The Starry Wisdom

by D. M. Mitchell

  *Moonfleck. Waking dazed on the riverbank. Painful darkness. Viola feels herself changed to a lunatic boy in black. Reeling in dark meadows he stalks adventure — hesitates — something on his back — fleck of white — bright patch of moonlight — on the back of his black jacket — he rubs and rubs till dawn — can’t get it off! Glimpse of riverbank, old pale woman rinsing her hands in the stream — Viola clutches the moonfleck — sinks to her knees in dreams of shuddering candle-light — the altar.

  *Maudeville. Call me what you like, you have heard of me. Dr Hate, Mr Brownstone, the moonstruck madman, dark stranger. The Master. I appear throughout all ages, father of the red magick, I raped the Madonna with swords, the mother of all pain. Now awake and taste my medicine again.

  *Capture. Waking to call of red-eyed raven — the stream a silver snake — pale washerwoman kneeling rinses blood from her white sheets — stirring eddies of madness — Viola stoops to pick blurred white spectre of a flower that grows only in moonlight — she glimpses her reflection as a great clam surfaces — opalescent entrails slither out — seeking young girls’ loins — pulsating green light — insane tentacles overwhelm her — more fingers enrage her grumpy cunt — the clam closes — red mass with the flesh — churning musculature — violation. Before dawn it vomits her out into soft mud. Wrapped in marbled slime she dreams on. Green edge of day on the horizon.

  *Robbers. Madnesses in the dark garden again. Viola rises from dreams of first sex — at last — dazed glides out through open doors down to where pantomime spectres act obscene vaudeville — tobacco smoked through holes drilled in screaming skulls — sneaking up to the house to rob — enraged Viola struts naked to intervene — sudden fear — squatting in the dark she watches the drunken rabble raid the crypt — picking rubies from hollow eyes of corpses — gems dozing with dead bones. Wild lust chords strike in the gloom — the ringleader in black robe, whitewashed face, seizes Viola by the throat...his robes fall away revealing Mrs Warlock.

  *Gallows Song. Warlock, the scrawny whore, will be her last lover — the noose — erotic horror stuck in Viola’s skull like a nail — Mrs Warlock’s long neck rejuvenates to lunatic melodies — wailing unseen choirs — Viola is lifted off the platform — menstruating in terror — the whore is changing to a young girl — strangling her with eager lust. Melting into each other.

  *Violation. Blood pounding in Viola’s ears — choking — red withdrawal nightmares — flashback dark stranger on the balcony — Mrs Warlock is a noose of dead hair round her throat — Viola’s eyes strain to find the laughter. Dark gardens. The dark stranger. At last.

  Maudeville appears on the gallows.

  He mounts her dangling body. Gruesome communions relived in all ages. Hearts ripped out in endless pranks. Now she feels his severed heart warm in her mouth — swollen gland prodding her thighs — twitching flesh and rending pain as his barbed red hook catches her insides — captured — glimpse of smoky hotelroom — endless dreams of orgasm — stranger breathing on her breasts — junk fevers, sudden spasm ...her body is draining in all directions...getting older...flesh withers to flakes...yellowing skin...sickly moon in her eyes...red hair fades to grey tired strands ...descending into the crumpled husk of an old woman...at last she feels herself completed.

  *Homecoming. A flash from ancient memories — a balcony, less than a glimpse. Years have passed. She sits at her sun-framed window watching the gardens below.

  Always. Sighing. Viola has been converted to Mrs Warlock.

  Pale haggard woman waiting for night, for the weird banquets. Sickly daydreams. She feels someone coming soon. Any day now. Or perhaps never. She will wait — for moonstruck nights, overgrown gardens alive, breathing graves, red mass. Waiting for her last communion, holding her heart. A distant memory now gone. And he is in her always. Maudeville. Waiting for her time, to strangle his next whore. When night falls all is relived.

  MELTDOWN

  D.F. Lewis

  The argument had lasted for some time, but nobody was going to give way. I strolled in on the off chance that I would meet up with a long lost friend, but I saw straight away that he was not one of those present. The landlord was playing pub games with himself in the snug corner. Ervin – need I tell about him? Well, he was the sort one overlooked in any gathering. Sometimes he’d be there for the duration but, come morning, one forgot that he was ever there. Poor bloke – not his fault.

  Patricia, Nadine and Susan – the feminine side of things, were always pleasant company, I suppose, wide smiles always on the brink of breaking out for no obvious reason.

  Put words into their mouths – and other sillier ones came back out at you.

  ‘Well, Naddy, give us a peck.’

  She did – a slobbering at my cheek. I motioned blown versions to Pat and Susie. They fancied me dreadfully, I know, but what could I do? I’d have rather bonked a post-box.

  Merchant Mannion, the group’s mascot, was all mouth and trousers – the former red and ever open with an overnourished tongue, the latter stained with a cocktail of snot, beer and piss. ‘Hiya!’ he shouted at me, and I nodded towards his flies, smiling a warning at their gaping state, and he pushed handfuls of it all back in again. I suspected him of having a billy-bob as big as that of a brontosaurus. Except that particular brand of monster was dead and long gone.

  ‘Hiya! Hiya! It’s always Hiya with you city slickers,’ complained the landlord from the corner. He had in fact got to the nudging stage (or was he holding?) as the fruits spun round. The incessant clatter of falling hard cash reminded us all that he was in fact the owner of the pub.

  ‘Insider-dealing!’ cried Merchant, pointing with his tobacco-brown finger at the leering landlord. Then out of nowhere, as it were, Ervin piped up over his breath: ‘I know more about the Money Markets and things like that than you’ll ever know. The City has very few secrets from me.’

  ‘So what?’ chorused the three floozies, lifting their left legs in unison like dogs at trees. ‘So what, you ask?

  Well...’ Ervin countered, ‘...there’s more going on there than meets even the mystical Third Eye!’

  ‘Go on,’ I said, abruptly curious. I had a few bucks in Fixed Interest Stock and Capital Growth Unit Trusts. I recalled that some butterfly-in-the-ointment hack had said that North American ‘smokestack’ securities were a safe bet between the next two wars.

  ‘Well, you know they have people floating Currencies, buying up Futures such as salt and sugar stocks which don’t exist and won’t ever exist. Not only that, but other Commodities such as coffee, tin, pork bellies and dead monsters.’ Ervin was enjoying the flavour of the words in his mouth.

  ‘Dead monsters!’ screeched Merchant Mannion.

  ‘Tentative dealing in Great Old Ones that have been seen across the outer edges of Suffolk and in one piece from Bishopsgate to Shoreditch round here. They are long tapering tentacles, trailing, coiling, with heads dotted along their lengths, controlling things...’

  I could not stand the literalness of Ervin’s description, as if what he was saying even approached some semblance of the reality I at least lived in. ‘Could you be more implicit?’ I scoffed.

  ‘They’re brown and long, emerging from those myths and legends which are candidates for reality ... and their starting-prices are pretty keen at the moment. All you have to do is buy up all the good sense in the world and sell it back at a premium – but, in the meantime, these long brown parcels populate the night, rubbing our roof tops with their undersides. Yes, stock up with sense, store it away where none can get at it, and it will yield index-linked and more. We’ll all need sense bad when the Great Old Ones have taken a harder line with reality...’

  The girls bounced on their benches, gleefully pushing forward for us to look down their fronts. Although they’d heard Ervin’s set-piece speeches before, their blind bit of notice was elsewhere. They must have rouged their nipples, for red stains broke out all over their busts, but I decided to ignore such cockadilloes for Ervin�
�s almost endless diatribe:

  ‘As you know, the price of a Share is different depending on whether you’re buying or selling it. The top price hangs on how much they let you have and how much you actually want – linked to scales of cyclic precession. If the Planet rises, so does the stock in trade, but if the Zodiac falls so does the Exchange Rate. Alien forces bolster or deflate interest in their own existences accordingly – a convoluted version of reality feeding into non-reality or a-reality and vice versa. Each touches the other at different points along their lengths.’

  I had a headache, one that always came on towards late evening, as if my skull were a hardboiled egg set between the little-and big-enders in Gulliver’s Travels.

  ‘Come on, Ervin...’ I began to complain.

  The landlord, now ensconced behind his bar with thousands of charity pennies piled up before him like a Dickensian chimney-hat, interrupted his shipinabottlecastle-of-matchsticks activities to pontificate: ‘The pub roof needs repairing from all that rubbing by Old Ones, so I will start a raffle in aid of such a good cause.’

  As I wended my way home, after a basinful of increasingly ludicrous pub talk and continental kisses, I cast a wary glance at the corners of the night sky which at day were hidden by office buildings. Although my headache was on its last legs, I saw against the moonlit sky a knotted string of wattled coxcombed heads following through from the Angel Islington to another night, another Britain.

  Life you’ve already lived cannot be lived again and can only be subtracted from your total life to measure what’s left.

  I’ve got a short memory and tall tales. I may have already mentioned that Ervin is that sort of person you don’t usually notice. He first came into my life as I sat minding my own business in one of those non-descript City squares.

  He sat beside me on the bench and offered me a cigarette. I ignored him, for fear of mixing myself up in something that Fate did not have Store for me. Unlike Merchant Mannion, I did not take life as it came. More like as it went.

  In truth, I’m a great believer in the fanning out of actions around the globe. Just one moment of mining prime snot from one’s gaping nostrils at a neutrally strategic moment in some (god)forsaken place could lead to the assassination of the US President. So I was always careful to pick my moments. Even the tiniest action had to be subject to well-considered premeditation.

  Ervin pulled agonisingly on his cigarette with such a long inhalation that I feared he would never come out of it. I then realised it was too late. The domino-rally of events had already been set in motion and I would concertina between two options, either acknowledging his presence or immediately quitting the bench, with my mind wriggling like an earthworm on a sea fisherman’s hook.

  Ervin was frozen into a park statue, his breath in-drawn, wreaths of cigarette-smoke dry-gargling through his lungs. It was as if the whole world stood still with his inhalation – not that there were any City slickers in sight, nor birds flapping in the sky, to prove my hypothesis. But the bus was over-long at the request stop, cars halted at tenantless zebra crossings, belisha beacons in continuous shine like bright fruit lollies and the wind was taking a breather.

  All was moving again, as Ervin exhaled long wispy trails of muck from his mouth leaving tacky yellow spots on his glasses.

  ‘They’re coming tonight.’

  ‘Who are coming?’ I asked, now certain that, whether Fate had been warned of this encounter between two of its subjects or not, there was little I could do about it.

  By staying on the bench, I had caused the world to jump the points and surge along yet unmapped tracks of Karma.

  He answered: ‘The Great Old Ones are coming tonight, that’s who, of course. H P Lovecraft created them out of the doings in his head. Others continued to write of them as if they assumed they really existed, trying to create contests as believable as possible. And yet others sanitised the Mythos so skilfully that I am now not the only one to call the Great Old Ones real...’

  I was more than certain, on listening to Ervin’s little speech, that I had been chosen to attend this conversational set-piece, since I had indeed heard of H P Lovecraft, a minor amateur US writer earlier this century, who invented the Cthulhu Mythos. I had even read his stories as a rather premature teenager, goggling over his falterings of word magic. Now new words came unbidden to my mind, as I thought of him: sailing between the obtruding karmic netbergs of outward existence, HPL had been a gentle fisher trawling valuable cast-offs that floated within our oceans of archetypal sewage.

  I decided to sacrifice a few more words to the conversation, hoping against hope that they would suffice:

  ‘If the Great Old Ones, as you suggest, are real, surely we should warn the world of their coming and get everybody under cover before dark?’

  ‘Let them find out for themselves, I say.’

  And he took a file from a brief-case I had not previously noticed. It was a wonder I had even noticed Ervin himself, since he merged into the backdrop of the setting. He let me look at the file. It was a Jobber’s Turn. He did not want to re-align the City markets by warning of the outcome of the night. All the figures dotted about the page were part of an enormously convoluted pattern of supply and demand – Bonds releasing Bonds, Commodities gobbling Commodities, Shares depriving Shares, Trusts deceiving Trusts, Pension Schemes with no love in them and very little hard cash. It all hung apparently on the exact timing of the Great Old Ones. No rehearsal had been possible.

  Ervin quit the bench without bye or leave, but then I noticed a slit of white card bearing his name on the ground in front of the bench. I threw it in the litter bin for filing by the dustmen, before deciding to go home forthwith.

  As I look back upon it all, I wonder whether I met Ervin at all. The Great Old Ones did not come that night, of course, nor has there even been a suspicion of them since.

  The markets did go the way of Ervin’s charts, however; so he must have made a mint on the upswing of the Indices. Try as I might, I cannot find him among the usual lunch-time City crowds.

  As I look back on my life, I feel that it must be half over, but I dare not breathe in case I tip the balance.

  “Could you please jump quietly – we have several thousand people thinking about whether they want to jump off or not.

  And, when you’re making such a big decision, you need absolute quiet...’

  The jump-regulator at the top of the Wall Street block was acting very officiously. This was really his day, a long time in a-coming, but here it was, the Dow Jones Index had fallen so far and so fast it had hit bottom, and was still going down.

  Loud-speakers, in every financial centre in the world, were touring the streets, announcing: ‘This is only a minor correction to an over-valued market.’ – ‘It’s only the global computer networks that tell the prices which way to go – they’ve all been Hacked.’ – ‘Industrial stock will be looking up by lunchtime, mark our words.’ – ‘Don’t even begin to panic – the lower the Share prices, the cheaper for us to buy when the Worm in the Market turns.’ – ‘Don’t listen to rumours, for rumours cost money.’

  There had indeed been a rumour in the City of London that one Ervin had met his death just before the latest Stock Market meltdown. The repercussions of such an event, even if only a rumour, were now all too plain to see.

  For Ervin was the official City Guru, who some believed had a direct line to a god who controlled the Footsie Index, by hacking from heaven. Some even believed Ervin himself was this god.

  We’ve all had experience of seeing him amid the hubble-bubble on the floor of the Commodity Futures market, shouting the toss with the Golden Yuppies: ‘I’ll give you three and three for a good figment of cocoa beans and completely free of green bug...’ – ‘Six tons of moonrock – for delivery in 25 years – who’ll give me two and five on the button today? No? Well, how about one and one, and a lick and a promise?’ – ‘Dead monsters, six million dead monsters, going cheap – for buying up by the horror story
writers whose business depends on the wholesale belief that they’re still alive!’

  I’ve now heard a counter rumour – Ervin is alive and well in Jaywinkle Sands. Can you believe it! That’s hardly a resort for the retirement of a Go-Go Boy like him – it should be Marbella at least. I’m told Jaywinkle is nowt a pound, a shanty town teetering on the edge of a (god)forsaken naze.

  Perhaps he wanted to sell up, having had enough of the City hurly-burly. But trading in Commodity futures is a funny business. Must have turned his mind. There were a lot of otherwise respectable people who ripped off plenty of punters with goods which never ever even existed. You buy them one moment and sell them at an outlandish profit the next – and what you bought and sold was merely a figment of your or someone else’s imagination. In fact, if I had to place bets (and I’m not a betting man), I would definitely say that those so-called dead monsters were very, what shall we say, nebulous.

  ‘Anyway, jump quietly, I said!’

  Looking up towards the top of the Wall Street block, I saw the Brokers launch themselves off. Apparently, they’ve not only lost the money they never ever really had but, according to rumour, their stake money on the football pools, too. One by one, they jumped in a rhythm automatically laid down by some force far greater. And, as they outstretched, in readiness for a skimming curving flight which they did not even hope to accomplish with their frail human arms, I watched them plummet in droves – their flesh slowly darkening, their limbs webbing over, their eyes bulging into bloodshot crystal balls, crashing to the pavement with an almighty sickening crunch of alien bones and a sea-squelch of half-diluted flesh. They had met their death just at the same moment as they were capable of flight with arms mutated into skewed wings, but all now littering Wall Street like collapsed circus tents.