Voice of the Fire

by Alan Moore

  ‘Don’t you fret about the warm, now, Judge. My mother says as we are all to take our clothes off for you later on. Then we’ll be glad the fire’s banked up so high.’

  What is she saying? From across the table, Widow Deene speaks now in a reproachful tone I have not heard her use before. ‘You mind now, Emmy. He might not be quite so underneath-the-weather as he looks.’

  The adolescent seems to take no heed of this, but only cocks her head to scrutinize me closely, as if making up her mind before she speaks. ‘Oh, no. I think he’s had it, right enough. Besides, I know a way we shall soon see.’

  She straightens up away from me. Without abandoning her smile she lifts her weighty arms to curl behind her neck where lie the fastenings of her smock, which she commences to unbutton. No one speaks. The room is silent save the fat old woman’s ragged breath. My mind is swimming, and it comes to me belatedly that there is something very much awry here in this sweltering chamber.

  Emmy has by now undone herself enough to work both shoulders from her dress, followed by one arm then the other. Finally, with a triumphant smile, she yanks the whole affair down to her hips so that above the waist she is quite naked. Do I dream this? Emmy’s breasts are large and dense, that now she lifts her hands to cup and weigh. Flat aureolae, brown and violet, surmount each bub, the purpled nipples thrusting out like baby’s thumbs. She steps towards me, cradling one teat in either palm and, with a vague anxiety that seems remote and distant to me, I discover that I can no longer move. The singing in my ears is louder, though I still hear Emmy as she speaks beside my ear.

  ‘There, now. What do you think of them? Aren’t they a lovely set of things? Why, I would wager that you’d like to suck upon them if you could. That’s what gents like to do, I hear.’

  Now she inclines her body closer to me so the musky scent of her is overwhelming. Lifting up one breast she tilts the nipple to my slack and gaping mouth, wiping it slowly back and forth across my lower lip, so that it folds, and bends, then springs again erect against my teeth. I try to close them on the slippery bud, and yet cannot.

  ‘Now stop it, Emmy!’ It is Widow Deene who speaks. ‘I’ll put up with this family’s ways so long as I am married into it, but not all of us wants to see your lechery both day and night.’

  In answer, Emmy lewdly rocks her body back and forth so that her breast pumps in and out between my numb, unmoving lips. It seems that the old lady seated at the table’s end finds this so comic an effect that she begins to cackle, deep in her polluted, rattling lungs. Hilarity being contagious, little Eleanor next starts to smirk while darting cautious glances at her taut-faced mother, Widow Deene, as if to ask if it is yet permissible to laugh. At length she can contain herself no longer, and her mirth is given vent in snivelling noises down her nose, whereon the widow may not any more maintain her scowling and affronted disposition, starting in to snigger too, so that the four of them are laughing now.

  The merriment endures a while and then is died away as Emmy takes her breast from out my mouth, a solitary pearl of spittle hung by a saliva thread there at its gallows tip. She takes a step back so as better to regard me and her smile is scornful now, filled with contempt.

  ‘He won’t be long now. We could make a start on divying him up, once we’ve our clothes off so they shan’t be marked.’

  Now the old woman speaks from somewhere to my right. My head hangs slack against the back-rest of my chair and I have not the strength to turn it, so must listen only to the phlegm-harp of her voice.

  ‘Don’t be so daft, girl. See the way his eyes move back and forth! There’s yet vitality in him and if we cut him now it would fly everywhere. We’ll bide our time until he’s gone. When blood no longer moves, the mess is not so great.’

  I am afraid, despite the numbing fog that seems to hang about me. Did they say I should be cut? I make attempt at protest yet can utter nothing save a hollow moan. What has become of me?

  Across the table, Eleanor now joins with the discussion, turning to the matriarch sat at the table’s end. ‘Is it all right to call you Grandma now?’ The woman coughs her gruff assent and Eleanor continues. ‘Grandma, it’s so very hot in here. Can I take off my things like Auntie Em? You said that we would do it later.’

  Here her mother, Mrs Deene, makes hurried interjection. ‘Never mind what Auntie Emmy does. I won’t have you grow up behavin’ like your father’s family.’

  Now Emmy’s mother, leaning in upon my field of vision, tips her great bulk forward in her chair to plant her elbows on the table-top and glare with hard resentment at the Widow Deene. ‘Your Nelly’s in this with the rest of us. That’s what we said, and that’s how it shall be. The reason it is being done at all is for her father, and your husband. Emmy’s brother, and my son. You’ve wed into this family now, young Mary Deene-as-was, and you’re a Deery. Deerys stick together.’

  There is pause wherein the younger woman seems to wither under that indomitable gaze. Her eyes fall to her lap and she is cowed, at which the harridan continues, speaking now once more to Eleanor.

  ‘If you’ve a mind to take your clothes off as we all agreed then so you shall, that they might not be splashed and stained when we commence the bloody-work. Indeed, we might as well all of us be about undressin’. He’ll be gone before I’m out my underskirts, you’ll see.’

  It is an effort now even to breathe and waves of crashing blackness break within me, rattling as they drag their foaming tendrils back across the shingle of my thoughts, churn buried notions up into the glistening light. I think of Francis, and I understand the way he starts at every creaking of a door. I think of Dee. I think of Faxton, but I cannot bring a picture of it to my mind. All I can see is empty streets that wind past pitiable ruins before even these are gone and in their stead there is a great forgetfulness of grass, unmarked by spire or fence or gutter.

  All about me now the women take their garments off amidst much whispering and laughter. Eleanor skips by, her skirtless, hairless body seeming almost without gender, to assist her grandmother in the prolonged unveiling of that huge, white form; the belly hung in folds above the almost bare pudenda where such few hairs that remain are yellow-grey, like spilled and dirty candle-fat. Propped naked up against the table’s other edge is Emmy, with her buttocks white upon the dark, scarred wood as she helps Mrs Deene comb out her auburn hair. Was Deene her name? Or was it Dee? Or Deery? I cannot recall.

  She sits and faces me across the table, wearing not a stitch, and keeps her eyes upon my face as Emmy starts to plait her chestnut locks for her. The room is like a furnace and I watch a crystal globe of sweat traverse the seated woman’s collarbone to vanish in the smear of light between her breasts. The scene reminds me very much of something I have seen before, damp women tending to each other’s hair, but fog-bound as I am I cannot place it.

  To my right, Nell’s grandmother steps shamelessly from out the tangle of her underskirts there pooled about her feet. Helped by the cherub Eleanor, she next retrieves a box of cutlery from somewhere up above the stove. Selecting carving knives from out the tray, she and the girl proceed to sharpen them against a hearth-brick that I cannot see, but only hear the measured slinth of iron on stone. There is a fierce pain in my belly that yet feels somehow remote from me, as if it were occurring to someone else. The waves of light and shadow that seem in my eyes to roll across the crowded room come faster now, like ripples.

  Bored with waiting for my strangled breath to cease, the naked women next ignore me. Sat about their table, they make conversation over little things as if I were not dying here amongst them. They discuss their ailments, and the price of grain, and what they’ll do once John is out of gaol. Without their clothes they seem not human but more like some cadre of weird sisters; Fates or Gorgons stepped from legend. All about them is a vaporous radiance that seems to boil away to subtle colours at its edge. The smallest gesture leaves its traces in the air behind, with a descending arm become instead like shimmering
pinions, fanned and splendid. They are talking, but I can no longer tell the sense of what they say.

  Their words are from a glossary of light, lips moving silently as if beyond the scrying glass and in my ears the singing has achieved a perfect clarity, the rounds and phrases of it now resolved. Above the roaring of the altitudes each foreign syllable is bright and resonant, is achingly familiar in its alien profundity, a layered murmur echoing in everything. I know this song.

  I know it.

  Partners in Knitting

  AD 1705

  Inside the heads of owls and weasels there are jewels that will effect a cure for ague, for colic. Lightning is the spend of God that strikes an ash tree, where His seeds grow up, with rounded heads and slender tails, between the roots. A woman or a man may take these spendings in their mouth, and after have the Sight, so that they may put all their thoughts into a fire, to travel with its smoke towards the sky. Here they will meet with stork or heron that will bear them up until the Great Cathedral may be apprehended, with its perfect vaulted ceilings formed from naught but Law and Number. I have swallowed my own piss, and I have seen these things.

  Not yet an hour since, Mr Danks, the Minister of All Saints came with Book and bailiffs to the cell I share with Mary, after which they brought us out and hung us from a gallows at the town’s North gate until we were near dead, our gizzards all but crushed. Cut down, we were next tethered here. Wearing our rope-burns now like glorious chains of office, we are sat half-conscious and resplendent on our kindling throne.

  Tied here beside me, Mary’s small, warm hand is in my own. She is no more afraid than I, soothed by a breeze come from the terraces invisible, made tranquil in that mauve light fogging their night pastures. Even were our throats not so constricted by our lynching to deny us speech, no word need pass between the two of us that we may know these things. It is the same Realm, the same thought of Realm, where thought of Realm is Realm itself. They’re going to burn me, and I’m not yet twenty-five.

  Across the cold March fields the birds are building something delicate and terrible from strings of sound, from play of echo. We two are the last that shall be murdered thus by fire in England. This we have been told by Imps and things of colour that abide in higher towns where all the days are one, where are no yesterdays nor yet tomorrows. After this, no more of human tallow round a wick of petticoat. No more the fair cheek rouged by blister.

  Now I slowly raise my weighted lids until both eyes are open, just as in that instant Mary does the same beside me. Seeing this, the gathered herd beyond our pyre make loud gasps of amazement and step back, their sty-born faces ill with terror. Widow Peak, who said she’d heard us talk of killing Mrs Wise, now draws a cross upon her withered tit and spits, while Parson Danks commences reading loudly from his moth-worn book, his words like smuts of ash wiped on the morning.

  If you only knew, you barn-apes, what it was you burned here. It is not for me I say this, but for Mary, who is beautiful where I am plain. If you might see the corners of her eyes when she is saying something comical then you would know her. If you knew the strong taste in her cunt when she has not yet woken of a morning, you would look away in shame and quench your torches. Captured in her ladyhair, my dribble turned to jewels and each one had a water-painted mansion of homunculi tiny and bright within it. When she walks up stairs it is like song, and at the time of each month’s blood she may speak in the tongue of cats, but then, what of it? It is all of this as nothing. Put a light to it, render it all to cinder, her red hair, the drawings that she makes.

  I will admit that we have had the conversation of those nine Dukes ruling Hell. Having now seen that place it holds no fear for me, for it is beautiful, and at its mouth are precious stones. It is but Heaven’s face when looked upon by the deceived and fearful, and in all my trade with its Ambassadors I have discovered them to be as gentlemen, both grand and fair of manner. Belial is like a toad of wondrous glass with many eyes ringed on his brow. He is profound and yet unknowable, while Asmoday is more like an exquisite web of pattern that surrounds the head: wry, fierce, and skilled in the mathematic arts. Despite their wrath and their caprice they are not bad so much as other to us, and are more than pretty in their fashion, that you should be envious of those who look upon such marvellous affairs of Nature.

  Now a thick-browed man I do not know steps forward with his torch and touches it to knotted rags and straw there at the kindling’s edge. We close our eyes and sigh. Not long, my love. Not far to go. The unseen balconies are not so high above us now.

  We met each other when I was fourteen and came from Cotterstock to Oundle up the road because my parents wanted quit of me. Mary was just the same age, pale and freckled, with big legs and arms. She let me hide out in her dad’s back yard those first cold months, and some nights in her room, if it should pass her sister and her brother were not there. We’d go about the town and play such games. With evening drawing in we’d dare each other into standing there beneath the Talbot Hotel’s cobbled passage, leading to the dark yard at the rear. We’d swear we heard the ghost of old Queen Mary that had slept there on the night before they took her head, walking the upstairs landing with it tucked beneath her arm. Squeal. Hug ourselves there in the gloom.

  Sometimes we’d venture out across the piss-and-ale-washed flagging of the yard and through to Drummingwell Lane, at the Talbot’s rear. We’d stand and listen at the Drumming Well itself, that made a sound much like a drum the night before King Charles died and at other times beside, as with the death of Cromwell. We would cock our ears and hold our breath, though no sound ever came.

  We’d run out in the fields to hide amongst the wild laburnum, and in fancy would be savage, blue-arsed men come from the Africas, that crawled half-naked with ferocious, droll expressions there between the drowsing, nodding stems. We stuck our fingers up each other and would laugh at first, become thereafter hot and grave. We found a dead shrew, stiff and with a gloss as though its death were but a coat of varnish, and one afternoon I watched her piddle in the cowslips, closed my eyes upon the wavering skewer of plaited gold that bored a sopping hole there in the soil beneath her, but heard still its pittering music and saw yet its braided stream within my thoughts.

  Now comes the first kiss of the smoke, a husband’s loving peck upon the nose, and just as with a husband we both keep our eyes shut while it’s going on. Time soon enough for him to shove his sour and choking tongue half down our gullets. Raw and smouldering nettle-bite curls there behind our cringing nostrils, and I hope the faggots are not green and damp, or likewise slow to burn, for when our covenant was made, the Black-Faced Man said that we should not know the fires of punishment. A whistling silence foams up in my ears, as if at some unfathomable approach, but swiftly dies away, subdued amidst the papery crackling that is all about us now. Hush, Mary Phillips, and be not afraid, for we were made a promise, you and I.

  We found a livelihood that suited me, and also found a little room in Benefield where I might lodge those next ten years, though hardly did a day go by we were not in each other’s company. As we grew up, the great adventure that there was between us seemed almost our coracle, that carried us away in time from that laburnum country, full of ghosts and secret games, to cast us up amongst the sulking islands that are men.

  We wallowed in them, men, those next few years, didn’t we, Mary? Although I confess I did more wallowing than you, you did not go without your share. Ditch-diggers, sextons, publicans, and slaughtermen still with the stink of killing on their hands. They bought us small beer in the front bar of the Talbot; took us up against the jetty wall just as they’d take a piss while on their stumble-footed journey back to wife and hearth. Because of this, I did not often sleep with them, but when I did I was surprised: if they are not awake, they are much softer to the touch, and more like women. What a pity, then, that they should ever stir.

  Yet stir they did. They’d rise before me, gone before my eyes were open properly, and when I’d s
ee them walking of a Sunday with their families only the wives would look at me, their faces hard. If these should glimpse me later in the market, gathered in their twos and threes, they’d call out after me, ‘There goes a whore’, or else they’d teach their little ones to taunt me, crying, ‘Shaw the whore’ and ‘Strumpet Nell’ wherever I should walk. How is it that the pleasant, simple thing of knobs in notches might provoke such scorn, and shame, and misery? Why must we take our being’s sweetest part and make it yet another flint on which to gouge ourselves?

  Now comes a curious thing. Shifting against my bonds, I once again have cause to open up my eyes, whereon I find that everything is stopped. The world, the smoke, the clouds, the crowds and leaping flames, all of it still and without motion. Stopped.

  How strange and charming is this realm with movement fled, how perfectly correct. The dragon frills of frozen smoke, upon inspection, have a beauty that is lost to normal sight, with smaller frills identical in shape that blossom, fern-like, from the twisting mother coil. To think that I had never noticed.

  Looking down, I feel only a mild surprise to note that we are burning, me and Mary both alike. Why, these drab skirts of ours have never looked so fine as they do now, awash with fire and light and colour; ruby-hung with flames that do not move. There is no hurt, nor even warmth, although I see one of my feet to be scorched black. Instead of pain there is a passing sadness, for I have believed my feet to be the prettiest part of me, though Mary says she likes my shoulders and my neck. When we have been undressed of form we shall walk truly naked from our ashes, and there shall be not a part of us that is not beautiful.

  Though she is strangled far beyond the point of speech, I can hear Mary’s voice inside me saying Elinor, oh Elinor, and bidding me look deep inside the flames that have in some way without any seeming movement risen to my bosom like ferocious heraldry.

  I stare at these inverted icicles of gold and light, and in each one there is a moment, tiny and complete, trapped in the shimmering amber. Here’s my father, leathering my mother as she stoops across the kitchen table howling, this seen as if through an open door. Here is the dream I had when I was little, of an endless house filled with more books than there are in the world. Here’s when I cut my shoulder open on a nail and here the dead shrew, waxed and chill.