by Ian Watson
And that was part of hell too. Anything you relied on might be damaged or vilely warped. Any carpet could be pulled from under your feet. Commencing with a numdah rug woven with a tree of peace, under which a pit yawned.
“Well, Gareth?”
“You-gave-birth-to-the-arm-of-power. Now-you-must-conceive-it-in-your-womb. Time-runs-sideways-back-wards-inside-out-so-that-sanctuary-can-shelter-you. So-birth-precedes-conception-and-conception-follows-birth. We-must-screw. Balls-tackle-touch-cockle-pussy. I-love-you.”
Not a statement of love, oh no. No way. A declaration of an action to be performed, a ritual ingredient. Gareth’s was the voice of the Power.
She stared at the corpse, which at least was still clad tat-tily, and wondered what sort of foul body those rags covered.
“You want to go to bed with me?”
The blotchy, hairless head nodded.
So it’s goodbye love, she thought. And goodbye sex. She’d never be able to sleep with Jack ever after, or even sleep with herself. Supposing Jack still wanted her, which she doubted, if he found out about this he’d never get it up. And supposing miracles followed, but afterwards he found out that she’d copulated with a rotting corpse as hors d’oeuvre, well…hardly the best basis for a relationship, unless Jack was a fucking saint as well as randy as a rabbit. If you could pass on VD and AIDS caught from a diseased lover, what could you pass on from a zombie-corpse?
Why figure on Jack? She almost giggled giddily. It was Gareth who wanted her, not Jack. Gareth was making sheep’s eyes at her. Boiled mutton eyes.
Soiled, soiled she’d be, worse than a rape. She would feel so, anyway, even though she offered herself willingly as a sacrifice to the lips of death. She would never be able to touch herself, except perhaps to wash maniacally. She would certainly never touch herself with any awakening pleasure, in case something decaying reached down from inside her to catch hold of her fingers.
In a sense this was the climax of her darkest masturbation fantasies from long ago. For she would be fucked by Evil. This was nemesis. And it was hell, the destruction of love, sex, touch, the transformation of herself into a kind of conscious robot, a zombie made of dead unfeeling flesh. She would never dare feel again. Her last memory, before she switched off her nerves: a dog’s amiable kindly kiss on the hand. A dog’s love.
“Your place, or mine?” she asked. “Or shall we do it in some other corpse’s cottage? They’d hardly notice, hardly raise a finger. Unless you need an audience. Do you? Maybe we ought to get married properly seeing as your Nancy’s defunct. Can’t fancy Nancy. How about getting spliced in church with the vicar’s head presiding? A congregation of cadavers, a couple of dead daughters of the village who aren’t too badly decayed, for bridesmaids? The bells would ring out if we tied a bellringer to the ropes. Confetti and loose flesh could fly like apple blossom. Reception in the village hall afterwards. Honeymoon in the White Lion, upstairs.”
Again she had begun to cry – as though she had ever wanted such a thing as a wedding! She was babbling, delaying. The horror was reducing her to banality. Once the Gareth-corpse had possessed her, she knew that she must surely have lost her own self, and any freedom, any proprietorship of her own body. To herself she would be dead tissue.
“No,” she whispered, “I won’t do it.”
Gareth stamped petulantly upon Felix’s grave.
“Will! Or-the-little-boy-will-rise-to-the-occasion. No-choice-eh?”
“You won’t be able to fuck me. You’ll burst like a bad tomato.”
“I-will-have-assistance. A-power-tool. If-we-don’t-make-love-soon-Jeneeee – ”
“Love!” She spat.
“If-we-don’t-I’ll-be-much-messier-next-week. So-will-every-villager-be. You’ll-spoil-the-pattern-speed-the-rot.” Suddenly, as if he was making a supreme effort, the real Gareth seemed to look out from those corpse eyes, a human Gareth. “Go on, Jan, be a sport! Nancy wouldn’t mind. We’re liberated. She won’t even know about it. Please! Then I’ll feel better.”
“Will you? How about me?”
“Keep your eyes shut if you like. Don’t look at the mantelpiece while the fire’s being poked, eh? It’ll feel the same. We can both enjoy it if we try. Please!” A small spoilt boy wheedling for a sweetie, insisting on a sweetie. To make him feel better.
His ulcerated lips looked disgusting. And his pulpy gums, his slack teeth coated with yellow fur. He needn’t kiss her on the mouth or anywhere else. But he probably would, slobbering all over her.
“Look you, girl, no one’s using the vicar’s house. That’s not far to go.”
“The vicar’s. Right. Agreed. I must tell the others not to-wait for me.”
“Jeneeee –!” he wailed after her.
“Don’t worry,” she shouted back, “I’ll not run away.”
For where was there to run to?
Out in Church Lane, Sheri stared wide-eyed.
“Yes?”
Jeni told her “friends”: “Go to the pub without me. Gareth and I have something to do.”
“What is it, pet?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“You aren’t going to dig up –?”
“No, Sheri. I dig nothing…about what’s going to happen to me. I’ll be dug a bit though. I’ll be dug.”
“What dee ye mean?”
Jeni shook her head. “Go on, go away. And don’t ever ask me.”
“You look blanked out,” said Mitzi.
“Good. I want to be blank. I hope I can be blank. I’ll be blank afterwards. Always blank.”
They went, looking totally distrustful. Soon Gareth caught up.
Thirty
A modest bungalow built of red brick at the end of tiny Dryden Close. No TV aerial. Net curtains at all the windows, the frames needing a lick of paint. Pruned stumps of roses in the well-weeded border, showing a few red sprouts of halted growth. An idiot blackbird, blind in one eye, stood in the middle of the patch of lawn immobile as a clay ornament.
If the bird had been waiting for a worm, it could wait forever. Nancy had told Jeni that the vicar dosed his pocket handkerchief of grass with Chlordane poison to wipe out the worm population. She caught him at it, on a walk last year. When she accused him of unecological behaviour, Partridge argued that he was guarding his lawn against moles. Moles could burrow from the Pattersons’ paddock which closed off the little road (and where a Welsh cob and a Shetland now mouldered on in a half-life). Moles ate worms; kill the worms and you’d keep the moles away.
Jeni recalled Gareth sucking portentously on his pipe before pronouncing diagnosis: “Our vicar’s scared of worms. Worms mean the corruption of the mortal body; death without resurrection. He can’t bear to have them in his garden of Eden.” “But the soil needs its worms,” Nancy had insisted. Gareth nodded. “I wonder if he doses the graveyard too? Cost too much, I suppose. Did you know that Darwin’s first book was a treatise on earthworms? I don’t suppose that would endear worms to the vicar either, ho ho.” “Worms can’t get into coffins,” Jeni had said reasonably….
Worms: that’s what she was going to find inside the bungalow. Worms still spilling in an endless stream from the vicar’s sliced windpipe, carpeting the place. A bathful of worms. A whole bedful. A mattress of wriggling white worms. That’s why the Power had prompted Gareth to name this place as their love nest. And the biggest, whitest worm of all: Gareth’s own tackle.
Incidentally, where had Bert and Jack stowed the vicar’s body, dead from the neck down, after they wheeled it here in the barrow?
Had they tucked it up in bed? That would be lovely. Or had they popped it in the bath? Next best thing to a coffin, with drainage laid on. Or sat it in a chair? Jeni concentrated on this puzzle so as not to think of other things as she walked slowly, and as Gareth staggered, up the concrete path to the vicar’s front door, a door that certainly wasn’t locked.
She pushed the door open, and almost spewed upon the mat. The toilet-thing was stretched out along the h
all, a hosepipe of a worm lying in wait.
No it wasn’t. That was the wheel-track of the barrow printed in the pile of the carpet.
Leading to…the kitchen? She followed the ribbed line till it met lino. Partridge’s shrouded body lay full length with the collar of his cloak squeezed up against the fridge door as though demonstrating some trick of stage magic. See, Magnificent Mandrake has his head inside a closed fridge keeping cool, while the rest of his body’s outside on the floor! How does he do it? (Actually, he retracts his head inside his shoulders like a tortoise, a knack that every member of the Magic Circle masters. Now you see it, now you don’t!) A rancid smell hung about the fridge.
The power was off; the smell was of perishables, well perished even though the kitchen was chilly.
Come to think of it, it would be pretty chilly stripping clothes off to copulate with a corpse. How much could she decently keep on? Sweater? T-shirt? Bra? Socks? Maybe Gareth would be a demanding Casanova. A roué of debauchery. Pity she hadn’t worn a skirt instead of jeans; she could simply have hoisted it like a two-quid dockland whore.
She glanced out of the back window into the little rear garden of grass and more rose beds surrounded by a larch-lap fence. Then she went to check the pantry. The shelves were all bare. Unless Partridge had been carrying fasting to extremes, Jack and Bert must have loaded up their wheel-barrow after they dropped the vicar off.
A grunty snuffling flipped her attention to the kitchen door, and Gareth.
“Bedroom, boyo, bedroom!” She surged past him in search of the right door.
Wrong one: this was a little study so crowded that only one pilot of the soul could ever fit into its single carved oak seat. Result of squeezing the ample study of the old vicarage into the spare room of a modern bungalow. Her glance took in the old desk, the filing cabinets, the topheavy bookshelves and table crammed with silver-framed photos of churches and Madonnas and crucifixion prints.
Next door: bingo.
The bed was unmade. Its bedspread, which had been tossed to one side, was jumble-sale craft work crochetted in ruby, black, and gold, giving it an ecclesiastical appearance. Partridge had obviously exited in haste. After comforting Sheri and handing custodianship over to Mary Kuzka he must have caught a few hours sleep before rushing out towards dawn to unlock the reliquary cage. So as to ward off abomination with the help of Saint Anonymous. An alarm clock with brass bells stood by the bed. Other things she noticed: a white surplice peeping out of the large wardrobe; the silver hair brush and bottle of Cotswold Rosegarden aftershave on the lady-like dressing table.
“Aha!” Gareth blundered through the doorway after her.
His irregular gait was determined partly by the derelictions of his body but also by the priapic erection pressing at his stained cords. His puffy green fingers worked the zip down and the frayed trousers parted to fall about his knees. His cod-flesh thighs were embedded with pustules like fishes’ eyes all staring at her. As for the cod itself…he dragged down browned, fouled underpants, and a smegmic organ also stared stiffly at her through its glue-drippy meatus. A purple chancroidal ulcer decorated the side of his glans. Cysts distorted his scrotum like knobbly fungi trying to burst out of the sac of tightened skin.
He managed, clumsily, to step out of trousers and rocked to and fro, the diseased swollen penis twitching metro-nomically. His tongue lapped through his ulcerated lips, a panting dog’s, smooth and magenta.
Shrugging, Jeni kicked off her trainers then unzipped her jeans and hauled them off. Next, her knickers. She lay upon the lavender sheet with her knees drawn up, turned her head aside and shut her eyes, imagining blankness.
Soon Gareth covered her, squashing her, stifling her in sweet foetid decay. His mouth slobbered on her cheek. A soft hand forced her face round to meet his. His tongue thrust into her mouth to butt hers. And his loins lunged. Lubricated with pus, his ulcerated glans entered. As his whole shaft impaled her, cysts thudded against her sex like a bag of marbles.
Blankness. Blank as death. Death was fucking her. Evil was fucking her. Be blank. Freeze up. Feel nothing, hide inside.
Inside was where the toilet-thing came from. No, not there. Vacate that part, go numb, be dead, a corpse yourself, dead from the waist down, dead from the neck up. Heart thumps. Hide in your heart, the red living heart pulsing away like a bird in the hand. But the thing fucking her had a pulse of its own, its penis. And birds were squirming in her bush.
“Respond,” panted Gareth. “Move yourself. Make love to me. Stroke me. Excite me. Or I can’t finish. I can only go on and on. Do it to me, girl. Stimulate me. Love me.”
“How? How?”
Use your imagination, girl. Just disconnect your senses first. Like smell and taste and touch. Touch without touching.
Think uniforms. No.
Think Gerry Healey. No.
Think Jack? No, don’t be a fool.
Think…Donna? Think that you are Donna raping Jeni, raping yourself. Compelling her (and you) to orgasm.
Think that evening in Oxford. Think of the witch who made a devil come to her, who made him come.
Let the witch take over, let her do it. Let her operate the Jeni body. Yes, yes! Let her lust after abomination, the shaggy stinking sabbath goat. Let her lick its bum, let her suck it off, and this time she’d survive, this time she’d be helped, this time she’d win…the world or what was left of it. Waves of power, waves of times washed her beneath the surface of herself as if she was drowning. Yet now her body was thrusting for the shore, stroking, squeezing, and convulsing, her legs dancing, her feet drumming a devil’s tattoo.
When Gareth came, he didn’t cry. He screamed in pain. This sound, so close to her ears, shattered the surface beneath which her Jeni-self lay deep – yanking her suddenly into the air, light, now-time, and awareness.
The Gareth corpse rolled aside, gasping and writhing. Jeni saw blood dripping out of the head of his ulcerated, wilting penis. She sensed that this wasn’t her own blood, but his. To bleed fresh sacramental blood – that was something new for a corpse!
And to feel pain was something new for him too. To feel any intense sensation, when you were dead.
He grimaced at her through slack teeth and lurid, suppurating lips. Was he actually trying to smile?
‘it’s done,” he rasped. “The pattern’s perfect.”
“Is it? I wouldn’t know.” As she propped herself on her elbow to scrutinize him, dimly she sensed someone else – who was herself, a witchy girl – falling away down a deep dark well clutching on to a bucketful of pain and filth and debasement as the rope between her and Jeni unravelled longer and longer. The witch had taken a load of the mess which was this experience, along with her. Not the whole of it, just a load. A lot was still left, but Jeni didn’t feel insane or annihilated. Just somewhat so. So she could bear to scrutinize the living cadaver beside her.
Gareth’s cold puppet passion was spent; it had climaxed in a scream and blood. Yet he seemed somehow…more human, more alive, more normal.
“Gareth?”
“Christ in a chipshop, Jen, that hurt!”
She clutched his shoulder.
“Are you feeling better? Do you know who you are? Do you know what’s been happening? Gareth?”
For a few moments he stared back at her glazedly, then his rotten lips said:
“Get-ting warm-er.”
That was when she screamed – louder than he had screamed and longer. The witch-girl with her bucket of mad filth was rushing up the well-shaft towards her at breakneck speed. The well-shaft was her own throat. Her screams were choked as she vomited her breakfast of cornflakes and lemonade all over the lavender sheets and the corpse which had mated her – to give birth, in twisted time, to the toilet-thing.
PART FOUR
Thirty-one
Perhaps the toilet-thing was still lurking in the drains and sewers under the village, but perhaps not. None of the true survivors apart from Jeni had ever caught a glimpse of it, eith
er wriggling over blighted grass or rearing itself up out of a stagnant, disused toilet bowl.
Since there was no mains water – only what was left in tanks and the motionless brook at the bottom of Green Street, plus a cattle trough fed by a spring which still bubbled up – Jack had long since dug a latrine pit on the green, which was an exact duplicate of the one at the peace camp. A sign: SHIT PIT. A bender, an igloo of tarpaulin over hooped branches, for privacy and to keep the rain off. If it ever rained again. Inside, a torn-off wooden toilet seat resting on crossed planks almost flush with the turf.
Bert had suggested mounting the seat on an open box with the bottom knocked out so that they wouldn’t need to squat so low, but Sheri with her summer camp experience pointed out that waste matter would flick on to the sides, which was unhygienic. Unpersuaded, Bert preferred to add his own waste to the slurry already on the farm. Jeni never used the shit pit either; she couldn’t trust what might be hiding down it. She used a field or a paddock instead. But Nell and Mitzi and Jack happily continued the old peace camp routine, and though Sheri could presumably have dug holes in her own back garden she too visited the pit out of some stubborn, self-punishing solidarity.
The sprightlier of the dead sometimes wandered up to the latrine as if attracted to it and stood outside the bender for a while, purposelessly since they only ate and drank enough to feed a sparrow, and farted into their clothes.
Perhaps, reasoned Jeni, the toilet-thing had indeed come to the end of its perverted, and inverted, existence when Gareth mated her. Now that the Power’s lips were unsealed, and now that it had been reinforced thanks to her, such an arm of the new law was unnecessary.