Eventually, of course, the friends turned into boys. Gretchen bought her some makeup, and the tight jeans and tee shirts she craved—because what are you going to do, make the kid wear hoop dresses and bonnets? And Chester—well, Gretchen’s parents bought him the video game for his birthday, and that was the end of that. Whatever demons were battling in his mind all day long found expression through his thumbs—it became the only thing that gave the poor kid any comfort. Eventually we would come to realize that Luann was turning into, forgive me, something of a slut, and that Chester had lost what few social graces we’d managed to teach him. Today his face is riddled with zits, he wanders off from the school grounds two or three times a week, and he still gets skidmarks in his tighty whities. And Luann—we bought her a used car in exchange for a promise to drive Chester where he wanted to go, but she gave him a ride maybe once—it was to, God knows why, the sheet metal fabricating place down behind the supermarket—and left him there for four hours while she got it on with some punk from the west side.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’d think we would have quit the portal entirely after the robot fog incident, but then you’re probably mistaking us for intelligent people. Instead we went back now and again, just to see what the portal was up to. Sometimes I went by myself. I suspect Gretchen was doing the same—she’d be missing for a couple of hours then would come back flushed and covered with burrs, claiming to have been down on the recreation path, jogging. I don’t think the kids went alone—but then where did Chester get that weird knife?
In any event, what we saw in there became increasingly disturbing. Crowds of people with no faces, a world where the ground itself seemed to be alive, heaving and sweating. We generally wouldn’t spend more than a few minutes wherever we ended up. The portal, in its decline into senility, seemed to have developed an independent streak, a mind of its own. It was…giving us things. Things it thought we wanted. It showed us a world full of money, or something that looked kind of like money, but felt as though it was made of…flesh. We saw a world that looked like ours, except thinner, everything thinner, the buildings and people and trucks and cars, and from the expression of horror on Gretchen’s face, I could tell where that one was coming from. And there was the one place where all the creatures great and small appeared to have the red hair, thick ankles, and perky little boobs of the new administrative assistant at my office. Gretchen didn’t talk to me for days after that, but it certainly did put me off the new assistant.
And so before the summer was over, we gave up. The kids were too busy indulging their new selves, and quit playing make-believe out in the woods. And Gretchen and I were lost in our private worlds of self-disgust and conjugal disharmony. By Christmas we’d forgotten about the portal, and the clearing began to fill in. We did what people do: we heaved our grim corporeal selves through life.
I checked back there a couple of times over the next few years—you know, just to see if everything looked all right. Needless to say, last time I checked, it didn’t—the humming was getting pretty loud, and the shimmering oval was all lopsided, with a sort of hernia in the lower left corner, which was actually drooping down far enough to touch the ground. When I poked a stick through the opening, there was a pop and a spark and a cloud of smoke, and the portal seemed to emit a kind of hacking cough, followed by the scent of ozone and rot. When I returned to the house and told Gretchen what I’d seen, she didn’t seem to care. And so I decided not to care, either. Like I said before, there were more important things to worry about.
Just a few weeks ago, though, I started hearing strange noises at night. “Didya hear that?” I’d say out loud, and if I was in bed with Gretchen (as opposed to on the sofa) she would rise up out of half-sleep to tell me no, it was just a dream. But it wasn’t. It was a little like a coyote’s yip, but deeper, more elongated. And sometimes there would be a screech of metal on metal, or a kind of random ticking; and if I got up and looked out the window, sometimes I thought I could see a strange glow coming from the woods.
And now, even in the daytime, there’s a funny odor hanging around the yard. It’s springtime, and Gretchen says it’s just the smell of nature waking up. But I don’t think so. Is springtime supposed to smell like motor oil and dog piss in the morning? To be perfectly honest, I’m beginning to be afraid of what our irresponsibility, our helplessness, has wrought. I mean, we bought this place. We own it, just like we own all our other problems. I try to talk to Gretchen about it, but she doesn’t want to hear it. “I’m on a different track right now,” she says. “I can’t be distracted from my healing.” Can you tell she’s been in therapy all winter? I want to throttle the shrink when she talks like this. Meanwhile, I have no idea where our daughter is half the time, and I haven’t gone up to Chester’s room in three weeks. I can hear him up there, muttering; I can hear the bed squeak as he acts out his violent fantasies; I hear the menacing orchestral strings and explosions and tortured screams that emanate from his favorite games.
Problems don’t just go away, you know? Problems get bigger and bigger and before you know it they’re bigger than you are, and it’s too late to fix them. Some days, when I’ve gotten a decent night’s sleep and have had a few cups of coffee, I think sure, I’ll just get on the phone, start calling people up and asking for help. A school guidance counselor, a marriage therapist, a pediatrician, a witch or shaman or wizard or physicist or whoever in the hell might know what to do about the portal, or even have the balls to walk down that path and see what’s become of the clearing.
But on other days, days like today, when I’m too damned tired even to reach for the phone, the only emotion I can summon up is longing—longing for a time when the world was miraculous, when I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and start living. I mean, the magic has to come from someplace, right? It’s out there, bestowing itself on somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s kids, somebody else’s life. All I want is to get just a little of it back. Is that so much to ask?
Saving the Gleeful Horse
K. J. Bishop
K. J. Bishop (1972–) is an Australian writer and artist. In 2004, her neo-Decadent fantasy novel The Etched City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and she won the William L. Crawford Award, the Ditmar Award for Best Novel, and the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. Her work has appeared in several publications including Leviathan 4, Fantasy magazine, and Subterranean magazine. Most infamously, her novella ‘Maldoror Abroad’ appeared in Album Zutique; the story riffed on the original Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) by Isidore Lucien Ducasse under the pen name ‘Comte de Lautréamont’. Her tale ‘Saving the Gleeful Horse’ (2010) shares affinities with Decadent modes of writing, including the Alfred Kubin excerpt that opened The Weird.
Children are cruel. No one who has lived in the world need ask for proof of that. So it is nothing for them to beat a living creature – a rare, marvellous creature at that – to death. They do so in order to seize the treasure inside it, but one sees the pleasure they take in this assassination of life, even before the plunder starts. Their laughter bounces from yard-wall to yard-wall and their eyes shine darkly as they beat the animal, which has done nothing to them, with wooden sticks and swords, until holes open in its body and the prizes – caramels, toys, game money printed with pictures of wrestlers and cartoon characters – rain down into their hands.
I am Molimus. I live under the bridge where the day-boats go from wet and wooden Bracklow to the foot of the sweeping stone stair going up the hill to Firmitas and the military school.
I am called Molimus the Great by some here in Bracklow, in recognition of my height and strength. My shirt is made of four men’s shirts sewn together, and an eight-pound cheese wheel fits in the palm of my hand. By profession I trade in flotsam, which I catch under the bridge in these great hands of mine and sell at the Pauper’s Forum up by Shindy Estate.
Because of this occupation, which keeps me under the bridge watching the water from morning until late at night
, I oftentimes see the dead animals. If the husks are not burnt, people toss them into the river. I see them on holidays, especially, when the slaughtered numbers are high, but they are killed all year round.
To look at them! Never did dreams supply such a zoo of little spotted and striped horses and chequered gazelles, sky-blue lions, dawn-pink bears, gallant golden beetles, chivalrous silver anteaters! I have even seen elephants amongst them, and star-shaped beasts that must have come from the carved waves of the sea before they were captured and hung up to be put to death.
To see their poor empty bodies makes me cry into the water – sometimes so much that I think the tears of Molimus could turn the river salty.
I can’t even salvage them for trading. The bodies last for very little time after they have yielded up the ghost. The husks are as diaphanous as cellophane, and any part submerged below the water dissolves like bread in soup.
I had never thought to see a live one that wasn’t already hanging in a yard, soon to die. But that is what happened. It was an October night, a while after sundown, when the day-boats were back at their moorings and the water was full of the dark medicinal colour of an overcast sky. I saw the head of a little horse, banded in red, blue, white and gold like the flag of some merry knight, tossing on the river waves – another dead victim of a party, I assumed, until I came to see the striped legs that were churning the water.
Despite his predicament there was nothing frightful about his looks, as I saw when his head turned towards me. Far from showing panic, he gave me a game sort of grin and rolled his eye as if to say, ‘It’s the world! What can you do?’
It was a simple thing to reach out and carry him into my little hut of boards and bark, where I wrapped him in a blanket and set him in front of the oil stove to get dry and warm.
I had saved a life and that life therefore became my responsibility. I did all I could to nurse the little striped horse, who I named the Gleeful Horse, but I could see my efforts coming to nothing. He was as full of holes as a sieve and his legs were twisted. I bound his wounds with clean rags and tried to feed him, but he had no appetite, despite his steady good cheer.
It became clear to me that I would have to take the bus out to Barrage Cross to get help from near there. I went in the early morning and carried the Gleeful Horse in a string bag. He seemed to enjoy the sight of the green market gardens of Shindy Back through the windows of the bus, and as we drove through the chalk hills that roll away behind the gardens his fiddle-shaped nostrils and his round hindquarters twitched, as if in his own mind he was galloping about out there on the world’s green grass.
From the Barrage Cross shops I walked out of the village, into the trees, and down the little grey weedy paths through the birch and buck-thorn, going by the way that leads to the Garth of the Aorist: where trunk and branch turn, by and rumly by, into pillar and vault, and the path passes into the shade of stone arcades forming a four-sided cloister around a garth choked high with enormous brambles.
As you must, I walked around the cloister with the sun a certain number of times, then against the sun another number, then with the sun again, so that the brambles withdrew underground, all the thorny bundles coming apart and slithering below in one rush as if a giant in the earth had them on a rope (the effect on the eye is striking). After this, where all was a wild saw-toothed muddle just a moment or two ago, in another moment the lawn of trefoil and clover grew, which grows no matter the season – as dainty a green spread as you could wish for a picnic or a wedding. Upon the grass, as settled as a hen in the middle of the sweet-smelling lawn, there appeared the dwelling that appears: a round, rose-bosomed hut of dry-stone, having a chimney at the rear and one doorless doorway at the front, facing the coming visitor across the green court.
Entering this shelter, half house, half dovecote, as it were, with the Gleeful Horse in the string bag under my arm, I tugged my cap to the White Ma’at, the last Ma’at.
Whoever first painted the omen-card where she is shown as a figure seated with legs crosswise in front of a painted hearth must have seen her, or been advised by someone who had; at any rate, I have never found her arranged other than in this way when I come to her house.
The White Ma’at: a woman, or a woman-shaped thing, built in a long and heavy way, with a tall forehead like a white wall and a knotty blue vein labouring up it. What lies on the other side is a great store of irregular, wonderful knowledge; a cellar provisioned with all the vintages of magic. What she doesn’t see through her milky cataracts would fit in a baby’s sock.
She already knows about the Gleeful Horse.
‘That is a treasure animal,’ she says, even before I’ve finished pulling him out of the bag. He has no fear of her; he gives even the White Ma’at his qualmless grin. Nor does he mind that she doesn’t grin back. When she taps on his bandaged belly with a sharp knuckle he only rolls his eye and winks at me. He makes no fuss even when the Ma’at prises his mouth open and squints inside. Her parsnip-white fingers find something under his tongue. A toy – a plastic ring with a false emerald. She shows it to me and puts it back.
‘When all their treasure is gone, they die,’ she says simply.
My poor horse, having to hang onto that uncomfortable lump. I suppose that if he swallowed it, it might fall out one of the holes in his side when the bandages I put on come loose, as they not infrequently do.
I take him from the White Ma’at and sit with him in my lap, expecting her to offer me a healing charm or a recipe for physick. But instead, she tells me:
‘You mustn’t blame the children. They don’t see that this is a living thing, Molimus.’
‘They do see,’ I say in reply, uncomfortably, for it isn’t really safe to argue with the White Ma’at. ‘And they enjoy turning it into a dead thing.’
‘Molimus,’ she starts, and I know she is going to defend them, and I can’t fathom why – ‘Molimus, you have a foot in both worlds. And in one world this animal has life, and you see it, and I see it, but in the other world it has no life, it is a thing. You see more than most persons, true, but that’s damning with faint praise. Your eyes have a picture of cruelty on the inside. You see that picture clearly, and because of it, see other things unclearly.’
I think of what I might say and choose silence. When I think of how that picture came to be there on the inside of my eyes, I am certain beyond any possibility of error that children know what is alive, and moreover that they are disposed to do harm with this knowledge. I’m surprised that the Ma’at doesn’t know.
But in any case, I don’t see what this has to do with my horse and his needs.
Then, rare for her, she asks a question: ‘Why do you want to save that thing?’
I feel like answering that I didn’t come all this way to talk to a town matron with ordinary vulgar ideas. I wish I could hide the thought, but she says, ‘What do I care about your dull thoughts, Molimus?’ Her hands fall at her sides after she speaks. The unstrung gesture is not one that should belong to her. She isn’t like herself at all today, so that I dare to ask:
‘Is anything wrong, Ma’at?’
There’s nothing to like about the distracted way she pinches at the folds of her clothing, as if the white wool were full of seeds and burrs, nor the way her jaw goes around like a cow’s chewing cud. Thankfully, both motions cease and she retires her hands to her sides again – they look better hanging than twitching.
There’s no reason why the Ma’at shouldn’t be tired, of course. She was old a long time ago, and her life has certainly had its ups and downs. But it’s too much to believe that she is actually infirm in either body or mind. Or that she is changing. The world changes. The White Ma’at doesn’t.
‘The White Ma’at doesn’t,’ she echoes me aloud. I can’t tell whether she is agreeing or mocking me.
I try to think of nothing, while her eyes move back and forth under the cataracts, probably following the movements of figures she sees in her head.
It comes to
me that she would surely have dismissed me by now if she didn’t have any magic for the Gleeful Horse. So perhaps she wants to bargain, after all, and has a peculiar way of saying so today.
The White Ma’at is a great one for bargaining. When she was young, as they tell it in Bracklow and Shindy, she lost a battle that she shouldn’t have lost. Rather than blame herself she blamed her armies and cursed those of her loyal men who were left alive. She cast a spell that pushed them into the chalk hills like raisins in a pudding, so that they all died in the white dark.
After that she slept, and was captured whilst asleep. She was to have been hung and burnt, but she escaped – by means of a bargain with Prince November himself. That’s why she never leaves her house in the midst of the cloister. Prince November keeps her there. He knows she’d escape from him forever if he let her wander even as far as to the paths in the birch wood, never mind to the bus stop at Barrage Cross. Gossip says he drinks knowledge from the vein on her forehead at night and uses it for his business in the world.
The White Ma’at says she doesn’t care about my dull thoughts. But if I had some thoughts that glimmered a little? Perhaps she wants payment or part-payment in that coin. She is getting fretful, it may be, like a bored child, sick of her boxed-in life, and wants to hear a wonder-tale. I would rather believe that than believe she has changed, or is changing.
But how to give wonder to a creature like her?
‘Well, White Ma’at,’ I begin at last, ‘as for why I want to save him, it’s like this…’
From the seed of the name I gave him there grows a tale of happiness and delight that was lost to the world even before the long-ago age when the Ma’ats ruled from their halls where Shindy Estate is now. The gist is that my Gleeful Horse will bring this happiness back to us.
Or the beginning of the tale grows, anyway, issuing from me like a run of notes from a whistle. I use my best words – words and devices of speech I have heard during my life and remembered for their decorative and noble effects but have never had occasion to use aloud.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 237