“Well done,” he shouted back.
“More to do.”
“Isn’t there,…” said Jarry, ever the Dada spin doctor, ongoing champion of flux and creation. “Look at what a can of worms you’ve opened.”
He pointed to a shadowy spot beneath the main arch of the bridge. The water where the blood was appearing was now bobbing with the corpses of naked men, women and children. The trellises that adorned the bridge were broken and hanging down, trailing blood-red Rosa banksiae into the sluggish current. More bodies came bubbling up, Dachau-starved, Treblinka-gassed, inky numbers etched on their foreheads.
Squab regarded these brick-and-mortar ghosts with warm indifference. The water fluted over them, the scatty wind twirled her hair into wanton curls.
Since only fish had escaped God’s curse on Adam and his descendents, we must perceive the presence of Endeavour’s mighty hand on Squab’s escape from Tolkien’s Brandywine Bridge and Ken Reid’s River Monster of the Id.
Was Lord Horror now playing the joker?
Surely his deviant hand was ubiquitous in these proceedings.
Holocaust fragrances wafted off the unfortunates as they scudded from the reeds in a coiling Teddy Tail, the white profiles of their dead faces clearly drawn against the rippling wavelets. The occasional swish of mermaid tails, those flirty guardians of the Thames, cut the air, their presence a reminder that kinder forces were also at work.
Caught in the centre of a dead group of bald turkey-heads, a woman with the ears of a vixen and wide staring eyes turned circles, shuddering like elastic in an earthquake.
“Well,” mused Squab in all sincerity, “if it’s Hell they’re going, they’ll face it. I don’t think they’ve done no wrong.”
Her eyes followed the shoots of viscous, brick-red liquid fermenting from the corpses. If you drank it, she thought, it would have a deep soothing flavour, the kind that powered her favourite fruit drink, Vimto.
“The dead are their own nation,” she said, her delicate feelings doing her justice. “We’ll all belong there one day.”
A mermaid’s fishy tail flipped among the corpses, turning over giddy topsy-turvy whirls of white water. This was seen by Squab as a lucky sign – all would presently be well again.
“I too don’t like the thought of dying,” her voice poodled along nicely. “On the other hand, I approve of the idea of not being here.”
Did Paula Rega ever feel this perplexed about the interior world revealed in her paintings?
Squab shrugged.
“Auf Wiedersehen.”
She waved again to the Frenchman, and set off purposefully across the clipped sward, along the river in the direction of Pixie Village.
But almost immediately she came to where the Crematoria Goose was snuggly bunked down amongst a necotoria of diseased flowers.
Fagged-out blooms, marigolds, cornflowers, lupins and tulips piss-yellow and wilting under the sun, covered the old brick-and-flint furnace. Clusters of nightshade and foxglove, tightly bound by stinging nettles (after which Nettlebed had been named), were grouped around the walls.
On its roof were human remains, a tropical plague of malformed bone arranged in fractal shapes, the whole looming in the image of an immense cross and swastika, epicene and bawdy. Wind rattled the skeletal mass, conjuring a big noise from Planet Bop.
No hidden agenda here, then, Squab surmised. Just another statement of the Thames’ rôle as the nation’s entrepreneurial conscience.
She sniffed noisily. There again was that aroma of toasted almonds and garlic.
Glancing expectantly at the river she saw a haughty pyramidal raft of corpses sneaking toward the furnace gates.
From it, a long slick of blood stretched back to the Brandywine Bridge.
The Untermenschen, seeded with severed hands and feet and decorated with the bones of pigs and apes, were piled on top of each other in obscene embraces, their skins furnace-red and flayed, pretty blue licks of gas-flame igniting their bodies. Certain unfortunates had what looked to Squab like deer antlers hammered into their skulls.
“Awesome,” she said sarcastically.
She shook her curls. This would never do. Her visit to Fudge and Speck’s tree house was meant to have been a cheerful idyllic break. She couldn’t end such a sunny day in such a dark mood. Being in Horror’s company for so long was sometimes like living in the shadow of Himself, and something she couldn’t sustain for any length of time. She hadn’t bargained on this grotesque adventure.
Yet, truth be told, she admitted, it did have curious parallels with other events that had recently occurred to her and Uncle Horace as they travelled down the Thames in their small steamboat, the Dolly Fisher. Their voyage had been interrupted by all manner of esoteric things lurking in the undergrowth, or inappropriate buildings importuning unsavoury deeds.
Each unholy building seemed symbiotically linked with another – no doubt, she surmised, to get the job done with the minimum of fuss.
She was impressed by the Redeemer’s hand on such cold order, but she was beginning to suspect that paranoia had set in, and the hand of the mighty Rearranger had jinxed them; but she set her mind against such thoughts.
The steady thrum of bumblebees was in the air, and the breeze, as it moved through the oak and elm of old England had a flavour of Pendlebury; Ken Reid’s spirit was in its breath.
That was enough, wasn’t it?
Squab gazed across the river to where the Poontang wagon glowed in the sun. Its back doors were open. There was no sign of Jarry. He had gone, she imagined, to exercise Boss-de-Nage’s relatives in the glades.
Listening to the little Frenchman had proved a wise thing. Pity more people didn’t.
Of the Splattersplooch there was also no sign. Had it retreated back beneath the Thames, to await the next traveller?
Her eyes drifted idly along the far bank to where the mulchy path broke through the trees. She squinted. Sure enough, a jerky figure was approaching, dancing like a buffalo on angel dust. Presently, she made out a three-legged caprice with a tiger’s striped body and the head of a rabbit, lurching along in an ungainly way, Brandywine bound.
“Oh hum, another arse coming to the pot.” Her voice was weary, but not without charity. “Dear, oh dear.” Yet another offering to the Hereafter would shortly make its play. But, she supposed, like all living things, the Splattersplooch must eat.
She set off once more.
What she really needed now, she decided, was a nice cup of tea.
DOMAIN OF THE VALVE CARDINALS
Jacques Dingue
Picture an old street falling through from a background of faded photographs, a small shape wrapped in black rags huddled in a doorway. Luminous eyes glimmer above sharp white teeth. Maldoror’s withered hand flicks over pages of the Manual of Correct Entries, stopping at a page marked with the sigil of caterpillar-death. Sick flies buzz like the murmur of distant voices at a family gathering to which one is not invited. A small dim red sun winks unsteadily reminding one of the beautiful certainties of death. Groans distract the attention.
Occult symbols and dog fetishes crowd a young girl’s eye. Enmeshed in Vatican imagery, she lies impaled on the staff of Christ – the nun’s reward for a lifetime spent in fatty changes and monthly devotion, shot up on stained glass and the worm’s embrace of tongues. Fibrosis in the Church of Advisors who murmur solemn incantations of under-nutrition and toxaemia scavenged from the morbid Bible – to assist the processes of chance. Heart policies made by a Pope, seeking their compensation, are dashed on the winds of High Mass or dipped in the eyes of a harlot scavenged by wolves.
Dog hair, broken teeth and the subtle machinery of a girl’s torn clothing combine to form the impression of insect love. Necrophile cardiac telegrams on stone slabs, bolts of purple lightning and meat-spasms. A black window opens and an old man leans out at forty-five degrees, supported only by his misery. His hands grip the ledge with the joyful desperation of an aneurysm, the profici
ency of a scavenging bird whose beak has fed only on creatures that have never seen the light of day. Smoke belches from his mouth and electronic screams turn the sky black where the headless snake of Catholic Guilt dances to the sound of lugubrious gongs.
Delicious stars slither gleaming silver and blue between shimmering two-dimensional walls of a faecal cathedral. In the College of Compensation, light from a solitary candle falls flickering over the peeled eyes of the seven observers – enshrouded, hooded, plague-carrying witnesses to the addiction of Christ dropping on all fours to a slow-hand clap. Their flabby jowls hang severed, ripped open in a mad bloody froth that sears the throat in acid gulps. Nervous priests appointed to the degeneration of the Roman Catholic clergy, hypertrophied and anaemic stand below the Pope as the disease is carried by the stimuli sent by Rome, but not before the howl, worse than anything heard on a forest floor.
They writhe and dance in embryo spasms, mouthing foreign tongues of flame, licking the red moon like an old woman’s face. No longer are there enough cups to fill with the unchecked viscera slapping around the barefoot priests.
The Valve Cardinals scoop up what they can, drink until their stomachs burst, or piss coagulated blood with the control of paraplegics. Then, spreading the legs of a blow-up Virgin Mary doll, they fall one by one piercing the navel in latex umbilical intercourse – the forbidden fruit.
“Death to the Mother!!” they shriek like castrati, re-enacting the destruction and suppression of indigenous cultures and rehearsing the annihilation of the planet.
Drawing their knives, they fall upon the grotesquely enlarged stomach of semen, into which they bury their daggers to the hilt, releasing in a rush of stale air mixed with seminal fluid – The Immaculate Conception.
On the altar of Holy Dispossession, a sacred hyena gnaws at the hanging entrails of the sacerdotal virgin in an apotheosis of irresolution. Black thunderclouds like cramped muscles open to reveal a dark eye entering the filthy congregation like viscous jelly, clouds of flies on a mixture of shit and honey. Women weep in shameless abandon while on a mountain top blind King Oedipus laughs, masturbating to the sound of flutes. The Maenads are abroad and the Valve Cardinals shudder.
“Euan Euan, Oi Oi Oi !!”
Flee the sound of their approach in chariots of dust pulled by a team with jackals’ teeth, who waylay an accursed traveller and pull him kicking and screaming to the desert floor. They give him the opportunity to gasp in amazement at the length of his own entrails, the size of his own booze-enlarged liver, and the great flock of carrion crow that follow the scent of death, leaving nothing but the inedible gold teeth and the shrunken left eye wrapped carefully in a silk handkerchief.
In the jaws of a white fox, furious suns piss light and a rain of particles of fur and blood moved by strange magnetism. The hill of patriarchy is parched and shrivelled – the shattered visage of the Oan Beg lying forgotten on the withered grass. Eyes in coral-pink penis flesh are grafted onto living stone, rising like smoke through corridors of holy lust. The wolf’s profile hangs overhead, emblazoned with swastikas and sunwheels. It breathes with the night beneath a moon of invisible paper.
Impossible biologic birds of tin stand always in mysterious chords, knotted together like the eager note on my door where the Eye opens like a mouth seeing the face of its lover. Eclipsed by snow from five split places loving with iron hands painted like revolving doors with trees. The Artificial Eye of the Usurping God comes circling late over an alleyway bonfire. Want, colder than an empty socket shivering in the heat of street corners. Cathedral towers humming with a faint vibration of tongues rest an eye with a sable pall as for burial.
A free reign for the ghostly preachment and the Earth’s discharges. Enter the clump of dark trees and giant plumes of funeral feathers waving sadly. The artificial eye is made of glass, hushed and noiseless becoming roughened in the course of time. The Black Eye of the Dying Solar God, still wresting a twisted feeling of awe from the millions of sacrificial victims. Anti-suns, ciliated hairs twitching blown across bright lifeless skies. A horse’s skull nailed to a tree, near sheets stretched between pointed twigs dug into cracked earth. On the sheets is a small painting of a pair of lips – old machinery screams in a red room while dogs’ teeth snarl cunt-lipped in agony and fear.
A changing neon sign above an old shop colours floating in the dusty air.
The Eye is discarded to the cautious wind and the swift clouds that skim the moon. Washing in the sand, it stops to listen turning its head this way and that in the wind then continuing to squeeze while the patients hold their heads like guilty spirits, free from the cramped prison called Convenient Method.
Hither comes the sound of voices, out on the waste waters of glass, sleeping a thousand miles away. The patient stoops forward and fits the eye securely in its socket, then rushes to meet the blasts from the unknown, throwing back its head in the desert places of the world. Here in the fury of opening and closing, his unchecked liberty reaches every part of the soul.
BATTLESHIPS
Herzan Chimera and James Havoc
It was hot and humid that day in Central London. The balmy air was pressing my damp undergarments to my flesh. This memory of the complementary sensations of disgust and delight that clothed my sweaty predicament, at first a steel-edge reminder of subsequent perfunctory events is now, only twenty-four hours later, a faded and jaded bastard-son lost to the turmoil of my wonderful and fortuitous reunion late in the afternoon of March 15th 1898.
I had not long since that afternoon, if my flaccid recollections can be relied upon, terminated my employ at the dank and dreary broomcupboard offices of the District Surveyors in Clerkenwell, having exchanged more than a few rather loudly slanderous remarks with my superior upon my final exit, when I happened upon an old cricket-team chum from my studious childhood years as a hardened boarder at Brighton Grammar School.
An enchanted and stoic establishment dedicated to the honourable pursuit of intellectual excellence and comic perversity, that to this haunted day invokes the brain-burning taste of Death Camp soil after the “fog” had settled.
A minor paradise of calculus and cocksucking; in that order.
“Foxhead!” The mystery figure had hailed from across the tumultuous street, thick with groaning, tyke-hauled barrows laden with tubs of donkey-lard, en route to Farringdon Station and all points North.
Initially, I believe, I had picked up my pace somewhat and had pulled my bowler down over my eyes.
Perchance my addressor was a debt collector I had up until now managed to evade, or a spurned husband intent on sweet revenge after my name had been innocently cited at the flashpoint of some matrimonial arraignment to which I was hitherto oblivious.
Then, suddenly, realising Foxhead was a name with which I had not been associated since my aforementioned schooldays, I halted abruptly and turned to face my hailer.
He was a tall fellow; gangly-looking as he skipped a loping stride through the perilous wheels and negotiated his navy woolen cape in the aftertow.
Conscientious to keep his footing on the uneven, ill-maintained and dog-shit slick old road.
“Foxhead! It’s you!” his taut face beamed.
I must have been wearing rather a serious face, for he laughed aloud, tossing back his head in his customarily flamboyant manner; a single gesture so vivid it necessitated no further interrogation.
“Gleeson!” I exclaimed, launching myself arms-wide into his embrace and hugging him to me.
We laughed like thorough-bred lunatics for the better part of a minute; passers-by forcing sheepish grimaces at our mad display.
“But my, how you’ve grown,” I commented.
“Chest high.” He broke free, masturbating air.
“Foolish man...I mean, you were always such a...”
“Shrimp? Yes. I admit it. I was a thimble of urine. Cheeks like peaches.” He made a fat face.
“Indeed. Where did it all go?”
“The weight? Fucked i
t off!” he bawled, as a fragile-looking femme glided coyly by.
To my shame, I laughed; aloud. We both laughed, long and loud, intoxicated by each other’s spirits.
“And me so lean. So athletic. So hungry-looking,” I added between raucous gasps. It was not until I had regained my composure sufficiently that I recognised that all-too-memorable look of effete dread in Gleeson’s eyes.
“Easy now..,” I remarked, “What could so grieve one so mercurial of nature as your good self?” Gleeson suddenly and inexplicably let a big wide grin crawl all the way across his pallid face from ear to ear.
A supernatural feat of physiognomy.
“I... err... seem to have stumbled upon a magnificent discovery. A purgative for the amoral soul the like of which few mortal men have sampled. Food of the Gods, man. And of their darker halves, no doubt...”
“In plain English.”
“Like a fucking eggshell, man,” he giggled unrestrainedly. “Feet the size of prawns. The future. Oranges and cinnamon...”
“Wait, wait...” I tried to calm him.
At length his mania subsided.
“You’re not on business of any sort?” he asked, anxiously checking his pocketwatch.
“No. Actually, I was just...”
“Splendid!” He motioned with a sweeping gesture of his white-gloved hands for us to move on, linking arms with me in public. “So much to catch up on. Senile though the days are.” He tugged my cheek boyishly. “It’s the whorehouse for this couple of war-horses. Merry maids.
Copious flagons of ale. The telling of the tale is a snorting foot-fetish.” He hooted; lost, I believed, to the insane humour of his own privately-distorted world.
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