her first ball. A girl, perhaps, who would happily murder her suitors.
I would go to bed early, I decided. Tomorrow, I would begin work in earnest. Before its destruction by the Romans in A.D. 71, Machaerous had been called the Black Fortress. The Citadel of the Gallows.
In its murderous depths, fact and fiction, legend and truth, might at last be reconciled.
I sat on the crumbling edge of the cistern. Under Herod the Great, comprehensive waterworks had been constructed. The cisterns hewn on the northern slope of the mountain had served an aqueduct that provided the fortress with rainwater.
I was 3,860 feet above the Dead Sea and 2,546 feet above the Mediterranean, my gaze trained westwards, toward Jerusalem. “When I touch bottom, I’ll holler,” I said to my two assistants. “Take the strain.” I took off my cheese cutter and threw it clear. Then, easing myself off the cistern’s lip, I began to abseil down the interior wall.
Soon, all that was left above me was a tiny circlet of clear blue sky, like a brilliant sapphire set in a bezel of darkness. “Hello!” I called, rather nervously. “Hello, can you—”
But at that moment I came to rest amongst a pile of rubble.
I slipped out of the harness and let it dangle by the wall. Then I took my flashlight from my backpack. The rubble made it difficult to walk, and I stumbled, then sprawled, grazing my knee and tearing a small hole in my jodhpurs.
The darkness crowded in. My flashlight had gone out. Luckily, however, it wasn’t broken. I got to my feet, turned it back on and held it aloft. As before, the cistern’s gray, circumambient walls curled about me. But during the moments when my flashlight had failed the sky had unaccountably disappeared. “Hello up there!” I shouted. But there was no reply.
I felt a draught. When I trained a be
am of light towards it, a perspective opened up. A tunnel.
I had walked some 50 yards when I emerged into a gigantic chamber.
From high above, oblique shafts of light crisscrossed the chamber floor, shining in through cracks and vents in the craggy vault. Doric columns—some truncated, some intact—rose before me like blasted, subterranean trees multitudinous enough for the prospect as a whole to resemble a petrified forest. Amidst the shadows, illuminated by a single shaft of light, was a great, black marble mausoleum. Standing next to it was a very old man.
“Dr. Calder?” he ventured, sweeping back the opera cloak that he had draped about his shoulders.
I walked across the chamber and stood before him.
“Who on Earth—”
“Dr. Lambshead,” he interjected, grasping my hand and shaking it vigorously. “Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead.” He smiled. “I’ve been expecting you.”
I cast a glance at the great, oblong tomb. It was inscribed with Greek letters. They read SALOME, PRINCESS OF JUDEA.
“Oh my,” I murmured, “oh my God.”
“Yes, yes,” said Lambshead. “You are well acquainted with her, of course. I have collected and studied all your papers! I was most interested in those carried in The British Journal of Near Eastern Archaeology. Impressive for a man trained in medicine for whom archaeology is little more than a hobby!” He nodded towards the huge tomb. “It is imperative that you know of her true significance.”
And then he told me her, and his, story.
“I have worn many hats in addition to medical doctor: those of archaeologist, choreographer, occultist, littérateur, exponent of outsider art, and countless others. But it is as well, I think, to mention—in the present context, at least—one of my contributions to Big Science.
“In 1997, after a decade of research involving studies in 27 countries, I concluded that a spontaneous mutation had occurred in the human population sometime during the late 1970s. At the beginning of that decade, a new star had flared in the constellation of Ophiuchus: a supernova that alerted the WHO and other UN agencies to the possibility of a pandemic of misbirths and infant deformity. Though such anxieties proved unfounded, research institutes around the globe continued to examine random DNA samples, until my groundbreaking paper in Nature demonstrated that mutation had indeed occurred, if with consequences almost diametrically opposed to those at first expected.
“In the course of pro bono gynecological work involving groups of disturbed, socially maladjusted young women, I had found that a small proportion tested positive for DNA that was not only incompatible with all notions of hereditary, but with the human genome itself. I concluded my findings thus: ‘This syndrome, if I may call it such (given that the isolated mutant DNA is accompanied by distinct biological and psycho-pathological phenomena) is undoubtedly a delayed effect of the high-energy radiation that saturated Earth following the Ophiuchus supernova flare-up of 1972. The syndrome is worldwide in scope and affects only females. Since subjects in the sample studies are under the age of 21, prognosis is, at present, problematic. But it seems certain that the syndrome represents a significant, and indeed, dangerous new evolutionary development for humankind.’
“But there had been another supernova that had flooded Earth with gamma rays: that of 5 B.C., which we have come to call the Star of Bethlehem . . .”
A young girl seemed to materialize out of the shadows. “Salome,” whispered Lambshead. “My divine phantom, Salome!”
After attending the premiere of Et Dieu créa la femme, Simone de Beauvoir had used the term “neotenic”—a biological term that refers to the retention of larval, immature, or juvenile characteristics, in the adult of the species. And like the young Bardot, Salome—or this, her ghost—possessed neotenic beauty. She was a small, doll-faced, buxom child-goddess—an adolescent Ishtar, Mistress of Babylon, and the dark little mother who drank the blood of Abel after he was murdered by Cain.
“Ah yes. This young lady was one such born under the Bethlehem star. A hierodule and priestess, she knew the secrets of sexual mysticism. She was one of the first true mutants. Now, poor thing, she belongs to that order exiled to a realm at right angles to our own, and who may be seen only in states of liminal gnosis. We call her kind Lamiae, or Daughters of Hecate. But after two millennia, her kind is about to once more become incarnate in flesh. Girls and women who the scientific community will come to call Lambshead females.”
Lambshead paused and held out a hand, like a Svengali introducing his latest protégée to an astonished public. “Look at her, Dr. Calder. Does she not fit all the criteria? An extreme degree of exhibitionism; permanent sexual irritability; an overriding need to be admired and pampered; and a tendency to spite, deceit, and treacherousness in direct proportion to deferred gratification. In test after test, the Lambshead psyche has revealed itself to be a seething miasma of sexual obsession. But surely the most bizarre, and disturbing, trait is one that I would surely have had classified as a communicable disease, if its effects on others had not been so obviously psychosomatic: a desire to drive human males insane with lust! Not figuratively, mind, but literally. In this, the Lambshead female proves to be all too successful. She will dance for the heads—the very sanity—of all men who stigmatize her beauty and disdain her love!”
She wore a choli, split chiffon skirts, and a coin belt. And the ruby in her navel was no legacy of the Hayes Code, which had veiled the belly of Rita Hayworth and Gina Lollobrigida; it harked back to something ancient, almost forgotten, the flaming belly of the Great Goddess herself, in whom fertility and death were conjoined.
She swayed, and then began to dance. And her belly was the focal point of her dance, just as her burning navel (that, like the Shulamite’s, was like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor) was the focal point of her belly. She danced like the ghawazi of Egypt, like the Algerian Ouled Nail. And like Stravinsky’s heroine, she seemed ready to dance herself to death, and to take the world with her. She was Maud Allan, Ida Rubinstein, Mata Hari, and Theda Bara. She was Alla Nazimova and Imogen Millais-Scott.
“My paternal grandfather saw her in 1903,” I murmured, “when he attended a production of Wilde’s play at the Neues Theater in Berlin. And then again, seven years later, when Beecham brought Strauss’ notorious new opera to London. He told me of her when I was a boy and I have been obsessed by her ever since.” She was so close to me, now, that I could smell her perspiration, my nostrils filling with the sharp scent of canal towpaths, deserted night-time wharves, the fire-escapes of tenement blocks, and the shadow-haunted depths of condom-littered alleyways. It was a musky perfume redolent of sex, blood, and morbidity. “I’ve waited for her so long. But what does she want?” Lambshead had no need to reply. As his little succubus drew nearer I bowed my head in submission.
The goddess had claimed me. She had affirmed her right to derange my senses.
Here, beneath Machaerous, legend and fact had become one. And something had been reborn. Those who had been damned by the Star of Bethlehem were the same mutant females who, in the last decades of the twentieth century, were being resurrected under the aegis of Ophiuchus. An order of being that heralded a new, Ophidian universe. For salvation lay in the degenerate, and had done so for some two thousand years.
I felt phantom lips press against the nape of my neck, and knew that I had been reborn, too. For the first time, the nature of my life’s true mission was clear.
I would subvert paramount reality. Semantic displacement would be my weapon. A studied program of détournement that would confuse fiction with fact, warp our universe’s plenum, and replace it with that of the beautiful, mad universe of Ishtar and her last temple-maiden, the Edomite and princess of Judea, Salome.
And Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead would be my guide.
2003: DR. R.F. WEXLER14
My Dearest Thwack:
How could you?
My heart knelled when first I heard the news of this . . . edition, this misguided attempt to create
a legacy in the twilight of your illustrious life.
Do you not recall the calamitous events that followed the first printing? And I do not mean that absurd myth of the tainted paper. All of the first printing was burned, Thwack. Burned. And the ashes scattered on the graves of our fallen comrades.
Knowing that you experienced (and bravely persevered) what I too experienced (nearly not surviving), I can only assume that madness and senility, or the onset of Bayard’s Syndrome, have invaded your soul, transformed your former clinical and analytical genius into a morass of irresponsibility.
You must be surprised to hear from me. It has been what? Close onto 80 years? In my grief, I never told you what befell my Daisy, her division into smaller and smaller components until nothing remained. Though surely you must have heard, and despite our rift, dear Thwack, your condolences would have been appreciated. Had I known the years of sorrow I would spend without her I would have ended my life long ago.
But that is not the point of my letter.
Could you have forgotten our time among the faceless nomads of the Gerund Desert? Or the putrefaction that struck down Dr. Aldus and his poor Caroline on their return to Tasmania? We were together, you and I, compiling the entries, when we received the telegram. And theirs was only the first death. More followed, so many brave and caring souls. Our colleagues. Our friends.
I know that your life’s goal has been to serve and heal the many hurts that we humans endure, but that only makes your present actions more reprehensible. Have you warned these young and brash doctors, this Roberts, this VanderMeer, of the consequences?
Publishing this edition is folly. You know this. You must not.
Yours,
Dr. R.F. Wexler, retired
An example of the first appearance of the Guide in its perfect-bound format (see Chronology). The copy shown is a reprint of the Scottish edition fry Saxon & Co., London, publishers of a popular range of pocket guides.