by Neil Jordan
Was there a plan? The buzzing creatures round them seemed to think so, but whatever plan they fluttered to was that of an appetite born long long ago, in a forgotten time, with long-forgotten rules. But it was an appetite, no doubt about it, a need for consumption embedded in some unknown DNA. If there was a plan, the Dewman seemed hardly to care; he left his ersatz son to relish the spectacle while he lumbered through the collapsing carnival, in search of his real one.
And the Ferris wheel was by now just a blur of movement. Mildew was whirling from it, like the spray on the Atlantic waves in a winter storm. Or just like, Burleigh thought, viewing it from close to the collapsing helter-skelter, the threads of floss in a candyfloss spinning drum. Soon the sounds of groaning widgets, of metal bolts and braces strained to breaking point, of the buzzing of engorged insects, of the whey-coloured horse’s mane of mildew flapping in its own storm, drowned out the screaming of the clientele that, it was frighteningly easy to forget, were still strapped within the flying cars.
There were carnies everywhere, struggling with this new chaos; roustabouts straining to keep the rides intact, carnival tents bursting into spontaneous combustion; they had had to forget to enable their kind to live, and couldn’t remember now how to survive this onslaught. Bulgar remembered something, his greased muscles more than his dulled brain, and as he saw the Dewman shambling through, he swung round with a carnival hammer, directed at the mildly curious head. But the Dewman’s hand anticipated it, whipped out and broke the wooden stave, and with the hammer’s shattered head reduced him to a brawny pulp.
The carnies saw. Some of them ran towards him, in bounds that became greater with each step and ended up in a flight of kinds. They descended from the mildewy air, murderous hands stretched out to grab, scratch and claw, but he swatted them off like what they were to him: flies. And as they tumbled in the flattened grass beneath the combusting carnival stalls, the clouds of engorged bluebottles descended to enact their own dewy punishments. And the carnies ran, this way and that, flew through the smoking air themselves, deluded by the rush of mildew that brought to each of them a private and particular hallucinogenic nightmare.
The roustabouts pulled wrenches from their roustabout pouches, claw hammers from their swinging belts, pipes and bits of bent scaffolding from the collapsing rides and threw themselves upon him, the squats attacking his flailing feet, the thins raining blows down on him from their elongated arms. But the buzzing of flying things confused them, the mildew clouded their eyes, and the small, pear-like shape of the marmalade-salesman form the Dewman had usurped proved stronger than all of their roustie musculature. He left them one by one lying comatose in the flattened grass, and pulled each head free of the buzzing insect cloud, inspected each bloodied face and bellowed: ‘Cha cha bhuil se, mo mhach, mo mhicheo?’
47
Dany heard him calling. He was twirling Mona on the rope, to that point where her beautifully arched body with its angled knees and arms was becoming a blur, when the sounds of screams outside developed into a roar, and he felt as much as heard the words in the pit of his stomach, which seemed to cry out, ‘My son, my son.’ But he continued with his hauler’s task, until the chaos outside became unbearable and the sawdust circle gradually filled with the agonised figures of carnival-goers, each of them encased in a cocoon of mildew, tearing at it with their desperate hands, as if to escape what their terror had given rise to. And the more they panicked, the more the mildew grew. So they were in what could be called a bind. Dany left Mona swinging on the trapeze way above and walked into the bright September air and, when his eyes had adjusted to the glare, a barely describable scene was there to meet them.
The Ferris wheel had become a blur, as if it was a paper windmill blown by a giant child. The rollercoaster was collapsing under the strain of its own movement, the supporting scaffolding flying off like matchsticks, the whole structure only held together by the mildew that the terror of those inside, like a growing mushroom cloud. And Dany knew, with an instinct he could no longer deny or avoid, that some reaping had commenced. He heard the voice once more, mo mhach, mo mhicheo, booming, as if echoing inside some great interior space, and he saw through the blur of the clouds of dew-engorged insects, a figure, at once strange and familiar, rubbing with a pudgy pair of hands its own slightly myopic eyes.
‘M’athair,’ he said and the father thing turned. He knew, and he didn’t know how he knew, that this father thing spoke only dead tongues. He saw the face crease into a thousand smiles. Shapes, or grimaces more likely, since the Dewman had not yet fully mastered the art of smiling. But the smiling figure walked towards him, over the bodies of stunned roustabouts, through the clouds of bluebottle things and reached out a pair of familiar arms.
‘Mab llwyb a pherth.’
Dany heard the words, dead and old, and a cold wind came with them, bound only for his carnie soul. He felt the arms wrapping round him, the soft hands gripping his shoulder blades; he felt a sudden swoon into a dark place he had never known existed. But it was in him, and he was it. He felt a warp inside him, an ancient, barely knowable warp, and he knew he had to battle this warp, and he knew that the battle had to commence now, or be lost for ever.
48
Killing his father turned out to be a gnarly, ritualistic and life-changing business. Oh the battle with the Captain was exhausting, almost endless, painful, battering, ruinous to what remained of the carnival, what rides still remained standing, and eventually sent the Captain back to whatever element he had come from. It was a battle between affection and hatred; a battle of competing affections, competing hatreds. He had loved the affable, greying, paunched body he was destined to find some way to destroy. He hated what lived now inside it (although you couldn’t call the Dewman’s condition a living one), and hate and love battled so much inside Dany it seemed they were almost the same, shadow and light, night and day, sweet and sour, open and shut, pain and ecstasy, reflective and reflected, all of the opposites, contradictions, antinomies. The sinewy arms that enclosed him in the first embrace; he knew they weren’t human, but there was the strange, seductively comforting sense of sinking into something otherworldly that had been waiting for him, for all of us. You think this human shape is your home, your body, your final destination? No, this affection said, there is another thing, another place, another home, another parent, where time will fade and pain will vanish and all of those green squawking birds will cease their chattering. You will be mine, I will be yours, and none of this human stuff need bother us. So Dany had to fight, he had to fight from the deepest recesses inside him, to resist this call that he knew was him. He felt his father’s form judder then, and shift, and saw a form emerge from behind those once-beloved eyes that was not human. This thing changed shape, once, twice, three times, and each time he knew he must hold it, he must smother it, he must bind it with his human arms until he extinguished whatever life was left in it. It was an embrace of kinds, an extinguishing embrace. Did you ever feel when a parent held you that they were squeezing the lifeblood from you, that whatever was yours, uniquely yours, was being smothered and whatever was theirs was designed to replace it? Those were the smothering arms with which Dany embraced his father of fathers, an fear drúcht, the Dewman. He held him while his feet kicked them both to the air, while the body he still held lurched sideways and scythed through the windmill of mildew that was the Big Wheel – the screams inside the cocoons of fluttering beard had long ceased – and he still held, while whatever force was left inside the half-living husk crashed them both through the canvas roof of the big top and inside, in the wavering sunlight coming through from above, they sank slowly together downwards, where whatever pulse Captain Mildew had left expired on the sawdust floor.
Dany heard a lazy growl, then, from beneath the bleachers. The old lion padded out, on ancient, furred feet, and nosed around the once-beloved, pear-shaped form of his father. It raised a hind leg and did what it had once done to him. It raised its hind leg and released a
stream that was yellow-coloured, ammonia-odoured.
He went searching for himself then. Which sounds like a figure of speech, a metaphor even, but which wasn’t. He suspected the other was out there somewhere, imitating him, masquerading as him, even being him. He wandered through the broken shards of carnival rides, down the mangled tracks of the ghost train, past the warped and mildewed cocoons of what had once been lovelorn bachelors and bachelorettes, and was moving down a twisted corridor of mangled scaffolding when he heard the tinkling sound of falling glass.
He turned and saw, through an apse of collapsed ghost-train cars, the entrance to Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors. The neon sign, which had entranced him so long ago, was swinging on its rusty pinion, small cascades of broken glass falling from it. He bent his head and pushed his way past the mangled cars, and inside.
He saw a squat version of himself approaching. He knew somehow, and he didn’t know how he knew, that this was simply another reflection. And he was less entranced this time by his grotesquely misshapen form than by the spider’s webs of cracks that covered it. Like the tracings on a lark’s egg, he thought, the kind he would find on the dunes when spring came round, that he shouldn’t touch, since the bird would smell his fingers and desert the nest, like him. Or like the fontanelle on a newborn baby’s skull. He never cared for babies, but he did like that word, fontanelle. He remembered when he had first heard it. Mrs Dignam, two doors down, had given birth. ‘At her age, would you believe,’ his mother had whispered, as the pram approached, on the pathway outside of the privet hedge. ‘You can touch,’ Mrs Dignam had proclaimed proudly, ‘and feel the fontanelle.’
What he remembered now was the word, and the dribble of tiny veins across the infant skull. The mirrors looked like that, cracked with a delicacy that threatened to collapse at any moment. Whole copses of spider cracks, Taw woods and forests of them. And as he examined them, he realised the sound he had heard outside might have not been the sound of falling glass after all. Because now he could hear a tiny, cracked, splintering voice, calling for help. He saw a shape then, behind the cracked mirror, a face, with the ancient cadaverous texture of vellum. He remembered the same shape, the same texture, seeing it through an explosion of bubbles as he fell towards the ocean floor. But where there had been the warp of descending brine, here was the warp of distressed glass. And he could see lineaments he recognised, in the skully shape with the papery leather skin, the cracked mouth, like crumpled cigarette paper, pleading, its claw-like fingers attempting to reach, through the cracked mirror, towards him. He held up his hand to meet it, as Mona had done all that time ago. His young, hairless fingers on one side of Burleigh’s glass, her centuries-old digits on the other. It was as if an angel had been revealed, ravaged by all of the years it never had to suffer, since the first expulsion of Adam.
‘Mona,’ he said.
‘Ydna,’ an ancient voice replied, his name garbled by the leathery tongue into something that must have been before speech.
But still, he recognised it. And he did what she had done, all of that time ago. And when his hands pierced the cracked mirror, he realised that time could now become whatever he wanted it to be. He grasped a pair of ancient hands and pulled a young girl, marginally older than him, out.
They stood there, wordless for a moment, a dumbshow of spider-cracked ghouls observing them.
‘Tusa—’ Mona began.
He knew what she was about to say before she said it.
‘Mo thuaidh agus mo dheas, mo thoir agus thiar—’
And if he kissed her, it wasn’t to shut her up. It wasn’t because he didn’t understand that dead tongue. He understood well enough.
‘My north and my south, my east and my west—’
It was to prove to himself that her lips were pliable, and that there was nothing mirrored about them.
‘I followed you inside,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘But whatever I followed is still inside there.’
And he could see another shape move, inside the cracked mirror. It had his own face, his own shape. But it was shifting, as if searching for an exit it might never find. And he himself was not moving.
‘Burleigh, too.’
And he could see another shape, behind the broken filigrees of gold. A downturned head, sloped shoulders. It moved, and a host of sloped reflections moved with it.
‘Can we leave them there?’
‘What do you think?’
She shook her head. And he shook his, in unspoken agreement. He knew they couldn’t.
So he glanced at what seemed to be his reflection. It shimmered for a moment, then slithered left. He whipped his head around, and saw it dart down a thousand mirrored surfaces. The slope-shouldered thing darted after.
Fear. Fear bubbled out of them, through the filigree cracks in the glass.
He played a mind-trick then; as the two reflections ran, he imagined a solid mirror in front of them.
He heard a crash, a curse, a howl of agony.
He imagined something else. A descending cuboid of mirrors that vanished into nothingness.
They ran down it and, terrified at their own diminishment, found themselves running back.
She knew he had it in him: the dew, the shine, the sult. She would tell him that later. His mind became mirror and his mirror, mind. He tossed Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors in his mind’s eye, as if it was his own glass kaleidoscope. He sent those reflections spinning down whole doll’s-house versions of Burleigh’s Pandemonium. Macro became micro and micro macro, until the very idea of size made nonsense of itself. He became an orchestrator of mirrors, a conductor of hidden harmonies from them; he coaxed rills and trills and tiny rippling cascades of something like melody from them; he created whole symphonies of rearrangement, infinities on infinities. He saw the other run down a whole avenue of himself, only to crash into a mutant version. And Burleigh clawed at the glass but couldn’t break it; he scratched and beat at his image with his pitiable hands and then retreated from himself into the tiniest corner, where Walter had, all of those years ago, hidden his codex. From that point onwards it was a simple matter. Dany coaxed the Rotterdam gold into motion, into action as it were; all of its molecules bowed their heads and said, yes sir, whatever your bidding is, sir, and Burleigh’s immense cathedral of glass began to move. Andy screamed and Burleigh howled as he saw the multiple images of himself approaching, crunching in cascades of splintering glass, to make a cube around him first, then a pentahedron then a dextrahedron then a duodenalhedron and then into not quite a perfect circle, but more like the earth’s orbit around the sun, an ellipse, which oddly was the perfect shape for the procedure that followed. Thus they both were confined in their perfect circle of hell, reflected everywhere in the elliptical orb’s mirrored surface, shaped like a cry of agony. And in the ravaged carnival, all that remained of it was this giant sphere of Rotterdam gold; not quite spherical, though, more like elliptical. The shape of a giant, golden tear.
As the carnies gazed at it in something like awe (and awe was, after all, an emotion foreign to them up to this particular point. In fact, it could be justifiably stated that it took an awful lot to amaze them), Dany booted the huge golden thing with his foot, and to their further amazement, it began to roll. Because the abandoned field behind the abandoned petrol station was on a gradual slope after all, the kind of slope that is never noticed until a sudden downpour sends water cascading through the tents. Anyway, it began a slight roll downwards which was like waving a red flag to the roustabouts who, talls, squats and thins, as with one mind, put their thick and thin fists to the surface of the rusted gold and continued its roll. And the carnies as a breed needed little encouragement to follow.
So it was that the strange rusted golden ellipse found its way to the town square, carnies and roustabouts pushing, and here the tarmac surface made its passage all the easier. The pubs had long closed and the chip shops with them, but a few mooning bachelors and
bachelorettes still sat on the green wooden benches. They were much the worse for wear, but that didn’t prevent them from lending what country folk called ‘a hand’. So the pushing continued, in the way of those things that gather a momentum of their own, that people engage in not quite knowing why but for the random fun of it. And it was fun, if truth be told, to be pushing this huge thing like an Anish Kapoor sculpture that should have been sitting in a square in Chicago or St Petersburg, but no, it was here, a hard shove up that incline and a little extra and there she goes boys, bouncing down the road, the cars scattering this way and that, for the elliptical thing owned the road now, so she did.
Why they thought of it as a ‘her’ was a mystery to be solved on another day, perhaps. There was nothing feminine about this huge ellipse, this massive, ever-so-slightly flattened sphere, apart from the fact that it was bound for water. The way ordinary seamen called a vessel, astronauts called a spaceship ‘her’, this motley crew – carnies, roustabouts, bachelors and bachelorettes – gave the thing sex, and it was female.