by Greg James
Looking out through the small opening, I could see the world and it was weeping like the willow tree. Oils, watercolours, inks and enamel; all running into one another then trailing off into nothingness. Faces, futures, lives and loves forming a disintegrating waterfall, all of it flowing down without making a sound. Blues, yellows, amethysts, old man red, cherry and apricot shapes dissolving into space. Coming in, through that space, from in-between, was that tangerine breeze threaded with a fine orange smoke. It made sighs that were like those of men who stand at the lowest step of the gallows waiting to ascend. It was a way of being that was no way at all. I moved away from the opening.
“What is the smoke?” I asked Kafu.
“It is what is under the world, I think. What the tired and world-weary leave behind. Such people are considered mutants because of their pessimistic exegesis of the life and times they lived in. So, when they pass on, their spirits sink below and become as this. Who better to wipe the canvas clean than those who were pilloried and harried for their desire to not draw blood, to not believe and to not love. Those who were made so as to never make a thing again. Sweet dissipation, my dream is here. Your dream too, I think.”
“But this is not a dream. This is real.” I said.
I showed him my finger; the bubble of a blister left by the hot teapot.
“So, you feel pain? So what? So what if you are as dead as I am? You would still dream. Shakespeare lied when he said there is undiscovered country ahead. There is no such thing. We die, we lie down, we rot and then we dream. Even when the maggots have snacked on the last of our brains, we carry on with the dreaming. I have been dreaming for fifty years and I want to make an end of it. What better end could there be than this?”
“But how can the world be dying, just like that?”
“Who knows? Perhaps it is its hundredth birthday? Maybe it is a tsukumogami and this is how it changes into being alive? Funny to think there were all those people spending their time raging about life and its beauty yet they were really living in a dead ugly world. Ah, here they are, my sweet ones.”
Hovering before us, there was a geisha, careworn, hair showing grey, suckling on a last tooth, brown with decay. Her eyes were polished marbles reflecting the chiaroscuro of the dying world’s enamel waterfall. She held a withered hand out to me. On either side of her stood a Japanese school girl, no angels these, their hair shining greasily, thoroughly unwashed, their cheeks marked by dirt and catfight-scratches. Their eyes were bright as spit-balls and their skin was preserved amber. They were wicked dolls, each holding out a hand also.
“Ah, my old ghosts!” Kafu smiled, showing where he had lost teeth, as he clapped his hands, “How good of you to come for us!”
He took the hand of one school girl. I was too tentative to take the hand of the other.
“Look here, gaijin, you should take her hand because otherwise, you will wake up. Go back to where you were, what you were doing. Here, you can take the hand of these unwashed delights and be led into whatever awaits us. See what must not be seen. Feel what must not be felt.” he winked lasciviously at me as he said this.
Kafu then gestured at the nearly-gone world. Its once-ordered layers fast becoming a deluge of evaporating muds. The scent of tangerines was so strong, so ripe, almost bitter, verging on rotten, suggesting a profound decay. Soporific softness. Lingering liquescent touches, heavily stained with satisfying and sour juices.
“Take a bite of uneaten fruit. What have you got to lose?” Kafu cackled.
The schoolgirl snatched her grubby fingers at me, trying to grasp my hand. I felt her touch on my skin for a moment. It was damp, dingily sweaty. I could smell wet refuse from alleyways and soiled linen. I thought of home, my bed, my house, my job. All the mundane things we hold so dear. There was a tear in her eye and a small, circular brown bruise on her cheek.
I took her dirty little hand.
The geisha, still sucking at her dead tooth, turned and led the way, leading us away.
“Out we go!” cried Kafu.
Breathing in a rich air tasting of rancid tangerines left in the bin of a backstreet takeaway, together we passed through a thinning veil of pale rain, which poured down endlessly into the soundless void. On the other side, I saw what Kafu always dreamed of seeing. The last sound I heard was his cackle; the laughter of an old man satisfied at last.
I do not know if I was.
“ ... I want dissipation, to destroy myself in dissipation … ”
Kafu Nagai
The Curse of Amen-Ra
We are born from darkness into darkness. The light, the colours we see, are mere creations cast before our eyes; we dwell in seas of inconstant shadow where there are no walls, no barriers, no limits - only the shadow of a darkness in which we endure. Those who know the way may learn to shape the shadow and come unto a further darkness that lies far beyond death and there, where the light is at its darkest, all things shall come to them and be their dominion.
'Invocation at the Gate of C'cth' - a translation from original hieratic script found in the tomb of Amen-Ra.
I do not know what fate is likely to befall these words or whether they will find their way into civilised hands. Perhaps, it would be for the best if they did not. Ignorance is, after all, a sweet blessing that I wish I had not given up as freely as I did. My purpose in writing this memoir is to ease my weakening faculties from the weight of memory that they have been suffering under for some time. My eyes ache and water, my hands shake and tremble but I will finish this task before I set about putting an end to myself.
There! I have done it; made my confession to you, or to no-one but this scrap of yellowed and tawdry pulp, that I mean to take my own life. It is a subject and course of action that I have been describing a narcotic orbit around for many months now. My rooms in this downtown New York hovel-house are grubby, rat-infested and cockroaches make their nests in my food. I feel no security from my neighbours or the oafish landlady. I have no-one to call upon for aid. I shiver under blankets in threadbare clothes when I desperately try to sleep at night and every night I fail to grasp more than a few hours of slumberous succour. For when the candle's light is put out and perfidious darkness veils the room, I see only her and hear only her.
I recall that night so long ago when I was a man of character and position in society rather than the washed-up, degenerate opium sot who scrawls these words in an unsteady script that has lost all its flow and style. Oh, god in heaven, what have I become? I have offended every sense in my body and every lingering trace of my soul – and still she tortures me with remembrance. I see now that total obliteration of myself from this tawdry sphere is the one remaining path to peace.
However, to business, before I lose my way and pen an unimportant rant of self-hatred. I mean to lay before you the full facts, as I recall them, regarding the case of Amen-Ra. If you are unaware of her legend, let me enlighten you a little. A brief will suffice for a full and detailed history. Amen-Ra was an Egyptian princess of the Eighteenth Dynasty and her sarcophagus was interred at Luxor by the banks of the River Nile. In 1891, her tomb was opened by the archaeologist, Paris Marsh. It was recorded as being bare with little in the way of the usual wealth and comforts associated with a person of such high-standing. However, there were hieroglyphics on the wall that hinted at the reasons why her corpse was so impoverished. Some scandal and estrangement from her royal line - at the time, reading of it in The Times, I thought it just went to show that even thousands of years ago, gossip, spitefulness and rumour-mongering were the heart of existence for much of humanity.
Amen-Ra’s mummy was sold to the British Museum by Marsh for a paltry sum; his hopes of gaining fame and fortune by unearthing her remains and treasures gone. Though his reasons for getting rid of the sarcophagus were miserly, more recent events have shown that Marsh's wounded avarice may well have saved him whereas the successive owners of the casket were much less fortunate despite having motives that could be argued to be far more nob
le and pure. It soon became apparent that there was something about the sarcophagus that set it apart from other artefacts retrieved from the tombs of Egypt's kings and queens; not just the mere fact of Amen-Ra's supposed slatternly history. Certain hieroglyphics conformed to none of the known pictographs of heavenly bodies, natural phenomena, gods, humans and so forth, instead it was noted that not only was the non-human pronounced in the decorative forms but the hieratic surrounding the peculiarly amorphous images bordered on being non-terrestrial. Familiar cuneiforms were the exception in this case, not the rule.
Then, there was the face as painted onto the outer shell of her ornate coffin. Again it was a distinct deviation from the norm as, rather than being an expression of beatific peace and serenity, it was a mask of horror; a young woman in the throes of torture, prostrated by death agonies. Her eyes and mouth broadened and distorted to the point of sickening grotesquerie.
Naturally, given the character of her catafalque, there were a number of stories that arose during her time at the British Museum. Tappings, scratching and frantic hammerings were supposedly overheard by watchmen and curators during the course of their nightly duties, whenever they were in the proximity of said vessel. Additionally, there was talk of a woman's voice being heard, breathy and light, close to the ear, muttering words, guttural and unintelligible, whenever a member of staff found themselves intensely immersed in a task. Startled into awareness, they apparently would then hear the sound of footsteps retreating and, in pursuing them, found themselves at the side of Amen-Ra's undisturbed sarcophagus with the askance chasms of her eyes and mouth spilling shadows at their feet. The decision to sell off Amen-Ra to the first bidder, never mind the highest, was taken after one particularly foul incident occurred, from which the British Museum was still recovering its reputation when I left London and Mother England behind me. The Times meant to do a feature on Amen-Ra; a glorified gossip column rather than an informative historical study, I shouldn't wonder. They sent a young journalist, Alistair Pearson, along to question the curators on the rumoured hauntings and to photograph the still-unopened sarcophagus. The fact that the sarcophagus was closed despite being many months in the possession of the British Museum, I will also come to later in the narrative. The interviews and photography session went smoothly. Then, the following morning, Pearson was found by his fiancée having shot himself in the head after performing upon himself what came to be described in the gutter press as 'particularly graphic self-mutilations' - this may well be hearsay conjured by mongrels looking to excite their mutton-headed readership but, since then, I have seen things that make me wonder at the veracity of their accounts.
I should be clear here that Pearson was not dead but rather, having made a mess of the event, severely mentally-impaired. He was sent away to the madhouse. His fiancée did not survive the circumstances as well as he did. Her suicide was much more effective - hung by the neck using her dressing cord. It was sometime after Pearson's failed suicide and derangement that the casket of Amen-Ra was purchased by an American collector, Donald Fairview; a self-made millionaire who, after the fashions of the time, purported an interest in the occult and otherworldly. Pearson's photographs of the sarcophagus and its strange designs having been part of a reflective feature on the man's prematurely terminated career in The Times, they brought the attentions of people such as Fairview to the long-dead princess.
So it was Fairview who desired Amen-Ra should travel to New York with him aboard a passenger liner making her maiden voyage from Southampton dock: RMS Titanic. As you will no doubt surmise, it is at this point that I found myself drawn into the narrative of events, a narrative that I fear is soon to end for me under circumstances I could never have dreamed of back then, in the innocent days of mere months ago. How little time it takes for a man to fall to ruin, so suddenly is the subtle weave of his fate undone.
In former times, I was known for my mastery of therapeutic mesmerism. So talented that I was able to eke out a living of reasonable economy visiting the Soho salons and homes of well-to-do ladies where I assisted in the healing of peculiar mental hysterias by the use of subtle suggestion and coercive forgetfulness. Some would call my behaviour unethical but I would put it to them that we have all the surgeons in the world and yet we remain as unable to successfully heal the wounds of the mind as the cave-dweller who first trepanned his brother in order to release the evil spirits bedevilling his brain.
The invitation to Mr Donald Fairview's cabin came as something of a surprise to me at the time. I was travelling alone, looking forward to a much needed holiday in New York, my first time in America. I had just dined sumptuously in the elegant Jacobean saloon on salmon in a water cress sauce - if I had known it was to be my last good meal on this earth, I would have savoured it all the more. Chance, destiny, fate, the Will as defined by Schopenhauer - which of these was behind my undoing that day?
I know not and think I never will.
Fairview's cabin was well-appointed, as were all of the First Class cabins, with a double bed, polished teak table and chairs with gold leaf decoration. The cabin was well occupied upon my arrival. Whatever revels were underway, I was none the wiser as to their nature until the matter was fully explained to me. The explanation must wait a moment however as a young woman did then enter the room and, as well as myself and the dead witch, Amen-Ra, she is intrinsic to what happened that night. The last point in the triangle. The final figure in our fateful trinity.
She was fair-skinned, dark-haired, and wore a blue nightdress that seemed to glow sapphire-bright in the dim light of the cabin. The only illumination came from a handful of oil lamps that had been turned down as low as could be. Her eyes were startlingly feline and shone emerald. She was a paragon of beauty, leaving my mouth dry and heart shuddering when her gaze passed over me. Her gaze came to rest upon the cabin's bed where something unsightly reclined; a wizened, frayed torso with walnut skin drawn tight over its fragile bones. Uneven teeth nestled within the receded pucker that would have been full fleshy lips in life and nuggets of browned gristle glistened in charnel-pit sockets beneath a torn papyrus brow, which showed patches of a darkly crystalline skull. These revealed patches caught the low light in a queer and fractal way, sending black rainbows streaming across my vision before cascading and dying out in the peripheries. For some reason I could not explain, the momentary illusion made my eyes swim with tears and a surge of melancholia seized at my heart.
There was a curious odour in the room that was identified to me as a mixture of balsamic resin and incense, apparently a fusion once favoured by the priests of Ancient Egypt when performing certain rites. The person who identified the source of the odour to me was the overseer of the scene into which I had unknowingly walked and would soon become a knowing and much-accursed player.
Donald Fairview was an American gentleman in the classic sense. As stout and bullish as the English gentleman is considered to be gaunt and affected. His chin was broad and hung double, making him appear as an over-excited rooster when he spoke. His complexion was as flushed as his daughter's was wan and pale. His eyes were dark sparking flints. He shook my hand with over-familiar vigour, thanking me for accepting his invitation. “I understand you know how to put a woman under, sir? Get her in touch with the spirits as it were?”
I assured him that the sex of the individual I mesmerised had no bearing upon their susceptibility.
“The point is can you put my Esme under or not?”
Before I agreed to make such an attempt, I asked what the purpose of the session would be and indeed why there were so many spectators. The vast majority of my appointments in London were private sessions. Fairview puffed himself up – a rooster in the henhouse – introducing himself even though everyone present was already well-acquainted. “I am Donald Fairview, a self-made man am I and, tonight, I mean to do what no-one else has been able to before me. I mean not only to speak with the dead but to get the dead to come back, to cross the great divide and show themselves in th
e here and now.”
I asked what was the purpose of the abomination laid out upon the bedspread.
“That is the Princess Amen-Ra. I mean to speak with her, bring her here, have her kneel before me and acknowledge me as her better … “
I was no longer sure what to make of the man. Great wealth had clearly had a deleterious effect upon his faculties.
Fairview went on with his self-important declamation as follows, “ … she tried to do as I will do tonight centuries ago and they cast her out for it. Shut her up in a casket that could not be opened unless someone came along who knew the code. Well, I found the code in an old book, a very old book, and, as the book says, first shall the body be set free and the spirit thereafter.”
Red in the face, his soliloquy done with, Fairview offered me a sum of money to mesmerise his daughter that no man in my position, or any other for that matter, could have turned down, my conscience became a bleating, insignificant thing.
“Very well, sir. Let us get to work then,” Donald Fairview declared.
Esme Fairview sat before me. Though it pained me, I asked her to close those stunning eyes and I took her hands in mine as I spoke in soothing tones, performing small circular motions upon her palms with my thumbs. I then laid down her hands and made a series of passes; touching her brow, cheeks, and chin, repeating the gestures in a variety of sequences, all the while continuing to speak and soothe until it was apparent that Miss Fairview was completely under. Her chin sank a little as did her shoulders. She breathed in the rhythm of a light sleep. A hush descended and, licking my lips, I waited, unsure as to my next move. I was no carnival hypnotist. I had never sold myself as a scryer of spirits yet the ignorant had made me out to be so. The sum promised to me by Fairview crept into my thoughts and, letting out a long, uneasy breath, I proceeded. “Esme, can you...hear me?”