The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
Page 238
My efforts sound very handsome to me – so handsome that they even sound truthful.
But before I am much past the beginning, the White Ma’at snaps ‘Enough!’ so sharply that I jump. In the glare of her cataracts, my story lies dead. If it had been a treasure animal it would have been not beaten with wooden weapons but dispatched in an instant with one swing of a real sword.
I want to cry out that this is not a game. It’s all I can do to bite my tongue. I can’t make myself not think of putting my huge hands around the neck of the White-Ma’at and shutting her throat for her. Of course, if I tried something so mad, she might drum me into the ground like the biggest raisin of all. I feel sick, not for my sake but for the sake of my horse, whose winking eye shows how little he understands.
But the White Ma’at only twitches her lips, as if she were amused at last.
‘Let’s not tell the end of the story,’ she says, and her voice is calm. And she, then: ‘You must fill that sorry thing with treasures again, Molimus.’ I don’t like her calling him a sorry thing. But I hearken to what she tells me, now that she is speaking about the Gleeful Horse.
‘You don’t know at all why you want to save it. But I know on your behalf. The future will work through you, Molimus. Who would have imagined that? Replenish his treasures – you have your work, Molimus the Great. Replenish them abundantly.’
‘And how shall I do that?’ I ask gruffly. Her insults and sneering tone have rubbed me up the wrong way, and I can’t hide it – but I think she was telling the truth that she doesn’t care about my thoughts, even if they’re disrespectful. ‘Should I buy caramels and trinkets and feed them to him?’
‘No,’ she answers to my words. ‘The world inside him is yet another world. You can’t see it, Molimus. These things, these nothings that fall out of a treasure animal, are altogether different when they’re inside him. In the world inside him, they are more like stars. It is elements – starlike pieces – of this sort that you must gather and feed to him. He has one left, as you saw. One is not enough.’
I feel a qualm, as if conspiracy sits there with us. The Ma’at sounds more like herself again, but I am suddenly ill with a spasm that feels like shame. I can’t say whether this is the reasonable compunction that belongs properly to the healthy conscience of a man, or an imaginative, fanciful shame. Whatever it is, here in the Garth of the Aorist it has the shape of a real, solid thing stuck in my gullet, making me gag around it. My tongue feels it as it comes up with a mouthful of bile. It is annular, with an embellishment on one side: a sort of ornamented sphincter. I spit the plastic ring out onto the floor, where its stones of pure false red blink sleepily in the weak sun that has placed one foot through the opening in the wall.
The White Ma’at picks it up and makes it vanish between her fingers like a street magician doing a coin trick.
‘Was that a starlike piece?’ I ask.
She says no, it wasn’t, but it was something I should feel better for having got out of me.
And waits, until I ask where I should find them.
Within every living thing is a starlike piece. Those within human beings are bright, and those within children are the brightest of all. As people age, the starlike parts grow dim as though with distance, except in the cases of certain geniuses and half-wits. At first I didn’t understand how children can be so cruel and their starlike parts so bright, but the White Ma’at, who told me these things when she gave me the Wine of Smoke, said that she knew nothing of stars being kind, only of their being powerful.
She asked me three times if I really wished to drink the Wine of Smoke.
The Wine of Smoke was acquired by her, hundreds of years ago, from a man who combined the talents of wizard and vintner, who had come to the Garth of the Aorist to bargain with her. She intended to use it to escape from the confinement that Prince November had forced on her. But even after drinking a draft and becoming smoke, she found that she still could not penetrate past the cloister. The White Ma’at spent more than a century in sorcerous meditation of the most strenuous kind to turn her body back to flesh.
For someone who is not a sorcerer there is no such possibility of return. And the gift of death is lost. If one who had drunk the Wine of Smoke were captured and, for example, shut within a bottle and the bottle sent deep into the earth, he would be stuck in that bind until the end of time. This, said the White Ma’at, is the penalty I should expect to suffer if I ever break our agreement.
As if I would ever break it – for all is well with the Gleeful Horse. He greets me leaping and grinning when I return home in the early mornings. Even before I get back, I hear him whinny merrily when he smells me coming through the fog on the river.
I think he has forgotten that he was ever hurt. There’s no rancour or fear in him, nothing timorous or furtive. He breathes in the starry motes – they look like sun-kissed thistledown – through his fiddle-shaped nostrils. He capers all around the bridge and the docks, rolling his eyes and winking, brave as a flag, friend to cats and dogs, and that is as it should be. I only wish I could pet him; but in the afternoons I lead him by my scent to Shindy Park, and the old ladies who feed the ducks there make a great fuss of him.
The starlike pieces don’t last very long – this being because they aren’t his own, the White Ma’at taught me – so I must keep putting them inside him, as she told me to do. For each one that I give to him, I must take another to give to her.
Over in Firmitas they shut all their gilded and vermilion windows at night, and in Bracklow and Shindy they hang up charms next to fireplaces. On both sides of the river they talk in whispers about the smoke that sticks to the life of children and pulls it away. The ones the smoke touches sicken and die quickly. Before they die they change, becoming like wax paper figures. You could light candles in them and they would be child-shaped lanterns. Because they become hollow, like treasure animals, the sick ones are euphemistically called Treasure Children.
Bracklow wonders where Molimus the Great has gone, but I’m still around, in the smoke of chimneys and bus exhausts, and in the engine smoke of the day boats ferrying the folk who work as maids and porters in Firmitas. I believe I know what the White Ma’at does with her share of the starlike pieces, for I’ve seen Prince November in his tin-shingled carriage out on the chalk hills more than once, with his retinue in dun and black, driving toward the birch wood. He and she have come to a new agreement, I think, whereby she is paying off her debts.
The vein on her forehead has become a lode of white gold: often swollen, but sometimes flat, so that the gossip about Prince November drinking from her has gained more currency amongst those who go to see her. But not so many do these days. Unthinkable as it is, she has changed. She is nearly always queer now. I never know whether she will be distracted or depressed or silly when I come with the lovely motes for her to inhale. She wears the ring I coughed up, and when she’s in her whimsical mood she steals admiring looks at it, as if it were a real ruby on her finger.
I would not have believed it possible, but since the emptying sickness has been in the world the old game of murdering treasure animals has fallen out of favour. Ball games and swap cards are popular now, and pageant games.
In the pageants, a character called Grinning Horse has for some time been a playground hero. He is the one who saves children by breathing in the smoke before it can reach them. He is also the one who, by the laws of the games, is the bold opponent of a certain Prince No-Never, and his old nurse, the Wheat Mate, and defeats them (as he defeats policemen, schoolmasters, and other vile enemies – often in rough and bloody ways, children being what they are). For months, I could make no pretence to having an explanation for this, but eventually I began to hear things. It seems that the Treasure Children themselves started the invention of Grinning Horse, Prince No-Never and the Wheat Mate. If what I have heard is true, the Treasure Children dream of these characters after the smoke visits them, and they say the smoke gives them the dreams in exchange f
or their lives. The dreams, and the part played by the smoke, they confide about to friends and siblings before they are seized by the silence that comes with the hollowing effect of the illness, and the accounts are reinforced by others who fall sick.
I remember the White Ma’at’s words concerning the future, and how my never-finished tale of the Gleeful Horse sounded true when I tried to tell it.
So perhaps it will all be just as I imagined.
Afterweird: The Efficacy of a Worm-Eaten Dictionary
China Miéville
How should we conduct investigations? We need access to the innards of whatever we would understand, but if we take a scalpel to their skins we change them, and the only thing we end up investigating then is something open and bleeding – as in very different grotesque ways both Heym’s and Shea’s dissection stories here make clear. Faced with objects whose terms and natures are not self-evident what we need is some variant of diaphanisation, that enzymatic process that makes transparent the flesh, makes the body a window. This is true of our heuristic terms and functions as much as of the objects they are intended to illumine. It’s as true of
our microscope-machines
(those were not here a moment ago, were they?) as of the microbes we stare at through them. We should wish, in other words, not only to examine history – cultural, literary, whatever – through some filter, but to turn our gaze on that filter itself. This book you hold is a collection of ‘The Weird’? Which is what, please? How to proceed?
Etymology as a making-transparent. Word-history is one of the most common
little doors-in-the-tree(-or-wall)
scholars start by opening. ‘This is a study of “Blah” or “Blahist” study’, a book announces. ‘The dictionary tells us that the root of the word “Blah”…’ Etc. So: the Weird. Running a rough plough through
the archaeology
of language brings up ‘Wyrd’, that Anglo-Saxonism of knotting cause and effect, as cats-cradle intricate and splendid as any Sutton Hoo buckle: Fate, Destiny. Sometimes even Doom. Personified in those women on that blasted heath, the implication is of a tug at some
slub
in the life-weft, the snarl of interweaving, the ineluctable. ‘Wyrd’, as the great Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’ insists, ‘bi
Thus Wyrd-armed we go back to the Weird, in this book in your hands, and in the world itself. We sensitise ourselves to certain moments. Those that we experience not merely as odd, or strange, or surprising, but as weird. We shove a
fate-shaped key
at the Weird keyhole (or pry at the Weird
doorframe with a fate-shaped jimmy
). Beyond, testing our hypothesis, we find among other artefacts: the presences of Blackwood and Morrissette’s ‘Familiars’, Krohn’s insects, the family-monsters of Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’, oneiric patchworks of biology and impossibility; the baleful spooks of modernity, in ‘Smoke Ghost’ that have, spuriously efficient as the industry they haunt, bypassed the necessity of dying or living in the first place; the uneasy almost-recognition of the punishments in Lanagan’s ‘Singing My Sister Down’; the fungal universe of Bernanos; the displacements of Leman’s ‘Window’ and Jones’ ‘Little Lambs’; vividly present unplaces (‘The Shadowy Street’; ‘The Night Wire’); unclearly suggestive fables (Chapman and Bhêly-Quenum); opaque punishments (Kafka and Sansom); lessons and items of all kinds. Bearing the meaning we’ve learnt, our
weapon
pilfered from the Anglo-Saxon wordhoard, we go to war against incomprehension. ‘Weird is Wyrd,’ we say, and see how this clarifies.
And after a long time trying to apply that as insight we nod and stop and consider again and must finally ask: What if etymology is fucking useless?
What if it’s worse than useless?
What if thinking through the prehistory of the term ‘Weird’ is utterly counterproductive? If the shift that occurred some time in the 19th Century is not an evolution of meaning but a cleft, a repudiation, a revolution, a violence, a break? If Weird is the ungrateful
feral child
of Wyrd, raised by Modernity’s wolves? And what if this semiotic abandonment means no Oedipal drama, no tedious lullaby of reconciliation or loss or mutual learning but instead an unexpectedly clear, debate-ending statement about the heritability of meme-content: that there is none at fucking all. That the Weird is not a new iteration of fatefulness, but its rebuke, a contingency, a newness that shreds the sealed totality its parental theme pretended existed. The fact of the Weird is the fact that the worldweave is ripped and unfinished. Moth-eaten, ill-made. And that through the little tears, from behind the ragged
edges
, things are looking at us.
The Weird is neither holy nor whole-y. It is hole-y.
Like flies in rot, frogs in the rich mud of the Nile, like mice in spoiled grain, the things that watch – Outer Monstrosities, Great Old Ones, as Hodgson and Lovecraft had it – were spontaneously generated. Larvae budding in the fruit of the world-loom. Modernity weaves a moth-eaten cloth, and it is the final instars of those bad eaters that watch us through rifts their maggoty baby selves made.
Weird is anti-Wyrd. A subtraction of the D (always a weak letter, prone to replacement), and its usurpation by M. Weird? Wyrd. Weird = Wyrm. This is the vermiformalist fact of the matter.
The dwellers in holes are not punishments. That they watch us is as random as a rip, the shape of threadbareness. That is the Weird: that we are watched from holes.
You feel eyes on you. Weird is an affect. We know it when we feel it. It’s constrained neither by ‘level’ of culture – there is pulp here, and there is ‘haute’ literature, by Bruno Schulz, Tagore, Leonora Carrington – nor by nationality, nor subject matter. Certainly there are monsters but there is emotion and character and monsterless places too. Supernature is strong, but by no means the only transmitter of that alien unease.
It is not uncanny – we might post-facto decode whatever metaphor we make of it, but its interior is less repressed than unrecognised. The Weird is not the un-but the abcanny.
This canon changes. Its edges are as protean, its membranes as permeable and oozing as the breaching biology of Lovecraft’s Dunwich Horror. We interpret it, of course: our minds are meaning-factories. But the ground below them is hole-y. There are cracks and chaos, meaningquakes. The metaphors we walk on are
scree
.
In this book is a Weird Canon. It is not exactly yours – how could it be? We don’t fray the world quite the same, and different things watch each of us. Nor is it quite mine. But we recognize it, and recognize the ways we don’t recognize it. The same book, read twice, in different frames of mind, might be once quotidian, unthreatening, and the next time – was it our own urgent fingers that snagged those threads? – frayed. Weird.
Weird travels with us, each reader a Typhoid Mary in every library. It passes from us into pages, infects healthy fiction (pretend for a moment there might be any such thing). A virus of holes, a burrowing infestation, an infestation of burrowingness itself, that births its own pestilential hole-dweller.
There’s a slip again.
Pick ourselves up, try to regain footing. Where are we? The world is a many-shelved library. The shovel-handed Things of Johnson’s ‘Far Below’, dholes, conqueror worms, cloth-maggots, bookworms. Burrowers have various names. They chew through books, and leave their exudations, that spoor of anxiety. We have all felt that tacky residue.
We’re tempted to hunt
Patient Zero
. Is there a culprit in this library? Which book was first sick? (Of course they’re all in terrible health.)
Turn to Margaret Irwin’s ‘The Book’. Ultimately it alleges malevolent orders, a struggle not to succumb, a heroic assertion of familial
piety. Such nostrums are resilient, and do no real harm. But that is far the least, the weakest weird of this most weird Weird Tale. An extensive postscript. The story’s pinnacle is its magnificent vision of the viral Weird, a bad sensibility breaching the cover-membranes of books, spreading the disease dis-ease. So that, slowly, the shelf of abutting volumes become nasty stories.
Like the proto-postmodern rewriting of Don Quixote brilliantly formulated by Borges’s Pierre Menard, which changes Cervantes’ passages solely by considering them in new contexts, Irwin’s Book alters no specific ‘words’ of the texts it abuts. But it corrupts them. The protagonist, reading them after they have sat too near the Book, finds in Dickens ‘revolting pleasure in cruelty’, in Stevenson ‘sickly attraction to brutality’, in Charlotte Bronte ‘a raving, craving maenad’.
All books alter the books that are (read) near them. Here, it is the unease, the strange, the alien malevolent, in its alterity, its Weird, that spreads. That contingent and unwyrdly, that wyrms its way throughout the library.
Thus the canon grows like mould, mildew-damp, eldritch, its vectors vermiform, gnaw-claiming even works that we had thought sedate, a subterranean countertradition, an abcanny that has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with the unsuspected. Burrowers cause the scree slippage of solid ground.