Almost Insentient, Almost Divine

by D. P. Watt

  The grotesque Punch figure edged forward, teetering on the rubble strewn across the floor. And as his fixed jaw clacked back and forth a squeaky voice emerged, one so alien to his appearance that if Charles had been at the pictures he would have laughed out loud. But here in this unreal, ruined village, with this gathering of menacing monstrosities, there was little to laugh about.

  “Now acting time is come and we do here appear. / Goodbye to mirth and merriment, although it’s dear, / A room, a room, a room! You’ve let us in! / We’re not your ragged sort, but of more ancient kin.”

  And here “Punch” gestured towards his other players who took a bow in turn. Charles Shepherd knew he was in for a beating, but the aberrant nature of these Mummers really was terrifying. Whichever troupe it was they must have spent a tidy packet getting all fitted up like this.

  “I dunno where you lads got those costumes this year. You must have been making them for months,” he said, as they advanced towards him. “Too much fuckin’ time on your hands I reckon!” Despite his outward aggression he was in turmoil within, unsure really who these mummers were, and where they might be from.

  “It’s bloody bad sport to go for me when the other boys aren’t around. Are you down from Wilmslow, or over from Ollerton, or Monks’ Heath?” he demanded with evident desperation and fear. “Yeah, you’re the Monks’ Heath lot. Well, if you’re gonna be bloody cowards then let’s have a punch up and get it over with. So who’s first then?”

  The knight figure moved towards him, although he didn’t make a sound. A red glow could be seen through his visor and again Charles Shepherd couldn’t resist one final attempt at resistance.

  “Come on then, you bloody oddballs,” he shouted, brandishing his pan and club. “Have you been down the joke shop and got your ghosts and goblins costumes? I’ll teach you a thing or two. You’ll wish you’d never started your stupid games.”

  “I am Moloch, the loveless, judger of old,” a metallic voice echoed from the knight’s helmet. “I come for your children, I lust for your gold. / Your sons I destroy, your daughters I rape, / On the ruin I reap I leave you to gape. / Those who do not before me kneel, / I’ll hop and chop with sturdy steel.”

  The thing seemed to glide across the ruined heap towards Charles, readying its sword.

  Charles jumped forward to get the first strike in. It might be his only one. He thumped the thing soundly on the top of its helmet with a swing of the dripping pan. A resounding gong rang out. It sounded to Charles like one of those slapstick sound effects from the flicks and he half expected at any moment to wake from the whole ludicrous nightmare, laughing.

  The armoured warrior collapsed into a pile of greaves, plates and buckles, no more than rusty theatrical props. And thus the scene played on, Charles’ mind either still slumbering or trapped in this grotesque reality.

  “Oh, woe, my son is wounded sore, / What world is this, bereft of law, / Where the bold, the bright, the brave, / are slaughtered by such a knave?” the woman with the long black veil cried out, dashing to the heap of armour and cradling the helmet as though it were a real head.

  “Are you mad, it’s just a pile of metal,” Charles yelled. “Look, I don’t know who you lot are but I’ve had about enough of this nonsense.”

  “Oh, fool, can I believe, / You do not know, surely you deceive? / For I am Everywoman and you are Everyman,” she said, rising slowly. “No, my dark and fated lover, / Do not let your soul regret / It is you who must repay this Mother / With the child we are destined to beget.”

  As she drew her veil aside Charles Shepherd looked upon something hellish. He dropped his pan and club, and stared in helpless, horrid fascination. Her face was that of a contorted hag, her skin wrinkled and sagging. However this was not merely your average vicious crone. Her features were a gruesome mask awkwardly stretched over another misshapen skull that seemed too wide for a human’s. Most of that “face” hung in limp folds from two nails driven into the forehead. A filthy stench wafted from her rotten maw that gaped in mocking glee at him. Her teeth were rough wooden stumps covered in a blackish tar; her tongue a plump, cavorting maggot that reached eagerly for his trembling lips as she took him in her beastly arms for the first of many savage kisses.

  As the blasphemous coupling frolicked through its painful hour the other dreadful Mummers sang a lullaby.

  O, there isn’t a family

  To compare to mine,

  My father he was hanged

  For stealing three swine.

  My brother he was hanged,

  For stealing only bread.

  We’re nearly all gone,

  Our story almost done.

  My sister died of fever,

  When her man did up ’n leave her.

  Poor mother drowned i’ the well.

  O, but, we’ll meet one day in hell.

  Though isn’t I a lucky buck

  To be living by mesel’?

  *

  What was left of Charles Shepherd stumbled into Lord and Lady Stanley’s drawing room at Alderley Park, right on cue. John Davies, as Prince Paradise, had just broken up the second battle between St George (Alan Wright, the Baker’s son) and Slasher (Brian Bright, the butcher). The Stanleys and their posh guests looked aghast. PC Shepherd was naked, save for his tattered cape that was covered in blood and mud. His bowler hat had been thrust over his head and the rim now hung about his bruised neck. The horns had been mounted upon his forehead, secured with two stout nails. His face was caked with dried blood and his eyes implored madly to the assembled party. The broken fingers of his left hand were strapped around his dripping pan with the strap of his leather satchel and his right hand had been nailed to his wooden club. Both arms hung uselessly by his sides.

  Charles Shepherd’s splintered teeth were chattering and his split lips broke the dark congealed blood that caked them long enough to splutter out his lines in an other-worldly voice, “In comes I, owd Beelzebub, / In my hand I carry my club; / In my hand my dripping pan, / Don’t you think I’m a jolly young man?” And with that the “jolly young man” breathed his last as his ruined body crumpled onto the magnificent Turkish rug the Stanleys had purchased a few weeks earlier from a charming gypsy family that were heading South to warmer counties.

  The Man We All Imagined I Might Have Been

  It was an insult! And it is one I shall never forgive! I was making my way for my morning coffee and had, somewhat reluctantly, taken some papers with me to look through. I was not in the best of humours, that is certain, but how does one prepare oneself for such an affront?

  How can I describe it, now, so many years later? It still makes me shudder with rage to recall the face on that swine, as he dismissed me with a twitch of arrogance.

  I caught sight of the wretch in the window of the café, just as I turned to go inside. There he stood in his ill-fitting suit (purchased by a penny-pinching nobody) with a new, and vulgar, cane. His hat was angled as though to imitate an American gangster; how cocky and pathetic he looked, his round glasses half-way down his nose that arced from his gaunt face like a ruined piece of rock hangs from a crumbling cliff, underlined by his little black moustache—the product of an adolescent obsession, and years of vigilant narcissism.

  I resolved to have nothing more to do with him. He was dead to me.

  30th November 1935

  In the first few days I was mired in depression; my most trusted friend had betrayed me. His scorn left me as bereft as a cuckolded husband. I found my solace in drink and dragged from bar to bar, from the sophisticated to the sordid. At the beginning I kept to myself, drowning in thoughts of the pointlessness of this earth and the deceitful, cursed bacteria infesting it.

  Then, the glint of a golden tooth in the mouth of a solicitous wench captivated me. It shone like an exploding star, and as I watched her performance unfold, snaring another customer, I was alive again—with the thrill of artifice, rather than the terror of it.

  The bar bubbled with characters as absu
rd and preposterous as they were real and true. I wandered from table to table, scrutinising every furrowed brow and noting every expletive. I watched the swing of angry arms and the pointing fingers, the swagger of drunken legs and the posture of threat and violence. I laughed loudly with my sudden freedom, even as they bundled me out of the bar, kicking and pounding at me, hollering and yelling, accusing and spitting.

  I assured them that my apparently disrespectful scrutiny of them was nothing more than delight at their wondrous difference, and a heady celebration of possibility. But they did not seem to listen and the crowd surged on with that vicious glee that motivates the masses. Despite my wounds, which took two weeks to heal, I was elated—this was just the beginning. He would hear of the people I would become, and marvel at my transformations.

  Day Twenty Eight, or, One Thursday in June

  In the early days of any all-consuming project one tends towards error. This was the case with my first. I had seen him about the town for a number of weeks, a pale man in dark, worn clothes, with a pencilling of beard and moustache—a young man, attempting to find work, from what I saw of his increasingly desperate calls at local tradesmen, factories and through the marketplaces.

  One evening I followed him as he left a bar. He trudged through the darkness, on his way to somewhere dismal and squalid. I stopped him in an alleyway and flashed my blade in the moonlight. I had never seen such fear.

  I demanded that he strip. He stripped.

  Seeing his clothes lying there upon the floor I wondered what was left of the man. He stood there shivering, the moon illuminating his skin as brightly as a newly pressed sheet.

  I slipped the knife between the folds of the sheet and he crumpled into a heap among the rubbish bins and the rats. I wiped the blade on his greasy hair and changed into his clothes, which were rank with sweat.

  I took from the pocket of his jacket his papers. He was German apparently, Stefan Sowinski. It was an interesting name for me to become. His pocket revealed other things, obviously of importance to him—a small clay pipe, well used and worn; a letter from his lover, or mother, perhaps, in Polish; a small key, the type that will open the cupboard of a dresser or bureau, and a fountain pen with red and black marbling whose nib was bent.

  I stood there, pulling at the shirt, jacket and trousers, trying to find a more comfortable way to make their smaller size more accommodating to my body.

  Then, in a moment of abject epiphany, I realised what I had done. I could no more become Stefan Sowinski than I could become Napoleon. They were dead.

  So I took off his trousers, jacket and shirt. I folded them neatly and placed them in the arms of the contorted body that had once owned them. I returned home to make some pancakes and take proper notes on the nature of my mistake.

  That day I had briefly become Stefan Sowinski, but his clothes were ill-fitting. He would read of my murder.

  1st December 1947

  That morning was the beginning of what I always called an “English Day”. By that I mean that it was dull, grey and frigid, with little to commend it but the fact that it had appeared, simply honouring the dependability of the earth’s trajectory.

  But I awoke infused with a feeling of quite extraordinary ability, in complete opposition to the ordinariness of the day. I felt certain that it would be a day of miracles, of metamorphosis and mystical revelation. I was possessed by a spirit both malevolent and mighty.

  The morning was spent in an oddly frantic malaise as I fretted and worried at what I might become, imagining all manner of incredible identities. At last, in my wanderings about my home, I chanced upon an old suitcase that contained some toys and games—the remnants of another’s life, but substance enough for a new becoming.

  Within an hour, and entirely foregoing lunch, I had mastered the arts contained in an old compendium of magic tricks and was ready to reveal my powers to an adoring crowd. Perhaps I would inaugurate a new religion and gather to me the lost and mad of the entire country, either that or earn a few coins, at least.

  I set up shop, so to speak, in the market square, with a card table, covered in moth-eaten green felt. I propped up a chalk board upon which I had quickly scrawled, “See amazing card tricks which will astound and dumbfound! See illusions the like of which will leave all witnesses aghast and speechless! Contortions and escapology to rival Houdini! Balloon animals, trinkets, and keepsakes!” In the drizzle it soon faded—all the better, for my claims were ill-founded and the repertoire I was capable of, if capable could even be the word, was limited to a trick with three egg cups and a cherry stone, and one card trick which I succeeded at only half of the time.

  I cannot lie, business was not brisk. I could blame it on the weather though.

  Those few that did stop, and stayed long enough to see the conclusion of my performance, were not impressed. One, an elderly man with an eye patch, even took the cards from me, after I had failed to pick his card, and performed the trick upon me with a nimbleness one would not expect from his gnarled fingers.

  Some children stopped by my soggy little stall on their way home from school, pausing for a while before my table, trying to discern the claims made on my board.

  One brave lad, with scuffed knees and a muddy satchel with a broken strap, stepped forward and placed a small coin on the table.

  “I want a balloon animal,” he said, with a confidence bordering on hostility. “I want… a giraffe.”

  I huffed and puffed and eventually achieved the inflation of two long, thin balloons, in bright orange and yellow.

  With a few twists and squeaky turns of the balloons I had succeeded in creating a ball of incomprehensibly intertwined rubber, with a protruding yellow section which seemed passable enough as a head.

  “Voila, monsieur,” I said, presenting him the “animal” with a flourishing bow.

  The other children laughed and ran home. The boy just stared at it, and then at me, and then back at it.

  “That’s not a giraffe,” he lamented. “I want my money back.”

  “Ah, but sir, there are no refunds, I’m afraid,” I exclaimed, pointing to the now unreadable chalk board, as though it had contained terms and conditions.

  He ran off crying.

  Within a quarter of an hour he had returned with his father—a grim little toad of a man, with fists as broad as anchors and a head that erupted like a furious boil from between his beef carcass shoulders.

  After his bellowing had abated a little I repeated what I had told his son—that the bond of trade cannot be broken and in having deposited his coin upon the table he had agreed to the manufacture of the animal, the likeness of which was a matter of aesthetic proclivity and therefore not one that might be verifiable in court.

  He thumped me soundly on the nose and I toppled to the ground.

  He beat me severely, with his fists, and his tatty boots. There was not an inch of me that he didn’t address, especially my legs and feet, which he seemed to take an animal glee in kicking and stamping upon.

  Once the pounding had subsided and he had stepped back to take breath I struggled up from the shining wet cobbles, my lip split and bleeding, my head ringing with a choir of angelic voices, my heart riotous with the fury of a thousand devils. But I would choose my battles. I thanked the brute for his violence as I packed my suitcase calmly and with dignity. I even offered him the crumpled flower from my lapel, which he declined with an obscenity. I folded my table and hobbled home, certain that at least one of my toes was broken.

  In the early evening it came to me that, with my new-found magical abilities I might fashion a doll of the thug and enact upon him a distant, supernatural vengeance. And so, as the cloudy night crept on I fashioned—from wax and dirt, the wings of flies and the tongues of lizards, scraps of paper and shavings of wood—an effigy of my attacker. I burnt it on the fire after anointing it with blood, semen and spit. Whether it had any effect is entirely beside the point—I was appeased!

  That day I had become The Great
Impossibilio. He would hear of my mastery of the occult arts.

  The Great Celebration

  It was a morning that heralds a day that will burn and boil you, where you wake choking on the dense, still air; where the bubbling pot of coffee, and its scorching liquid, is a thing to be feared, and the dry breakfast breads stick in your throat as you dab the sweat from your brow with a sodden handkerchief.

  That day called for a challenge. As I crept about the house, keen to conserve as much energy as possible, I concluded that today was one for tweeds—thick layers of painfully stiff material that would require all my skills in becoming another. And a beard—yes! a beard. I had one somewhere, a leftover from a silly little show I’d played in at the local theatre, before it became a casino.

  It was jet black, and rather patchy, after all these years. The little bottle of glue I had used to fix it on with had maintained its adhesive qualities and, although a little thick, I had soon applied it and was ready to become someone again.

  Who that was remained elusive though. It would occur to me soon enough, an hour or two out on the streets, ducking between shady alleyways would reveal my identity.

  On leaving the door I declined a cane or stick and spotted, instead, another item that was already hinting at what I might be. It was a beaten leather case, with a broken handle. Not a travelling suitcase, but more a document folder, the type one sees in the hands of educated folk. There was a scholarly air already forming about my being and as I stepped into the glare of the midday sun it was as though through a portal to otherness.