by Unknown
Until recently, no cure was believed to exist. In early 1978, however, the case of Ivar Jorgensen was finally laid to rest by Jack Oleander, an infamous book thief who chartered a boat to take him to Cook Island so that he could steal the city’s secret library and sell the books on the black market. He succeeded in spiriting the books out of the city, but when the hired pilot failed to rendezvous with him at the agreed-upon time, he was forced to burn the books in order to survive the Antarctic night.
According to the statement he gave the Argentine authorities (who had, incidentally, arrested Oleander’s boat captain and were on their way to arrest him when he consigned the library to flame), as he turned to watch the cascades of glowing cinders carried away by the snowy wind, his gaze fell upon the city, and he fell to his knees in astonishment. Two great wings arose from the humble skyline, beating mightily, and the city was carried away into the deep night.
Oleander escaped from the authorities shortly after giving this statement. It is believed he is headed to Libya to pillage the Norton city.
The Jorgensen incident has since given rise to the Society of Urban Transcendence, whose members have declared their intentions to seek out and destroy the secret libraries of all the cities of the earth, so that the iron- and concrete-clad ghosts that have turned our world into a forest of tombs might finally be free, and rise like God’s breath into the stars which beckon them.
NATHAN BALLINGRUD, M.D.
THE EIGHTIES
1982: SAMOAN GIANT RAT BITE FEVER • FORMAT: SOFTCOVER, 5.5 X 8.5
PUBLISHER: JOLLY BOY PUBLISHING & SOAP COMPANY, BOMBAY, INDIA
The following anecdotal entry formed part of Dr. Lamhshead’s “Classic Reprint” series, culled from obscure sources. As Dr. Lambshead wrote in his introduction to this disease, “I am particularly fond of this entry for several reasons. My days in Samoa were among the most restful and productive of my career. I also experience a perverse joy at finding a reference to another ‘Dr. Lambshead’ in the text. And I love the author’s fanciful approach to the subject of rodent breeding habits.” Interestingly enough, the good Reverend Moorcock seems to display additional symptoms of disease, including “multiverse chronoshock.”
SOME OBSERVATIONS BY A RETIRED CLERGYMAN
WHOAH! Whoah, there Poppy, girl. Watch out for her, sir. Don’t be deceived by her, sir. Watch her fangs, sir. Strongest rat in Christendom, she’s un! They don’t brush their teeth, sir, ha, ha, and they don’t want us to do it fer em, neither. Don’t let ’er jump yer guv’nor!”
This last too late!
Sergeant Fletcher himself was soon to perish from the disease which came inevitably with my refusal to heed his warnings. I was not the first to be lured back to the Vauxhall Sanctuary to make fascinated contact with the Samoan Giant Rat, straining in her straps and muzzles and barely checked by the huge Curiosity Monger. Although almost seven feet tall and broad as a Welshman’s boast, Sergeant Fletcher was evidently terrified and his attendants were clearing the amphitheatre. I turned to follow the others, but too late, Poppy had torn through enough of her jaw restraints to take me in the calf.
A NARROW ESCAPE.
The Samoan Giant Rat is a close cousin of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, but larger and with a nastier bite. The showman had been quite right. I rued the day I was ever lured back to the mad house by the fresh attractions of captured deadly animals and shrubs. I had sworn away from the place, partly because most madmen are banal at best. They share so many delusions that they might as well form a society of their own and have done with it. And partly on account of new findings which showed the seeds of madness are carried by mouth, upon the breath. Thus locking up one lunatic with another had the effect of increasing the madness of both, with a clear danger to the observer. I was not alone and the public had fallen away badly. Since the madhouse was an institution entirely dependent upon the goodwill of a visiting public, lavender-soaked handkerchiefs were offered and novelties introduced. The rat was one of them. Four days later it escaped, was cornered by a one-legged costard-woman in Portobello Read, fixed its teeth inextricably in the oak of her false limb, and was held there with nothing but a crutch and her natural odour until Captain Meadley turned up to deal with it. He was from Leeds and specialised in capturing or destroying large rodents. They were able to drug this one. I believe it’s still alive on the Isle of Mom, which Meadley and his men had a grudge against. By all accounts only seven of the original fourteen hundred inhabitants have not succumbed. Seamen from the Scillies refuse to land there and there is no other communication. The reports have never been published and those privy to them refuse to speak of their contents. Millais, the painter, paid two men to take him out in a boat, but the sounds from the island drove him back and he returned with a few disturbing sketches. The large house has been abandoned and is apparently the rat’s favoured winter quarters. Since there was some suggestion she was carrying eggs when she escaped, there is a likelihood that she is no longer the only example of her species at liberty in Christendom.
Samoan Rat Bite Fever does not at first seem serious. Initially it feels no worse than a fairly bad dog bite, but within a day the infected area begins to pulse and spread, sending glittering green tendrils into thighs and pelvis in my case, but more commonly into wrists and lower arms. That first night, believing Fletcher’s words to be exaggerated, I took a couple of aspirin, a hot water bottle and a copy of A Man Without Qualities to bed but was soon forced to get up and select one of the later Soviet Socialist Realists before I could get a wink.
Tirgiditi never fails and has been a blessing for myself and fellow sufferers for three quarters of a century. How many, like me, mourned the passing of the Soviet Union and the prospect of incurable insomnia? Wet Socks: Big Factory, especially in the fifth volume, remains the definitive and most effective work of that particular movement.
THE RIGHT REV. M. ST.-J.N.S. MOORCOCK
(Photo: Elliot & Fry, Baker Street, W.)
By the following day the now-familiar symptoms had begun to manifest themselves. I had spasming fingers and uncontrollable feet. Naturally I went into denial, which was only reversed after I had been arrested several times. The first occasion was when I groped two elderly ladies, my fingers inadvertently locking on a surgical stocking. My arm was knocked by the wheel of her chair and this of course compounded the situation. Of all the embarrassing incidents, this was the most shocking. I was also accused of minor obscenities involving an organ-grinder’s monkey and a Rottweiler. In the end, the Rottweiler best reminded me that I needed to seek professional help. I sought it and my hand was sewn back on by the great performing surgeon Ten Seconds Tennyson. But the limb was by now even more unpredictable in its behaviour. I suppose I could be said to have hit rock bottom during the now-notorious football game in which the Saints beat the Bears by some enormous margin. The Saints had certain advantages over the Bears, not least in being the most sentient creatures after God Himself (fielding three powerful Archangels in their offence), while the Bears are to be blunt reasonably bright brutes. They have never won a game over any kind of supernatural intelligence and have yet to recover from the shame of losing 105-4 to the junior Cherubims.
I digress. Suffice it to say that during the game, involuntarily, my hand had clamped itself on the upper thigh of one of the player’s wives and my efforts to release her (and myself) had not gone unnoticed by the Bears’ best reserve players, one of whom was her husband and the other her lover of recent weeks. Their disappointment in losing a game they had expected to win (they are optimistic but not realistic) found some release in their treatment of me but I reminded them, while I was still able to speak, that mauling a human being was not going to improve their pathetic score averages against the various heavenly echelons they insisted on challenging, season after season. Soon afterwards I lost sensibility, but I remember some remarks about “that warty geek” and “ichorous underwear.” I believe those were from the ambulance men who carried me to St Xavier the H
ermit’s.
By the time the shop-lifting arrests began I already had a letter explaining my condition, but I was never trusted in my own neighbourhood and had to go further and further afield in search of common household supplies. Then of course the condition worsened and I became desperate for a cure. Ultimately, of course, I had no choice but to seek out Lambshead, who deals in these things and acquires items most captains would not dare dream of seeking, but he placed a high price on his courage and I could not be sure I would get my money’s worth. He had shrugged and given me a sweat-stained card. I could find him there if I made a different decision.
Any talk of raspberry porridge or poultices of drawn house-rats is pure superstitious tomfoolery and no time should be wasted on preparing either. The Samoan Rat makes its venom not from any secreted sacs, but from the permanent filth boiling on her large incisors and in her gums.
Therefore, there is no specific cure because the volatile poison which develops on the Rat’s front teeth often varies considerably in character and might be formed from any combination of elements. Raspberry porridge, if introducing the right amount of fine-chopped bloodworm, or lampreys, can provide sustenance and strength and control symptoms but is not in itself useful against the condition, which takes this form, viz:
• Small pustules on the back of the neck and between fingers, especially Samoan close to the original bite (one to three days before second symptom appears), viz:
• Moisture exuding from under fingernails and toenails, sometimes gelatinous
• Oddly smelling sweats, especially at night, but gradually becoming frequent during day
• An itching which feels as if the flesh is being nibbled from within
• Vomiting ichor
• Uncontrollable movement of arms, hands and fingers (Cocker’s Twitch, in the vernacular)
• Tendency to make peculiar moo-ing noises from odd parts of mouth (see above)
• Constant yearning for salty cheese
• Tendency to hallucinate (and mistake soap for cheese–v. common)
• Foaming at the nostrils and gums
• Foaming at the tear ducts and also some foaming from saliva glands (occasional foaming from other orifices such as penis, vagina, sphincter, throat)
• Blackening or reddening and swelling of testicles in men, but women exhibit typical “vagina glow”. Unrelievable “pelvic cramp”. Both cause considerable embarrassment in public.
• Distortion and elongation of nose and upper jaw (Cocker’s twitch; usually only develops in infected infants)
• Discoloration of front incisors
• Loosening and falling out of molars
• Ichorous stools
• Patient notices pool of ichor when rising from chair
• Blood mixed in coughed up ichor
• Stomach shows signs of dissolving, Patient reports strong smell of malt vinegar.
• Stomach, bowels and intestines dissolve
• Death follows.
Fundamentally, the antidote neutralises the ichor and while most of the other symptoms persist it is possible to live some sort of normal life, often for several years. Needless to say, I was eventually forced to seek the services of Lambshead whose gloating response was scarcely gracious. I paid his price, which included all the teeth that had so far fallen out, a piece of fresh skin, plus a cup of mixed juices. The cash payment alone would have ruined an ordinary man and involved unwelcome negotiations with trustees and relatives, but the antidote was duly delivered, together with the offending rat, since the antidote must first be smeared on the rat’s front teeth to be effective. Not only must one suffer a further bite, but the antidote’s malforming side effects guarantee that all further sexual relationships will be both foul and perverse, requiring a whole new chapter of psychopathology to describe. Because of the side effects, real celibacy, of course, is out of the question and would, in fact, be lethal. Vinegar baths (must be malt) filled with small eels offer some temporary relief. Sympathetic friends have placed advertisements in the more idiosyncratic specialist “Venusian” sex journals, but so far there has been no response, so perhaps my sacrifices have, after all, been for nothing. I have so far refused the unwholesome Lambshead’s offer to capture, train and bring me a Dwarf Stoat of Sarawak, which has notorious compulsions.
I leave you, Reader, with an urgent warning! Avoid curiosity, at all costs. It is the Devil who guides your instincts. Eschew the temptations of madhouse and gaming theatre. It is particularly unwise to allow oneself to be fascinated by the Samoan Rat, for she will almost inevitably find a way to bite you. Samoan Ratbite Fever is not a disease deserved by any but the most evil, yet I was until recently a respected man of the cloth. Should you hear of such a rat being exhibited (one other is in captivity and was of some use to me before being returned to the Split Royal Zoological Park) and should you fall party to that deadly curiosity, then be sure never to approach the beast, however entranced you may be, no matter how great your attraction to the rat’s glittering colouring and infamous smile.
Submitted by:
Reverend M.St.-J.N.S. Moorcock
TAKE NO MEDICINE!
THE NINETIES
1997: THE PUTTI • FORMAT: SOFTCOVER, 6 X 9
PUBLISHER: BOOJUM PRESS, ATAXIA GORGE, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
The 1997 edition of the Guide represented a slight detour for Dr. Lambshead, into the free-form disease entry, in which the writer attempts to capture the flavor and substance of the disease through the style of the prose. Less importance is attached to an accurate rendering of the disease, or to use of standard medical terminology. Dr. Lambshead abandoned this approach in 1998 due to several dozen malpractice suits filed against practitioners who had used the prior year’s Guide for diagnostic purposes. Dr. Shelley Jackson continues to mix medical fact and medical fiction to this day, with no adverse side effects.
I AM HERE TO SKETCH the contours of the double danger that concerns us: the putti as parasite, the putti as drug. I am here with bias, performers and visuals.
We will start by considering the putti as drug, known as auntie, little sister, pigeon (after the look-alike that dupes hasty buyers), slug, devil, root, red doll. I am a user. No doubt I will speak strangely at times. It is my conviction that if I do so, it will not hobble my presentation, but add to it that stink of the real which makes of fact: understanding.
Please follow me as we leave the committee room to observe the sale of putti firsthand. If you are wearing the wrong shoes, elegant slip-on medium-heel galoshes are available for a small rental fee from the kiosk outside, so move right along toward this authentic street scene, please do not step over the ropes to examine the illusion more carefully, as you will damage the exhibit. You will all be thoroughly searched as we leave. Observe a street polka-dotted with chewing-gum rounds. Here putti may be tracked down quickly enough by anyone with a wad to wave around, and I have been amply supplied thanks to the Commission’s caboodle. The financial acumen of this commission makes me stiff in my physical pants. But even with bags of the wallet-weed you can’t pick up prime stuff on the street.
Street putti’s not the scab red of the best strain, but a waxy cardinal red, and not much bigger than a grasshopper. Show your money and watch the plastic-baggied root unroll from squares of flannel drawn from the pockets of our well-treated stand-ins whose chapped ankles stretch bare out of secondhand dress shoes, boys with long hairless thighs and slender cocks and brown-mauve heads shiny like oiled hardwood furniture. They have the sex appeal of a small mallet rapped on the table by a presiding officer in calling for attention or silence.
A word of advice: examine the goods before you buy. You wouldn’t believe the things they pass off as the good stuff. Pigeon meat, snipped and dyed. Garden slugs salt-stiffened and lipsticked red. I hold a specimen in my hand if the camera would move in and you can see on the screen we have disguised as a bus shelter a fine specimen as rubicund as hemorrhoidal dogbottom. The putti is tacky
and I handle it gingerly so none of the skin comes away on my hand. Putti are plump in the center, tapering toward the ends. They are firm but flexible; note the torque I can induce with a simple turn of the wrist. Note the splinter between their clothespin “thighs.” It looks like a schlong, scaled small, but it’s just a wen, a nodule, a bump on a root. Under the thick, spicy skin lies the meat of a turnip, a radish, a beet. No tiny bones, no tiny lungs or heart. Just the deep red flesh, ringed with subtle bands of pink.
The rubbery “arms” are forced to the sides and bound there for drying. Observe the crease left by the twine at the tip of my nail. Ideally tied with hemp to sweet cedar racks and dried in high desert, more often they are strung up on the back of a chair in front of a fan in a closet.
As the putti dry their sketchy features sharpen. Their flesh goes malleable, dark and sticky where pressed. It holds a thumbprint, turns gummy like hash. The putti contract; go from smooth and shiny to deeply cleft, awry. They range from delicate rose, said to be milder, to the deep red approaching black beloved of connoisseurs. Connoisseurs like the late Bitch Henry, whose dealer picked out the most florid specimens for him, their heads black and heavy like rotting roses.
If you trim the joint close enough you can hold a match to the feet and suck the tiny head, pronged and spicy as a juniper berry, and of a size. Suck it and you’ll numb your tongue, while the pepper smoke, sticky black and resinous, will coat your lungs faster than a cigar.
Dried like this specimen, putti cost more than cocaine; even fresh they come at a price, for harvest is lucky, bloody, unsafe. From a popular underground handbook: “Drug your victim and hold him down. Slide in your blade until it meets resistance. Keeping the slit propped open, extract Junior with tongs. Then run,” advise the authors, who recently appeared on a talk show in well-ironed pin-striped masks, and were spotted sharing auntie with the host after the hour.