KING SQUID by Frederick Madnok
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born on the Madnok family estate 33 years ago, Frederick Madnok has, in his interests, long mimicked his illustrious ancestors. His father, James Madnok, was the author of several books on the study of mushrooms; his scientific bent fostered an early love of analysis in his son. His mother, Henrietta Madnok, served as the choir leader and Home Matron of the local branch of theTruffidianChurch. Her devotion to spiritual matters instilled in him the discipline to pursue his interests in Squidology. The presence of squid mills on the family property no doubt fed his curiosity as well.
An excellent student at theBlytheAcademy,Frederick graduated with high honors and a degree in general biology (no squidology degree being available at that time). Despite a brief flirtation with illustration and cartoons, he soon found himself in the field observing the King Squid in its natural habitat.
Several of his more interesting observations have been published in chapbook, pamphlet, and broadsheet form (refer to the bibliography for more information). After the sale of his family’s estate at the age of 27 and following a series of misfortunes,Frederick eventually regained the seclusion necessary to expand upon his studies and his writings. For the past four years, the generosity of his current benefactors has allowed him to make the important discoveries set out in this monograph.
I
WHAT THE SQUID IS NOT
INTRODUCTION
IT IS A SAD BUT INCONTROVERTIBLE FACT THAT the world stands in profound ignorance of the King Squid — and the related festival. Although some might say that more has become known of this creature than evidenced by the mistakes contained in a few naturalist guides published abroad, I am not among their number. To my wandering eye, such errors of fact have multiplied, as have the inaccurate estimates of the number of the King Squid’s tentacles. Firstly, squid have both tentacles and arms.
Secondly, the arms do not number five, six, seven, nine, ten, or, most absurdly, fourteen — as suggested by the no doubt severely landlocked Dr. Alfred Kubin, a man who probably also thinks he himself has seven arms and no leg to stand on. The correct number of squid limbs is ten — eight arms and two tentacles— and it is from the foundation of this tenant of fact that all else in this institution shall build. The tentacles, of course, distinguish themselves from the arms by their ingenious hooks, with which they grip prey in a manner improbable for the arms.
From these examples, and such grievous ignorables as “squid is my favorite kind of fish,” a statement I overheard Madame Tuff’s farctated daughter proclaim from an adjacent table in the cafeteria just last Thursday, it should be clear that before we approach the mad misconceptions of the Festival’s history and associated customs, we must first disperse current layperson fogginess about the squid itself.1
Firstly, the squid does not “lay its eggs on the banks of the muddy River Moth in the Spring, whence they hatch in late Autumn and pull themselves by means of proto-tentacles and their scrappy little beaks into the water” as has been suggested by the jarkman Leo Pulling in his crapulous treatise “An Account of the Squidlings’ First Hours by the Banks of the Great River,” published in that soggy sack of lies known as The Ambergris Journal of Speculative Zoology.
Secondly, although pustulated by a certifiable army of morons, including Blas Skinder, Volmar Gort, Maurice Rariety, Frank Blei, and Nora Kleyblack, the King Squid is not related to any of the lesser squid. It is not related to the Morrow Barking Squid, the Stockton Burrowing Squid, the Exploding Kalif Squid, the Detachable Mandible Squid, the Truffidian Monk’s Head Squid, the Fallowpine Honking Squid, the Burning Leopard Squid, the Myopic Slorvorian Howling Squid, the Northern Batwinged Squid, the Eastern Red-faced Mongoose Squid, the Three-Eyed Leaf Squid, the Scintillating Button Squid, the grossly-named Daffed Dancing Sapphire Squid, or even the Nicean Scuttlefish.2
It is none of these things — nor related to any of them — I must repeat for those of you who may have lost the thread or are hard of reading.
MISS FLOXENCE’S PRETTY THEORIES
I realize at this point that some readers may think it important for me to say what the King Squid is rather than what it continually is not. However, I am not yet finished with my essential ablutions, which must be completed to purge the reader of the impure negative energy created by so many madcap theories.
For we have yet to encounter the pathologically inane and scientifically unsound utterances of one Edna Floxence, primarily remembered as the unbalanced astrologer of the Banker-Cappan Trillian, but whom, under Trillian’s auspices, suborned the public’s attentions in such a way that certain myths engendered there continue to feast upon the brains of Ambergrisian school children to this very day. The Strange World of the Freshwater Squid is only trumped in its bilious and breezy antidotes for the truth by The Mysteries of the Freshwater Squid Revealed: six hundred continuous pages of spurious text that no true squidologist can read today without bleeding profusely from the nose, ears, and mouth.3
The problem, for one, is that in amongst the straitjackets of commonsense in the closet of her looney-ness, Miss Floxence makes the amazing claim to have “swum with the squid on a daily basis for an entire summer” in order to learn their secrets. The dust jacket for The Strange World even sports an engraving of Miss Floxence in a fetching frock, a petticoat bathing suit made all of frills and dangling tangles.
Why should the foolish Miss Floxence’s claim seem so bogus? For two reasons: (1) At the time of setting herself adrift like so much floppery amongst the no doubt perturbed (and forever traumatized) squid, the River Moth’s silt content was higher than it had been in years, thus ensuring that any swimmer in those mad murky waters could hardly have seen their own mud-sloppy hand in front of their wet leaf-obscured face, let alone observed and documented over one hundred complex mating rituals, alarm strobes, feeding frenzies, and “quaint ancestral games” and (2) In her frilly petticoat bathing suit and with her pale skin and bulbous eyes, Miss Floxence bears an uncanny resemblance to the common fopgrinder, a fish in the toxicana family. This fish, with its frilly fins and dead white pallor, is the King Squid’s favorite delicacy.4One can only imagine the eye-popping jubilant salivation of a hungry pack of teenage King Squid upon encountering a fopgrinder of such magnificent size and proportions.
No, I’m afraid that Miss Floxence never swam with the squid — this delusion is not supported by the evidence. Even supposing clear visibility and a bathing suit not as likely to trigger close-up observations of squid eating habits, the reader must keep in mind that a King Squid routinely reaches speeds of 14 knots. I doubt the flouncy Miss Floxence could reach one knot on a really ambitious day.
We must thus jettison and watch float out of sight, perhaps sparing a curt wave, all of Miss Floxence’s pretty theories, from the idea of squid changing partners every three months (a popular practice among humans in Ambergris at the time), to the ridiculously complex courtship rituals that combined the worst attributes of a spasmodic seizure with the most daring escapades from a romance novel, topped off by a very optimistic use of tools. (Owning up to your crimes is, as they say, very important for redemption.
Dear Miss Floxence has yet to achieve that state of grace and, undiscovered letters and notes notwithstanding, may never achieve it.)
BLITHERING ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE
Early eyewitness accounts range from the choicest pulpatoons to the worst trillibubs of information. Such inaccuracies should be put aside along with our alphabet blocks, mother’s too-frequent goodnight kisses, and therapy sessions.
A single example should suffice to catalog a mountain of mariner anecdotes, this selection ripped from a book actually paid for by the Society of Morrowean Scientists Abroad, entitled Squidologist Enoch Sighly’s and Doctor Bernard Povel’s Journey Up the River Moth by Way of Native Canoe and Indigenous Ingenuity,Culminating in a Boat Wreck, a Near Escape, Alcoholism, and Some Unfortunate Negotiations with the Aforementioned Natives:
A wondrous Fish or Beast or Other Creature that was lately Killed or Speared or Shot washed up by its own Accord, Being Dead, on a nearby Sandbank on the 20th Day of our Expedition. We bade the curiously mirthful Natives Heave To! And when they did not, Asked Again, that we might Examine the Specimen. It had two Heads and ten Horns and on eight of the Horns, it had 800 Fleshy Bumpies; and in each of Them, a set of Teeth, the said Body bigger than three Cows of the Largest Size and with the Abnormous Horns being of almost 40 hoofs in length. The Greater Head carried only the Horns and two very large Eyes, much pecked by the birds that the natives call Birds. And the Little Head thereof carried, in addition to an Unwholesome Stench and an Odd Putrefaction, a Wondrous Strange Mouth and two Tongues within it, which had the Unnatural Power to draw itself out or into the Body as Necessity required. Other remarkable things observed in the Monster must be said to include its reddish Colored Wrapper sticking fast to the back thereof, and loose laps on both sides, white and red throughout. As well as Blubberous Skin that the Natives will not touch. It hath the most Monstrous Nose ever seen within or without the World.
From the fractured description of a “fish or beast or other creature” to the “bumpies,” the “horns,” the
“little head” (clearly a funnel), the “tongues,” and the “wrapper,” not to mention the comically mis-diagnosed “laps,” it becomes simultaneously clear that the “fish or beast or other creature” in question is a King Squid and that the Society of Morrowean Scientists Abroad was unwise to choose as observers the Fatally Unobservant.5
At least in such accounts, however, we come closer to the beast itself, the life’s blood of Ambergris, the bounty of plenty, the squidologist’s beakish wet dream, the freshwater monster known simply as “King Squid.”
NOTES
1. As my father used to say, “Layperson fogginess is the leading cause of hatred directed toward scientists.” (See: Madnok, James, A Theory of Mushrooms. ) The context of this statement? A discussion of the city’s subterranean inhabitants, the semi-mysterious gray caps, and the mass disappearances they supposedly induced, known as “The Silence.”
2. The King Squid eats all of these species, with great relish, on a weekly basis.
3. I first encountered Miss Floxence’s text in the family library. My father and I had gone there to escape mother’s wrath over some trivial offense and he pulled out the tome both because it was mother’s favorite and because he thought I might enjoy a good laugh. He read me bits aloud to my cackling response. So I cannot pretend to be objective about Miss Floxence’s books.
4. A fact lovingly recorded by D. S. Nalanger in his paper “The Fish Preferences of the Giant Freshwater Squid as Recorded During a Controlled Experiment Involving a Hook, Bait, a Boat, and a Strong Line of Inquiry,” publication pending.
5. Indeed, although the Society never published the monogram from the second expedition, such a (slim) pamphlet could have been titled “Enoch and Bernard’s Cut-Short Journey Wherein the Canoe Overturned and the Crocodiles Danced a Merry Jig Upon Our—”
INTRODUCTION
IT IS A SAD BUT INCONTROVERTIBLE FACT THAT the world stands in profound ignorance of the King Squid — and the related festival. Although some might say that more has become known of this creature than evidenced by the mistakes contained in a few naturalist guides published abroad, I am not among their number. To my wandering eye, such errors of fact have multiplied, as have the inaccurate estimates of the number of the King Squid’s tentacles. Firstly, squid have both tentacles and arms.
Secondly, the arms do not number five, six, seven, nine, ten, or, most absurdly, fourteen — as suggested by the no doubt severely landlocked Dr. Alfred Kubin, a man who probably also thinks he himself has seven arms and no leg to stand on. The correct number of squid limbs is ten — eight arms and two tentacles— and it is from the foundation of this tenant of fact that all else in this institution shall build. The tentacles, of course, distinguish themselves from the arms by their ingenious hooks, with which they grip prey in a manner improbable for the arms.
From these examples, and such grievous ignorables as “squid is my favorite kind of fish,” a statement I overheard Madame Tuff’s farctated daughter proclaim from an adjacent table in the cafeteria just last Thursday, it should be clear that before we approach the mad misconceptions of the Festival’s history and associated customs, we must first disperse current layperson fogginess about the squid itself.1
Firstly, the squid does not “lay its eggs on the banks of the muddy River Moth in the Spring, whence they hatch in late Autumn and pull themselves by means of proto-tentacles and their scrappy little beaks into the water” as has been suggested by the jarkman Leo Pulling in his crapulous treatise “An Account of the Squidlings’ First Hours by the Banks of the Great River,” published in that soggy sack of lies known as The Ambergris Journal of Speculative Zoology.
Secondly, although pustulated by a certifiable army of morons, including Blas Skinder, Volmar Gort, Maurice Rariety, Frank Blei, and Nora Kleyblack, the King Squid is not related to any of the lesser squid. It is not related to the Morrow Barking Squid, the Stockton Burrowing Squid, the Exploding Kalif Squid, the Detachable Mandible Squid, the Truffidian Monk’s Head Squid, the Fallowpine Honking Squid, the Burning Leopard Squid, the Myopic Slorvorian Howling Squid, the Northern Batwinged Squid, the Eastern Red-faced Mongoose Squid, the Three-Eyed Leaf Squid, the Scintillating Button Squid, the grossly-named Daffed Dancing Sapphire Squid, or even the Nicean Scuttlefish.2
It is none of these things — nor related to any of them — I must repeat for those of you who may have lost the thread or are hard of reading.
MISS FLOXENCE’S PRETTY THEORIES
I realize at this point that some readers may think it important for me to say what the King Squid is rather than what it continually is not. However, I am not yet finished with my essential ablutions, which must be completed to purge the reader of the impure negative energy created by so many madcap theories.
For we have yet to encounter the pathologically inane and scientifically unsound utterances of one Edna Floxence, primarily remembered as the unbalanced astrologer of the Banker-Cappan Trillian, but whom, under Trillian’s auspices, suborned the public’s attentions in such a way that certain myths engendered there continue to feast upon the brains of Ambergrisian school children to this very day. The Strange World of the Freshwater Squid is only trumped in its bilious and breezy antidotes for the truth by The Mysteries of the Freshwater Squid Revealed: six hundred continuous pages of spurious text that no true squidologist can read today without bleeding profusely from the nose, ears, and mouth.3
The problem, for one, is that in amongst the straitjackets of commonsense in the closet of her looney-ness, Miss Floxence makes the amazing claim to have “swum with the squid on a daily basis for an entire summer” in order to learn their secrets. The dust jacket for The Strange World even sports an engraving of Miss Floxence in a fetching frock, a petticoat bathing suit made all of frills and dangling tangles.
Why should the foolish Miss Floxence’s claim seem so bogus? For two reasons: (1) At the time of setting herself adrift like so much floppery amongst the no doubt perturbed (and forever traumatized) squid, the River Moth’s silt content was higher than it had been in years, thus ensuring that any swimmer in those mad murky waters could hardly have seen their own mud-sloppy hand in front of their wet leaf-obscured face, let alone observed and documented over one hundred complex mating rituals, alarm strobes, feeding frenzies, and “quaint ancestral games” and (2) In her frilly petticoat bathing suit and with her pale skin and bulbous eyes, Miss Floxence bears an uncanny resemblance to the common fopgrinder, a fish in the toxicana family. This fish, with its frilly fins and dead white pallor, is the King Squid’s favorite delicacy.4One can only imagine the eye-popping jubilant salivation of a hungry pack of teenage King Squid upon encountering a fopgrinder of such magnificent size and proportions.
No, I’m afraid that Miss Floxence never swam with the squid — this delusion is not supported by the evidence. Even supposing clear visibility and a bathing suit not as likely to trigger close-up observations of squid eating habits, the reader must keep in mind that a King Squid routinely reaches speeds of 14 knots. I doubt the flouncy Miss Floxence could reach one knot on a really ambitious day.
We must thus jettison and watch float out of sight, perhaps sparing a curt wave, all of Miss Floxence’s pretty theories, from the idea of squid changing partners every three months (a popular practice among humans in Ambergris at the time), to the ridiculously complex courtship rituals that combined the worst attributes of a spasmodic seizure with the most daring escapades from a romance novel, topped off by a very optimistic use of tools. (Owning up to your crimes is, as they say, very important for redemption.
Dear Miss Floxence has yet to achieve that state of grace and, undiscovered letters and notes notwithstanding, may never achieve it.)
BLITHERING ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE
Early eyewitness accounts range from the choicest pulpatoons to the worst trillibubs of information. Such inaccuracies should be put aside along with our alphabet blocks, mother’s too-frequent goodnight kisses, and therapy sessions.
A single example should suffice to catalog a mountain of mariner anecdotes, this selection ripped from a book actually paid for by the Society of Morrowean Scientists Abroad, entitled Squidologist Enoch Sighly’s and Doctor Bernard Povel’s Journey Up the River Moth by Way of Native Canoe and Indigenous Ingenuity,Culminating in a Boat Wreck, a Near Escape, Alcoholism, and Some Unfortunate Negotiations with the Aforementioned Natives:
A wondrous Fish or Beast or Other Creature that was lately Killed or Speared or Shot washed up by its own Accord, Being Dead, on a nearby Sandbank on the 20th Day of our Expedition. We bade the curiously mirthful Natives Heave To! And when they did not, Asked Again, that we might Examine the Specimen. It had two Heads and ten Horns and on eight of the Horns, it had 800 Fleshy Bumpies; and in each of Them, a set of Teeth, the said Body bigger than three Cows of the Largest Size and with the Abnormous Horns being of almost 40 hoofs in length. The Greater Head carried only the Horns and two very large Eyes, much pecked by the birds that the natives call Birds. And the Little Head thereof carried, in addition to an Unwholesome Stench and an Odd Putrefaction, a Wondrous Strange Mouth and two Tongues within it, which had the Unnatural Power to draw itself out or into the Body as Necessity required. Other remarkable things observed in the Monster must be said to include its reddish Colored Wrapper sticking fast to the back thereof, and loose laps on both sides, white and red throughout. As well as Blubberous Skin that the Natives will not touch. It hath the most Monstrous Nose ever seen within or without the World.
From the fractured description of a “fish or beast or other creature” to the “bumpies,” the “horns,” the
“little head” (clearly a funnel), the “tongues,” and the “wrapper,” not to mention the comically mis-diagnosed “laps,” it becomes simultaneously clear that the “fish or beast or other creature” in question is a King Squid and that the Society of Morrowean Scientists Abroad was unwise to choose as observers the Fatally Unobservant.5
At least in such accounts, however, we come closer to the beast itself, the life’s blood of Ambergris, the bounty of plenty, the squidologist’s beakish wet dream, the freshwater monster known simply as “King Squid.”
NOTES
1. As my father used to say, “Layperson fogginess is the leading cause of hatred directed toward scientists.” (See: Madnok, James, A Theory of Mushrooms. ) The context of this statement? A discussion of the city’s subterranean inhabitants, the semi-mysterious gray caps, and the mass disappearances they supposedly induced, known as “The Silence.”
2. The King Squid eats all of these species, with great relish, on a weekly basis.
3. I first encountered Miss Floxence’s text in the family library. My father and I had gone there to escape mother’s wrath over some trivial offense and he pulled out the tome both because it was mother’s favorite and because he thought I might enjoy a good laugh. He read me bits aloud to my cackling response. So I cannot pretend to be objective about Miss Floxence’s books.
4. A fact lovingly recorded by D. S. Nalanger in his paper “The Fish Preferences of the Giant Freshwater Squid as Recorded During a Controlled Experiment Involving a Hook, Bait, a Boat, and a Strong Line of Inquiry,” publication pending.
5. Indeed, although the Society never published the monogram from the second expedition, such a (slim) pamphlet could have been titled “Enoch and Bernard’s Cut-Short Journey Wherein the Canoe Overturned and the Crocodiles Danced a Merry Jig Upon Our—”
II
WHAT THE KINGSQUIDIS
APPROACHING THE TRUE KING SQUID
Now WE SHALL TALK OF WHAT THE KING SQUID is INSTEAD OF what it is not. It is magnificent and vast. It is mythical and, to some of the misguided, Divine. It is, to more practical souls, a fine meal with a side of potatoes and a glass of brandy.
That it can be all things to all people may be explained by the fact that squidologists have identified over 600 species of squid. Large, small, medium-sized, oblong, squat, lithe, and long — all kinds exist in oceans, in rivers, in lakes. Beaks like parrots. Skin that flames and gutters with its own potency; depending on the time of day and temperature/ment, sometimes mute gray or festooned with self-made light like the Festival route at night. Some tough, some soft, some muscular, some gelatinous. Some can fling their bodies out of their watery domain and seem to fly! Others live in the deepest depths of the River Moth. Some commune together like swimming judges without scales to do them justice. Some, solitary, cannot stand even their own company. Yet others must, by their very nature, endure the company of an inferior species until they can metamorphose to a more exalted state.
UNCOMMON CHARACTERISTICS
While I shall attempt to recite shared characteristics in an orderly6fashion, as rote as any children’s song, I must admit that the closer we approach to the squid itself, the more excited I become: my mantle turns cerulean with pleasure, my funnel juts more prominently, my suckers tremble. So to speak.
As every young squidologist — released to happily squat over tidal pools (if in the Southern Isles) or lurk around the dock pilings (if in Ambergris) — knows, almost every squid has eight arms and two tentacles, grappling hooks, etc. As I may have mentioned. (The bookish squidologist will find case files on the now extinct Morrowean Mud Squid, whose tentacles reabsorb into the body upon attaining adulthood, leaving only flaccid nubs. This embarrassing condition is not shared by the King Squid.) Some defective species — the malodorous Stunted Beak Squid, the aptly-diagnosed Stockton Disabled Squid, and the repugnant Saphant Arse Squid — have arms of differing lengths. However, the King Squid is by contrast a paradigm of good health, its eight arms the exact same thickness and length, its two tentacles longer by only a few feet.
The tentacles, a marvel of biological engineering, serve a number of graceful functions, but primarily bring prey to the doom that is its mouth. Not a particularly swift doom, however. The King Squid does not swallow its food whole as does the Swollen Mantle Squid peculiar to the Alfar Lake Region. Nor does it batter its food against underwater rocks to tenderize it as does the Purple Bullheaded Squid popular along the coast ofScatha. Instead, the King Squid must chop up and grind down its food using its beak, teeth, and pistolaro (a tongue-like organ).
Why must the King Squid do this? Alas, as every aspirating young squidologist knows, the squid’s cartilaginous head capsule has little elasticity. It already houses a miraculous clamor of inmates: luminous eyes, a large brain, the esophagus.
Is this a flaw or some forethought the squidologist has not yet deciphered?
A SHORT DIGRESSION ON SQUID EYES
And the eyes! If the eyes function as a window on the soul as so many doctors seem to believe,7then the King Squid is a being from the Truffidian’s Heaven. Firstly, a squid’s eyes are not binocular: each sees what is on that side of the head. As a result, a squid can see twice as well as a human being; four times as well as those of you with glasses. Secondly, these eyes come in all shapes and sizes, from eyes as big as wagon wheels to eyes as small as buttons. Oblong, circular, ovoid, slitty, triangulated, spherical, octagonal. In colors that range from the exact shade of the green-gold sunset over Ambergris through the bars (of distant music) to the red-silver shimmer of a rich woman’s skirt at visiting time.
The King Squid’s eyes number not one like the Cyclopedic Swelling Squid, nor two like Every Other Type of Squid, but three! Three eyes! The third and most exciting lies hidden on the underside of the mantle. The third eye performs two miraculous functions. Firstly, it detects bioluminescence only.
Secondly, certain retina secretions suggest that this third eye produces a beam of light to aid the squid in seeing through the murky silt of theMothRiver.
I can shed no further light on this subject as profound as the King Squid’s own.
CONTINUING ON WITH LESSER-KNOWN UNCOMMON CHARACTERISTICS
But this, as I have said, any enterprising8young squidologist must already know — if not from first hand adventures than from any of the treacly but beloved kiddie squid cartoons that I believe still run amok in the various Ambergris broadsheets.
What the bemuddened, water-splashed, invertebrate-loving young rascal may be unaware of are certain aspects of the King Squid’s physiology and behavior that separate it from its squidkin. This should come as no surprise, given the paucity of quality sources for squidfact.
Firstly, the King Squid may reach adult lengths of 150 feet and weights of more than 5,000 pounds (would that the Moth were wider, deeper, and therefore more hospitable to larger specimens). As a result, the King Squid has the largest beak of any known squid. Squid beaks run small in relation to the body, but this still means a brave man with arms outstretched could just touch a large King Squid’s open upper and lower mandibles. Since this would require said man’s head to be inside said squid’s mouth, I cannot recommend it as a measurement technique except when approaching the deadest of squid.
But size alone cannot explain our lifelong fascination with the King Squid. Indeed, not even the most reputable amateur squidologist would recognize the creature in its juvenile phase, when it resembles the larva of some aquatic insect.9This has caused several unfortunate errors over the years.
TAKE THE CASE OF RICHARD SMYTHE, AMATEUR SQUIDOLOGIST
For example, even a published amateur squidologist such as Mr. Richard Smythe — a traveling salesman residing in the landlocked city ofLeander — can make a mistake. Mr. Smythe scooped up a jar of Moth water on a trip to Nicea precisely because it was full of what he believed to be insect larvae. Once home, he added the water to his aquarium to feed his patient fish and promptly departed in pursuit of a rumor of umbrellas needed in an umbrella-less land. Upon his return three weeks later, an angry King Squid the size of a small dog greeted him from the fishless tank. The starving squid promptly set upon the unfortunate Mr. Smythe, arms and tentacles flailing. Only the unsold umbrellas from his trip saved this silly man from an otherwise grinding fate. That he and the squid later became the best of friends does not alter the two basic lessons to be derived from this story: Always strain your water for juvenile squidlings and never trust water from the River Moth.
ENEMIES AND EATABLES
According to Clyde Aldrich, hailed by inaccurate blateroons as the “leading expert” on the King Squid, this beast among squid has no natural enemies. (This is not the case for its closest relative, the southern saltwater Saphant Squid, which must fend off the treacherous predations of the schizophrenic Saphant Whale — the whale that framed an empire, so to speak.)
As for the King Squid’s consumables, we can say with some authority that it eats with more variety than those released at the appointed hour to graze the cafeterias or even kitchens. The King Squid is a rapturous meativore that hunts relentlessly for prey ranging from insects, crustaceans, fish, other squid, and cows (when available), to the contents of badly placed houses. In short, the King Squid will eat anything it can wrap its limbs around, including the deadly but stupid freshwater shark. However, contrary to George Edgewick’s A Study of the Link Between Invertebrates & Garbage, the King Squid, due to its highly developed sense of smell, does not follow garbage scows any more than it would care to order out from an Ambergrisian tavern.
THE PLAYFUL SIDE OF THE KING SQUID
All talk of predators and prey aside, the King Squid expresses a playful side when released from the prison of rote instinct. This sense of play usually manifests itself through its propulsion system. To move about, the squid depends upon its funnel — a short, hose-like organ that projects from the mantle below the head. Because the mantle swivels, the squid has remarkable funnel control. From which point derives one of the most remarkable of the King Squid’s habits.
Namely, the King Squid has been known to shoot long streamers of water at unsuspecting travelers who walk on paths along the riverbank. These high-speed columns of water can travel as far as 80 feet inland and douse a soon-spluttering pedestrian with a pungent dose of silty water.
Such preternatural aim requires excellent eyesight and remarkable intelligence. The displays are often accompanied by a “huffing” sound that I believe is laughter, despite what my neighbor John says about my theories. The so-called experts — who could be locked up forever in a cell for all I care — believe this is just an effect created by refilling the funnel with water to have another go.
Regardless, as an unfortunate result, those bloated ticks who congregate under the name “The Ambergrisian Safety League” drafted a resolution allocating monies to train squid as firefighters for those sections of Ambergris accessible by water. Less laughable although more absurd are the oft-fatal and crackpot “squid baptisms” performed by the Church of the Squid Children, a cult that attempts to provoke “the holy act of absolution” from the squid. As might be expected from a confirmed meativore, the King Squid rarely obliges with anything approaching civilized behavior.
FURTHER INKLINGS OF SQUID INTELLIGENCE — AND A BROD SIGHTING
Meanwhile, further inklings of King Squid intelligence continue to surface, the ripplings of a case for cognitive ability long established by physiological evidence. Surely it cannot be coincidence that the squid’s two mighty hearts pump blood not only into its stalwart gills, but into its large and complex brain as well? The average King Squid brain receives three gallons of blood more each day than the average resident — fed a lunch of dried-out fish strips, curdled yogurt, and a disappointed-looking green bean — receives in a week. The only animal with a larger brain, the Odecca Bichoral White Whale, is said to list to one side from the weight of its cranium.
The King Squid — like some lesser squid but unlike the Spastic Alarming Squid — also maintains direct control over its coloration and patterns, which appears to provide further evidence of craftiness.
Phosphorescent displays over the river at night bring to mind the strange lights seen over the ruined town ofAlfar ten years ago and attributed to an unknown intelligence. (The careful reader will begin to catch a glimpse of the context for my unique theories, imparted to you in Part IV of this monograph.) From a base of translucent silver, the King Squid can strobe to green, blue, red, yellow, orange, purple, black, or any combination thereof. They can camouflage themselves against any background, with lightning-fast color changes. Although such changes may originally have “evolved”—to use the much-abused Xaver Daffed’s over-analyzed word— to interrupt predator attack sequences or to assist in mating rituals, the skill now appears to form a sophisticated communication system, more effective than sound or the tentacle sign language Maxwell Brod once hallucinated he observed on a deep river dive.
FURNESS AND LEEPIN’S REVELATORY DISCOVERY
If people were not by nature insane and resistant to self-improvement or therapy, the joint research of the under-appreciated Raymond Furness and Paulina Leepin would have long ago replaced the buffoonish efforts of ludicrines like Brod.
Furness and Leepin’s first stroke of inspiration was to bypass the Silt Problem by setting up a blind much like those used for birding. Made of glass and located in the hollowed out bottom of a houseboat tethered to a sandbank in the middle of an otherwise deep part of the Moth, this device represented a classic advancement in the tools available to the squidologist.
In time, various King Squid overcame their wariness and peered curiously into the glass while Furness and Leepin, motionless and somewhat terrified, stared back. It took several months of study, according to their journals, but they eventually recorded evidence of squid “flash communication” as they called it.
Later, these two pioneers were able to glean meaning from the “flash communication”—and actually communicate back! Thus was the barrier between squidologist and squid broken, if only for a moment, altering forever the relationship between scientist and tidal pool, observer and observed.
To start with, Furness and Leepin sketched out some basic communication patterns, reproduced on page 20.
As even a mythomaniac can see, such communication operates at a much higher level than that of a dog, a cat, or a pig, even considering recent experiments in that area.
But Furness and Leepin’s research had not yet reached its full potential. With the help of a lamp and crepe paper, they projected letters into the water alongside their squid equivalents, first in random strings such as RIEKHITMLALFEYD and then as words and phrases such as I AM A SQUID. HOW ARE YOU TODAY?
At first, the squid did not reply. After a week of such stimuli, however, Furness and Leepin were astonished to find that the squid would display the letters on their glowing skin — and not only display the letters but send them in motion, circling their bodies, so that dual messages of I AM A SQUID and HOW ARE YOU TODAY might collide like ghostly alphabet trains.
Such findings should have led to further revelations, with fame and fortune awaiting Furness and Leepin once they had documented all of their observations. However, an odd incident then occurred to discredit them utterly in the eyes of other scientists. This incident hints at a higher level of squid intelligence than previously reported in even such optimistic publications as Squid Thoughts. The journal entry makes for riveting reading, but also distresses me. What might have been if only they had held their ground?
Today Furness and I decided to abandon our research. It is too dangerous. The squid make it so. I never thought that the squid themselves could dissuade us from our love of squidology, but, alas, it has happened. To explain—
After an uneventful morning, a series of huge bubbles breached the water’s surface near our houseboat around noon. A slow, ponderous wave, as of something enormous coming toward us below the surface, buffeted the boat. We immediately donned our emergency animal skin flotation devices, our globular fishbowl masks, and our seal fins and, thus safe (or so we thought), descended into the glass blind at the bottom of the houseboat. Flashing red and orange, the King Squid we had nicknamed Squid #8, Squid
#5, Squid #12, Squid #16, and Squid #135 hovered in front of the blind for a moment, receded into the middle distance, and then sped away into the murk. At first, we thought our odd attire had startled them.
Even so, their reaction unnerved us. Yet we stayed in the houseboat because of our devotion to the Cause… only to scream in terror as a tentacle the size of our entire boat slid through the water beneath the glass. Across its vast greenish surface, as Truff is our witness, we read, in gold letters: LEAVE NOW OR I WILL DEVOUR YOU, SUCK OUT YOUR MARROWS, AND USE THE BONES TO MAKE A NEST FOR MY YOUNG.
For a moment, we sat there in terror. We could not move. It was only a sharp slap of tentacle tip against the boat, a sudden stench of ammonia, and an added squidular message of HURRY UP! that unparalyzed us.
It is difficult to reconstruct what happened next, but we remember running onto the deck and jumping onto the sandbar, screaming all the while, and then, behind us, the houseboat crunching into bits from tentacle lashings. We threw ourselves into the waters opposite in a state of utter hysteria and scrambled for shore, bits of broken planks slicing through the air all around us, our masks obscured by silt, our seal fins impeding our progress and, most annoying of all, our animal skins filling with water because we had clutched them so tightly they had begun to leak from puncture marks. When at last we reached the safety of the shore, only a few floating timbers remained of the houseboat. A sudden lunging wave of water convinced us to seek more permanent shelter far, far inland — where we have remained to this day.
Alas, muddleheads with all-powerful spectacles pushed up on their brows, doltish jury lumps with puddings for brains — what constituted Established Squidology — swept Furness and Leepin’s findings aside as easily as their houseboat and they were lucky to escape that catastrophe with even the integrity of their earlier studies intact. Confined to the bin of rejects, labeled as “lunatics,” despite having made perhaps the single most important squidology discovery since Rebecca Yancy’s revelations concerning the air-water gill ratio, Furness and Leepin descended into that nightmare half-lit world of pseudo-science and alcoholism that so many of our practitioners enter never to return. (For more information on the circumstances surrounding this, our primary affliction, please refer to Hops and the Amateur Squidologist by Alan Ruch and The Squid on Our Backs, The Tentaclesin Our Brains: An Account of a Descent into Madness by Macken Clark.)
SQUID CROSS-COUNTRY ADVENTURES
Reliable scientific study aside, at least two pieces of anecdotal evidence also point to squid intelligence and squid creativity.
The first evidence concerns reports of squid perambulations on solid ground! On six separate occasions, individuals reported seeing groups of giant squid come up out of the water and “walk around” using shimmering globes of water encased around their gills and eyes to protect them from the villainous air. In all cases, the globe of water, tension unbroken, was held in place by four arms wound above the head, while the remaining four arms and two tentacles sufficed for the King Squid to drag itself over the grass.
As they gafflocked along (a term I myself coined while experimenting with the squidly means of transportation out in the yard), intense communication shimmered like heat lightning across their skin, strobing from silver to red to blue to green to purple to black and back again within a matter of seconds.
Where these adventurous squid were headed, the eyewitnesses could not say, being too shocked at the sight of these hardy invertebrate explorers of terror firma to do much more than bleat in panic and run away. One man even dropped his pipe and started a fire — quickly put out by a nonchalant water blast from the squid.
As further proof of squid wiles, every witness encountered the squidpeditions in sparsely habitated regions near dusk, while walking alone. In each case, the delusional local authorities explained it away as a result of “poor light and bad eyesight.” In one case, the witness was asked if she hadn’t in fact seen a
“balloon of some kind.” However, the more advanced and dedicated squidologist will note that the King Squid is, in its natural habitat, most active at dusk — and surely a cross-country jaunt of some length suggests a high level of activity! Alas, all of the accounts on this matter are protected under the quaint laws governing doctor-client privilege, as each witness has since been hospitalized for various and sundry psychological ailments, squidanthropy chief among them.
HELLATOSE & BAUBLE: FACT OR FICTION?
It has been more difficult for skeptics to scuttle the case of Baron Bubbabaunce & His Amazing Performing Squid. This act, associated with many a circus, from the Amazing Two-Headed Trilobite Brothers’ Cavalcade of Miracles to High Priest David Thornton’s Abyss of Sinfully Good Fun, consisted of George Bubbabaunce (known by his carny friends as “Bauble”) and his King Squid Hellatose Jangles performing a water puppet show. While “Bauble” narrated from the side, Hellatose Jangles created complex psychodramas based on the work of the obscure playwright Hoffmenthol (an influence on the great Voss Bender). Flanked on three sides by bleacher seating, the “theater” consisted of a rectangular pool of murky water siphoned in from the River Moth. Hellatose’s mantle and head provided an island or
“stage” within the pool. Bauble would fit Hellatose’s arms with tentacle puppets. This meant that up to 10 puppets could inhabit a single scene — leading to extremely sophisticated productions that rivaled the pomp and circumstance of Machel and Sporlender. Two of Bauble’s comrades at the Abyss of Sinfully Good Fun recall that he did not seem to be the one in control of the artistic relationship. As quoted in Sneller’s A History of Traveling Medicine Shows and Nefarious Circi, the Four-Faced Lizard Boy, Samuel Pippin, indicated that “In their tent at night, they would have long arguments. Bauble would shout.
Hella would respond with high-pitched squealings from his traveling pond. If the light was on in the tent, you could see Hella’s arms writhing as he tried to make some point with body language. Bauble would just stand there with shoulders slumped, like a hen-pecked husband.”
Three-Jawed Shark Fin Girl claims to have witnessed even more damning evidence of squid intelligence.
She entered the Bauble-Hellatose tent only to find the squid dictating new scenes to Bauble, Bauble reacting with severe annoyance as he wrote down a line only for Hellatose to object and force him to erase it and start over. “It seemed,” she said, “as if Bauble was just a scribe for Hella, the master playwright.”
Certainly, the very public argument over set design that ended their relationship conveyed a succinct affirmation of squid intelligence, as Hellatose used his arms to make a rude gesture in Bauble’s general direction. Following this altercation, recorded in Elaine Feaster’s article for The Amateur Squidologist (see: Feaster, Elaine) neither man nor squid was ever heard from again.
Much nonsense has been expelled into print over the years about Bauble and Hellatose. The worst of this revolves around rumors, silly to the extreme, that both Sporlender and Bender owed many of their best lines to “a mysterious Mr. H,” to whom they would send dead scenes when their creativity had dried up… “only to receive back, by anonymous messenger, a fortnight later, wonderful revisions… in a delicate handwriting that used squid ink.”
I need not point out the ridiculousness of this assertion — a squid would rather write with its own vomit than use its ink. The very thought is repugnant.
NOTES
1. A classic case study of the day-to-day reality of a noun transformed into mad adverb.
2. My father’s eyes were a steely gray that locked in on the subject of his stare with a scientist’s ardor.
Once seen, you could not be unseen by his gaze, even were he to turn away. My mother had pale blue eyes that never stared for long. They did not follow the fastidious detail of the stern words that issued from her mouth, but fluttered here and there. I recommend to every young squidologist that they study first their parents’ eyes before looking into the eyes of a King Squid. For you will then be surprised by how similar, despite the differences, the two species, in such different families, can be…
3. Truant or troublemaking squidologists may actually know more but find themselves confined to restrictive settings in which it is difficult to obtain the proper books and tools to advance themselves in their chosen profession. See: Footnote #3. (In those early years, some sort of transformation may seem necessary, even desirable. Usually, this is just a condition of youth. However, in rare cases, it may develop into something miraculous. Refer to Roberts, M.A., for more information.) 4. I would compare the problem to my father’s reliance on “fruiting bodies” when discussing mushrooms with the general populace. My father was a firm believer in the Invisible World simply because so much of his research depended upon the microscope. This formed a marked contrast to my mother, who used the widest celestial and psychic telescopes in hopes of catching a glimpse of God. Somewhere between the two extremes lie the young of the King Squid, which, although observable by microscope, must often feel like tiny gods adrift in some limitless expanse of darkness.
5. See: An Amateur Squidologist’s Journey Toward Self-Realization: The Squid and I, by Richard Smythe.
6. SeeFrederick Roper’s fascinating study, Incidences of Squid Incursions Among the Communities of the Lower Moth: Anecdotal Evidence Supporting the Need for Squid-Proof Habitats.
7. Which leaves Edgewick with one valid conclusion, only implied by his book: “George Edgewick follows garbage scows.” My father used to call this sort of thing the “bookless theory.”
8. It would be easier to just show you the infernal and uncomfortable thing than have to describe it, frankly.
9. Eyewitness accounts convey a sense of embarrassed terror. John Kuddle, a financial officer and former banker-warrior under Trillian, related that “I was walking down a quiet path by the river, on my way to the town ofDerth, a big bag of money over my shoulder, when suddenly something hit me and knocked me off my feet. The coins in my bag went flying. It was only when I got up and surveyed my situation and found I was all wet and covered in bits of algae that I realized I had been doused — and there the big brute of a bastard was, lazing in the water with his mantle up, that tin plate eye staring at me as if to say ‘What are you going to do about it?’ ” (Local washerwomen also tell of being taunted by squid for sport.)
10. As for evidence of souls, I can offer no evidence more circumstantial than the words of my mother upon our frequent returns from theTruffidianChurch: “Nothing without bones to rattle can truly be said to have a soul.” (She was herself merely parroting the priest to whom she had expressed concerns about my interest in squidology. Needless to say, such fears were unfounded.)
11. Zoologists have never caught a good glimpse of this whale, let alone been able to perform a taxonomy.
12. Some squid have even been known to camouflage themselves perfectly as human beings. (See: Kranch, George, who claimed that he “often came upon squid masquerading as human beings.” How to tell the difference? “You must look at the purported human being from the corner of your eye. If you experience a shimmering ripple effect around the edges of its form, then it is actually a squid.” The ridiculous Kranch then writes, “Of course, sometimes I just see sunspots. And it can be embarrassing to net a squid camouflaged as a human and then have to let them go.”)
13. Brod is clearly a congenial idiot hailing from a long line of idiots of the first order who would be better off counting the fins of the dull fish with which his name rhymes. Brod’s dive took place within the confines of a metal suit connected to an airhose. Assuming Brod was even receiving enough oxygen through his fragile lifeline to avoid brain damage, he had less than a slit of visibility through the poor quality glass of his face plate. Such visibility is, as I have previously pointed out while disposing of the mal-efficient Floxence, rendered moot by the silt content of the Moth anyway. I therefore have great difficulty believing his description of an “intricate device of communication that held me in thrall, the lithe sweep of tentacles forming signs and arcane letters that I could not decipher but nonetheless held me in awe of their magical meaning.” To which I reply: it’s the silt, man! The silt! Remember the silt before you fabricate outrageous lies. (This is good advice for any aspirating squidologist, I believe.)
14. A replica of the blind has apparently been put on display in theMorhaimMuseum for Scientific Advancement in the Biological Sciences just this past Thursday, according to a letter I have received.
15. It would be of benefit to the general populace if this inversion of the usual professional relationship were applied to other fields.
16. By an odd coincidence, the color scheme matches that of the Ambergrisian flag.
17. That the notebooks of these two pioneers in squidology remain unpublished and must be crudely mimeographed by attendants and passed around to their colleagues at squid conferences is a travesty of science, the blame for which falls squarely upon the anti-invertebrate shoulders of the so-called “academic” journals.
18. My father suffered from a similar affliction in his relationship with my mother. Although he did not allow it to ruin his studies, it did “mute” them to a degree. I would like to say that my mother misunderstood my father’s work, but I am afraid she understood it all too well. I loved her very much, despite the circumstances, but I do wonder what might have been for my father if she had left him to his own devices for more than ten minutes at a time.
19. Of Science, one assumes. Not, as one twisted ambivert with mesomorphic tendencies shared with me recently, some anti-squid terrorist organization. Most of the theories one hears are not worth repeating.
20. I sneer at those who claim Furness and Leepin were drunk long before they recorded the fateful events that ruined their reputation. As for a plot to collect insurance on the houseboat — such a rumor will not even receive a reply from me.
21. Certainly not to rescue me, apparently, despite my efforts these many years on their behalf.
22. Eyewitnesses believed Bauble used ventriloquism to create the voices of the characters. However, what if, instead, Hellatose was throwing his voice?
23. Except for the odd children’s comic strip “The Adventures of Hellatose & Bauble” that ran for several years in local broadsheets. A sample of the text:
Bauble & Hellatose are sitting in their circus tent, Bauble on a chair, Hellatose in his wading pool. Bauble is reading a broadsheet on the current state of Ambergrisian politics. Hellatose is imbibing, through a very long straw, a slightly alcoholic beverage with a tiny umbrella in it. It’s been a long day performing complex psycho-dramas for uncaring snot-nosed children…
Hellatose: Bauble?
Bauble: Yes, Hellatose?
Hellatose: Bauble, why aren’t I better known?
Bauble: Better known as what, Hellatose?
Hellatose: As a playwright, Bauble. A playwright. I should be as well known as Voss Bender.
Bauble (absorbed in his broadsheet): Really?
Hellatose: Yes. I should be. I definitely shouldn’t be here.
(Waves tentacles around to indicate the confines of the tent.)
Bauble: You’re a squid, Hellatose.
Hellatose: All the more reason. I should be splashing around in my very own place of honor in a private pud-
dlebox at the theater.
Bauble: There’s no such thing as a puddlebox, Hellatose.
Hellatose (sighing): There should be, Bauble. There should be.
1. My family used squid ink to write with for a time, while we had the squid mills. The squiders would bring it up in a glass container whenever we needed a refill. If I had known what indignities squid endure during ink collection, I would have used more conventional substances. My father, however, continued to use the ink and so it was never entirely exorcised from our house.
APPROACHING THE TRUE KING SQUID
Now WE SHALL TALK OF WHAT THE KING SQUID is INSTEAD OF what it is not. It is magnificent and vast. It is mythical and, to some of the misguided, Divine. It is, to more practical souls, a fine meal with a side of potatoes and a glass of brandy.
That it can be all things to all people may be explained by the fact that squidologists have identified over 600 species of squid. Large, small, medium-sized, oblong, squat, lithe, and long — all kinds exist in oceans, in rivers, in lakes. Beaks like parrots. Skin that flames and gutters with its own potency; depending on the time of day and temperature/ment, sometimes mute gray or festooned with self-made light like the Festival route at night. Some tough, some soft, some muscular, some gelatinous. Some can fling their bodies out of their watery domain and seem to fly! Others live in the deepest depths of the River Moth. Some commune together like swimming judges without scales to do them justice. Some, solitary, cannot stand even their own company. Yet others must, by their very nature, endure the company of an inferior species until they can metamorphose to a more exalted state.
UNCOMMON CHARACTERISTICS
While I shall attempt to recite shared characteristics in an orderly6fashion, as rote as any children’s song, I must admit that the closer we approach to the squid itself, the more excited I become: my mantle turns cerulean with pleasure, my funnel juts more prominently, my suckers tremble. So to speak.
As every young squidologist — released to happily squat over tidal pools (if in the Southern Isles) or lurk around the dock pilings (if in Ambergris) — knows, almost every squid has eight arms and two tentacles, grappling hooks, etc. As I may have mentioned. (The bookish squidologist will find case files on the now extinct Morrowean Mud Squid, whose tentacles reabsorb into the body upon attaining adulthood, leaving only flaccid nubs. This embarrassing condition is not shared by the King Squid.) Some defective species — the malodorous Stunted Beak Squid, the aptly-diagnosed Stockton Disabled Squid, and the repugnant Saphant Arse Squid — have arms of differing lengths. However, the King Squid is by contrast a paradigm of good health, its eight arms the exact same thickness and length, its two tentacles longer by only a few feet.
The tentacles, a marvel of biological engineering, serve a number of graceful functions, but primarily bring prey to the doom that is its mouth. Not a particularly swift doom, however. The King Squid does not swallow its food whole as does the Swollen Mantle Squid peculiar to the Alfar Lake Region. Nor does it batter its food against underwater rocks to tenderize it as does the Purple Bullheaded Squid popular along the coast ofScatha. Instead, the King Squid must chop up and grind down its food using its beak, teeth, and pistolaro (a tongue-like organ).
Why must the King Squid do this? Alas, as every aspirating young squidologist knows, the squid’s cartilaginous head capsule has little elasticity. It already houses a miraculous clamor of inmates: luminous eyes, a large brain, the esophagus.
Is this a flaw or some forethought the squidologist has not yet deciphered?
A SHORT DIGRESSION ON SQUID EYES
And the eyes! If the eyes function as a window on the soul as so many doctors seem to believe,7then the King Squid is a being from the Truffidian’s Heaven. Firstly, a squid’s eyes are not binocular: each sees what is on that side of the head. As a result, a squid can see twice as well as a human being; four times as well as those of you with glasses. Secondly, these eyes come in all shapes and sizes, from eyes as big as wagon wheels to eyes as small as buttons. Oblong, circular, ovoid, slitty, triangulated, spherical, octagonal. In colors that range from the exact shade of the green-gold sunset over Ambergris through the bars (of distant music) to the red-silver shimmer of a rich woman’s skirt at visiting time.
The King Squid’s eyes number not one like the Cyclopedic Swelling Squid, nor two like Every Other Type of Squid, but three! Three eyes! The third and most exciting lies hidden on the underside of the mantle. The third eye performs two miraculous functions. Firstly, it detects bioluminescence only.
Secondly, certain retina secretions suggest that this third eye produces a beam of light to aid the squid in seeing through the murky silt of theMothRiver.
I can shed no further light on this subject as profound as the King Squid’s own.
CONTINUING ON WITH LESSER-KNOWN UNCOMMON CHARACTERISTICS
But this, as I have said, any enterprising8young squidologist must already know — if not from first hand adventures than from any of the treacly but beloved kiddie squid cartoons that I believe still run amok in the various Ambergris broadsheets.
What the bemuddened, water-splashed, invertebrate-loving young rascal may be unaware of are certain aspects of the King Squid’s physiology and behavior that separate it from its squidkin. This should come as no surprise, given the paucity of quality sources for squidfact.
Firstly, the King Squid may reach adult lengths of 150 feet and weights of more than 5,000 pounds (would that the Moth were wider, deeper, and therefore more hospitable to larger specimens). As a result, the King Squid has the largest beak of any known squid. Squid beaks run small in relation to the body, but this still means a brave man with arms outstretched could just touch a large King Squid’s open upper and lower mandibles. Since this would require said man’s head to be inside said squid’s mouth, I cannot recommend it as a measurement technique except when approaching the deadest of squid.
But size alone cannot explain our lifelong fascination with the King Squid. Indeed, not even the most reputable amateur squidologist would recognize the creature in its juvenile phase, when it resembles the larva of some aquatic insect.9This has caused several unfortunate errors over the years.
TAKE THE CASE OF RICHARD SMYTHE, AMATEUR SQUIDOLOGIST
For example, even a published amateur squidologist such as Mr. Richard Smythe — a traveling salesman residing in the landlocked city ofLeander — can make a mistake. Mr. Smythe scooped up a jar of Moth water on a trip to Nicea precisely because it was full of what he believed to be insect larvae. Once home, he added the water to his aquarium to feed his patient fish and promptly departed in pursuit of a rumor of umbrellas needed in an umbrella-less land. Upon his return three weeks later, an angry King Squid the size of a small dog greeted him from the fishless tank. The starving squid promptly set upon the unfortunate Mr. Smythe, arms and tentacles flailing. Only the unsold umbrellas from his trip saved this silly man from an otherwise grinding fate. That he and the squid later became the best of friends does not alter the two basic lessons to be derived from this story: Always strain your water for juvenile squidlings and never trust water from the River Moth.
ENEMIES AND EATABLES
According to Clyde Aldrich, hailed by inaccurate blateroons as the “leading expert” on the King Squid, this beast among squid has no natural enemies. (This is not the case for its closest relative, the southern saltwater Saphant Squid, which must fend off the treacherous predations of the schizophrenic Saphant Whale — the whale that framed an empire, so to speak.)
As for the King Squid’s consumables, we can say with some authority that it eats with more variety than those released at the appointed hour to graze the cafeterias or even kitchens. The King Squid is a rapturous meativore that hunts relentlessly for prey ranging from insects, crustaceans, fish, other squid, and cows (when available), to the contents of badly placed houses. In short, the King Squid will eat anything it can wrap its limbs around, including the deadly but stupid freshwater shark. However, contrary to George Edgewick’s A Study of the Link Between Invertebrates & Garbage, the King Squid, due to its highly developed sense of smell, does not follow garbage scows any more than it would care to order out from an Ambergrisian tavern.
THE PLAYFUL SIDE OF THE KING SQUID
All talk of predators and prey aside, the King Squid expresses a playful side when released from the prison of rote instinct. This sense of play usually manifests itself through its propulsion system. To move about, the squid depends upon its funnel — a short, hose-like organ that projects from the mantle below the head. Because the mantle swivels, the squid has remarkable funnel control. From which point derives one of the most remarkable of the King Squid’s habits.
Namely, the King Squid has been known to shoot long streamers of water at unsuspecting travelers who walk on paths along the riverbank. These high-speed columns of water can travel as far as 80 feet inland and douse a soon-spluttering pedestrian with a pungent dose of silty water.
Such preternatural aim requires excellent eyesight and remarkable intelligence. The displays are often accompanied by a “huffing” sound that I believe is laughter, despite what my neighbor John says about my theories. The so-called experts — who could be locked up forever in a cell for all I care — believe this is just an effect created by refilling the funnel with water to have another go.
Regardless, as an unfortunate result, those bloated ticks who congregate under the name “The Ambergrisian Safety League” drafted a resolution allocating monies to train squid as firefighters for those sections of Ambergris accessible by water. Less laughable although more absurd are the oft-fatal and crackpot “squid baptisms” performed by the Church of the Squid Children, a cult that attempts to provoke “the holy act of absolution” from the squid. As might be expected from a confirmed meativore, the King Squid rarely obliges with anything approaching civilized behavior.
FURTHER INKLINGS OF SQUID INTELLIGENCE — AND A BROD SIGHTING
Meanwhile, further inklings of King Squid intelligence continue to surface, the ripplings of a case for cognitive ability long established by physiological evidence. Surely it cannot be coincidence that the squid’s two mighty hearts pump blood not only into its stalwart gills, but into its large and complex brain as well? The average King Squid brain receives three gallons of blood more each day than the average resident — fed a lunch of dried-out fish strips, curdled yogurt, and a disappointed-looking green bean — receives in a week. The only animal with a larger brain, the Odecca Bichoral White Whale, is said to list to one side from the weight of its cranium.
The King Squid — like some lesser squid but unlike the Spastic Alarming Squid — also maintains direct control over its coloration and patterns, which appears to provide further evidence of craftiness.
Phosphorescent displays over the river at night bring to mind the strange lights seen over the ruined town ofAlfar ten years ago and attributed to an unknown intelligence. (The careful reader will begin to catch a glimpse of the context for my unique theories, imparted to you in Part IV of this monograph.) From a base of translucent silver, the King Squid can strobe to green, blue, red, yellow, orange, purple, black, or any combination thereof. They can camouflage themselves against any background, with lightning-fast color changes. Although such changes may originally have “evolved”—to use the much-abused Xaver Daffed’s over-analyzed word— to interrupt predator attack sequences or to assist in mating rituals, the skill now appears to form a sophisticated communication system, more effective than sound or the tentacle sign language Maxwell Brod once hallucinated he observed on a deep river dive.
FURNESS AND LEEPIN’S REVELATORY DISCOVERY
If people were not by nature insane and resistant to self-improvement or therapy, the joint research of the under-appreciated Raymond Furness and Paulina Leepin would have long ago replaced the buffoonish efforts of ludicrines like Brod.
Furness and Leepin’s first stroke of inspiration was to bypass the Silt Problem by setting up a blind much like those used for birding. Made of glass and located in the hollowed out bottom of a houseboat tethered to a sandbank in the middle of an otherwise deep part of the Moth, this device represented a classic advancement in the tools available to the squidologist.
In time, various King Squid overcame their wariness and peered curiously into the glass while Furness and Leepin, motionless and somewhat terrified, stared back. It took several months of study, according to their journals, but they eventually recorded evidence of squid “flash communication” as they called it.
Later, these two pioneers were able to glean meaning from the “flash communication”—and actually communicate back! Thus was the barrier between squidologist and squid broken, if only for a moment, altering forever the relationship between scientist and tidal pool, observer and observed.
To start with, Furness and Leepin sketched out some basic communication patterns, reproduced on page 20.
As even a mythomaniac can see, such communication operates at a much higher level than that of a dog, a cat, or a pig, even considering recent experiments in that area.
But Furness and Leepin’s research had not yet reached its full potential. With the help of a lamp and crepe paper, they projected letters into the water alongside their squid equivalents, first in random strings such as RIEKHITMLALFEYD and then as words and phrases such as I AM A SQUID. HOW ARE YOU TODAY?
At first, the squid did not reply. After a week of such stimuli, however, Furness and Leepin were astonished to find that the squid would display the letters on their glowing skin — and not only display the letters but send them in motion, circling their bodies, so that dual messages of I AM A SQUID and HOW ARE YOU TODAY might collide like ghostly alphabet trains.
Such findings should have led to further revelations, with fame and fortune awaiting Furness and Leepin once they had documented all of their observations. However, an odd incident then occurred to discredit them utterly in the eyes of other scientists. This incident hints at a higher level of squid intelligence than previously reported in even such optimistic publications as Squid Thoughts. The journal entry makes for riveting reading, but also distresses me. What might have been if only they had held their ground?
Today Furness and I decided to abandon our research. It is too dangerous. The squid make it so. I never thought that the squid themselves could dissuade us from our love of squidology, but, alas, it has happened. To explain—
After an uneventful morning, a series of huge bubbles breached the water’s surface near our houseboat around noon. A slow, ponderous wave, as of something enormous coming toward us below the surface, buffeted the boat. We immediately donned our emergency animal skin flotation devices, our globular fishbowl masks, and our seal fins and, thus safe (or so we thought), descended into the glass blind at the bottom of the houseboat. Flashing red and orange, the King Squid we had nicknamed Squid #8, Squid
#5, Squid #12, Squid #16, and Squid #135 hovered in front of the blind for a moment, receded into the middle distance, and then sped away into the murk. At first, we thought our odd attire had startled them.
Even so, their reaction unnerved us. Yet we stayed in the houseboat because of our devotion to the Cause… only to scream in terror as a tentacle the size of our entire boat slid through the water beneath the glass. Across its vast greenish surface, as Truff is our witness, we read, in gold letters: LEAVE NOW OR I WILL DEVOUR YOU, SUCK OUT YOUR MARROWS, AND USE THE BONES TO MAKE A NEST FOR MY YOUNG.
For a moment, we sat there in terror. We could not move. It was only a sharp slap of tentacle tip against the boat, a sudden stench of ammonia, and an added squidular message of HURRY UP! that unparalyzed us.
It is difficult to reconstruct what happened next, but we remember running onto the deck and jumping onto the sandbar, screaming all the while, and then, behind us, the houseboat crunching into bits from tentacle lashings. We threw ourselves into the waters opposite in a state of utter hysteria and scrambled for shore, bits of broken planks slicing through the air all around us, our masks obscured by silt, our seal fins impeding our progress and, most annoying of all, our animal skins filling with water because we had clutched them so tightly they had begun to leak from puncture marks. When at last we reached the safety of the shore, only a few floating timbers remained of the houseboat. A sudden lunging wave of water convinced us to seek more permanent shelter far, far inland — where we have remained to this day.
Alas, muddleheads with all-powerful spectacles pushed up on their brows, doltish jury lumps with puddings for brains — what constituted Established Squidology — swept Furness and Leepin’s findings aside as easily as their houseboat and they were lucky to escape that catastrophe with even the integrity of their earlier studies intact. Confined to the bin of rejects, labeled as “lunatics,” despite having made perhaps the single most important squidology discovery since Rebecca Yancy’s revelations concerning the air-water gill ratio, Furness and Leepin descended into that nightmare half-lit world of pseudo-science and alcoholism that so many of our practitioners enter never to return. (For more information on the circumstances surrounding this, our primary affliction, please refer to Hops and the Amateur Squidologist by Alan Ruch and The Squid on Our Backs, The Tentaclesin Our Brains: An Account of a Descent into Madness by Macken Clark.)
SQUID CROSS-COUNTRY ADVENTURES
Reliable scientific study aside, at least two pieces of anecdotal evidence also point to squid intelligence and squid creativity.
The first evidence concerns reports of squid perambulations on solid ground! On six separate occasions, individuals reported seeing groups of giant squid come up out of the water and “walk around” using shimmering globes of water encased around their gills and eyes to protect them from the villainous air. In all cases, the globe of water, tension unbroken, was held in place by four arms wound above the head, while the remaining four arms and two tentacles sufficed for the King Squid to drag itself over the grass.
As they gafflocked along (a term I myself coined while experimenting with the squidly means of transportation out in the yard), intense communication shimmered like heat lightning across their skin, strobing from silver to red to blue to green to purple to black and back again within a matter of seconds.
Where these adventurous squid were headed, the eyewitnesses could not say, being too shocked at the sight of these hardy invertebrate explorers of terror firma to do much more than bleat in panic and run away. One man even dropped his pipe and started a fire — quickly put out by a nonchalant water blast from the squid.
As further proof of squid wiles, every witness encountered the squidpeditions in sparsely habitated regions near dusk, while walking alone. In each case, the delusional local authorities explained it away as a result of “poor light and bad eyesight.” In one case, the witness was asked if she hadn’t in fact seen a
“balloon of some kind.” However, the more advanced and dedicated squidologist will note that the King Squid is, in its natural habitat, most active at dusk — and surely a cross-country jaunt of some length suggests a high level of activity! Alas, all of the accounts on this matter are protected under the quaint laws governing doctor-client privilege, as each witness has since been hospitalized for various and sundry psychological ailments, squidanthropy chief among them.
HELLATOSE & BAUBLE: FACT OR FICTION?
It has been more difficult for skeptics to scuttle the case of Baron Bubbabaunce & His Amazing Performing Squid. This act, associated with many a circus, from the Amazing Two-Headed Trilobite Brothers’ Cavalcade of Miracles to High Priest David Thornton’s Abyss of Sinfully Good Fun, consisted of George Bubbabaunce (known by his carny friends as “Bauble”) and his King Squid Hellatose Jangles performing a water puppet show. While “Bauble” narrated from the side, Hellatose Jangles created complex psychodramas based on the work of the obscure playwright Hoffmenthol (an influence on the great Voss Bender). Flanked on three sides by bleacher seating, the “theater” consisted of a rectangular pool of murky water siphoned in from the River Moth. Hellatose’s mantle and head provided an island or
“stage” within the pool. Bauble would fit Hellatose’s arms with tentacle puppets. This meant that up to 10 puppets could inhabit a single scene — leading to extremely sophisticated productions that rivaled the pomp and circumstance of Machel and Sporlender. Two of Bauble’s comrades at the Abyss of Sinfully Good Fun recall that he did not seem to be the one in control of the artistic relationship. As quoted in Sneller’s A History of Traveling Medicine Shows and Nefarious Circi, the Four-Faced Lizard Boy, Samuel Pippin, indicated that “In their tent at night, they would have long arguments. Bauble would shout.
Hella would respond with high-pitched squealings from his traveling pond. If the light was on in the tent, you could see Hella’s arms writhing as he tried to make some point with body language. Bauble would just stand there with shoulders slumped, like a hen-pecked husband.”
Three-Jawed Shark Fin Girl claims to have witnessed even more damning evidence of squid intelligence.
She entered the Bauble-Hellatose tent only to find the squid dictating new scenes to Bauble, Bauble reacting with severe annoyance as he wrote down a line only for Hellatose to object and force him to erase it and start over. “It seemed,” she said, “as if Bauble was just a scribe for Hella, the master playwright.”
Certainly, the very public argument over set design that ended their relationship conveyed a succinct affirmation of squid intelligence, as Hellatose used his arms to make a rude gesture in Bauble’s general direction. Following this altercation, recorded in Elaine Feaster’s article for The Amateur Squidologist (see: Feaster, Elaine) neither man nor squid was ever heard from again.
Much nonsense has been expelled into print over the years about Bauble and Hellatose. The worst of this revolves around rumors, silly to the extreme, that both Sporlender and Bender owed many of their best lines to “a mysterious Mr. H,” to whom they would send dead scenes when their creativity had dried up… “only to receive back, by anonymous messenger, a fortnight later, wonderful revisions… in a delicate handwriting that used squid ink.”
I need not point out the ridiculousness of this assertion — a squid would rather write with its own vomit than use its ink. The very thought is repugnant.
NOTES
1. A classic case study of the day-to-day reality of a noun transformed into mad adverb.
2. My father’s eyes were a steely gray that locked in on the subject of his stare with a scientist’s ardor.
Once seen, you could not be unseen by his gaze, even were he to turn away. My mother had pale blue eyes that never stared for long. They did not follow the fastidious detail of the stern words that issued from her mouth, but fluttered here and there. I recommend to every young squidologist that they study first their parents’ eyes before looking into the eyes of a King Squid. For you will then be surprised by how similar, despite the differences, the two species, in such different families, can be…
3. Truant or troublemaking squidologists may actually know more but find themselves confined to restrictive settings in which it is difficult to obtain the proper books and tools to advance themselves in their chosen profession. See: Footnote #3. (In those early years, some sort of transformation may seem necessary, even desirable. Usually, this is just a condition of youth. However, in rare cases, it may develop into something miraculous. Refer to Roberts, M.A., for more information.) 4. I would compare the problem to my father’s reliance on “fruiting bodies” when discussing mushrooms with the general populace. My father was a firm believer in the Invisible World simply because so much of his research depended upon the microscope. This formed a marked contrast to my mother, who used the widest celestial and psychic telescopes in hopes of catching a glimpse of God. Somewhere between the two extremes lie the young of the King Squid, which, although observable by microscope, must often feel like tiny gods adrift in some limitless expanse of darkness.
5. See: An Amateur Squidologist’s Journey Toward Self-Realization: The Squid and I, by Richard Smythe.
6. SeeFrederick Roper’s fascinating study, Incidences of Squid Incursions Among the Communities of the Lower Moth: Anecdotal Evidence Supporting the Need for Squid-Proof Habitats.
7. Which leaves Edgewick with one valid conclusion, only implied by his book: “George Edgewick follows garbage scows.” My father used to call this sort of thing the “bookless theory.”
8. It would be easier to just show you the infernal and uncomfortable thing than have to describe it, frankly.
9. Eyewitness accounts convey a sense of embarrassed terror. John Kuddle, a financial officer and former banker-warrior under Trillian, related that “I was walking down a quiet path by the river, on my way to the town ofDerth, a big bag of money over my shoulder, when suddenly something hit me and knocked me off my feet. The coins in my bag went flying. It was only when I got up and surveyed my situation and found I was all wet and covered in bits of algae that I realized I had been doused — and there the big brute of a bastard was, lazing in the water with his mantle up, that tin plate eye staring at me as if to say ‘What are you going to do about it?’ ” (Local washerwomen also tell of being taunted by squid for sport.)
10. As for evidence of souls, I can offer no evidence more circumstantial than the words of my mother upon our frequent returns from theTruffidianChurch: “Nothing without bones to rattle can truly be said to have a soul.” (She was herself merely parroting the priest to whom she had expressed concerns about my interest in squidology. Needless to say, such fears were unfounded.)
11. Zoologists have never caught a good glimpse of this whale, let alone been able to perform a taxonomy.
12. Some squid have even been known to camouflage themselves perfectly as human beings. (See: Kranch, George, who claimed that he “often came upon squid masquerading as human beings.” How to tell the difference? “You must look at the purported human being from the corner of your eye. If you experience a shimmering ripple effect around the edges of its form, then it is actually a squid.” The ridiculous Kranch then writes, “Of course, sometimes I just see sunspots. And it can be embarrassing to net a squid camouflaged as a human and then have to let them go.”)
13. Brod is clearly a congenial idiot hailing from a long line of idiots of the first order who would be better off counting the fins of the dull fish with which his name rhymes. Brod’s dive took place within the confines of a metal suit connected to an airhose. Assuming Brod was even receiving enough oxygen through his fragile lifeline to avoid brain damage, he had less than a slit of visibility through the poor quality glass of his face plate. Such visibility is, as I have previously pointed out while disposing of the mal-efficient Floxence, rendered moot by the silt content of the Moth anyway. I therefore have great difficulty believing his description of an “intricate device of communication that held me in thrall, the lithe sweep of tentacles forming signs and arcane letters that I could not decipher but nonetheless held me in awe of their magical meaning.” To which I reply: it’s the silt, man! The silt! Remember the silt before you fabricate outrageous lies. (This is good advice for any aspirating squidologist, I believe.)
14. A replica of the blind has apparently been put on display in theMorhaimMuseum for Scientific Advancement in the Biological Sciences just this past Thursday, according to a letter I have received.
15. It would be of benefit to the general populace if this inversion of the usual professional relationship were applied to other fields.
16. By an odd coincidence, the color scheme matches that of the Ambergrisian flag.
17. That the notebooks of these two pioneers in squidology remain unpublished and must be crudely mimeographed by attendants and passed around to their colleagues at squid conferences is a travesty of science, the blame for which falls squarely upon the anti-invertebrate shoulders of the so-called “academic” journals.
18. My father suffered from a similar affliction in his relationship with my mother. Although he did not allow it to ruin his studies, it did “mute” them to a degree. I would like to say that my mother misunderstood my father’s work, but I am afraid she understood it all too well. I loved her very much, despite the circumstances, but I do wonder what might have been for my father if she had left him to his own devices for more than ten minutes at a time.
19. Of Science, one assumes. Not, as one twisted ambivert with mesomorphic tendencies shared with me recently, some anti-squid terrorist organization. Most of the theories one hears are not worth repeating.
20. I sneer at those who claim Furness and Leepin were drunk long before they recorded the fateful events that ruined their reputation. As for a plot to collect insurance on the houseboat — such a rumor will not even receive a reply from me.
21. Certainly not to rescue me, apparently, despite my efforts these many years on their behalf.
22. Eyewitnesses believed Bauble used ventriloquism to create the voices of the characters. However, what if, instead, Hellatose was throwing his voice?
23. Except for the odd children’s comic strip “The Adventures of Hellatose & Bauble” that ran for several years in local broadsheets. A sample of the text:
Bauble & Hellatose are sitting in their circus tent, Bauble on a chair, Hellatose in his wading pool. Bauble is reading a broadsheet on the current state of Ambergrisian politics. Hellatose is imbibing, through a very long straw, a slightly alcoholic beverage with a tiny umbrella in it. It’s been a long day performing complex psycho-dramas for uncaring snot-nosed children…
Hellatose: Bauble?
Bauble: Yes, Hellatose?
Hellatose: Bauble, why aren’t I better known?
Bauble: Better known as what, Hellatose?
Hellatose: As a playwright, Bauble. A playwright. I should be as well known as Voss Bender.
Bauble (absorbed in his broadsheet): Really?
Hellatose: Yes. I should be. I definitely shouldn’t be here.
(Waves tentacles around to indicate the confines of the tent.)
Bauble: You’re a squid, Hellatose.
Hellatose: All the more reason. I should be splashing around in my very own place of honor in a private pud-
dlebox at the theater.
Bauble: There’s no such thing as a puddlebox, Hellatose.
Hellatose (sighing): There should be, Bauble. There should be.
1. My family used squid ink to write with for a time, while we had the squid mills. The squiders would bring it up in a glass container whenever we needed a refill. If I had known what indignities squid endure during ink collection, I would have used more conventional substances. My father, however, continued to use the ink and so it was never entirely exorcised from our house.
III
EXPOUNDING WITH BREVITY ON THE PECULIARITIES OF SQUID LORE
A WARY INTRODUCTION TO THE FESTIVAL THOSE WITH MAGGOTS FOR BRAINS, WHO NUMBER MANY AND cure so few, often refer to the “misunderstood” Festival, as if it were some sort of sorely maligned creature, unfairly subjected to electric shock therapy and short rations due to a vice that, if viewed in a more sympathetic light, might be revealed as virtue. The boobish Bellamy Palethorpe, in his weekly tirade for the Ambergris Daily Broadsheet, “Bellamy Retorts,” would take precious column inches away from spraying the arterial blood of his enemies across the printed page to reminisce about youthful festival indulgences, referring to them as “innocent,” “fun-loving,” and “harmless antics.” Even the great lackbrain Voss Bender would at times shrug his shoulders and look to the heavens, as if the Festival existed independent of its participants. It is this kind of cloddish thinking that my mother, for all of her faults, railed against on a weekly basis. For if this theory of non-responsibility were universally applied, many an insensate, myopic fool, tripping through life in undeserved freedom, could hope for “redemption through reinterpretation”—a ham-fisted piece of Truffidian theology and a favorite dream of prison/asylum inmates.
The “truth”—and every squidologist is always painfully aware that today’s truth may be tomorrow’s chum — is that the Festival, as Martin Lake once put it, “exists whole and darkly glittering in the mind of each citizen of Ambergris.” I would travel farther than Lake and state that each separate version/vision creates a splinter Festival — and another, and another, until, turning upon that distant stage, no stars above for comfort, one finds oneself trapped in a hall of fractured mirrors comprised of so many reflected Festivals that it becomes impossible to choose the real Festival, even should freedom depend upon it. The various accumulations of rituals and odd customs, gathered together and twisted into a beggar’s pack before being offered up by smug experts as the “festival experience,” have no intrinsic worth.
The true “festival experience” cannot be fully explained even by the most learned squidologist. At the height of the Festival, one almost feels at home as, surrounded by squid floats and revelers in squid masks and squid balloons and the musky odor of fresh fish and seaweed, one can almost pretend that the trail of the light-festooned street is the Moth itself, and the revelers freshwater squid, gathered for social intercourse. The giddy energy, the sense of swimming upstream caused by the heavy thickness of the people you must brush up against to walk along the sidewalk, the sloshing of drinks in their glasses and cups, the wild surge of conversations, like the trickling of water over rocks downstream… There is such longing in these memories.
I experienced my first Festival more than 15 years ago. Freed finally from the ancestral home, from the magnifying-glass attentions of my mother and the febrile energy of my father, I was taking classes with the esteemed squidologist Chamblee Gort and breathing in such liberty as I have not known since. The Festival came as a revelation to me. It wakened in me all of those long-repressed feelings that I had accumulated in my youth among the books, reading tome after tome in that library as large as many people’s houses. Like many others, I ran naked through the revelers, clad only in my squid mask and lost myself in the crowds. It was only later, when I remembered the attendant violence, that I realized the Festival was a poor substitute.
AN ATTEMPT TO ATTEMPT THE SUBJECT REGARDLESS
However, despite my introduction, why not attempt (and tempt) the impossible. Therefore: The Festival did not originate as so many feckless historians (from Mr. Shriek on down) have suggested — namely, with an order by Cappan Manzikert I, first ruler of Ambergris, a year after founding the city. No, the Festival echoes a much earlier Festival put on by the indigenous tribe called the Dogghe.
The Dogghe worshipped what we now call the “Mothean Scuttlefish,” a dour type of squid, primitive by invertebrate standards, that likes nothing better than to wallow in the silt at the river’s bottom and siphon gross sustenance from the rotting refuse to be found there.
The Dogghe believed — for reasons forever lost to us along with most of the Dogghe — that the flesh of the scuttlefish held regenerative powers and heightened the amorous abilities of those who ate of it. Their annual celebration, held at roughly the same time as the modern day Festival, culminated with the choosing of one man to hunt the scuttlefish. Given that the average Mothean Scuttlefish, flattened against the riverbed, forms a circle roughly six feet across and that their primary defense consists of stuffing as much of their invertebrate bodies as possible down their attacker’s mouth and other available orifices, being selected cannot have been considered much of an honor by the selectee. (Imagine being suffocated underwater rather than drowned.)
No doubt the Manzikert clan, opportunists as always, usurped the Dogghe’s festival for the practical reason that it marked the start of the best (“best” is a relative term in this context) time to hunt the King Squid but also to replace the Dogghe’s rituals with stronger “magic.”
From dubious sources such as Dradin Kashmir’s third-person autobiography, Dradin, In Love, we can extract a few additional “facts”:
The Festival is a celebration of the spawning season, when the males battle mightily for females of the species and the fisher folk of the docks set out for a month’s trawling of the lusting ground, hoping to bring enough meat back to last until winter.
Beyond the obvious errors in this silly passage, I would point out the pathetic phallacy of battle. No such contests occur, except within the syllables of overheated ultra-decadent purple prose. The depiction of a
“spawning season/lusting ground” conjures up a depraved scene of tentacular orgies with great strobing bodies entangled and writhing as they thrash about in the silt. Alas, King Squid mate for life and do not congregate to breed. Only “widowed” or “unwed” squid maneuver for mates, and then only in solitary, scattered rituals that occur at another time of year entirely.
No, in fact, the squid gatherings at Festival time appear to consist of an orderly convocation of conferences — a convention of squid, at which a good deal of intense strobing occurs, but very little sexual activity.
I cannot overstate the dangers involved in disrupting such meetings for the purpose of hunting squid. One year, Ambergris lost 20 ships and over 600 sailors. On average, the squid-hunting season results in at least 30 casualties and the loss of more than a dozen ships. Even the casual researcher begins to wonder, scrutinizing the statistics, whether the King Squid congregate merely to hunt humans.
What benefits does Ambergris gain from this yearly sacrifice of men and materials? The answer is “an abundance of riches,” from the skin used as airtight containers and the meat sold to the Kalif’s empire, to the experimental new motored vehicle fuels developed by Hoegbotton & Sons Industrial Branch from squid oil and ink. Every part of the squid is used for some product, even the beak, which, ground down, comprises a key ingredient in the perfume exports that have, in recent years, brought money pouring into the Ambergris economy (little of which has gone into invertebrate research).
THE SQUID MILLS OF MY YOUTH
As an offshoot of the hunt — and perhaps to offset its unpredictable nature, Ambergris and many other Southern river cities experimented with squid mills for a time. Such attempts to breed the squid in semi-captivity were doomed to failure: the mills required too much space, blocking river traffic, and the squid were, at best, uncooperative.
In a depressingly familiar scenario, replicated throughout my life with regard to the objects of my desire, I remember the squid mills precisely because I was not, at first, allowed near enough to them to satisfy my curiosity (and when I finally was allowed, I could not enjoy the experience).
Framed by the third-story window of the locked library, the River Moth wound its way through the vast expanse of grounds to the west. With the naked eye, all I could make out of the squid mills was a glint of sun off metal and a suggestion of movement. With the aid of a spyglass, smuggled up from my rooms, I could just discern the unsubmerged portions of the squid mills: the tops of the huge metal cages, the great white pontoons that separated and supported them. Around these cages, from which I often fancied I saw a tip of tentacle creep out, strode the squiders in their red boots, overalls, thick gloves, and wide-brimmed hats. The single-minded attention they paid to their tasks only underscored the dangers of farming the squid.
Those men assigned to the deeper parts of the river, which contained completely submerged squid cages, used “squilts”—long, thick stilts that required great strength to maneuver through the turgid water.
The top half of the squilts could be detached for use as a weapon against either the captive squid or the wild squid that often attempted to free their brethren.
From my vantage, through the selective eye of the spyglass, those squiders in the deepest parts of the river seemed miraculous—“walking” on the water, the squilts completely submerged as they trudged along, gaze intent upon the swirling silt below them. The job of the squider took a tremendous sensitivity, for they “felt” the water with the squilts, searching for the vibrations of wild squid, sometimes sweeping special hand-held hooks through the water, hoping to encounter rubbery flesh. When the caged squid were used as bait for juvenile wild King Squid, the squiders would herd the wild squid into nets using nothing but the hooks and squilts. On one occasion, I observed a sudden frantic splashing of water, the suggestion of a large, dark body shooting up from the river bed, followed by a squider suddenly disappearing, his squilts still upright and vibrating…
Little wonder that to be “put through the squid mill” still means accomplishments gained through tedious yet dangerous labor. As we were driven through the local village on our way to the Truffidian Cathedral, I would often hear the children of the squiders singing: Oh, stop the squid mill, stop it, I pray
For I have been tending squid a good deal today
My head is quite sore from the thrashing I’ve received.
And my squilty bosses ache so much that sorely I am grieved.
Oh, stop the squid mill, stop it today, and I’ll be relieved.
For a long time, stuck in that library for so many months, forbidden by my mother to go outside, I wanted to be a squider. Alas, eventually the village children got their wish and the squid mills died out. I turned to squidology and the library became associated not with squid mills but with a series of other banal events.
RELATED SQUIDLORE
Many of the folk remedies attributed to lesser squid do not apply to the King Squid, which seems oddly resistant to being of use. For example, the old remedy in which one “lays a squid on the feet of the afflicted” to cure toothache or headache would take on a nightmarish context should a two-ton squid be winched into position and dropped on the patient! Nor does the ground beak of the King Squid, mixed with wine, stimulate sexual prowess or draw the poison from the bite of a venomous snake.
This also applies to the “squid cap”—a popular folk remedy to cure headaches and insomnia, immortalized in these lines from a play by Machel:
Bring in the squid cap. You must be shaved, sir
And then how suddenly we’ll make you sleep.
Traditionally, the “squid cap” placed on countless hapless heads consisted of a mixture of raw squid tentacles, milk, honey, rice, and wine, contained within a poultice. Relatedly, to have a “head squid”
means to have a head cold — an apt metaphor since a cold could often feel to the patient as if a squid had reached its arms down into his or her skull. Alas, the squid cap has never been touted as a cure for the common head squid. Alas, too, some folks have a more serious, permanent case of squid head. (Not to mention “squidlick,” a badly curled haircut.)
Actual squid recipes have been around for many hundreds of years, as exemplified by this children’s rhyme taken from the Blythe Academy Squid Primer:
Here’s water in your eye
From a half-baked squid pie
With the tentacles still a’twitching
And the gummy arms still itching
To catch you up to the beak
The beak beak beak beak beak
The Ambergris Gourmand Society has recorded 1,752 squid recipes originating from Ambergris alone.
Many squid-related words have entered the Ambergrisian vocabulary. While “ambiloquent” still means to be dexterous in doubletalk, to be “squidiloquent” is a much higher compliment. A “squid wife” sells squid. A “squidler,” as opposed to a “squider,” is one who handles squid for entertainment. Bauble would have been a good example of a squidler. A “chamber squid” is a common Mud Squid placed in a hotel room during the Festival for luck. A “squidpiece,” no longer much used now that Cappans do not rule Ambergris, used to refer to what can only be termed a kind of ornamental protective gear worn outside of the clothing, covering the genitals. An “obsquidium” would refer to an act of compliance in squid cult orations.
Of course, squidanthropy is the most famous aspect of squidlore.
SQUIDANTHROPY
Squidanthropy is not, as some have misidentified it, the domain of squid philanthropists but, rather, a form of supposed insanity in which a man imagines himself to be a squid. This may result in the subject taking to the waters in an attempt to rejoin his squidkin, with often fatal consequences if one wants to be honest about it, or simply a confused physiology: the subject may believe he or she is drowning while on dry land or feel the absence of gills or a mantle, or lose the ability to walk and find oneself swimming around in public fountains.
The most committed of amateur squidologists will always empathize with the underlying urge toward squidanthropy. It is no empty promise, no empty threat of a cure. It is simply one way in which to fulfill the dream known since childhood: to understand the squid in all of its manifestations. What squidologist has not thought of what it would be like to have a mantle? What squidologist, while spraying water on his boyhood friends, many or few, has not thought how much more fun to have a funnel? It is inevitable that in the quest to get under the King Squid’s skin, the squidologist learns to think like the squid. Like the detective who, in investigating a murder, loses himself in the identity of the murderer, the squidologist may, at times, lose himself in the identity of the squid (which, admittedly, has committed no crime). That some few do not come back out the other side to “sanity” is to be expected — and, perhaps, applauded.
Those who follow a singular obsession their entire lives should not be castigated for achieving the object of that obsession. Would we punish an artist for, through one last burst of genius flecked with insanity, creating the masterwork for which the world had been waiting since the beginning of the artist’s career?
For make no mistake — in squidanthropy, the amateur squidologist longs to make the final, synergistic leap that separates observer from observed, patient from doctor. The doctor studies the thing the patient has become, whereas the patient longs to study and understand himself. The correlation and the corollary are clear…
NOTES
1. Ironically, my mother loved the Festival for its colors and its spectacle. She truly believed theTruffidianChurch ’s proclamation that the Festival had been “reclaimed for God.” My father, on the other hand, found it frivolous and dangerous — he forbade me from going at first, although he would never tell me why.
2. Sometimes, one’s freedom, as any squidologist knows, depends on the patterns a squid’s ink makes as it lingers in the water.
3. The situation is not without humor, for it closely resembles the situation that exists within a mental institution: in tight quarters, in similar garb, dissimilar minds attempt to build a consensus reality that, with a monumental effort of empathy, cannot — can never! — take concrete form. (If you do not like this new tone I have adopted, O Reader, remember that tone can change depending on the mood of the day and the amount of medication.)
4. Better that I be deprived of the “Festival” as practiced here — it resembles the real Festival only in the way a soggy cupcake resembles a wedding cake.
5. Alas, young squidologists, you are unlikely to see a woman in the places you’ll be traipsing through in your waterproof boots. Only a female squidologist will truly understand you — and they are few and far between; not every Furness finds his Leepin. You may find some comfort in documenting the sensual activities of the female King Squid, but danger lies therein as well.
6. Issues of Festival violence and the involvement of Ambergris’ subterranean inhabitants, the gray caps, lie outside of this section’s purview and therefore I have chosen to ignore such unpleasantries for the moment.
7. See: Cane, Albert.
8. At least at the level of drought-like fact, one may make statements about the history of the Festival that, while boring, could be sworn to before a board of inquiry.
9. As do, to be brutally honest, half of Ambergris’ current stuporstitions, including raw, chopped-up rabbit as a cure for eating poison mushrooms and the enchanting thought that lying in a pool of blood extracted from deer livers will bring back the dead. Believe me, if I thought it worked, I would have tried it first. (See: Stindle, Bernard.) At least the modern welt that is psychotherapy cannot be laid at the Dogghe’s door.
10. Written by a madman, if you can believe that, and yet still read today.
11. Unlike many human beings. Some, like my mother, could not stop preying off the local help.
12. Squid baiting has never been a popular sport.
13. These silent, solitary men must be of the sternest and calmest disposition while pursuing their work.
Many, in fact, left the employ of the squid mills to become solo squid hunters, or “squidquellers,” and were often found in remote parts of the River Moth, waiting patiently on their squilts for the slightest ripple of squid.
14. My mother was a devout Truffidian. My father and I would spend an hour at night with her, praying.
Although I did not, as a rule, get to go out — as now as then — mother did insist we go to church: that stale and perfunctory place where all the cattle sit like people in the pews.
15. I feel a great (s)urge, suddenly, to wax autobiographical, but shall contain the impulse until once again among my ancestral books. (Is this the “breakthrough” in my personal development long promised by the resident gods? Strange. It feels more like a death knell. I sense a great abyss opening up beneath me, a vein of deep water not previously negotiated by fish or squid.)
A WARY INTRODUCTION TO THE FESTIVAL THOSE WITH MAGGOTS FOR BRAINS, WHO NUMBER MANY AND cure so few, often refer to the “misunderstood” Festival, as if it were some sort of sorely maligned creature, unfairly subjected to electric shock therapy and short rations due to a vice that, if viewed in a more sympathetic light, might be revealed as virtue. The boobish Bellamy Palethorpe, in his weekly tirade for the Ambergris Daily Broadsheet, “Bellamy Retorts,” would take precious column inches away from spraying the arterial blood of his enemies across the printed page to reminisce about youthful festival indulgences, referring to them as “innocent,” “fun-loving,” and “harmless antics.” Even the great lackbrain Voss Bender would at times shrug his shoulders and look to the heavens, as if the Festival existed independent of its participants. It is this kind of cloddish thinking that my mother, for all of her faults, railed against on a weekly basis. For if this theory of non-responsibility were universally applied, many an insensate, myopic fool, tripping through life in undeserved freedom, could hope for “redemption through reinterpretation”—a ham-fisted piece of Truffidian theology and a favorite dream of prison/asylum inmates.
The “truth”—and every squidologist is always painfully aware that today’s truth may be tomorrow’s chum — is that the Festival, as Martin Lake once put it, “exists whole and darkly glittering in the mind of each citizen of Ambergris.” I would travel farther than Lake and state that each separate version/vision creates a splinter Festival — and another, and another, until, turning upon that distant stage, no stars above for comfort, one finds oneself trapped in a hall of fractured mirrors comprised of so many reflected Festivals that it becomes impossible to choose the real Festival, even should freedom depend upon it. The various accumulations of rituals and odd customs, gathered together and twisted into a beggar’s pack before being offered up by smug experts as the “festival experience,” have no intrinsic worth.
The true “festival experience” cannot be fully explained even by the most learned squidologist. At the height of the Festival, one almost feels at home as, surrounded by squid floats and revelers in squid masks and squid balloons and the musky odor of fresh fish and seaweed, one can almost pretend that the trail of the light-festooned street is the Moth itself, and the revelers freshwater squid, gathered for social intercourse. The giddy energy, the sense of swimming upstream caused by the heavy thickness of the people you must brush up against to walk along the sidewalk, the sloshing of drinks in their glasses and cups, the wild surge of conversations, like the trickling of water over rocks downstream… There is such longing in these memories.
I experienced my first Festival more than 15 years ago. Freed finally from the ancestral home, from the magnifying-glass attentions of my mother and the febrile energy of my father, I was taking classes with the esteemed squidologist Chamblee Gort and breathing in such liberty as I have not known since. The Festival came as a revelation to me. It wakened in me all of those long-repressed feelings that I had accumulated in my youth among the books, reading tome after tome in that library as large as many people’s houses. Like many others, I ran naked through the revelers, clad only in my squid mask and lost myself in the crowds. It was only later, when I remembered the attendant violence, that I realized the Festival was a poor substitute.
AN ATTEMPT TO ATTEMPT THE SUBJECT REGARDLESS
However, despite my introduction, why not attempt (and tempt) the impossible. Therefore: The Festival did not originate as so many feckless historians (from Mr. Shriek on down) have suggested — namely, with an order by Cappan Manzikert I, first ruler of Ambergris, a year after founding the city. No, the Festival echoes a much earlier Festival put on by the indigenous tribe called the Dogghe.
The Dogghe worshipped what we now call the “Mothean Scuttlefish,” a dour type of squid, primitive by invertebrate standards, that likes nothing better than to wallow in the silt at the river’s bottom and siphon gross sustenance from the rotting refuse to be found there.
The Dogghe believed — for reasons forever lost to us along with most of the Dogghe — that the flesh of the scuttlefish held regenerative powers and heightened the amorous abilities of those who ate of it. Their annual celebration, held at roughly the same time as the modern day Festival, culminated with the choosing of one man to hunt the scuttlefish. Given that the average Mothean Scuttlefish, flattened against the riverbed, forms a circle roughly six feet across and that their primary defense consists of stuffing as much of their invertebrate bodies as possible down their attacker’s mouth and other available orifices, being selected cannot have been considered much of an honor by the selectee. (Imagine being suffocated underwater rather than drowned.)
No doubt the Manzikert clan, opportunists as always, usurped the Dogghe’s festival for the practical reason that it marked the start of the best (“best” is a relative term in this context) time to hunt the King Squid but also to replace the Dogghe’s rituals with stronger “magic.”
From dubious sources such as Dradin Kashmir’s third-person autobiography, Dradin, In Love, we can extract a few additional “facts”:
The Festival is a celebration of the spawning season, when the males battle mightily for females of the species and the fisher folk of the docks set out for a month’s trawling of the lusting ground, hoping to bring enough meat back to last until winter.
Beyond the obvious errors in this silly passage, I would point out the pathetic phallacy of battle. No such contests occur, except within the syllables of overheated ultra-decadent purple prose. The depiction of a
“spawning season/lusting ground” conjures up a depraved scene of tentacular orgies with great strobing bodies entangled and writhing as they thrash about in the silt. Alas, King Squid mate for life and do not congregate to breed. Only “widowed” or “unwed” squid maneuver for mates, and then only in solitary, scattered rituals that occur at another time of year entirely.
No, in fact, the squid gatherings at Festival time appear to consist of an orderly convocation of conferences — a convention of squid, at which a good deal of intense strobing occurs, but very little sexual activity.
I cannot overstate the dangers involved in disrupting such meetings for the purpose of hunting squid. One year, Ambergris lost 20 ships and over 600 sailors. On average, the squid-hunting season results in at least 30 casualties and the loss of more than a dozen ships. Even the casual researcher begins to wonder, scrutinizing the statistics, whether the King Squid congregate merely to hunt humans.
What benefits does Ambergris gain from this yearly sacrifice of men and materials? The answer is “an abundance of riches,” from the skin used as airtight containers and the meat sold to the Kalif’s empire, to the experimental new motored vehicle fuels developed by Hoegbotton & Sons Industrial Branch from squid oil and ink. Every part of the squid is used for some product, even the beak, which, ground down, comprises a key ingredient in the perfume exports that have, in recent years, brought money pouring into the Ambergris economy (little of which has gone into invertebrate research).
THE SQUID MILLS OF MY YOUTH
As an offshoot of the hunt — and perhaps to offset its unpredictable nature, Ambergris and many other Southern river cities experimented with squid mills for a time. Such attempts to breed the squid in semi-captivity were doomed to failure: the mills required too much space, blocking river traffic, and the squid were, at best, uncooperative.
In a depressingly familiar scenario, replicated throughout my life with regard to the objects of my desire, I remember the squid mills precisely because I was not, at first, allowed near enough to them to satisfy my curiosity (and when I finally was allowed, I could not enjoy the experience).
Framed by the third-story window of the locked library, the River Moth wound its way through the vast expanse of grounds to the west. With the naked eye, all I could make out of the squid mills was a glint of sun off metal and a suggestion of movement. With the aid of a spyglass, smuggled up from my rooms, I could just discern the unsubmerged portions of the squid mills: the tops of the huge metal cages, the great white pontoons that separated and supported them. Around these cages, from which I often fancied I saw a tip of tentacle creep out, strode the squiders in their red boots, overalls, thick gloves, and wide-brimmed hats. The single-minded attention they paid to their tasks only underscored the dangers of farming the squid.
Those men assigned to the deeper parts of the river, which contained completely submerged squid cages, used “squilts”—long, thick stilts that required great strength to maneuver through the turgid water.
The top half of the squilts could be detached for use as a weapon against either the captive squid or the wild squid that often attempted to free their brethren.
From my vantage, through the selective eye of the spyglass, those squiders in the deepest parts of the river seemed miraculous—“walking” on the water, the squilts completely submerged as they trudged along, gaze intent upon the swirling silt below them. The job of the squider took a tremendous sensitivity, for they “felt” the water with the squilts, searching for the vibrations of wild squid, sometimes sweeping special hand-held hooks through the water, hoping to encounter rubbery flesh. When the caged squid were used as bait for juvenile wild King Squid, the squiders would herd the wild squid into nets using nothing but the hooks and squilts. On one occasion, I observed a sudden frantic splashing of water, the suggestion of a large, dark body shooting up from the river bed, followed by a squider suddenly disappearing, his squilts still upright and vibrating…
Little wonder that to be “put through the squid mill” still means accomplishments gained through tedious yet dangerous labor. As we were driven through the local village on our way to the Truffidian Cathedral, I would often hear the children of the squiders singing: Oh, stop the squid mill, stop it, I pray
For I have been tending squid a good deal today
My head is quite sore from the thrashing I’ve received.
And my squilty bosses ache so much that sorely I am grieved.
Oh, stop the squid mill, stop it today, and I’ll be relieved.
For a long time, stuck in that library for so many months, forbidden by my mother to go outside, I wanted to be a squider. Alas, eventually the village children got their wish and the squid mills died out. I turned to squidology and the library became associated not with squid mills but with a series of other banal events.
RELATED SQUIDLORE
Many of the folk remedies attributed to lesser squid do not apply to the King Squid, which seems oddly resistant to being of use. For example, the old remedy in which one “lays a squid on the feet of the afflicted” to cure toothache or headache would take on a nightmarish context should a two-ton squid be winched into position and dropped on the patient! Nor does the ground beak of the King Squid, mixed with wine, stimulate sexual prowess or draw the poison from the bite of a venomous snake.
This also applies to the “squid cap”—a popular folk remedy to cure headaches and insomnia, immortalized in these lines from a play by Machel:
Bring in the squid cap. You must be shaved, sir
And then how suddenly we’ll make you sleep.
Traditionally, the “squid cap” placed on countless hapless heads consisted of a mixture of raw squid tentacles, milk, honey, rice, and wine, contained within a poultice. Relatedly, to have a “head squid”
means to have a head cold — an apt metaphor since a cold could often feel to the patient as if a squid had reached its arms down into his or her skull. Alas, the squid cap has never been touted as a cure for the common head squid. Alas, too, some folks have a more serious, permanent case of squid head. (Not to mention “squidlick,” a badly curled haircut.)
Actual squid recipes have been around for many hundreds of years, as exemplified by this children’s rhyme taken from the Blythe Academy Squid Primer:
Here’s water in your eye
From a half-baked squid pie
With the tentacles still a’twitching
And the gummy arms still itching
To catch you up to the beak
The beak beak beak beak beak
The Ambergris Gourmand Society has recorded 1,752 squid recipes originating from Ambergris alone.
Many squid-related words have entered the Ambergrisian vocabulary. While “ambiloquent” still means to be dexterous in doubletalk, to be “squidiloquent” is a much higher compliment. A “squid wife” sells squid. A “squidler,” as opposed to a “squider,” is one who handles squid for entertainment. Bauble would have been a good example of a squidler. A “chamber squid” is a common Mud Squid placed in a hotel room during the Festival for luck. A “squidpiece,” no longer much used now that Cappans do not rule Ambergris, used to refer to what can only be termed a kind of ornamental protective gear worn outside of the clothing, covering the genitals. An “obsquidium” would refer to an act of compliance in squid cult orations.
Of course, squidanthropy is the most famous aspect of squidlore.
SQUIDANTHROPY
Squidanthropy is not, as some have misidentified it, the domain of squid philanthropists but, rather, a form of supposed insanity in which a man imagines himself to be a squid. This may result in the subject taking to the waters in an attempt to rejoin his squidkin, with often fatal consequences if one wants to be honest about it, or simply a confused physiology: the subject may believe he or she is drowning while on dry land or feel the absence of gills or a mantle, or lose the ability to walk and find oneself swimming around in public fountains.
The most committed of amateur squidologists will always empathize with the underlying urge toward squidanthropy. It is no empty promise, no empty threat of a cure. It is simply one way in which to fulfill the dream known since childhood: to understand the squid in all of its manifestations. What squidologist has not thought of what it would be like to have a mantle? What squidologist, while spraying water on his boyhood friends, many or few, has not thought how much more fun to have a funnel? It is inevitable that in the quest to get under the King Squid’s skin, the squidologist learns to think like the squid. Like the detective who, in investigating a murder, loses himself in the identity of the murderer, the squidologist may, at times, lose himself in the identity of the squid (which, admittedly, has committed no crime). That some few do not come back out the other side to “sanity” is to be expected — and, perhaps, applauded.
Those who follow a singular obsession their entire lives should not be castigated for achieving the object of that obsession. Would we punish an artist for, through one last burst of genius flecked with insanity, creating the masterwork for which the world had been waiting since the beginning of the artist’s career?
For make no mistake — in squidanthropy, the amateur squidologist longs to make the final, synergistic leap that separates observer from observed, patient from doctor. The doctor studies the thing the patient has become, whereas the patient longs to study and understand himself. The correlation and the corollary are clear…
NOTES
1. Ironically, my mother loved the Festival for its colors and its spectacle. She truly believed theTruffidianChurch ’s proclamation that the Festival had been “reclaimed for God.” My father, on the other hand, found it frivolous and dangerous — he forbade me from going at first, although he would never tell me why.
2. Sometimes, one’s freedom, as any squidologist knows, depends on the patterns a squid’s ink makes as it lingers in the water.
3. The situation is not without humor, for it closely resembles the situation that exists within a mental institution: in tight quarters, in similar garb, dissimilar minds attempt to build a consensus reality that, with a monumental effort of empathy, cannot — can never! — take concrete form. (If you do not like this new tone I have adopted, O Reader, remember that tone can change depending on the mood of the day and the amount of medication.)
4. Better that I be deprived of the “Festival” as practiced here — it resembles the real Festival only in the way a soggy cupcake resembles a wedding cake.
5. Alas, young squidologists, you are unlikely to see a woman in the places you’ll be traipsing through in your waterproof boots. Only a female squidologist will truly understand you — and they are few and far between; not every Furness finds his Leepin. You may find some comfort in documenting the sensual activities of the female King Squid, but danger lies therein as well.
6. Issues of Festival violence and the involvement of Ambergris’ subterranean inhabitants, the gray caps, lie outside of this section’s purview and therefore I have chosen to ignore such unpleasantries for the moment.
7. See: Cane, Albert.
8. At least at the level of drought-like fact, one may make statements about the history of the Festival that, while boring, could be sworn to before a board of inquiry.
9. As do, to be brutally honest, half of Ambergris’ current stuporstitions, including raw, chopped-up rabbit as a cure for eating poison mushrooms and the enchanting thought that lying in a pool of blood extracted from deer livers will bring back the dead. Believe me, if I thought it worked, I would have tried it first. (See: Stindle, Bernard.) At least the modern welt that is psychotherapy cannot be laid at the Dogghe’s door.
10. Written by a madman, if you can believe that, and yet still read today.
11. Unlike many human beings. Some, like my mother, could not stop preying off the local help.
12. Squid baiting has never been a popular sport.
13. These silent, solitary men must be of the sternest and calmest disposition while pursuing their work.
Many, in fact, left the employ of the squid mills to become solo squid hunters, or “squidquellers,” and were often found in remote parts of the River Moth, waiting patiently on their squilts for the slightest ripple of squid.
14. My mother was a devout Truffidian. My father and I would spend an hour at night with her, praying.
Although I did not, as a rule, get to go out — as now as then — mother did insist we go to church: that stale and perfunctory place where all the cattle sit like people in the pews.
15. I feel a great (s)urge, suddenly, to wax autobiographical, but shall contain the impulse until once again among my ancestral books. (Is this the “breakthrough” in my personal development long promised by the resident gods? Strange. It feels more like a death knell. I sense a great abyss opening up beneath me, a vein of deep water not previously negotiated by fish or squid.)
IV
DIVULGING AN ACCURATE SCIENTIFIC THEORY THAT EXPLAINS A NUMBER OF OTHERWISE PUZZLING THINGS THAT HAVE LONG PREYED UPON THE MIND OF THIS WRITER (AND A VISION)
THE THEORY
NOW, AS WE COME TO THE CRUCIAL POINT, I SHALL BEGIN TO shed my horrible verbosity as if it were just my human skin. My words, I promise, shall become sure and fleet, as if my feet were different than those a poet knows (this squidologist’s fleeting fancy). I realize that I have, for the most part, documented the ridiculous theories of others in hopes of dissuading the reader from holding credence in them. However, I beg for the reader’s indulgence and endurance as I expound upon my own, scientifically-based theory about the King Squid, derived from my ceaseless and exhaustive study of this fascinating creature, both in its natural state and flatly two-dimensional within the pages of various books. (I have tried to hold back and speak only of these matters at the end, when you might be most receptive to what could, in the light of day that is the beginning of an essay rather than the dusk at the end, appear absurd. But now I am duty-bound to discuss it.) Preamble is overrated: In short, I believe that the King Squid serves as host for the so-called King Fungus cultivated by the gray caps — the purple wedge of evil that so proliferated across the city’s streets and dwellings prior to the murder we call The Silence. I do not suggest, as some have, that the gray caps’
spores alone cause the violence and disorientation that is the Festival. No, the truth is more insidious and invasive, dear reader. The unique symbiosis between fungi and squid is the reason why we remain in subconscious thrall to the gray caps. We should not eat the flesh of the squid, for it has been contaminated by the fungus. (I say this having momentarily set aside my mantle as squid advocate.) Or, more specifically, the fungus incubating within the flesh of the squid. The fungus in the squid.
The concept may be difficult for the layperson to understand, or to accept, but I base it on very sound invertebrate intuition. Squidologists, for example, have long wondered how the King Squid attains the raw intensities of red and green that make it burn with light under the stress of hunger or courtship — intensities impossible in any other squid, and strangely akin to the lights seen over landbound Alfar directly prior to the mass murder of The Silence. Not to mention the evidence of intelligence, landward jaunts, and messages sent to squidologists writ in pulsing skin.
As all of these developments have occurred over the past 100 years, I believe it is only recently that the gray caps have fed a special fungus to the squid, using their submerged metal boats. These feedings have increased the squid’s color intensity and its ingenuity, while simultaneously contaminating the meat in such a way as to make Ambergrisians more susceptible to the gray caps’ spores during the (ironically-named) Festival of the Freshwater Squid. From squid steaks to squid stews, we poison ourselves more and more each year. Thus does the Festival violence spread and intensify.
If this monograph serves any useful purpose beyond the mundane, it is to caution against the eating of squid flesh.
A VISION
A vision may have no place in a serious monograph, but having come this far, I am reluctant to stop. This vision comes to me on days when I am fed squid meat. Alas, I cannot, even now, knowing what I know, being what I am, stop eating squid meat, such is the compulsion of the fungus within the squid.
The vision that has reached me in my sleep of recent months is worthy of the likes of Hellatose: I travel across a great chasm of Time that passes as quickly as clouds in a storm and as that time trickles past I see the squid taking more and more to the land, their bewitching eyes hidden by the globes of water, their skin a translucent silver, while, fed on spores and the meat of an animal more intelligent than they know, Ambergris’ true inhabitants grow watery and ill, their flesh moist, sallow, and ever more boneless, until eventually the squid take their place and the current Ambergrisians recede into the waters as if they had never been anything but a fiction, remnants, revenants, in this great city, globules of infected fat and skin — too dazed and decadent to fight back when the gray caps flood the city and we, long-prepped for invasion, scuttle into Ambergris, our arms and tentacles wrapped around buildings and vehicles, the very stones marked by the claw and the sucker, while the humans, pale underclass, pale underbelly, are but servants for our will.
The advance guard and scouting parties have already begun — what are the water-globed squid if not this? I would not be at all surprised if the King Squid were already among us, their spies having perfected the art of camouflage so as to replicate setting and human alike.
There are those idiots here who would escape their fate more literally, and with haste, their means as simple as they are and yet myriad — sneaking into the pill cabinet, sharpening a spoon for their wrists, tearing their clothes up for a noose. You see it here all the time. None of them in death will better understand the mysteries of their lives and I do not envy them this state, even when my own transformation seems so far away.
NOTES
1. Perhaps too tentative a pentameter.
2. What else is there to do here? The other patrons of this fine establishment share neither my interests nor my temperaments. Were I to awaken a vague interest in squidology amongst the general populace, I might take solace in lectures or even idle conversations during the blank hours, but, alas, this is not to be.
3. I believe my morelean father was, at the time of his demise, working on just such a theory. Perhaps this explains his own morbid interest in the abandoned squidmills. Unfortunately, he did not have the background in squidology necessary to develop his theory.
4. During the rule of the Cappans, the gray caps had not yet perfected this system and the city had not become as dependent on squid flesh. Why, it may be that the gray caps have worked to make squid meat more succulent to us and therefore more addictive.
THE THEORY
NOW, AS WE COME TO THE CRUCIAL POINT, I SHALL BEGIN TO shed my horrible verbosity as if it were just my human skin. My words, I promise, shall become sure and fleet, as if my feet were different than those a poet knows (this squidologist’s fleeting fancy). I realize that I have, for the most part, documented the ridiculous theories of others in hopes of dissuading the reader from holding credence in them. However, I beg for the reader’s indulgence and endurance as I expound upon my own, scientifically-based theory about the King Squid, derived from my ceaseless and exhaustive study of this fascinating creature, both in its natural state and flatly two-dimensional within the pages of various books. (I have tried to hold back and speak only of these matters at the end, when you might be most receptive to what could, in the light of day that is the beginning of an essay rather than the dusk at the end, appear absurd. But now I am duty-bound to discuss it.) Preamble is overrated: In short, I believe that the King Squid serves as host for the so-called King Fungus cultivated by the gray caps — the purple wedge of evil that so proliferated across the city’s streets and dwellings prior to the murder we call The Silence. I do not suggest, as some have, that the gray caps’
spores alone cause the violence and disorientation that is the Festival. No, the truth is more insidious and invasive, dear reader. The unique symbiosis between fungi and squid is the reason why we remain in subconscious thrall to the gray caps. We should not eat the flesh of the squid, for it has been contaminated by the fungus. (I say this having momentarily set aside my mantle as squid advocate.) Or, more specifically, the fungus incubating within the flesh of the squid. The fungus in the squid.
The concept may be difficult for the layperson to understand, or to accept, but I base it on very sound invertebrate intuition. Squidologists, for example, have long wondered how the King Squid attains the raw intensities of red and green that make it burn with light under the stress of hunger or courtship — intensities impossible in any other squid, and strangely akin to the lights seen over landbound Alfar directly prior to the mass murder of The Silence. Not to mention the evidence of intelligence, landward jaunts, and messages sent to squidologists writ in pulsing skin.
As all of these developments have occurred over the past 100 years, I believe it is only recently that the gray caps have fed a special fungus to the squid, using their submerged metal boats. These feedings have increased the squid’s color intensity and its ingenuity, while simultaneously contaminating the meat in such a way as to make Ambergrisians more susceptible to the gray caps’ spores during the (ironically-named) Festival of the Freshwater Squid. From squid steaks to squid stews, we poison ourselves more and more each year. Thus does the Festival violence spread and intensify.
If this monograph serves any useful purpose beyond the mundane, it is to caution against the eating of squid flesh.
A VISION
A vision may have no place in a serious monograph, but having come this far, I am reluctant to stop. This vision comes to me on days when I am fed squid meat. Alas, I cannot, even now, knowing what I know, being what I am, stop eating squid meat, such is the compulsion of the fungus within the squid.
The vision that has reached me in my sleep of recent months is worthy of the likes of Hellatose: I travel across a great chasm of Time that passes as quickly as clouds in a storm and as that time trickles past I see the squid taking more and more to the land, their bewitching eyes hidden by the globes of water, their skin a translucent silver, while, fed on spores and the meat of an animal more intelligent than they know, Ambergris’ true inhabitants grow watery and ill, their flesh moist, sallow, and ever more boneless, until eventually the squid take their place and the current Ambergrisians recede into the waters as if they had never been anything but a fiction, remnants, revenants, in this great city, globules of infected fat and skin — too dazed and decadent to fight back when the gray caps flood the city and we, long-prepped for invasion, scuttle into Ambergris, our arms and tentacles wrapped around buildings and vehicles, the very stones marked by the claw and the sucker, while the humans, pale underclass, pale underbelly, are but servants for our will.
The advance guard and scouting parties have already begun — what are the water-globed squid if not this? I would not be at all surprised if the King Squid were already among us, their spies having perfected the art of camouflage so as to replicate setting and human alike.
There are those idiots here who would escape their fate more literally, and with haste, their means as simple as they are and yet myriad — sneaking into the pill cabinet, sharpening a spoon for their wrists, tearing their clothes up for a noose. You see it here all the time. None of them in death will better understand the mysteries of their lives and I do not envy them this state, even when my own transformation seems so far away.
NOTES
1. Perhaps too tentative a pentameter.
2. What else is there to do here? The other patrons of this fine establishment share neither my interests nor my temperaments. Were I to awaken a vague interest in squidology amongst the general populace, I might take solace in lectures or even idle conversations during the blank hours, but, alas, this is not to be.
3. I believe my morelean father was, at the time of his demise, working on just such a theory. Perhaps this explains his own morbid interest in the abandoned squidmills. Unfortunately, he did not have the background in squidology necessary to develop his theory.
4. During the rule of the Cappans, the gray caps had not yet perfected this system and the city had not become as dependent on squid flesh. Why, it may be that the gray caps have worked to make squid meat more succulent to us and therefore more addictive.
BIBLIOGRAPHY (INTERMITTENTLY ANNOTATED)
This bibliography allows the reader to follow up on the subject matter set out in my monograph. Many of these books I conjure whole from memory, the originals having haunted the shelves of my long-abandoned childhood library. (Thus this bibliography serves as a kind of memorial to the one saving grace of my youth.) As for the question of publication dates, even those books found in the pathetic library I currently have access to are likely to be hopelessly antiquated editions. Most of these tomes are either so common or so rare as to make the question of time moot, even if I could set out the dates with anything approaching consistency. Where necessary, I have placed my own comments about a particular book in parentheses following the bibliographical information, in the hopes that my added insight will be of some small value.
Absence, Thrasher T., Squid Camouflage: What Are They Try ing to Hide? Squid Mill Library Press.
Aldrich,Clyde, Squid? Distant Bells Press.
Allans, John, The Hoegbotton Guide to Nymphomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Alsop,Seymour, Ammonia Among Old Beaks: Essays and Idylls of a Squid Lover, Dyfold Press.
(Precise in its data yet utterly false in its conclusions.)
Anon, The Hoegbotton Book of Absurd Synonyms, Hoegbotton & Sons.
Anon, The Hoegbotton Book of Obscure Insults, Hoegbotton & Sons.
Anon, The Hoegbotton Guide to Psychological Terminology, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Babbit, Cynthia, A Child’s Coloring Book of Squid, Featuring Three Imaginary Ones, Libyrinth Press.
Bamardot, Allison, The Squidularch and His Watery World, Nicea Publishers.
(An interesting argument for a crude form of squid government.) Batton, Sarah, ed., Squid Sightings Magazine, Vols. 1–23, Renegade Mollusk Press.
Bender, Voss, “A Refutation of the Claim that Certain of My Operas Have Been Aided by Squid-Written Arias,” Ambergris Drama Digest, Vol. 234, No. 12, Front Row Publications.
(Would that they had been.)
Bender, Voss, Bender for RiversideReading, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Bender, Voss, Libretto with Squid, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Bentinck, Bargin, The Library of Robert Quill: An Instance of Squidophilia, Borges Bookstore Publishing.
(Bentinck’s library far exceeded that of my parents, especially in the area of squid-related books. It is one of the great tragedies of my life that I have been unable to visit it. If I ever do, it will blissfully eclipse memories of my own red-spined volumes.)
Blade, Jeremy, The Hoegbotton Guide to Oikomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Blei, Frank, “Invasive Foreign Squid: The Visitors That Never Leave,” The Morrow Wildlife Quarterly, Vol. 400, No. 4, Mandible & Crossclaw.
Bordman, Ann K., Squidopolis, Buzz Press.
(A novel, this book is, in fictional form, the twin to my nonfiction and, lacking my purpling prose, my better half.)
Brecht, Richard, Jr ., Jackaclock Squidulous: The Life of a Squid Boxer, Savor Press.
Breitenbach, Joseph A., ed., The Hoegbotton Guide to Common Cephalopod Mannerisms (chapbook), Hoegbotton & Sons.
Breitenbach, Joseph A., “Caudal Fin Exercises You Can Do at Home,” published in The Amateur Squidologist, Vol. 19, Issue 7, Ambergris Squidology Society.
(Quite useful — these exercises do indeed strengthen the arms.)
Breitenbach, Joseph A., ed., Hoegbotton & Sons Parts Catalog for Squid-Grade Freshwater Filters, Hoegbotton & Sons.
Breitenbach, Joseph A., Mating Rituals of the Freshwater Squid (Illustrated Edition), Hoegbotton & Sons.
(As debauched a book as one is likely to own. Salacious and steamy — complete with hard-to-follow diagrams.)
Breitenbach, Joseph A., The Book of Squid Sense, Alfar Publishing Consortium.
Breitenbach, Joseph A., The Hoegbotton Pricing Guide to CollectibleCeramic Squid (chapbook), Hoegbotton & Sons.
Brek, George, The Squid and the Shade-Head: Philosophical Loci of the New Art, Tarzia Publishers.
(I much prefer the views on the New Art set out inRogers ’ Torture Squid books.) Brisk, Susan, A Compendium of Squid Sounds and Squid-RelatedSounds, Southern Cities Press.
(What, you might ask, is a “squid-related” sound? The unexpected gush of a water funnel. The wet slap of a tentacle against a railing. Suckers clamping down on skin.) Brisk, Susan, The Illustrated Book of Squid, Hoegbotton & Sons.
Brod, Maxwell, Classic Fallacies in the Work of Jonathan Madnok, Debunked Press.
(I include this misshapen and monstrous text only to provide a balanced bibliography. Not a word of this book, except for some conjunctions and prepositions, contains any truth.) Burden, Rosetta, The Cephalopod’s Colophon, House & Garden.
Burke, K. Craddock, The Short Lives of Squid Cults: An nalsof a Long Legacy, Hoegbotton & Sons.
(Squid cults have afflicted us since before the rise of the Dogghe Tribes. This fascinating book traces their development and frequent demise. The most interesting chapter explains the intricacies of the Squid Head Cult that arose during the civil unrest caused by the Reds and the Greens.) Burlveener, William Barnett, Encyclopedia Cephalopodia, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Burlveener, William Barnett, The Compleat Squider, Outdoor Adventure Publishing.
Burlveener, William Barnett, The Inkmaker’s Reference Guide, Borges Bookstore Publishing.
(Most relevant for the whimsical aside on Hellatose the performing squid.) Butterhead, R.G., The Double Cephalopod Folio: The Story of Da fed’s “Squids of Ambergris,”
Hoegbotton & Sons.
Butterhead, R.G., The Squidqueller’s Handbook, Fisherman’s Hook Publications.
Cane, Albert, Squidanthropy: Causes and Appropriate Reactions, Modern Psychiatrics Press.
(One of the few doctors to grasp the true nature of this tragically misunderstood phenomenon.) Chisler, John, The Hoegbotton Guide to Anthomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Chisler, John, The Hoegbotton Guide to Paramania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Clark, Machen, The Squid on Our Backs, the Tentacles in Our Brains: An Account of a Descent into Madness, Grievance Press.
Cram, Louis, A List and Description of Ambergris Squid Clubs, Blackmarket Publications.
(Squid clubs, for the uninitiated, constitute one of Ambergris’ dirty little secrets. Squid clubs vary in degeneracy, from those that feature betting on squid fights to those that boil live squid right in front of you. And in some of the city’s most dangerous establishments, you can partake of debaucheries best left to the shadows of wordlessness.)
Cram, Louis, Squidphilobiblon, Squid-Lover’s Press.
Cram, Louis, The Cephalopod Codex, Squid-Lover’s Press.
Cross, Templeton, “An Analysis of the Mating Call of the Crimson Bull Squid,” Bulletin of the History of Mollusk Studies, Vol. 676, No. 6, Libyrinth Press.
Cross, Templeton, “Maestros of the Deep: A Proposal Towards Revising Our Notions on the Intelligence of the Crimson Bull Squid,” Bulletin of the History of Mollusk Studies, Vol. 678, No. 4, Libyrinth Press.
Cross, Templeton, “A Note on Rook’s Misappropriation of Crimson Bull Squid Mating Calls in his Proposed ‘Opera,’” Bulletin of the History of Mollusk Studies, Vol. 679, No. 12, Libyrinth Press.
Ditchfield, Marc, Squid Fatal to Their Owners, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(It astonished me to read just how many squid have been fatal to their owners throughout Ambergris’
history.)
Dormand, Samuel T., The Hoegbotton Guide to Bruxomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Dormand, Samuel T., The Hoegbotton Guide to Pathomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Drabble, Smocke, A Compleat Dictionary of Squid Types with Small But Comprehensible Drawings of Tentacles and Beaks, Diverse Kinds Press.
(The dictionary is compleat, all right. Alas, the drawings are not comprehensible, consisting as they do of a series of spasmodic scribbles.)
Dribble, Larken, Squid Inks: A Catalog of Cephalopod Political and Personal Satire Preserved by the Ambergris Department of Broadsheet Licensing, Ambergris Department of Broadsheet Licensing Publications.
Dundas, Elayne, “And I Heard of a Mollusk in Your Ear”: Folk-Humor Among the Squid Fishermen of theMothRiver Delta, Tarzia Publishing.
(So this is what the squiders said to each other as they tended the squid mills! It was a revelation to discover this book one sticky sweet summer day stuck — bliss and torment — in the library. It gave voice to those far-off men otherwise only visible to me through my spyglass.) Enamel, George, The Hoegbotton Guide to Cheromania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Enamel, George, The Hoegbotton Guide to Phaneromania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Evens, Langerland, “Squid Mating Activity on the Southern Coastal Plain During the Late Pre-Trillian Period,” Vol. 29, No. 11, Squidologist Digest, Morrow Squidologist Association.
Everlane, Brian, Gentleman Squid, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(A risky and risque novel that charts the downward course of a promising young architect as he tries unsuccessfully to deal with his squid obsession. The evocation of the infamous Oleander Squid Club — closed down twenty years ago — has true poignancy.)
Everlane, Brian, Squidy Jenkins: The Great Prize Fighters of Yesteryear, Volume 9, Southern Cities Press.
(Gerald Jenkins received his “Squidy” nickname for the rapidity of his punches, which at times made his arms appear multiplied to a more cephalopodic number.)
Fain, Corbett, “An Analysis of Squid Feces Obtained at Various and Divers Locations Around the City,” published in The Amateur Squidologist, Vol. 10, Issue 5, Ambergris Squidology Society.
(The less said, the better.)
Fain, Corbett, Nicean Cuttlefish Rarities Discovered in a Sec ondPortfolio of Louis Verden’s Squid Plates, Southern Cities Press.
Fangmountain, Eliza, Squid in Myth, Magic, and Medicine, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(The myth, the magic, if not the medicine, are all, as far as I’m concerned, to do with the author’s dangerously precipitous surname.)
Farmore, Arthur, “Rising Bubbles: The Case for Squid Indiscretions,” published in The Amateur Squidologist, Vol. 19, Issue 7, Ambergris Squidology Society.
(Farmore would have enjoyed talking to Fain, no doubt — both covered their subject from the same end.)
Feaster, Elaine, “B&H: The Circumstantial Evidence,” The Amateur Squidologist, Vol. 44, Issue 4, Ambergris Squidology Society.
Feeney, Dora, The Hoegbotton Guide to Poriomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Fisher, Marian T., “Wrede’s Aporia: A Refutation of Gendered Hydrotherapy,” Current Cephalopodic Remedies, Vol. 21, No. 7, Libyrinth Press.
Fisher, Marian T., “Spilled Ink: A Deconstructionist Critique of Wredian Methodology,” Current Cephalopodic Remedies, Vol. 21, No. 11, Libyrinth Press.
Flack, Harry, Squid Stalking at Home and Abroad, Action-Danger Press.
Flack, Harry, The Further Deadly But True Adventures of the Squid Hunter, Hoegbotton & Sons.
Flack, Harry, The Latest Horrifying and Yet Oddly Magnifi cent Adventures of the Courageous Squid Hunter, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(Probably the best of this tough-man series. Ironic, really, that I read him as a child and fill him out as an adult.)
Flack, Harry, The Return of the Squid Hunter and His HorriblyDangerous Profession, Hoegbotton
& Sons.
Flack, Harry, The Squid Hunter’s Ferocious Adventures in the Wilds, Hoegbotton & Sons.
Flack, Harry, Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute Clinic Check-In Form.
Flack, Harry, Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute Handbookof Regulations.
Flack, Harry, Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute Patient Evaluation Form.
Flack, Harry, Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute Patient Sign-in Sheet.
Flaunt, Contense T., How to Order Your Bibliography for Maximum Reader Impact, The Writing Life Consortium.
Flex, Drednaught, Squid Squinting: The Elmor Brax Story, Mathew Press.
Floxence, Edna, The Mysteries of the Freshwater Squid Revealed, Credence, Ltd.
(Acarpous!)
Floxence, Edna, The Strange World of the Freshwater Squid, Credence, Ltd.
(Feeble-brained theorists should not tackle squidology!)
Forrest, Hayden A., An Outspoken Condemnation of Squid Wrestling, Six Doors Press.
Forrest, Hayden A., Beaks to Beakers: The History of Squid Science, Mollusk Medicine Press.
(A harrowing volume in which electric squid experiments and nerve ending research make me cringe in sympathy even now.)
Forrest, Hayden A., Cephalopodectomy in Theory and Practice, Mollusk Medicine Press.
Forrest, Hayden A., Famous Tentaclopheliacs, Snark & Daughters.
(Even Trillian, apparently, was one — and most of his Banker Warriors.) Forrest, Hayden A., Kraken Dawn: An Investigation of the Post-Celebration Sleep Patterns of Festival Attendees, Wry Investigations, Inc.
Forrest, Hayden A., Squid Wrestling for Fun and Profit, Engelbrecht Club Publishing.
Fragnall, Dibdin, Puddling by the Docks: An Ecstacy of Collecting, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(Truly a career-affirming experience for any aspiring squidologist. Dibdin understands the squidology subculture better than any living author.)
Fragnall, Dibdin, The Co fee Table Book of Squid Forgeries, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, Anatomy of a Betrayal: Why We Left the Water After 20
Years of Squid Studies, Bypass Press.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, Discredited: Why We Have Been the Target of Unfair Ridicule and Persecution by Other Squidologists (chapbook), privately published.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, King Squid NocturnalPrey Stalking Tactics, Buzzard Publishing.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, Some Interesting Metaphors Conveyed to Us By the King Squid (chapbook), Ambergris Squidology Society.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, Squid Communication in Murky Conditions (chapbook), Leoprand Collective Publishing.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, Sucker Strength in King Squid Juveniles, Nicea Publications for the Betterment of Science.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, That Which Cannot Be Said: The Real Case for Squid Intelligence, Cephalopod Press.
(Although not specifically cited within my monograph, this book most influenced my arguments for squid intelligence.)
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, The Darkness of Squid Ink: Our Personal Journey into Obscurity (chapbook), privately printed.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, The Loss of Dignity in the Face of Persecution: Scientists Forced to Beg for Food (broadsheet), privately published.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, The Sociological Sig nificance of Beak Size in King Squid Communities, Southern Cities Press.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, The Terrifying King Squid Speaks, privately published.
Furness, Raymond and Leepin, Paulina, Vital Similarities Between the King Squid and the Skamoo Icicle Squid of the Extreme North, Absence Publications.
Gambol, Nils, Flashions: The Influence of Squid Tentacles on Ambergrisian Hair Salons, Nail Biter Productions.
(One might consider the recent squid fads in hair styles and other primpings to be a kind of passive squidanthropy— although to one truly afflicted with the disease, it no doubt feels like cruel mockery.) Gevers, Nicholas, Last and First Squid, Johannes Publishing.
Giflank, Henry, The Hoegbotton Guide to Cresomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Giflank, Henry, The Hoegbotton Guide to Pseudomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Gort, Joan, Investigations, According to Licensed Dock Number and Maritime Phratry, of Squid-Haul Tallymen on Public Aid: Volume Seven of the Statistical Survey of Mothian Municipalities,With Figures Representing the Flux of Civil Posts During the Partition of the Ruling Government, Tarzia Public Document Archives.
Gort, Marmy, “A Select Listing of Squid Catalogued at the Fish Markets of the Ambergris Docks,”
published in The Amateur Squidologist, Vol. 12, Issue 6, Ambergris Squidology Society.
Gort, Marmy, “Remarks Addressed to an Ignorant Squid Fancier,” published in The Amateur Squidologist, Vol. 11, Issue 5, Ambergris Squidology Society.
(This speech is perhaps the funniest rebuttal of ignorance ever published. It consists of a conversation between two squid as they perform an autopsy on a drowned human. The squids’ absurd mislabeling of parts and purpose — the heart is determined to be a tumor, the liver a misplaced tongue — still makes me chuckle.)
Gort, Marmy, “Seven ‘Profane’ Properties of King Squid Ink,” published in The Amateur Squidologist, Vol. 15, Issue 3, Ambergris Squidology Society.
Gort, Marmy, A Detailed Diary of Mold, Great Moments in Science Press.
(This boring tome chronicles the spread of fungus to the river’s bank over 300 long pages; however, there is some pay-off for the amateur squidologist at the end of the account, as a tentacle flicks briefly from the water and then disappears.)
Gort, Marmy, ed., Homage to a Squidman: Essays on Cepha lopods Written forClyde Aldrich on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday, Ambergris Squidology Society Press.
(I had the great pleasure of meeting Clyde Aldrich at this event. Whatever one may think of Aldrich’s ridiculous theories, his passion for squidology has done more to legitimize this noble science than a hundred more logical theorists.)
Gort, Volman, The History of Tenticular Creatures, Southern Cities Press.
(Perhaps a bit fanciful — for example, I do not personally consider frogs to be tenticular creatures unless born deformed.)
Griffin, Magni, The Vanished Squid: An Exploration of the Extinguished White Ghost Squid, Walfer-Barrett Publishers.
Halme, J. P., An Annotated Bibliography of References Pertain ingto the Biology, Fisheries, and Management of Squids, The Squid Lover’s Press.
Halme, J. P., Squid Strandings, Southern Cities Press.
Halme, J.P., “There Are Giants in the River”: Monsters and Mysteries of the River Moth, Frankwrithe
& Lewden.
Hatepool, J. D., The Dictionary of Obscure Insults, Up Yer Arse Publications.
Hewn, Reese, Decadence with Decapods, The Real Cephalopod Press.
Hewn, Reese, Nine Arms Are Not Enough, Cephalopod Publications.
(My good friend Reese is wrong — nine arms are more than enough. Seven arms are not enough.) Hoegbotton, Henry, ed., Henry Hoegbotton’s Squid Primer, Hoegbotton & Sons.
Hortent, Nigel, The Hoegbotton Guide to Dipsomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Hortent, Nigel, The Hoegbotton Guide to Pyromania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Istlewick, James, The Hoegbotton Guide to Doramania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Istlewick, James, The Hoegbotton Guide to Siderodromomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Jakes, Laura, My Life As a Squid, The Squid Lover’s Press.
Jitterness, Jonathan, The Hoegbotton Guide to Sitomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
John, Samuel, Confessions of an Asylum Inmate (chapbook), Sensational True Life Story Serials Press.
Keater, Mathew, A Report from the Cappan’s Ministers on an Odd Occurrence Involving Certain Types of Intractable Squid, Bits and Scraps Publications.
(To Keater, the president of the Ambergris Gourmand Society, any squid that resists being harpooned and eaten is an “intractable” squid. Although I am sure that any squid sampled by his rubbery lips must at least feel somewhat at home.)
Keensticker, Harrod, The Malicious Monster: An Experienced Seaman’s Heated Oral Ejaculations on the Coming Battle BetweenSquid and Man, Tales of the Sea Press.
Kickleback, John, The Hoegbotton Guide to Drapetomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Kickleback, John, The Hoegbotton Guide to Squidomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Kleyblack, Nora, Squid of the Southern Isles, Being an Abridged Description of the Cephalopods and Other Mollusks of Saphant, Nicea, Briand, and Wrayly, Arranged According to the Natural System, Pulsefire Products.
Kron, Michael, “Sensory-Motor Skills of the Injured Squid,” Squidology Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, Southern Cities Press.
Kron, Michael, Squid Death Danses & Habitual Mourning, Southern Cities Press.
Laglob, E.A., The Story of My Boyhood Amongst the Squid Folk and What Became of Me Because of It, privately printed.
(Laglob’s story, although poorly written, is a poignant, sometimes heartbreaking, tale of acceptance and ultimate betrayal. Too intense for me to finish.)
Larsen, David, Ambush Courtship in theMothRiver Delta, Source Press.
Larsen, David, Beak Soup: A Season Tracking Bull Squid, With a Note About Night and a Caution Regarding Riverbank Assignations, Source Press.
Lawler, L. Marie, Combating Compression, Cephalopod Publications.
(Compression is usually more of a problem for squidologists writing essays than for the squid.) Lawler, L. Marie, Critical Inking, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Lawler, L. Marie, Invisible Ink: Tentacles from the Dark Side, Cephalopod Publications.
Lawler, L. Marie, Squibble: An Indepth Look at Squid Person alityDisorders, Cephalopod & Cuttlefish.
Lawler, L. Marie, The Colors of Fear: Squid Self Defense, The Real Cephalopod Press.
Lawler, L. Marie, The Curious Case of Changed Careers: The Tragedy of Freelance Writer Harry Flack, Ex-Squid Hunter, Hoegbotton & Sons.
Lorstain, Michael, The Hoegbotton Guide to Eleuthromania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Lorstain, Michael, The Hoegbotton Guide to Timbromania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Madnok, Frederick, “Squidanthropy: The Silent Disease,” published in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric& Discredited Diseases, M. A. Roberts, ed., Chimeric Press.
(In retrospect, I chose a bad title. The disease is not so much “silent” as “inappropriate.”) Madnok, Frederick, Certain Subtle Aspects of Squidanthropy (chapbook), Madnok Press.
(What many do not realize is how disconcerting sudden non-binocular vision can be to sufferers — not to mention the loss of muscular control as one’s hindquarters “melt” into a funnel and mantle and one’s legs
“dissolve” into eight arms.)
Madnok, Frederick, Tentative Tentacles: A Failure of Nerve Among Amateur Squidologists (chapbook), privately printed.
(The publication that resulted in the Ambergris Squidology Society banning me from any future meetings.
Even so, I stand by every statement I made.)
Madnok, James, The Meaning of Mushrooms, Murmur Press.
(Even then the house was crumbling. Many of my father’s finest experiments revolved around fruiting bodies situated in some dark corner of the basement or wine cellar. My mother, dedicated to the eradication of all rot, hated this situation — especially since my father sometimes went out of his way to encourage rot [“but not rubbish,” as he was fond of saying]. When my father was at his most mischievous, my mother might open the tea cupboard and find tendriled gray-and — crimson fungi peeking out from the side of each perfect saucer.)
Madnok, James, Experiments into the Transformative Element of Fruiting Body Absorptions, Southern Cities Press.
(The most amazing transformation my father ever made involved the alchemy of merging metal and mushroom. The result was uncanny. For days, my father slowly weaned the red-dappled gort cap from its normal diet of compost and dead beetles, replacing its sustenance with iron shavings. After months of careful regulation, the mushroom became shiny, gray, and hard. After a year, it became almost entirely metallic, with but a few flecks of red-and-beige to hint at its formerly edible nature. It had become a decorative ornament. [My own experiments have been of an opposite nature: turning the decorative into the sinuous and fleshy…] He gave it to my mother for her birthday; she gave it to me soon thereafter and I still have it somewhere in storage.)
Madnok, James, The Invisible World, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(My father’s masterwork: A beautifully-designed 400-page book that was unfairly ignored by reviewers and readers at the time of publication but which is now widely recognized in certain circles as the definitive statement on Southern fungi. I still have a copy of this book. The sarcastic jabs at Truffidian
“theories” on the gray caps drove a wedge between my parents.)
Madnok, James, A Unified Theory of Spore Migration, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(I would like to believe that my father was on the right track in this, his final book, posthumously published — alas, he was forced to abuccinate; the book never saw print in the Southern Cities — and that he felt no pain.)
Mannikan, A., The Great Cephalogod (fiction), Hoegbotton & Sons.
Marmont, E.D., A Raucous Yet Commercial People: Living on the Banks of the Moth, A Study, Not Worthy Publishers.
Midan, Pejora “The Architectural Marvel That Is the Cephalopod”, published in Architecture of the Southern Cities, Vol. 95, Issue 12, Barqology Press.
Midan, Pejora, Squid Iconography as Expressed in Ambergrisian Architecture, Blueprint Publications.
(Midan’s infatuation with squid did not last. His plannedMolluskPalace and Tentacle House never came to fruition; all we have now are the plans for such wonders.)
Midan, Pejora, The Underwater Gardens of the Mollusk: God’s Design, Blueprint Publications.
Mipkin, Siffle, The Hoegbotton Guide to Entomomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Morge, Ralph, Squid Theories Involving the Sabotage of Haragck Flotation Devices (chapbook), Ambergris Squidologist Society.
(Morge’s postulation that squid sabotaged the Haragck during their famous attack by puncturing their flotation devices seems circumstantial at best.)
Nanger, D.T., “The Fish Preferences of a Freshwater Squid in a Controlled Experiment Involving a Hook, Bait, a Really Big Boat, and a Strong Line of Inquiry,” Hablong Research Institute Quarterly Report, Hablong Publications.
Nick, Robert, The Edge of Madness, Frankwrithe & Lewden. Nick, Robert, The Role of Madness and Creativity, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(That squidanthropy should be cited so inappropriately in this context discredits the book before the reader has even finished a quick skim of the index.)
Norman, Hugh. Beware of Random Letters: The History of Non-Human Communication, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Nymblan, Kever, The Hoegbotton Guide to Erotographomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Parsons, Kevin, A Field Guide to Freshwater Squid, Southern Cities Press.
Pickleridge, Timothy, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Adapted to the State and Condition of All Orders of the Religious, Being a Call to Worship Our Father the King Squid (chapbook), privately printed.
Plate, S. N., Eight Arms to Choke By: The Suicide of a Squidler (poems), Tarzia Publications.
Pond, Samuel, The Hoegbotton Guide to Florimania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Povel, Bernard and Sighly, Enoch, Vice Squidologist Enoch Sighly’s and Doctor Bernard Povel’s Journey Up the River Moth by Way of Native Canoe and Indigenous Ingenuity, Culminating in a Boat Wreck, a Near Escape, and Some Unfortunate Negotiations with the Aforementioned Natives, Society of Scientists Abroad in Morrow Press.
Pulling, Leonard, “An Account of the Squidlings’ First Hours by the Banks of the River Moth,”
Ambergris Journal of Speculative Zoology, Fungoid Press.
Quiddity, Teresa, Sucker Punches, Feeble Bleatings Press.
Quiddity, Teresa, The Case to be Made for Hellatose Authorshipof Various and Sundry Theatrical Performances, Front Row Publications.
(Leave it to Quiddity to spend nearly 300 pages digging around in the archives of various Ambergris theaters only to conclude that “the evidence for Hellatose authorship of any dramatic production, other than those sponsored by the carnivals and circuses he was associated with, is circumstantial at best.”) Quork, Corvid, The Hoegbotton Guide to Ornithomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Rariety, Maurice, The Ambergris of James Kinkel Lightner: His Species and Types, Collecting Localities, Bibliography, and Selected Reprinted Works by Guyerdram, Historic Archive Publications.
(The first of an accursed breed, the “gentleman squidologist,” Lightner hired others to observe the squid in its natural habitat — while he frequented bankers’ clubs and other dens of equity. In smoke-filled back rooms, Lightner would then recount, as if he had experienced them first-hand, exploits and dangers related to him by his underlings. Guyerdram, Lightner’s chief expert, snapped one night and murdered Lightner in mid-sentence, using nothing more complicated than a Nicean Mud Squid wound around the old man’s neck. Unfortunately, the perception that Lightner was a great scientist has not died as easily as the man himself.)
Redfern, Kathryn, The Odd Account of Malfour Blissbane and His Squid of Fear, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(Sensationalist stories for young adults and impressionable adults.) Redfern, Kathryn, The Strange Tale of Ronald Battlebuss and His Seven Squid of Doom, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Redfern, Kathryn, The Stranger Tale of Bartley Gangrene and His Three Squid of Destiny, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Riddle, William, The Hoegbotton Guide to Hamartomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Riddle, William, The Clash of Science and Religion: Personal Explorations, Squid Mill Library Press.
(One day, my father entered his workshop to find that my mother had cut off the fruiting bodies of the King Fungus central to his research. It had taken 17 years of trial-and-error to grow them in the artificial environs of his laboratory. Mother had methodically snipped them with a small scythe, placed them in his wastepaper basket, and put them to the match. All that remained was a little ash and a stringent smell. I would imagine he stared into that circle of smolder and smoke until his eyes watered. Then he got up and went into the library.)
Roberts, M.A., The Big Book of Squid, Chimeric Press.
(Marred in its otherwise splendid authenticity by illustrations showing the mature Morrowean Mud Squid with two tentacles.)
Roberts, M.A., The Captain’s Advanced Freshwater Squid Telemetry, Tales of the Sea Press.
Roberts, M.A., The Odd Case of Hellatose & Bauble (chapbook), Chimeric Press.
Rogers, Vivian Price, Laying Low with the Torture Squid, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(The Torture Squid will always remain my favorite fictional creations. The books take as their premise that five jackanapes, steeped in the ways of petty thuggery, are transformed by the gray caps, through the medium of squidanthropy, into King Squid. As squid, the five of them — renamed Squidy Johnson, Squidy Macken, Squidy Slakes, Squidy Taintmoor, and Squidy Barck (the leader) — have lost none of their criminal ways. They take up their old prowling grounds in the decrepit Bureaucratic Quarter and wreak havoc on its citizenry. In this installment, Squidy Taintmoor suggests that the Torture Squid lay low for awhile, since the Cappan’s men are after them. By the end of this blackly humorous story, “laying low” has resulted in burglary, arson, armed robbery, and many other offenses against the law.) Rogers, Vivian Price, The Return of the Torture Squid, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(Squidy Barck and his mates decide to visit their mums, with disastrous results. Stepfathers take a beating, as does most of the criminal code.)
Rogers, Vivian Price, The Torture Squid and the Magnetic Rowboat, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(Squidy Macken finds a magnetic rowboat, possibly left behind by the gray caps, and the Torture Squid have fun propping it up near major thoroughfares and cackling as motored vehicles driving past suddenly find themselves stuck to it — windshield glass flying in all directions — and soon on the receiving end of demands from the knife-wielding Squidy Barck, Squidy Johnson, and Squid Slakes. At the end, they hijack one motored vehicle and smash it into a tree, laughing through their bruises.) Rogers, Vivian Price, The Torture Squid Beat Up Some Priests, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(Squidy Slakes remembers how the priests who brought him up in the orphanage used to do mean and nasty things to him. Squidy Johnson suggests getting some revenge and Squidy Barck seconds the motion. The Torture Squid cruise the Religious District, punching out mendicants and stealing donations from collection boxes. In the stunning conclusion, they smash the stained glass of the Truffidian Cathedral and beat a confession of sodomy out of the Antechamber himself before Squidy Slakes breaks down and begins to cry — but, no: he’s not crying, he’s snickering. Squidy Slakes has been having everyone on — he wasn’t an orphan and a priest never raised him. The Torture Squid all share a good laugh.) Rogers, Vivian Price, The Torture Squid Get Drunk in TrillianSquare, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(One day, Squidy Barck wakes up in the Torture Squid’swest Albumuth Boulevard hovel and finds that Squidy Johnson is missing! Have the Cappan’s men found him and arrested him? Squidy Barck and the rest of the remaining Torture Squid spread out and cover the adjoining streets. No Squidy Johnson.
Where could he be? As the Torture Squid search ever more desperately for their companion, they inevitably become thirsty. Many a pub receives their gruff demands for alcohol, until finally, after a number of adventures — one involving a squid club — the Torture Squid converge onTrillian Square, as pre-arranged. Who should they find there but Squidy Johnson, curled up on a bench, nursing a massive hangover from having snuck out for a “quick pint” the night before. The Torture Squid assuage their irritation by kicking Squidy Johnson into unconsciousness.)
Rogers, Vivian Price, The Torture Squid Pillage the Towers of the Kalif, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(In this slightly less successful book,Rogers takes the Torture Squid out of the familiar environs of Ambergris and sets them on a quest to plunder the Kalif’s treasure. By the time they reach the gates of the Kalif’s capital city, they are so drunk on cheap wine that they are mistaken for merry-making pilgrims and allowed into the city. Once there, they proceed to pinch the bottoms of women, steal fruit from grocery stands, rob wealthy merchants, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. Eventually, the Kalif’s soldiers arrest them, sober them up by torturing them in the dungeons, and then release them, naked, into the wastelands beyond the city’s walls. Less clothed, but a bit wiser, the Torture Squid sadly wander home. As Squidy Johnson remarks, “Foreign conquest is not as exciting as I thought it would be.”)
Rogers, Vivian Price, The Torture Squid Take on the New Art, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(Squidy Macken points out, one fine morning as the Torture Squid sit imbibing refreshments at the Cafe of the Ruby-Throated Calf, that, as a group, they are under-educated. True, Squidy Barck once spent a semester at theBlytheAcademy as a janitor, thus qualifying him to lead the Torture Squid, but in general they lack refinement. After Squidy Slakes punches Squidy Macken several times, Squidy Barck decides Squidy Macken is right. But how to become better educated? After some thought, Squidy Barck suggests that they attend a retrospective of the New Art down at the Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. So the Torture Squid don their best clothes, sharpen their knives, slick back their hair, and head off for the gallery exhibit. Once there, however, they are sorely disappointed. Most of the canvases seem unfinished — one is just a blotch of blue with some white blobs on it. Squidy Barck, embarrassed, decides maybe he should try to finish a few of the paintings— show the other Torture Squid some true culture.
Alas, the museum guards try to stop them and the room erupts into a prolonged tussle, accompanied by the sound of knives tearing canvas. When the museum guards are finally disposed of, the Torture Squid turn their back on the gallery — and all “refinements”—although they read in the Ambergris Broadsheet the next day that spectators found their resulting performance art piece “oddly appealing.”) Rogers, Vivian Price, The Torture Squid Torch an Underground Passage, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(One ofRogers ’ simplest books, this title delivers exactly what it promises — the Torture Squid torch an underground passage. They spend 50 pages planning the torching. They spend 50 pages torching the passage. They spend 50 pages escaping from the Cappan’s men as a result. Many critics believe this book was ghost-written forRogers.)
Rogers, Vivian Price, The Torture Squid Trash a Restaurant, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(For once, the Torture Squid do not instigate the nastiness. Squidy Barck and Squidy Johnson sit in the River Moth Restaurant minding their own business when they are recognized by members of a rival gang, the Moth Heads, who happen to be walking by. A fight ensues, during which Squidy Barck holds off the Moth Heads by throwing chairs and dishes at them while Squidy Johnson goes around the corner for reinforcements. When Squidy Slakes, Squidy Johnson and Squidy Taintmoor join the fracas, the Moth Heads soon find themselves on the receiving end of too many blows to count and wind up being chased down the street by the Torture Squid. Not content with the evening’s activities, the Torture Squid then proceed to blow up a bakery and set a motored vehicle on fire. As Squidy Johnson says, “Them Moth Heads provocatated us.”)
Rogers, Vivian Price, The Torture Squid’s Stint in Prison: Memories of Beastly Childhoods, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(PerhapsRogers ’ masterpiece, this book relates, in six chapters, the childhood experiences of Squidy Johnson, Squidy Macken, Squidy Slakes, Squidy Taintmoor, and Squidy Barck — while, in the story’s present-day, all five occupy the same prison cell. Surprise, surprise: only Squidy Barck had a genuinely bad childhood, his mother a prostitute, his father unknown, and out on the street by the age of 10. The rest were the sons of privileged members of society who simply preferred thuggery to honest work. In chapter six, the Torture Squid break out of prison after beating the guards half to death and the previously nostalgic feel of the book gives way to the usual merry mayhem.) Rogers, Vivian Price, The Torture Squid’s Last Stand, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
(Enraged by the Torture Squid’s criminal activities, the Cappan raises a small army dedicated to their eradication. In the climactic final scene, the Torture Squid, cornered in a barn outside of the city, escape by setting themselves on fire and running through the shocked encircling troops to the freedom of the River Moth. Finally released into their natural element, they never return to the city, “although even today mothers tell the story of Torture Squid’s exploits to their aspiring young thugs.”) Rook, Alan B., Passion in Crimson; Pelagian Love; Rosy Tentacles;Dido and the Squid: Four Libretti and Scores for UnrealizedOperas, Quail Note Publishers.
Rook, Alan B., Chamber Mass for the Nautilus & Requiem for the White Ghost Squid: Two Liturgical Scores After the Noran and Stangian Modes, Quail Note Publishers.
(There is no bliss in all the world as complete as listening to the Requiem for the White Ghost Squid
[based on Spacklenest’s classic novel]. It is especially sublime if listened to on phonograph while relaxing in a small wading pool.)
Roper, Frederick, Incidences of Squid Incursions Amid the Communities of the Lower Moth: Anecdotal Evidence Supportingthe Need for Squid-Proof Residences, Not Easily Read Publications.
Roper, Frederick, The Significance of Bookshelves in Domestic Squabbles, Squid Mill Library Press.
(In the library, through a trick of light in some cases, the books sat in their rows, steeped in red. Red were the bindings. Red was the floor.)
Roundtree, Jessica, Husbands Who Kill Their Wives, Squid Mill Library Press.
Rowan, Iain, “Tentaculon: An Approach to Human-Squid Communication,” Journal of Squid Studies, Vol. 52, No. 3.
Rowan, Iain, “The Squid As Other: Transgressive Approaches to Hegemonic Dualities,” Journal of Aquatic Hermeneutics, Vol. 34, No. 1.
Ruch, Alan, Hops and the Amateur Squidologist, Tornelain Publications.
Savant, Charles, An Invitation to Squid Sightings: Its Pleasuresand Practices: With Kindred Discussions of Maps, Depth Charts, and Physiology Tables (chapbook), Ambergris Squidology Society.
Savant, Charles, Historical Notes on the Relationship Between Fires in Quiet Port Towns and the King Squid, Ambergris Squidologist Society.
Savant, Charles, Sunset Over the Squid Mills, Squid Mill Library Press.
(He must have known I would find her there. Every summer, returning fromBlytheAcademy or from my expeditions, I would go there first, although they had been long abandoned — wooden husks where once the squiders swished to and fro on their squilts. Her head rocked gently against the rotted pontoons, gold-gray hair fanning out. Her gaze seemed peaceful although I could read nothing in her eyes. The echo of her words now as gentle as her caress. She had been in the water for more than a week. I almost did not recognize her.)
Shannon, Harold, Sorrowful Wake for Mother Squid: The Attachmentsof Juvenile King Squid, Mournful Press.
Shannon, Harold, Adaptations of Cephalopod Organisms to Non-Saltwater Environments, Woode-Holly Productions.
Shannon, Harold, Cephalopod Mating Behavior (Freshwater Seduction Rituals), Woode-Holly Productions.
Shriek, Duncan, The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, Hoegbotton & Sons.
Shriek, Janice, TheBlytheAcademy Squid Primer, Blythe Academic Press.
Sidlewhile, Henry, The Life and Times of Thackery Woodstocking,Amateur Squidologist, Ashbrain Press.
Simpkin, A.L., Gladesmen, Squidlers, Moonshine, and Sni f- ers, Candon Press.
(A rollicking adventure that properly immortalizes the tough, solitary life of the squidlers and the gladesmen who insure them.) Sirin, Vlodya, Verse by Tentacle: An Anthology of Poetry FeaturingSquid Down Through the Ages — Saphant Empire to William Buckwheat, Running Water Publications.
Skinder, Blas, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madnessof Festival Crowds, Southern Cities Press.
Slab, Thomas, The Redeeming Noose: The Reception of Doctor R. Tint Tankle’s Ideas on Social Discipline, Mental Asylums, Hospitals, and the Medical Profession as They Relate to Squid-InducedSuicide Attempts, Reed Publications.
Slab, Thomas, The Anatomy of Madness, Reed Publications.
Slay, Jack, Cephalopods: A Handbook of Decapodian Grammar, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Sleeter, M. J., The Hoegbotton Guide to Hippomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Sleeter, M. J., A Guide to the Mushrooms of Late Summer: The Poisonous and the Benign, Squid Mill Library Press.
(He was picking mushrooms in the forest behind the house and humming softly to himself. I paused a moment to marvel at his calm, even though the late afternoon sun, mottled through the deep silence of the fir trees, cast my shadow far in advance of his gaze. He must have known I would find him there.) Smutney, Jones, The Squid That Killed His Own Father: A Novel of Cephalopodic Revenge, True Tales Press.
Smutney, Jones, Wealth, Virtue, and Seafood: The Shaping of a Political Economy in Ambergris, Archival Squid Press.
Smythe, Alan, The Physiology and Psychology of the King Squid (illustrations by Louis Verden), Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Sneller, Anne, A History of Traveling Medicine Shows and NefariousCirci, Spectacular Press.
Sourby, Pipkick, A Carousel for Squidophiles: A Treasury of Tales, Narratives, Songs, Epigrams, and Sundry Curious StudiesRelating to a Noble Theme, Borges Bookstore Publishing.
Sourby, Pipkick, Mollusk Wise, Squid Foolish, Borges Bookstore Publishing.
Spacklenest, Edgar, Lord Hood and the Unseen Squid, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(This tale of a Nicean nobleman haunted by the ghost of the squid he jigged has a simple poignancy to it.
In the book, Lord Hood lives alone in his ancestral home, his parents murdered in a terrible double tragedy some years before. Once a year, Lord Hood leaves his property to attend a fishing expedition with his fellow lords. On one such expedition, he spears the mantle of a young female King Squid. The squid dies and is eaten that night by the aristocratic fishermen. The very next day, as Lord Hood sits reading in his extensive library, the apparition of the squid appears before him, beseeching him with mournful eyes. At first, Lord Hood flees in terror, but over time, as the visitations become more frequent, he becomes used to the company of the squid ghost. As the reader learns more about Lord Hood’s tortured past and his parents’ fate, it is clear that he is as much a ghost haunting his own house as the squid. Eventually, he comes to feel affection for the squid who haunts him and he begins a kind of squidanthropic transformation on an emotional level. He finds himself drawn to the nearby River Moth — and as the squid ghost manifests itself more often the closer the proximity of water, Lord Hood begins to spend most of his time in the river. Lord Hood finds himself less and less attached to the land.
In the heart-breaking final scene, he — not truly blessed with squidanthropy — sinks beneath the waters and drowns… only to liberate his ghost, which finds union with the ghost of the squid.) Stang, Napole, Edict the Fifth: On the Question of Whether Squid Shall Have Souls, as Written by the 12thAntechamber of Ambergris, Napole Stang, Truffidian Religious Books, Inc.
Stark, Rokham, Further Adventures in Squidology, Tannaker Publications.
Starling, Lee D., Squid Dish: An Esoteric Seafood Lovers’ Cookbook, Bait & Hook Press.
Starling, Lee D., The Squid Scrolls, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Stiffy, Madeline, An Argument on Behalf of the New Science Known as Squidology (chapbook), Ambergris Squidologist Society.
Stiffy, Madeline, The Curious Case of Manzikert VII and the Squid What Burped, Arcanea Publishing Collective & Outdoor Market.
(An undignified, mocking, and completely worthless amalgamation of rumor, hearsay, and libel.) Stim, Zyth, Sarah Volume (I) and the Great Squid Migration, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
Stim, Zyth, Sarah Volume (II) and the Mysterious Squid of Zort, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
Stim, Zyth, Sarah Volume (III) and the Treasure of the Squid, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
Stim, Zyth, Sarah Volume (IV) and the Squid With No Name, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
Stim, Zyth, Sarah Volume (V) and the Underwater Valley of the Squid, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
Stim, Zyth, Sarah Volume (VI) Goes Squidless, Small Books/ Big Dreams Incorporated.
Stim, Zyth, Sarah Volume’s Eight-Armed Volume of Squid Stories for Bedtime, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
Stindel, Bernard, A Refutation of the Theories of Jessica Roundtree, Squid Mill Library Press.
Stine, Allison, ed., Squid Lover, The: A Magazine of Squid Lore, Being a Miscellany of Curiously Interesting and Generally Unknown Facts About Squid-dom and Squid-Related People; Now Newly Arranged, with Incidental Divertissement and All Very Delightful to Read, The Squid-Lover’s Press.
Sumner, Geoffrey T., Behind a Cloud of Ink: A Biography of the Enigmatic A. J. Kretchen, Squid Hunter, Southern Cities Publishing Company.
Sumner, Geoffrey T., Cuttlefishing, Ecropol Press.
Sumner, Geoffrey T., How to Make Jewelry from Polished Squid Beak, Arts & Crafts Publishers (Squidcraft imprint).
Sumner, Geoffrey T., The Squid as Aquatic Angel in Religious Visitations, Truffidian Cathedral Publishing.
Tanthe, Meredith, Taste & Technique in Squid Harvesting (chapbook), Ambergris Gastronomic Society.
Tribbley, Jane, The Hoegbotton Guide to Hypomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Umthatch, Wiggins, The Hoegbotton Guide to Mentulomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Ungdom, George, Squid Anatomy for the Layperson (illustrated by Louis Verden), Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Vielle, C. M., Naughty Lisp and the Squid: A Polyp Diptych, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Viper, Arnold, The Hoegbotton Guide to Mesmeromania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Vosper, Robert, The Pauseback Collection of Rare Squid Children’sBooks, Small Books/Big Dreams Incorporated.
Willis, Sarah, The Book of Average Squid, Savor Press.
Willis, Sarah, The Book of Greater Squid, Savor Press.
Willis, Sarah, The Book of Lesser Squid, Savor Press.
Wortbell, Randall, The Hoegbotton Guide to Mythomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Wrede, Christopher, “‘I Think You’re Both Quacks’: The Controversy Between Doctor Blentheen Skrill and Squidologist Croakley Lettsom,” Bulletin of the History of Mollusk Studies, Vol. 689, No.
7, Recluse Press.
Wrede, Christopher, “Gender, Ideology and the Water-Cure Movement,” Current Cephalopodic Remedies, Vol. 21, No. 5, Recluse Press.
Wrede, Christopher, “Hysteria, Squid Hypnosis, and the Lure of the Invisible: The Rise of Cephalo-mesmerism in Post-Trillian Ambergris,” Bulletin of the History of Mollusk Studies, Vol. 699, No. 3, Recluse Press.
Wrede, Christopher, “Squidology and Spiritualism in the Pre-Trillian Era,” Bulletin of the History of Mollusk Studies, Vol. 700, No. 9, Recluse Press.
Wrede, Christopher, “The Chronic Squidanthropist, the Doctor, and the Play of Medical Power,”
Journal of Squid-RelatedPsychological Diseases, Vol. 377, No. 2, Recluse Press.
Wrede, Christopher, Institutions of Confinement, Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in the Southern Cities, Recluse Press.
Wrede, Christopher, Squidologist Quackery Unmasked, Recluse Press.
Xyskander, Melanie, The Hoegbotton Guide to Nosomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Yit,Florence, The Hoegbotton Guide to Nudomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.
Yowler, John, The Beaten Child: The Essential Iniquity of Physical Abuse, Mother’s Milk Publishing.
(The noted writer Sirin once said, “Every unhappy family is the same. Every happy family is unique.” The beatings could be bad, but not as bad as the ones here.)
Yowler, John, The Present-Absent Father, Mushroom Studies Press.
(The old grandfather clock dolling out my doom. The nightly “calls to prayer” that he could not protect me from.)
Zeel, George H., The Book of Squidanthropy, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(It is coming sooner than I thought — the transformation they wish to deny me. One night, although it is forbidden, I shall sneak past the guards and slide out into the yard, sidle up to the fence, and flow through and over it as suits my new self…)
Zenith, C. N., E fective Techniques for Building Suspense, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Zither, Marianne, The Triumph of Madness Over Guilt, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(… under the light of the moon, with sweet, sweet longing, I make for the River Moth. Through the tangle of branches and moon-bright leaves, I surge toward the river. I can smell it, mad with silt, and hear its gurgling roar. Finally, the mud of the riverbank is under my tentacles, firm yet soft, and the grass can no longer lacerate my arms. For a moment, I remain on the river bank, looking out across the black waters reflecting the clouds above, and just watch the slow current, the way the water wavers and flows.
I remember my mother, my father, the squid mills of my youth, the vast, silent library…) Zonn, Crathputt, How to Hold Your Audience in Thrall to the Very End, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
Zzy, Veriand, Satisfying Conclusions: Epiphanies in Squid Transformations, Frankwrithe & Lewden.
(…then, with the strobing lights of my fellow squid to guide me, I baptize myself in the water, let it take me down into the silt, the sodden leaves, my lungs filling with the essence of life, my mantle full, my third eye already raking through the darkness, filling it with luminescence. The water smells of a thousand wonderful things. I am feather-light in its embrace. I want to cry for the joy of it. Slowly, slowly, I head for my brothers and sisters, disappearing from the sight of the doctors and the attendants, impervious to their recriminations, once more what I was always meant to be…)
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