APPENDIX
A LETTER FROM DR. V TO DR. SIMPKIN
Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute
1314 Albumuth BoulevardAmbergris I13-24
Doctor William Simpkin
Central Records Office
Psychiatric Studies Division c/o Trillian Memorial Hospital
8l8l Sallowskull Avenue
Ambergris Ml4-5l8
Dear Doctor Simpkin:
As requested, enclosed please find all personal effects left behind by X, save for his pen, a blank notebook, and that tattered paperback copy of City of Saints & Madmen he insisted on clasping to his bosom like a talisman. I have kept these items for my personal collection. (You may recall that I have an extensive selection of souvenirs from my many years here. If you should ever again visit our humble outpost of insanity, I will be happy to give you a guided tour as I have recently begun to catalogue my collection in anticipation of the day when we will receive funding for its proper display. Each item comes complete with an exhibit card explaining the history of the item. If I may say so, the organization and presentation are exquisite. I am lacking only a display case and monies for maintenance.) Most of X’s possessions consisted of various writings, which either originated with him or which he acquired during that brief period when he walked the streets of Ambergris a free man. As you requested, I have carefully read through all of these writings, despite the time it has taken away from those other of my patients who have had the courtesy to remain in my care. I now present my findings to you: 1. X’s Notes. The notes typed up on the following pages came from crumpled sheets of paper found in the wastepaper basket. They consist of a series of reminders, observations, word sketches, drawings (X
has had a lot of free time to perfect his doodling), and a short account of one of X’s dreams that I like to call “The Machine.“ The notes seem self-explanatory. “The Machine,“ on the other hand, demonstrates an extreme paranoia directed toward the gray caps. One must learn not to read too much into nightmares- my own nightmares usually concern having to close down vital services due to lack of funds-but I would hazard the guess that X suffers from anxiety about his studies. This would be consistent with his case history.
2. The Release of Belacqua. Although an attached note attributed this manuscript to Sirin, a secretary at his office assured us via telephone (ours being broken, I walked five blocks to a colleague’s house to use his) that Sirin did not write it. Therefore, we must conclude that X wrote it himself. Nothing in the story sheds light on X’s whereabouts, however. If anything, the protagonist is as puzzled about X as we are.
The cold little reference to Janice Shriek puts the lie to X’s protestations that he felt remorse for his actions. Throughout the story, X communicates to the reader “between the lines“ in a rather pathetic manner. Such self-consciousness has clearly corrupted his writing. (Consulting my abridged version of Bender’s Trillian, I find no mention of a “Belacqua,“ although this is a point of curiosity only.) 3. King Squid by Frederick Madnok. At first, I assumed that this slim pamphlet had been privately printed by X under a pseudonym. However, further inquiries revealed that Madnok does indeed exist and that for a few months he hawked this pamphlet, among other self-published oddities, on the corner ofAlbumuth Boulevard andBeak Drive. His present whereabouts are unknown. Although our records could be incorrect, it appears he was never a patient here. (You may wish to use the impressive resources at your disposal to verify this fact, as many of our records have been damaged by water seepage. In many cases, your copies should now be considered the originals.) Given that King Squid did not originate with X and there are no margin notes from him, I cannot extrapolate much about X from it.
On a surface level, however, one might assume that X envied the transformative qualities of Madnok’s prose. Perhaps he saw Madnok as a kindred spirit. Again, we lack the personnel to perform the kind of analysis necessary to make such a third-party document “speak“ to us about X’s condition.
4. The Hoegbotton Family History. This document, although fascinating to me personally, seems at best something X may have read as background for enjoyment of item (5), below. It was found stuffed between his mattress and bed frame. There is a possibility it belonged to the former occupant of the cell, a Mr. M. Kodfan.
5. The Cage. I also checked with Sirin’s secretary about this manuscript, given X’s scrawled note of attribution. (I wish I had discovered said attribution before having returned to the asylum; as it was, I had to turn right back around to use my colleague’s telephone.) This time, she confirmed that Sirin had indeed written the story. She found it remarkable that X had galleys, given that the story is due to be released next month as part of Sirin’s new collection. She was most anxious that we return the manuscript to Sirin.
I told her this was impossible until I had secured your approval. As for any connection between Sirin and X, it hardly seems credible-more the case of an “admirer and an admiral,“ as they say. While X’s possession of the story confirms his obsession with the gray caps, I’m not sure that The Cage is otherwise of much use to us. Sirin’s characterization of Hoegbotton struck me as perverse. But, then, I am not a fan of Sirin’s fiction, although I did much admire his book of verse, “The Metamorphosis of Butterflies.“
6. In the Hours After Death. X tore this story by Nicholas Sporlender out of last month’s Burning Leaves, the creative journal enjoyed by so many of our patrons. I can confirm that the pages did indeed originate with our library copy. Several other pages had been ripped from the journal, but none of these pages remained in X’s room. I want to discuss the absent pages first because they perplex me. In comparing a complete copy of Burning Leaves with the torn one, I found that X may have absconded with an advertisement for women’s underthings, an article on the origins of water puppetry, a caricature of the current Truffidian Antechamber, a short, experimental (and completely incomprehensible) fiction by Sarah Beeside entitled “Bedbugs and Ballyhoo,“ and yet another advertisement for women’s underthings. (Sticking to the letter of your instructions, I have not included these items since you specifically asked for what X left behind, not what-he-didn’t-leave-behind-but-had-torn-out-at-some-point-from-a-creative-arts-journal. I must note that we often follow the letter of instructions due to lack of funding; anything that deviates, other than our incarcerated deviants, costs money.) “In the Hours After Death“ itself sheds no enduring light on X’s condition. It points to a simple death wish, by which wish we would expect to have found X’s corpse, not the absence of his corpse, in his cell that very interesting morning when I decided, on a whim, to talk with X before the appointed hour.
7. Encrypted story. Several pages, folded and stuck inside City of Saints & Madmen, consisted of a long series of numbers. Rather than bore you with them, I took an amateur’s stab at deciphering what appeared to be a code, even though we are really not prepared here at V.B.M.M.I. to interpret encrypted materials. (You will recall that we lost our funding for even such a basic necessity as a frenziologist last year; perhaps you could put in a word with Flauntimer?). After much tortuous experimentation, I discovered that each number series referred to a page, paragraph, line, and word in X’s book. I then decoded the manuscript in some haste, keeping in mind the urgency of your request for the materials to be examined by your investigator at Central Records. Some of the words I have translated seem to make no sense-in my haste I have made errors-but the last paragraph has escaped my efforts completely. It seems to draw on some other type of decryption. What seems clear from what I have decrypted, however, is that X seeks to make a parallel between the gray caps and us, his “captors“ at the Institute. Such a crude comparison is spurred on by a childish need for revenge. I am sure your expert will have his own theories.
8. The Exchange. This festival story by Nicholas Sporlender has been in X’s possession for some time, but he did not arrive with it. Someone handed it to him, I believe. He has scrawled some notes on the envelope the booklet came in, specifically, “Sporlender hated Verden by the end. But I don’t yet hate Eric. I wonder if that ’echo’ will ever appear, or if it’s simply not a one-for-one resonance.“ X then carefully cut the pages out, glued them to larger sheets, and added his own typewritten notes. (I am also intrigued by X’s insinuation that he met Madnok while in this institution. Again, I don’t see how this could be-no patient by that name ever stayed with us.) Clearly, I should have given X more to do in his spare time.
9. Learning to Leave the Flesh. Although I took this story from X at the beginning of his sojourn in this delightful place, I include it as an item of potential interest, having carefully cut it from X’s collection. I have read the story several times in hopes of deciphering it. It, I feel, far more than even the typed numbers, holds some clue to X’s whereabouts. The story is luminous-it almost seems to glow as one reads it. I must admit to sending it to you mostly to be rid of it.
10. The Ambergris Glossary. This item, received by X via mail the week before his disappearance, is a strange alliance of the original entries from Duncan Shriek’s The Early History of Ambergris and X’s added entries, so intertwined that it will require a detailed comparison to determine the extent of X’s changes. I will leave this analysis in your capable hands since mine are full of such interesting decisions as which sub-department to shut down due to crumbling facilities: farkology or incrementology.
The facts in this case remain the same, my good Simpkin: X gone with no trace of how he accomplished the feat and no sign of where he might have sought refuge. The most telling clue is that he left his beloved copy of City of Saints & Madmen behind. But we’ve certainly made no further progress in our investigations. (Some wags among the long-suffering kitchen staff-who last week resorted to poaching from the nearby zoo for supplies-have noted that X took all pens but one and conclude he must have “written his way out.“ It’s as good a theory as any at this point.) It seems of little use to note that most of these written materials deal with some form of transformation, a common enough concern of those who wish to leave their insanity behind.
As soon as I can buy a new typewriter ribbon, I will of course submit a full report to the Board. For now, however, the Strange Case of X, as it might be termed, remains open.
Sincerely, Dr V.
P.S. I said the notebook I kept is blank, and it is, but on the inside back cover, I found scrawled the following words: “Zamilon,“ “convergence,“ and “the green lights of the towers.“ Could they be a clue, I wonder? The words mean nothing to me in this context.
P.P.S. When possible, please return X’s possessions-for my display.
X'S NOTES
— A writer who is having difficulties with his masterwork-too old or just unmotivated? Read H’s Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, first.
— A writer in a prison. The prison is his own story. How can he make himself free?
— Ask the attendant for a better night lamp, not to mention another typewriter ribbon.
— Tonsure kept two journals, one that he wanted to be found. Why, really, would it be important for a fake account to be found?
— Always exercise when you first get up in the morning!
— Could easily write a biography of Voss Bender while in here. Start with childhood. Picture him this way: in the Truffidian Cathedral, surrounded by people yet utterly alone, sitting in the place of honor at the head of the altar, his left leg crossed over his right, an arm and fist supporting his head-a wild shock of black hair that goes to his shoulders, the olive skin, the darkness under the eyes, accentuating the darkness of the eyes themselves. These are eyes that see a lot without seeming to. The thick lips, the hint of a smile on those lips, while all around the congregation continues to chant. His foot is tapping.
But the tapping foot is not a sign of boredom. Inside his head, he is already, at l2, composing an opera.
Beside him-shriveled, white-haired grandfather, vacant sad-eyed mother, a father to whom everything in the world is cause for indifference. As the ceremony progresses and each of the relatives comes up to say something, most stress that he should “use his skills for good.“ He looks up at them from beneath the wall of black hair as if they were all made from scraps of paper. Throughout it all, his foot is still tapping.
And as he receives the benediction with his parents, their hands placed gently atop his head, he stands with his arms behind his back, his hands clasped together as if he has been shackled… and still the foot taps to the great swelling of symphonies in his head… He will always be this way-half in the real world, half in the next. (How, then, does he go from this idealism to despotism of old age?)
— Don’t forget that the director needs a letter to his superiors about funding.
— In the future, the gray caps will probably have taken over the city no matter what I write-how might the city change as a result? What will be the dangers of writing in such a milieu? Simple incarceration or something much worse? Is it worth the risk? Is it a good staging ground anyway?
— Ask for new books, even if theoretically you wrote them all.
— An encoded message from the future, itself with a message embedded in it?
— Is there more to theMartinLake story? Later years?
— Oxygenated squid blood is blue, not red.
— “His dreams will rise to the surface like bubbles of air, and when they pop open, he will finally remember the one thing he had hoped to forget.“ Bad B-movie material?
— Visions that I am not sure are mine. I’m not quite sure what to make of them. They suggest answers to some questions about the gray caps. It is always underground. And it is dark. There is a machine. The front of the machine has a comforting translucent or reflective quality. You will never be able to decide which quality it possesses, although you stand there staring at it for days, ensnared by your own foolish hope for something to negate the horrible negation of the machine’s innards. Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks.
Images of jungles and swamps inhabited by strange birds, strange beasts. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen them or heard mention of their existence. Ever… After several days, your eyes stray and unfocus and blink slowly. You notice, at the very bottom of the mirror, the glass, a door. The door is as big as the machine.
The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so small that you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent-the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely-perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a non-existent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyzes you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth.
The worms are singing to you through the rubble. You cannot think. You cannot breathe. You dare not breathe. Your head is full of blood.
There is something behind the door.
There is something behind the door.
There is something behind the door.
The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You run you run you run you run from that place as fast as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while you drown in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work thatdoesn’twork hatdoesnwor atdoeswor tdoeswor doeswor doewor dowor door…
Patient l9-9-l8-9-l4
Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute l3l4Albumuth Boulevard
Ambergris Il3-24
THE RELEASE OF BELACQUA
The shade of the composer Voss Bender himself might have passed Belacqua in the back corridors of the opera house; the aging critic Janice Shriek might have half-noticed the stoic humor of his performance, just not thought it important enough to mention in her review.
Much about him cried out for attention. Above the black shoes: the long red socks, matched only by the outrageous pink-blue chessboard buttons of his jacket, mimicked in lazy rural fashion by the green eyes on his yellow shirt. His hair — in a twisted red braid (frayed at the end) — hung down in front like the fuse to the bomb of his head. His made-up face reflected a certain forethought mirrored in the shrewd miscalculation of his clothes. The eyebrows (more than one opera-goer may have thought, attention wandering momentarily from the major players) had been stolen from the flourishes on the body of a violin: they overpowered the small, terrified eyes, melted into the lines of the long, garrulous (fake) nose, which itself loomed over the parrotfish mouth (flanked by vertical lines like gills) and sometimes slid down in mock surrender to gravity by performance’s end. This farce was pigmented with sow-pink skin, paler above the rarefied heights of the dueling eyebrows, as overdone in description as in life.
But we would know all of this if we had attended a performance, his costume blaring at us like a bawdy horn. Belacqua, Belacqua, the horns blared— this is Belacqua. See him move across the stage. See him briefly speak, and turning burn his image across our eyes. We could never know that he lives on the fifth floor of a hideous old hotel, in a cramped apartment with indi ferent lime-green wallpaper. Neighbors who move around above and below like blunt objects with a dulled sense of direction. Children who cry in the dark like ragged ghosts. A flutter of wings at the windowpane, delicate as eyelashes, and then gone. The repeated banging of a bedpost like some erotic gunshot aimed at his heart. (Next door, for ease of transition and translation, a necropole awaits those who grow cold in the hotel’s embrace.) On weekend mornings, he sits on the balcony, an unlit cigar between his lips. Dressed in a plain white robe, renouncing all make up, he feels the wind move through him as if he does not exist. He watches the people who pass by on the street below and anoints them all with secret lives, breathes into them qualities to match the golden light that filters down between the rooftops.
Sometimes, his gaze blurs upon the filigreed balcony railing as he remembers his dreams. His dreams are all disturbing jokes with obscure punchlines. In one dream, he sees his father: a dark figure at the far end of an alley, briefly illuminated by the glare of a bulb that cuts through the murk. He hears the sound of running water or beer poured from a bottle. Shards of glass lacerate his feet as he runs across the cobblestones. But the joke is, no matter how fast he runs, he can never come close enough to read his father’s eyes. Motionless, frictionless, his father glides ahead, continually twenty, thirty feet beyond his grasp.
The filigree of the balcony at first seems like protection from the dream, not protection from falling. He drops the cigar, stands up, goes back inside, dresses in subdued pants and shirt, descends the stairs, walks out onto the street, loses himself there, glad to be anonymous. He leaves his opera persona behind him like an abandoned skin: a husk that has as little to do with him as his clothes.
As he walks toward Albumuth Boulevard (possibly to buy a book at Borges Bookstore, possibly just to wander), a black flame burns inside of him — it lights up his eyes and lends his speech (a word to the fruit vendor, a brief exchange with a more talented but unemployed actor) a subdued yet incandescent fury.
Each word arrives burnt around the edges, consumed. His mother used to talk that way, as she let her life be created by his father. The Great Actor. The DrownedMan. The Drunkard.
Even now, he cannot completely forget his role in Bender’s most popular opera, the last written before his death and staged posthumously under a one-word title: Trillian. The opera recounts, in six raucous acts lasting four hours, the reign of Trillian the Great Banker, leaving out nothing, presenting every scene as a painting of the sort in which a thousand brightly-colored details battle for the viewer’s attention. His role, as the Great Banker’s gray cap advisor Belacqua, consisted of four lines and two hours of pratfalls.
The part was based on hearsay, heresy, and innuendo, for no history he had ever read mentioned Trillian’s advisor. Bender had made it up, and he had played the falsehood for ten years now, the opera’s undiminished popularity both blessing and curse. His father would never have taken such a role, but he had no choice. He had always recognized both the limitations of his acting style and that he lacked any spark of talent in other trades. Belacqua he was and Belacqua he would always be. Thus doomed to replay this other self night after night, while his father’s ghost hooted and howled, besotted, from some upper balcony seat.
The role, though small, required work, if only because the directors could require work of him without complaint. They told him exactly where to stand, and he stood there. They told him when to make absurd little motions in time to the main players pouring out in perfect pitch and tone the words that now to his ears had no meaning, much as any repetition reduces function and content to a void. He also studied gray caps when he came upon them slumped in alleys or, from a distance, at dusk as they began to waken — observed their hunching gait, their distinctive clothing, their deep, unknowable eyes. He even took lessons on how to project small upon the audience, making his five-foot-six-inch height look like four-foot-four (this last a precaution against getting the boot).
In his pocket, he kept a crumpled piece of paper. On the paper he had scribbled stage directions and The Lines.
BELACQUA approaches the front of the stage, holding the bloody knife. When he reaches TRILLIAN, he sternly sings:
What you cannot know and will not trust Will find you here because it must— I fly away now, the night to bring Down upon Trillian’s head, and then? No-thing.
Below this, he had written what he thought Belacqua felt in that moment: “Everything that had been building up for so long — dissipated in the pool of blood bubbling up from X’s body.”
He knew how Belacqua felt, but he didn’t know what the lines meant, even after ten years. For ten years, he had been saying these lines, show after show, and they were incomprehensible to him. He didn’t even believe the lines were particularly relevant to the opera. They seemed to have arrived from some other opera, confused in Bender’s mind, glittering darkly and spun into Trillian on a whim. Not that it should bother him as much as it did — he hadn’t actually written the lines. Although he would have liked to be a writer, he had always been written.
Late one afternoon, he brought home a loaf of fresh bread, a squid pie, and a bottle of red wine imported from Morrow. As he entered the apartment, the telephone rang. He froze at the sound, did not at first recognize it. Phones did not often ring in such an old and sleeping city. Then, as if awakened from dream, he dropped the bag. He walked into the kitchen, picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” he said. “Hello?” No response, only a low splashing gurgle of water in the background, so he said, “Who is this?”
Like an imperfect echo, refracted by the corrosion of static, a voice replied, “Hello. Is this Henry?
Henry, is that you?”
A vague disappointment settled into his stomach like a smooth, gray stone. “No. It’s not. I’m sorry — you have a wrong number.”
“But I have no other number. This is the only number.” A distressed tone had entered her voice. Such an achingly beautiful voice even without the new element of loss, even through the background interference.
“I’m sorry,” he forced himself to say. “I’m not Henry.” I wish I was, Belacqua thought to himself, but I’m not even sure I’m Belacqua.
The static raged, faded, raged, as the woman said, “Can you connect me to Henry?”
“I don’t know Henry,” he said, a hint of desperation in his voice, “but if I did, I’d gladly connect you.”
The woman began to weep. Such lovely weeping. He felt himself start to reach out through the phone line to comfort her. The whine of static stopped him. Now he listened to her and did not dare to interrupt.
“We’ve run out of time,” she said. “There is no time. I can’t call again. They’re coming now. I have to give you the message and leave here. It’s very important… They come up through the floor. If you’ve got metal floors, they come up even through the steel. They sneak around in your rooms at night. If they don’t like you, you’re dead, Henry.”
“But—”
“Please. Don’t say a word. I know what you want to say, but please don’t say it. You shouldn’t say it.
Here is the message: I delivered the last package to X last week. I’m to explain the writing was fine and the lock has been picked. He can find me if he tries. Make him try.”
“I’ll make him try,” he said, resigned to his role. “I have the message. But tell me one thing. What is your name? Please tell me your name. Maybe I can help you. Please… ”
Any answer she might have given was drowned out by the maniacal grinding of unseen engines of the night. The lapping of water against a dock. The clacking of keys against paper.
For a long time afterwards, he sat in semi-darkness, puffing on a cigar. The bag with his dinner in it lay forgotten by the open apartment door, the broken wine bottle leaking red wetness into the hall. It was the longest telephone conversation he had had in months. With a complete stranger. He watched the spark from the tip of his cigar. His skin felt tight, uncomfortable. His head was a mortar balanced atop a pestle.
His fingers around the cigar were thick and slow. And yet, his heart beat as delicately as that of a stunned thrush he had once found on his way to the theater.
He could make no sense of it, all through the night. What could he do? Why should he do anything? But in the morning he left a message for Henry and the woman on a note card at the central telephone exchange. So many lines got crossed that they had set up a special series of bulletin boards devoted to chronicling that very problem. He left the note card impaled on a thumbtack, a white moth lost amongst all the other white moths. When he looked back after having walked several paces, the message had disappeared into the blur of all the other distressed signals of miscommunication.
The very next day, he became Belacqua again and stalked the stage as if he owned a very small portion of it. He opened his mouth and out leapt The Lines, crisp and insignificant as ever. As he gazed through the sparkling glare, past the frantic insectile movements of the orchestra, he wondered if the woman sat in one of those seats, or had attended some past performance. He felt helpless, lost, alone.
The next weekend, he visited the message board. His message was still pinned there, writhing in the wind. No one had written a reply.
One day the city froze over, the snow falling in muffled flakes. The lizards turned white, developed protective skin over their eyes, and grew thick fur. Lit by holiday lamps even on sunny days, the hotel took on an odd glow, a blanched light usually found only in paintings. He and Belacqua both thought it sad. He imagined the surprised gasping of the fish as they drowned on snow, their scales tipped with frost. The screams of the swans on the river, their legs trapped in the ice. (His silent screams at the sight of the unchanged message board.) The seasons had become strange in Ambergris. The seasons did not know how to change, just as the telephones did not know how to connect.
In the midst of this, he came down with a fever that burrowed into his head like the most terrible word for torment. His limbs on fire, he trudged to the theater and donned his ridiculous costume. All through the performance, which he remembered only as a blur of sequins and song, his head ached and his eyes smoldered as if with smoke.
Afterwards, mumbling his lines under his breath, he put his street clothes back on and drifted out the theater’s back entrance. The snow came down in clumps and clots. Not a single leaf had survived on the trees lining the avenue. The lamps had frosted over, trapping the light inside them. The sky resembled a writer’s idea of the worst kind of gray: streaked with shadow, shot through with darker shades. He trembled in the cold, breathed the sting of it into his lungs. The fever had worked so far into him that he had succumbed to a fatigued restlessness. He could not return to his apartment. He could not stand still.
The message board. He would check it again, although only a day had passed since the last time.
As he set off down the avenue, the fever lent everything he passed a terrible clarity. The polished brass of a lamp post shone so brightly it hurt his eyes. A boy dragged a wooden wagon past him and the dirty wheels revealed the inner mysteries of their polished grain to him. The pink faces of passersby ate into his mind with a cruel precision. He refused to grant them a secret life; he could forgive none of them for what he had done to himself. Yet he allowed himself this lie: he decided as he walked that he would never give up his quest to find the woman. He would return to the message board again and again until the thrush that was his heart could no longer bear it.
His sense of despair so deep he would have drowned had he not already frozen, he approached the snow-flecked bulletin board. He found his message readily enough, faded around the edges, gray with ash, ink smeared but legible:
THIS MESSAGE IS FOR HENRY AND FOR THE WOMAN WHO CALLED ME. HENRY: THE LAST PACKAGE HAS BEEN SENT. THE WRITING IS FINE BUT THE LOCK HAS BEEN
PICKED. TO THE WOMAN: I TALKED TO YOU ON THE TELEPHONE. I’D LIKE TO TALK TO YOU AGAIN. PLEASE GIVE ME SOME WAY TO CONTACT YOU. YOU HAVE A VERY BEAUTIFUL VOICE.
A chill slipped over him, extinguishing the fever. No one had written on it. No one would ever write on it. But then his roving gaze found another message on a card next to his own. It was new. It had no snow on it. The ink was still bright with the memory of forming words.
HE IS NOT A CHARACTER. THIS HAS NEVER BEEN A STORY. NOW THAT WE HAVE FILLED HIM UP, WE RELEASE HIM. LET HIM BECOME WHATEVER HE WILL BECOME. LET HIM NO LONGER BE WRITTEN. X.
He stood there, looking up at the message. Was it meant for him? It could have been pure coincidence, as peripheral to his existence as the telephone call. It could have meant nothing. But even knowing this, he felt something loosen within him, thawing, as he read the words. He is not a character. This has never been a story. “Belacqua” began to fade away, and with him the lines, the costume, the opera. His father’s face. The woman’s voice.
He blinked back tears as he read the message over and over again, memorizing it. His fingers curled around the crumpled piece of paper in his pocket. The edges cut against his palm. Somehow he knew that when he took the paper out of his pocket, the words written there would be utterly, irrevocably transformed.
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—”
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.
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.)
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.
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…)
THE HOEGBOTTON FAMILY HISTORY by Orem Hoegbotton
Nine souls we were in the old city. Now, there remain of us only two: myself and my brother Myon. Our father and mother knew what it meant to have a homeland, but lived to see it taken from them by the Kalif. Once, we were a united people living in Yakuda — a long, wide valley through which ran theDalquinRiver. It was hilly territory and my ancestors liked nothing better than to ride through the thick forests on our sturdy horses. Before we settled in the valley, we had come from a place farther to the west where, for a time, we had been members of a mighty empire, much greater than that of the Kalif.
Some even breathed the word “Saphant.” We were also known for our rug weaving and the elaborate ceremonies, lasting for weeks, by which we said farewell to our dead. But by the time I was born, the Kalif’s armies had driven us from our homes and we had become refugees. We lost our valley first. Then we lost our horses to the ice and cold as we circled far to the north to avoid death at the hands of the Kalif. As we entered the eastern lands, we lost our very name, “Hyggboutten” become “Hoegbotton” because this sounded less like the names of our distant cousins, the warlike Haragck.
I have tried in this account to tell what our daily lives were like and how we came to survive and to prosper.
THE EARLY DAYS
My brothers and sisters and I were all brought up in Urlskinder, south of the lands of the Skamoo, but far north of Morrow. Urlskinder lay upon the southeast bank of theGeberniaRiver, in that territory claimed by the Kalif’s Empire but rarely taxed or visited by his men. The city had been built on unending plains, with no escape from the cold winds that blew in from the river.
Our house stood on a street that stretched from the Gebernia itself up to the market square and eventually to the larger city ofOrsha, some seventeen miles to the north. My father would add rooms onto the house whenever we had the money. Behind the house, we made a very large garden, and in the front of the house a small garden with two cherry trees.
I do not know the number of people who lived in Urlskinder, but I do know that we had one high church surrounded by five lesser buildings, all devoted to the northern-most outposts of the Truffidian faith. We had ten shops for supplies, 250 houses, and three schools. Everywhere, even with the muffling snow that caused such hardship, we could hear the students reciting from their texts through the late afternoon.
The greatest majority of our people at that time were workers; very few merchants, although we would grow strong in that line. Most of them wove prayer shawls, shirts, and curtains. Some made the religious icons that the Truffidians used in their church and often exported to greater areas of worship in the south.
Yet others learned to write the sacred words that were inserted into the icons.
The best weavers were the artists who could weave as many as 60, 70, or even 80 threads into each inch of material. These weaver-artists were sought out by the wealthy buyers, and they were always busy. Everything they produced was bought. At the market, there would often be traders from far away, their ships anchored in the middle of the Gebernia and their longboats a common sight on the riverbank.
We had five or six weaver stools in our house. Every adult wove, and even some girls were hired to work with us, but we were not of those who had steady work. There was a fixed price for the raw material, and every store would buy it in exchange for merchandise, but when we put our hard work into them and made the prayer shawls, few would buy them. They looked like the other shawls to us, but the people knew that we were not Truffidians.
As I grew older, I could see that our father was a sick man. He could not work. In the summer, he would sit in our front garden trying to catch his breath. In the winter, he stayed in the house. His ambition was that at least one child of his should leave behind the old ways and become learned in the ways of the Truffidian priests, so as to advance the family. The old ways, tied more to the earth and the sky than to the idea of a God, marked us as different from the others. But, as insult added to injury, my father had to pay a fee for such teachings. I know this pained him since food was always scarce. An aura of poverty existed in our house. Sometimes I was sent away to the nearby town, to a hostel for the poor, and there I ate “days.” (This meant I was supposed to be given a meal in a different wealthy family’s house each day of the week. This was a customary way of seeing to it that students — who were generally poor — would get a good meal every day.) Often, there were “days” missing and I had to go hungry. I was ashamed to let anyone know of this, and I often starved. A few times, hoping for some frozen fish to thaw, I would go begging from the lone Skamoo who haunted the edges of the town like ghosts, but they were wary and would vanish into the snow before I could approach them.
I remember that my father was learned in the old ways and read from the faded prayer books every afternoon, although he had to be careful to put such books away when the Truffidians made their rounds.
Often, he would wake up in the middle of the night and study and groan. When I asked him why he groaned, he would say that it was his burden, which meant that ever since we had lost our home to Kalif and we were scattered throughout the world, his soul could find no rest.
Our father was a wise man. People would come to him and ask him to settle their disputes. He would always give the verdict for the good of all, although in times of need our mother became mad at him because he refused payment for those services. He could also speak the language of the Skamoo and so he would help trappers discuss rights of land use. For this last service, he did accept payment.
When I look back, I recall that we children lived in harmony together before we dispersed to our separate fates. There was even among us a certain discipline because we were careful not to mention our sick father. We felt a great respect for our parents and a special empathy for our mother, who constantly cared for us. She cooked and baked and was always busy, without rest.
I can remember the serene atmosphere of the forbidden holy days when we would throw the windows open and those neighbors who dared came in to sing with us heartily and with pleasure. (We would always have a boy hidden on a rooftop to warn us of approaching priests.) After dinner, our father would go to his room to rest and my mother would read to a few women the battered prayer books. Already, our native language was beginning to be lost, because so few of the youth could read it, or wished to read it. Everything the Truffidians brought, they embraced, in rebellion.
Sometimes, too, at night, by the fireplace, our mother would tell us stories of the old country, especially of daring raids on horseback against our enemies. I knew the stories of our resistance to the Kalif could not all be true or we would not have been driven from Yakuda, but I liked to hear them. Before we became displaced, my mother had been a great breaker and trainer of horses. There was no call for such a gift in our adopted home.
Our father died at 48 years of age, in the year 7590 of our calendar. At the time, my oldest brother was in Kretchken, a village outside of Zamilon, with his wife and child. This left me as the oldest one at home, for my brother Myon was younger. I became the leader of the household. (I gave up my studies in the Truffidian faith, although I did not miss them.)
It was recorded in the books of the local government that my brothers Myon and Bestrill were twins.
According to the law, as the youngest brothers one of them had to go into the Kalif’s army, and this lot fell to Myon. But Bestrill felt that Myon could better help our household so he volunteered to go into the army. Bestrill died in battle against Stretcher John’s army, at a place called Thraan. We were told in a letter from one of his fellow soldiers that Bestrill had ridden to his death, his regiment attacking into the mouths of cannon. I am glad my father was dead before he could hear of this. When Bestrill died, they called up Myon to take his place. Our mother was heart-broken.
OUR LIFE CHANGES
A short time after our father died and I became the head of the family, an organization of benefactors from Orsha tried to help the workers in Urlskinder in their poverty by constructing a big building for communal weaving. A man came from Morrow to manage the workers. His name was Frederick Alsomb, an agent of the respected Frankwrithe & Lewden. He raised wages and paid us with coins instead of the paper that was redeemable for food in the stores. It took from two to four sels per week for a family to exist in poverty and he paid six to seven sels.
They needed a finisher (one who prepares the pattern) and they hired me because I knew how from preparing the pattern for weaving the prayer shawls. I do not remember my father ever weaving, but he prepared the threads and this I learned from him. (He was a big man and although he became gaunt in later years, his hands were always lithe and nimble.)
I soon figured out quicker ways to make the patterns and Alsomb increased my wages. He also hired other relatives to work for him. We threw away our weaver stools and my mother had only to prepare meals for us. They spoke of us in the town: that we were buying bread in a bakery and that we ate meat every day and not just on holidays. Most important to me was the respect between Alsomb and myself.
When he walked out of the office to inspect the weaving area every morning, he always talked to me for a few minutes. However, when he found out I was not a Truffidian, he began to ignore me.
At that time all of the people in the town, especially the youth, were listening to revolutionaries and offshoots of religions. There were those who wished to raise an army and fight against the Kalif. There were those who called for a holy war against Morrow. There were those who wanted the mayor to make Truffidianism the official faith of the region. Everyone was against the Kalif, but most of it was talk only.
We all knew that sooner or later the Kalif’s spies would make those who talked loudest disappear. And so it would happen — men and women taken from their homes, never seen again. It was rumored that in the prisons of the Kalif, the sound of our people chanting became ever louder. We had a bitter winter that year and because of this and the unrest, we received lower payment for our work. Some of us were let go, including me. As things became worse, many people wanted to settle in Morrow. It was a long journey to Morrow. It took a lot of money. I had already saved up enough money so that when Myon ran away from the army, I gave him money to go to Morrow, where I would go to meet him later. It took longer than I had thought, but eventually I made it to Morrow.
LIFE IN MORROW
Morrow was usually not as cold as Urlskinder and its dark green forests reminded me of the stories our mother told of the old lands. We had already heard in Urlskinder that for one of us, displaced from our lands, to become employed as a weaver would be most difficult. Therefore, I began to learn how to make cloaks. My brother Myon was more worldly than I and more important he was sturdier; the army had strengthened him. Myon worked as a clerk for Frankwrithe & Lewden and we hoped to save enough to bring our whole family over. But the situation in Morrow became bad after we had been there for several months. Sometimes the agents of Frankwrithe & Lewden saw my people as competition and attacked us openly in the streets. There was no more work for Myon and he joined me in making cloaks and taking courier jobs. Still, we continued to send our money home.
At that time, an office was opened in Morrow’s main square. It was supported by certain of our countrymen, to help the displaced spread even further south so they would not all have to live in Morrow.
Myon went to the office and was advised to go to Nicea. There he would find work or he would be able to peddle in the “country.” We decided that he would go to Nicea and that I might follow later.
In Nicea, my brother Myon used to ride on a cart and get off many miles from the city. There he would peddle at the farms where he sold various necessities that he had bought in Nicea on credit and sought to sell them for money. But as there was still a crisis, the farmers who purchased the merchandise paid with butter, eggs, and chickens.
That second winter was long and bitter. Myon could not return to help and my peddling small articles from house to house made hardly enough money for one meal a day. My shoes were ruined and I could not afford to replace them. I gave up my living space in a loft to buy secondhand shoes and for two months I hid in the back of the Truffidians’ cathedral, sometimes stealing bread when I could not bear the hunger. If I was lucky, I could afford to buy a hard-boiled egg for lunch.
When the winter had passed, I returned to peddling. For the first few days of the week, I would peddle in various parts of the city. Later in the week, I would stay aroundDekkle Street, there to sell my merchandise to passersby in front of the furniture and antique stores. After a few months, one store owner took me aside and said, “I can see from the way you talk and your bearing that you are a fine young man and willing to work. I want to sell my store. I will teach you and you can buy my store. You have peddled enough. You will pay me weekly or monthly.” That was Wolf Shalzan, a kind man to whom I owe everything.
Myon came home a few weeks later, broke and tired, and we talked it over. We decided to accept Shalzan’s offer. We had no choice. Through the office run by our countrymen, we were able to receive a loan with payments spread out over several years. After I bought the store, Myon also bought a store and we were partners until his marriage.
Many more displaced peoples had arrived in Urlskinder by this time, some of them blood kin and others northern neighbors also forced to flee by the Kalif’s armies. The news spread that we had made more of our lot than most and there arrived in the city dozens of men and women who wished to work for us. Our credit was good, and through small banks we could borrow up to 500 sels to pay back in a year. As most of the newcomers were young unmarried men, we bought stores for them. We also lent them cash money from time to time and so each one lived sparingly and paid back the borrowed money. The result was that we assured all newcomers from Urlskinder that they could eat and sleep with us until they could become established for themselves. That was the beginning and the cause of so many new immigrants to Morrow becoming store owners.
Gradually, our own family made the trip from Urlskinder to Morrow. When our mother arrived with Praidal, our sister, and “Itchi”, our young cousin, our whole life changed for the good. At the place where newcomers were inspected, the officials and doctors would talk to each person in his own language.
Praidal and Itchi were immediately passed through, but mother was held back. It took awhile to examine her eyes. They were fearful of disease brought in by foreigners. We knew this and understood, and were satisfied, and then forgot it. Once, though, much later, when our mother and a few women were talking in Praidal’s house, she told them that at the examination the doctor spoke to her and asked why she had come to the city. When she told them that she had come to meet the Hoegbottons, her children, they then immediately let her through. This was not true, but it shows the pride she took in us.
We had already prepared a house so that Praidal and my mother could live in a certain style. I, not being married, shared the house with them. We were all very happy. Then Praidal got married and my mother went to live with her. I would visit them during the week. Our mother visited us very often in our stores and would take money from us to send to her poor sister, who had moved to Nysimia (a far western province of the Kalif’s Empire) with her husband. Even when we had lived in Urlskinder she felt it was her duty to help her sister, who was poorer than us. My mother, when she went to the market in Urlskinder, would stop on the way home at her sister’s, who had not yet left for Nysimia and had a house full of children, and there my mother would leave some food and then come home. We all knew of this, except for my father, but none of us children ever said a word about it.
Our mother felt quite content for a time. She sent money and letters to her sister and received letters in return, until the beginning of several wars conducted by the Kalif against his own people. The mail from the empire was discontinued abruptly. No more letters arrived from Nysimia and mother became uneasy.
We all assured her that the wars could only last a few months. That is what everyone thought at the time.
But as each month went by, she became more concerned and worried, and she changed completely.
She would sit for hours at a time in her room, often in silence. One evening when we were all sitting in the dining room talking pleasantly, our mother came out of her room upset and tearfully asked us how it could be that they wouldn’t let a letter through from a sister. She asked us to go in force to the Kalif and ask him how he could allow for sisters to be out of touch for such a long time. How could he allow such a thing! Such agony was in her question that we were gripped by more pain than we could bear.
A few days later, we experienced the first death in the family since our arrival in Morrow. Somehow, I will always connect my mother’s distress and this death. Praidal became ill from wheat infected with fungus. Others recovered, but in Praidal the illness became more profound. It made her unable to keep down food and it changed the pallor of her skin so that it became almost clear. After four days, she died.
This was a shock to us. We wept for days. We had survived so much and come so far that I suppose we had thought we could endure anything. Washing her body for burial and knowing the hardship she had suffered in Urlskinder, I could not forget her. It was then, in the cemetery, as I held my mother close to me, that I first grieved for the homeland.
WHAT CAME AFTER
At the present time, all of us original Hoegbottons have multiplied and become intertwined with other families. Because the agents of Frankwrithe & Lewden have been hostile to us, we have had to spread out — to Nicea, toStockton, even, as I write this, to Ambergris. From the nine of our generation, most have gone to their eternity, including my mother, just two years ago. The children and the children’s children do not know who they are and how they came to Morrow. They are here and that is enough for them. They are different than us — sharper and less kind (although they will laugh if they read this).
Some of our people still lived in Yakuda, under the Kalif’s rule, for many years. We did not hear from them, but we used to send money to Yakuda after the wars had ended, each to his own people. One time, we undertook to send a large sum of money through the Kalif’s ministers to Yakuda. We told them it was for everyone in Yakuda, even those who had been resettled there from distant lands and had helped to drive us out. We did this so as to not create any ill-feeling.
I don’t remember the amount of money, but it was a very large sum and they never received it. After a time, one of the leaders in Yakuda — a pale man whose family must have originated far to the West — came to Morrow and we called a meeting. He was a good speaker. He spoke for a long, long time. He said that the Kalif knows better who is in need and that if the Kalif’s ministers did not give the money to the people in Yakuda, then it is certain that it was needed more elsewhere. We were naïve. We still had not heard the reports of the atrocities performed in the name of the Kalif, or could know that many of those remaining in Yakuda would be uprooted or killed in the coming months.
After the repressions had subsided, many years later, we tried to find out something about Yakuda and as a last resort sent out letters to the regional administrator for the area. We did not get an answer. Later, we heard a story that the Kalif had dammed the river, flooding the valley. It was strange to hold in our minds the thought of our homeland lost to the river — our homes, our cities, underwater. For years, I told people that this story was not true. But lately, I have come to realize it does not matter. There are no Hyggboutten left there.
Many evenings now, I have a dream. It is probably not a dream so much as a wish. I should like to tell it to my children, but I do not know that it will mean anything to them. I am frightened that it will mean nothing.
In the dream, my brothers and I are riding through the valley we have never seen, up the hills that border the river. Our parents gallop ahead of us and we try to catch up to them. The sun fills the leaves of the trees with shadow. We laugh as we ride, the underbrush lashing against our leather-clad legs. The river is a line of silver light below us. The horses are very fast. And we are happy because we are home.
THE CAGE
I
The hall contained the following items, some of which were later catalogued on faded yellow sheets constrained by blue lines and anointed with a hint of mildew:
• 24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop one box stood
• 1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing co on (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the
• 5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors — lit with what he could only describe as a black light: it illuminated but did not li the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of ta ered jellyfish floating in amber bo les, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in bri le poses.
The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and
• 1 Manzikert-brand phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and
• 8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles.
Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by some wild delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower le corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop
• 1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood
• 8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice
• 1 grandfather clock, its blood-spa ered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again — and beneath the clock
• 1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal
• 1 bookcase, lacquered, stacks with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines, leaving blood in wide furrows. Next to the bookcase
• 1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the “Invisible World” newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists.
Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to
• 1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her le nub held by
• 1 pale gaunt boy with eyes as wide and twitchy as twinned pocket watches. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ash-gray trousers. He stared at
• 1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had lately rained down upon the city during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the a ention of
• 1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbo on, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly.
He wore a drab gray suit he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor.
Hoegbo on considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set half-way up the wall where the cage sat on a window ledge. The dark, narrow window reflected needlings of rain through its tubular green glass. It was the season of downpours in Ambergris. The rain would not let up for days on end, the skies blue-green-gray with moisture. Fruiting bodies would rise, fat and fecund, in all the hidden corners of the city. Nothing in the bruised sky would reveal whether it was morning, noon, or dusk.
The solicitor was talking and had been for what seemed to Hoegbo on like a rather long time.
“That black swan, for example, is in bad condition,” Hoegbo on said, to slow the solicitor’s relentless cha er.
The solicitor wiped his beaded forehead with a handkerchief tinged a pale green.
“The bird itself. The bird,” the solicitor said, “is in superb condition. Missing eyes, yes. Yes, this is true.
But,” he gestured at the walls, “surely you see the richness of Daffed’s collection.”
Thomas Daffed. The last in a long line of famous zoologists. Daffed’s wife and son stood beside the solicitor, last remnants of a family of six.
Hoegbo on frowned. “But I don’t really need the collection. It’s a fine collection, very fine”—and he meant it; he admired a man who could so singlemindedly, perhaps obsessively, acquire such a diverse yet unified assortment of things —”but my average customer needs a pot or an umbrella or a stove. I stock the odd curio from time to time, but a collection of this size?” Hoegbo on shrugged his famous shrug, perfected over several years of haggling.
The solicitor stared at Hoegbo on as if he did not believe him. “Well, then, what is your offer? What will you take?”
“I’m still calculating that figure.”
The solicitor loosened his collar with one sharp tug. “It’s been more than an hour. My clients are not well!” He was sweating profusely. A greenish pallor had begun to infiltrate his skin. Despite the sweat, the solicitor seemed parched. His mask puffed in and out from the violence of his speech.
“I’m sorry for your loss — all of your losses,” Hoegbo on said, turning to the mother and child who stood in mute acceptance of their fate. “I won’t keep you much longer.” The speech never sounded sincere, no ma er how sincerely he meant it.
The solicitor made a noise between a groan and a choke that Hoegbo on did not bother to catalog. His thoughts had returned to the merchandise — rug, clock, bookcase, phonograph, table, chairs. What price might they accept?
Hoegbo on would not have included the cage in his calculations if the boy’s stare had not kept flickering wildly toward it and back down again, gliding like Hoegbo on’s own over the remnants of a success that had become u er failure. For all the outlandish things in the room — the boy’s own mother to be counted among them — the boy most feared the cage, an object that could no more hurt him than the green suitcase that hung from his arm.
A reflexive sadness for the boy ran through Hoegbo on, even as he noted the delicacy of the silver engravings on the chair legs; definitely pre-Trillian.
He stared at the boy until the boy stared back. “Don’t you know you’re safe now?” Hoegbo on said a li le too loudly, the words muffled by the cloth over his mouth. An echo traveled up to the high ceiling, encountered the skylight, and descended at a higher pitch.
The boy said nothing. As was his right. Outside, the bodies of his father, brother, and two sisters were being burned as a precaution, the bodies too mutilated to have withstood a Viewing anyway. The boy’s fate, too, was uncertain. Sometimes survivors did not survive.
Nothing could make one safe. There had been a great spasm of buying houses without basements or with stone floors, but no one had yet proven that such a measure, or any measure, helped. The random nature of the events, combined with their infrequency, had instilled a certain fatalism in Ambergris’ inhabitants.
The solicitor had run out of patience. He stood uncomfortably close to Hoegbo on, his breath sour and thick. “Are you ready yet? You’ve had more than enough time. Should I callSla ery or Ungdom instead?”
His voice seemed more distorted than the mask could explain, as if he were in the grip of a new, perhaps deadly, emotion.
Hoegbo on took a step back from the ferocity of the solicitor’s gaze. The names of his chief rivals made a li le vein in Hoegbo on’s le eyelid pulse in and out. Especially Ungdom — towering John Ungdom, he of the wide belly, steeped in alcohol and pork lard.
“Call for them, then,” he said, looking away.
The solicitor’s gaze bored into his cheek and then the foul presence was gone. The solicitor had slumped into one of the chairs, a great smudge of a man.
“Anyway, I’m almost ready,” Hoegbo on said. The vein in his eyelid would not stop pulsing. It was true: neitherSla ery nor Ungdom would come. Because they were afraid. Because their devotion to their job was incomplete, insufficient, inadequate. Hoegbo on imagined them both taken up into the rain and torn to pieces by the wind.
“Tell me about the cage,” Hoegbo on said suddenly, surprising himself. “The cage up there”—he pointed—”is it for sale, too?”
The boy stiffened, stared at the floor.
To Hoegbo on’s surprise, the woman turned to look at him. Her eyes were black as an abyss; they did not blink and reflected nothing. He felt for a moment as if he stood balanced precariously between the son’s alarm and the mother’s regard.
“The cage was always open,” the woman said, her voice gravelly, something stuck in her throat. “We had a bird. We always let it fly around. It was a pre y bird. It flew high through the rooms. It— No one could find the bird. A er.” The terrible pressure of the word after appeared to be too much for her and she fell back into her silence.
“We’ve never had a cage,” the boy said, the dark green suitcase swaying. “We’ve never had a bird.
They le it here. They le it.”
A chill ran through Hoegbo on that was not caused by a dra. The sleepy gaze of a pig embryo floating in a jar caught his eye.Opportunity or disaster? The value of an artifact they had le behind might be considerable. The risks, however, might also be considerable. This was the third time in the last nine months that he had been called to a house visited by the gray caps. Each of the previous times, he had escaped unharmed. In fact, he had come to believe that late arrivals like himself were impervious to any side effects. Yet even he had experienced moments of discomfort, as when, at the last house, he had walked down a white hallway to the room where the merchandise awaited him and found a series of dark smudges and trails and tracks of blood. Halfway down the hallway, he had spied a dark object, shaped like a piece of dried fruit, glistening from the floor. Curious, he had leaned down to examine it, only to recoil and stand up when he realized it was a human ear.
This time, the solicitor had experienced the most unease. According to the talkative messenger who had summoned Hoegbo on, the solicitor had arrived in the early a ernoon to find the bodies and survivors.
Arms and legs had been stuck into the walls between specimen jars, arranged in intricate poses that displayed a perverse sense of humor.
The light glinted so ly off the windows. The silence became more absolute. All around, dead things watched one another, from wall to wall — a cacophony of gazes that saw everything but remembered nothing. Outside, the rain fell relentlessly.
A tingling sensation crept into Hoegbo on’s fingertips. A price had materialized in his mind, manifested itself in gli ering detail.
“Two thousand sels — for everything.”
The solicitor sighed, almost crumpled in on himself. The woman blinked rapidly, as if puzzled, and then stared at Hoegbo on with a hatred more real for being so distant. All the former protests of the solicitor, even the boy’s fear, were nothing next to that look. The red at the end of her arms had become paler, as if the white bandages had begun to heal her.
He heard himself say, “Three thousand sels. If you include the cage.” And it was true, he realized — he wanted the cage.
The solicitor, trying to mask some small personal distress now, giggled and said, “Done. But you must retrieve it yourself. I’m not feeling well.” The cloth of the man’s mask moved in and out almost imperceptibly as he breathed. A sour smell had entered the room.
On the ladder, Hoegbo on had a moment of vertigo. The world spun, then righted itself as he continued to the top. When he peered onto the windowsill, two eyes stared up at him from beside the cage.
“Manzikert!” he hissed. He recoiled, almost lost his balance as he flailed at empty air, managed to fall back against the ladder… and realized that they were just the missing marble eyes of the swan, placed there by some prankster, although it did not pay to think of who such a prankster might be. He caught his breath, tried to swallow the unease that pressed down on his shoulders, his tongue, his eyelids.
The cage stood to the right of the ladder and he was acutely conscious of having to lock his legs onto the ladder’s sides as he slowly leaned toward the cage.
Below, the solicitor and the boy were speaking, but their voices seemed dulled and distant. He hesitated.
What might be in the cage? What horrible thing far worse than a severed human ear? The odd idea struck him that he would pull the cord to reveal Thomas Daffed’s severed head. He could see the bars beneath the cloth, though, he told himself. Whatever lived inside the cage would remain inside the cage.
Now that it was his property, his acquisition, he refused to suffer the same failure of nerve asSla ery and Ungdom.
The cover of the cage, which in the dim light appeared to be sprinkled with a luminous green dust, had a drawstring and opened like a curtain. With a sharp yank on the drawstring, Hoegbo on drew aside the cover — and flinched, again nearly fell, a sensation of displaced air flowing across his face, as of something moving. He cried out. Then realized the cage was empty. He stood there for an instant, breathing heavily, staring into the cage. Nothing. It contained nothing. Relief came burrowing out of his bones, followed by disappointment. Empty. Except for some straw lining the bo om of the cage and, dangling near the back, almost as an a erthought, a perch, swaying back and forth, the movement no doubt caused by the speed with which he had drawn back the cover. A latched door extended the full three feet from the base to the top of the cage and could be slid back on special grooves. Stained green, the metal bars featured detail work as fine as he had ever seen — intricate flowers and vines with li le figures peering out of a background rich with mushrooms. He could sell it for 4,000 sels, with the right sales pitch.
Hoegbo on looked down through a murk diluted only by a few lamps.
“It’s empty,” he shouted down. “The cage is empty. But I’ll take it.”
An unintelligible answer floated up. As his sight adjusted to the scene below, the distant solicitor in his chair, the other two still standing, he thought for a horrible second that they were melting. The boy seemed melded to his suitcase, the green of it inseparable from the white of the a ached arm. The woman’s nubs were impossibly white, as if she had grown new bones. The solicitor was just a splash of green.
When he stood on solid ground again, he could not control his shaking.
“I’ll have the papers to you tomorrow, a er I’ve catalogued all of the items,” he said.
All around, on the arms of the chairs, on the table, atop the bookcase, white mushrooms had risen on slender stalks, their gills tinged red.
The solicitor sat in his chair and giggled uncontrollably.
“It was nice to meet you,” Hoegbo on said as he walked to the door that led to the room that led to the next room and the room a er that and then, hopefully, the outside, by which time he would be running.
The woman’s stubs had sprouted white tendrils of fungus that lazily wound their way around the dried blood and obscured it. Her eyes were slowly filling with white.
Hoegbo on backed into the damaged table and almost fell. “As I say, a pleasure doing business with you.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” the solicitor said, and giggled again, his skin as green and wrinkly as a lizard’s.
“Then I will see you again, soon,” Hoegbo on said, edging toward the door, groping behind him for the knob, “and under… under be er… “ But he could not finish his sentence.
The boy’s arms were dark green, fuzzy and indistinct, as if he were a still life made of points of paint on a canvas. His suitcase, once blue, had turned a blackish green, for the fungi had engulfed it much as ivy had engulfed the eastern wall of the mansion. All the terrible knowledge of his condition shone through the boy’s eyes and yet still he held his mother’s arm as the white tendrils wound round both their limbs in an ever more permanent embrace.
Hoegbo on later believed he would have stood at the door forever, hand on the knob, the solicitor’s giggle a low whine in the background, if not for what happened next.
The broken clock groaned and struck midnight. The shuddering stroke reverberated through the room, through the thousands of jars of preserved animals. The solicitor looked up in sudden terror and, with a so popping sound, exploded into a lightly falling rain of emerald spores that dri ed to the floor with as slow and tranquil a grace as the seeds of a dandelion. As if the sound had torn him apart.
Outside, Hoegbo on tore off his mask, knelt, and threw up beside the fountain that guarded the path toAlbumuth Boulevard. Behind him, across a square of dark green grass, the bodies of Daffed, his daughters, his other son, smoldered gray and black. The charred smell mixed with mildew and the rain that stippled his back. His arms and legs trembled with an enervating weakness. His mouth felt hot and dry. For a long time, he sat in the same position, watching pinpricks break his reflection in the fountain.
He shivered as the water shivered.
He had never come this close before. Either they had died long before he arrived or long a er he le. The solicitor’s liquid giggle trickled through his ears, along with the so pop of the spores. He shuddered, relaxed, shuddered again.
When his assistant Alan Bristlewing questioned, as he o en did, the wisdom of taking on such hazardous work, Hoegbo on would smile and change the subject. He could not choose between two conflicting impulses: the upswelling of excitement and the desire to flee Ambergris and return to Morrow, the city of his birth. As each new episode receded into memory, his nerve returned, somehow stronger.
The boy’s arm, fused to his suitcase.
Holding on to the lichen-flecked stone lip of the pool, Hoegbo on plunged his head into the smooth water. The chill shocked him. It prickled his skin, cut through the numbness to burn the inside of his nose.
A sob escaped him, and another, and then a third that bent him over the water again. The back of his neck was suddenly cool. When he pulled away, he looked down at his reflection — and the mask he had made to hide his emotions was gone. He was himself again.
Hoegbo on stood up. Across the courtyard, the Cappan’s men had abandoned the bodies to begin the task of nailing boards across the doors and windows of the mansion. No one pulled the shades open to protest being trapped inside. No one banged on the door, begging to be let out. They had already begun their journey.
One look at his face as he staggered to safety had told the Cappan’s men everything. No doubt they would have boarded him in too, if not for the bribes and his previous record of survival.
Hoegbo on wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. The merchandise he had bought would molder in the mansion, unused and unrecorded except in his ledger of “Potential Acquisitions: Lost.” Depending on which hysteria-induced procedure the Cappan had adopted this fortnight, the mansion grounds might be cordoned off or the mansion itself might be put to the torch.
The clock struck midnight.
The cage stood beside him, slick with rain. Hoegbo on had gripped its handle so hard during his escape — from every corner, Daffed’s infernal collection of dead things staring innocently at him — that he had been branded where the skin had not been rubbed off his palm. He bore the mark of the handle: a delicate filigree of unfamiliar symbols from behind which strange eyes peered out. In the fading light, with the rain falling harder, the fungi appeared to have been washed off the cover of the cage. Perversely, this fact disappointed him. With each new encounter, he had come to expect further revelations.
Blinking away the rain, Hoegbo on let out a deep breath, stuffed his mask in a pocket, wrapped the cloth around his injured hand, and picked up the cage. It was heavier than he remembered it, and oddly balanced. It made him list to the side as he started walking up the path to the main road. He would have to hurry if he was to make the curfew imposed by the Cappan.
Ambergris at dusk, occluded and darkened by the rain that spla ered on sidewalks, ra led against rooftops, struck windows, hinted at a level of debauchery almost as unnerving to Hoegbo on as the way, whenever he stopped to switch the cage from his le to his right hand and back again, the weight never seemed the same.
The city that flourished from wholesome activity by day became its opposite by night. Orgies had been reported in abandoned churches. Grotesque and lewd water puppet shows were staged down by the docks. Weekly, the merchant quarter held midnight auctions of paintings that could only be termed obscene. The fey illustrated books of Collart and Slothian enjoyed a popularity that placed the authors but a single step below the Cappan in status. In the Religious Quarter, the hard-pressed Truffidian priests tried to wrest back authority from the conflicting prophets Peterson and Stra on, whose dueling theologies infected ever-more violent followers.
At the root of this immorality: the renewed presence of the gray caps, who in recent years came and went like the ebb and flow of a tide — now underground, now above ground, as if in a perpetual migration between light and dark, night and day. Always, the city reacted to their presence in unpredictable ways.
What choice did the city’s inhabitants have but to go about their business, hoping they would not be next, blind to all but their own misfortunes? It was now one hundred years since the Silence, when thousands had vanished without a trace, and people could be forgiven their loss of memory. Most people no longer thought of the Silence on a daily basis. It did not figure into the ordinary sorrows of Ambergris’
inhabitants so much as into the weekly sermons of the Truffidians or into the worries of the Cappan and his men.
As Hoegbo on walked home, street lamps appeared out of the murk, illuminating fleeting figures: a priest holding his robe up as he ran so he wouldn’t trip on the hem; two Dogghe tribesmen hunched against the closed doors of a bank, their distinctive green spiraled hats pulled down low over their weathered faces.
Of the recent Occupation, no sign remained except for painted graffi ti urging the invaders to go home.
But Hoegbo on still came upon the faintly glowing, six-foot-wide purplish circles that showed where, before the Silence, huge mushrooms had been chopped down by worried authorities.
Hoegbo on’s wife was already asleep when he walked up the seven flights of stairs and entered their apartment. She had turned off the lamps because it gave her the advantage in case of an intruder. The faint scent of lilacs and honeysuckle told him the flower vendor from the floor above them had been by to see Rebecca.
A dim half-light shone from the living room to his le as he set down the cage, took off his shoes and socks, and hung his raincoat on the coat rack. Directly ahead lay the dining room, with its mold-encrusted window, the purple sheen burning darkly as the rain fed it. He had checked the fungi guard just a week ago and found no leakage, but he made a mental note to check it again in the morning.
Hoegbo on found a towel in the hall closet and used it to dry his face, his hair, and then the outside of the cage. Again picking up the uncomfortable weight of the cage, he tiptoed into the living room, the rug beneath his feet thick but cold. A medley of dark shapes greeted him, most of them items from his store: Lamps and side tables, a couch, a long low coffee table, a book case, a grandfather clock. Beyond them lay the balcony, long lost to fungi and locked up as a result.
The fey light almost transformed the living room’s contents into the priceless artifacts he had told her they were. He had chosen them not for their value but for their texture, their smell, and for the sounds they made when moved or sat upon or opened. Li le of it appealed visually, but she delighted in what he had chosen and it meant he could store the most important merchandise at the shop, where it was more secure.
Hoegbo on set the cage down on the living room table. The palms of his hands were hot and raw from carrying it. He took off the rest of his clothes and laid them on the arm of the couch.
The light came from the bedroom, which lay to the right of the living room. He walked into the bedroom and turned to the le, the closed window above the bed reflecting back the iridescent light that came from her and her alone. Rebecca lay on her back, the sheets draped across her body, exposing the long, black, vaguely tear-shaped scar on her le thigh. He ran his gaze over it lustfully. It glistened like obsidian.
Hoegbo on walked around to the right side and eased himself into the bed. He moved up beside her and pressed himself against the darkness of the scar. An image of the woman from the mansion flashed through his mind.
Rebecca turned in her sleep and put an arm across his chest as he moved onto his back. Her hand, warm and so, was as delicate as the starfish that glided through the shallows down by the docks. It looked so small against his chest.
The light came from her open eyes, although he could tell she was asleep. It was a silvery glow awash with faint phosphorescent sparks of blue, green, and red: shivers and hiccups of splintered light, as if a half-dozen tiny lightning storms had welled up in her gaze. What rich worlds did she dream of? And, for the thousandth time: What did the light mean? He had met her on a business trip toStockton, a er the fungal infection that had resulted in the blindness, the odd light, the scar. He had never known her whole.
Who was this stranger, so pale and silent and beautiful? A joyful sorrow rose within him as he watched the light emanating from her. They had argued about having children just the day before. Every word he had thrown at her in anger had hurt him so deeply that finally he had been wordless, and all he could do was stare at her. Looking at her now, her face unguarded, her body next to his, he could not help loving her for the scar, the eyes, even if it meant he wished her to be this way.
II
The next morning, Hoegbo on woke to the fading image of the woman’s bloody bandages and the sounds of Rebecca making breakfast. She knew the apartment be er than he did — knew its surfaces, its edges, the exact number of steps from table to chair to doorway — and she liked to make meals in a kitchen that had become more familiar to her than it could ever be to him. Yet she also asked him to bring back more furniture for the living room and bedroom or rearrange existing furniture. She became bored otherwise. “I want an unexplored country. I want a hint of the unknown,” she said once and Hoegbo on agreed with her.
To an extent. There were things Hoegbo on wished would stay unknown. On the mantel opposite the bed, for example, lay those of his grandmother’s possessions that his relatives in Morrow had sent to him: a pin, a series of portraits of family members, a set of spoons, a poorly copied family history. A le er had accompanied the heirlooms, describing his grandmother’s last days. The package had been waiting for him on the doorstep of the apartment one evening a month ago. His grandmother had died six weeks before that. He had not gone to the funeral. He had not even brought himself to tell Rebecca about the death. All she knew of it was the crinkling of the envelope as he smoothed out the le er to read it. She might even have picked up the pin or the spoons and wondered why he had brought them home. Telling her would mean explaining why he hadn’t gone to the funeral and then he would have to talk about the bad blood between him and his brother Richard.
The smell of bacon and eggs spurred him to throw back the covers, get up, put on a bathrobe, and stumble bleary-eyed through the living room to the kitchen. A dead sort of almost-sunlight — pale and green and lukewarm — suffused the kitchen window through the purple mold and thin veins of green. A watermark of the city appeared through the glass: gray spires, forlorn flags, the indistinct shapes of other anonymous apartment buildings.
Rebecca stood in the kitchen, spatula in hand, framed by the dour light. Her black hair was brightly dark. Her dress, a green-and-blue sweep of fabric, fit her loosely. She was intent on the skillet in front of her, gaze unblinking, mouth pursed.
As he came up behind Rebecca and wrapped his arms around her, a sense of guilt made him frown. He had come so close last night, almost as close as the boy, the woman. Was that as close as he could get without…? The question had haunted him throughout his quest. A sudden deep swell of emotion overcame him and he found that his eyes were wet. What if, what if?
Rebecca snuggled into his embrace and turned toward him. Her eyes looked almost normal during the day. Flecks of phosphorescence shot lazily across the pupils.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked. “You came home so late.”
“I slept. I’m sorry I was late. It was a difficult job this time.”
“Profitable?” Her elbow nudged him as she turned the eggs over with the spatula.
“Not very.”
“Really? Why not?”
He stiffened. Would Rebecca have realized the mansion had become a deathtrap? Would she have smelled the blood, tasted the fear? He served as her eyes, her contact with the world of images, but would he truly deprive her by not describing its horrors to her in every detail?
“Well… ” he began. He shut his eyes. The sick gaze of the solicitor flickering over the scene of his own death washed over him. Even as he held Rebecca, he could feel a distance opening up between them.
“You don’t need to shut your eyes to see,” she said, pulling out of his embrace.
“How did you know?” he said, although he knew.
“I heard you close them.” She smiled with grim satisfaction.
“It was just sad,” he said, si ing down at the kitchen table. “Nothing horrible. Just sad. The wife had lost her husband and had to sell the estate. She had a boy with her who kept holding on to a li le suitcase.”
The remnants of the solicitor floating to the ground, curling up like confe i. The boy’s gaze flu ering between him and the cage.
“I felt sorry for them. They had some nice heirlooms, but most of it was already promised toSla ery. I didn’t get much. They had a nice rug from Morrow, from before the Silence. Nice detail of Morrow cavalry coming to our rescue. I would have liked to have bought it.”
She carefully slid the eggs and bacon onto a plate and brought it to the table.
“Thank you,” he said. She had burned the bacon. The eggs were too dry. He never complained. She needed these li le sleights of hand, these illusions of illumination. It was edible.
“Mrs. Bloodgood took me down to theMorhaimMuseum yesterday,” she said. “Many of their artifacts are on open display. The textures were amazing. And the flower vendor visited, as you may have guessed.”
Rebecca’s father, Paul, was the curator for a small museum inStockton. Paul liked to joke that Hoegbotton was just the temporary caretaker for items that would eventually find their way to him.
Hoegbo on had always thought museums just hoarded that which should be available on the open market. Rebecca had been her father’s assistant until the disease stole her sight. Now Hoegbo on sometimes took her down to the store to help him sort and catalog new acquisitions.
“I noticed the flowers,” he said. “I’m glad the museum was nice.”
For some reason, his hand shook as he ate his eggs. He put his fork down.
“Isn’t it good?” she asked.
“It’s very good,” he said. “I just need water.”
He got up and walked to the sink. The faucet had been put in five weeks ago, a er a two-year wait.
Before, they had go en jugs of water from a well down in the valley. He watched with satisfaction as the faucet splu ered and his glass gradually filled up.
“It’s a nice bird or whatever,” she said from behind him.
“Bird.” A vague fear shot through him. “Bird?” The glass clinked against the edge of the sink as he momentarily lost his grip on it.
“Or lizard. Or whatever it is. What is it?”
He turned, leaned against the sink. “What are you talking about?”
“That cage you brought home with you.”
The vague fear crept up his spine. “There’s nothing in the cage. It’s empty.” Was she joking?
Rebecca laughed: a pleasant, liquid sound. “That’s fu ny, because your empty cage was ra ling earlier.
At first, it scared me. Something was rustling around in there. I couldn’t tell if it was a bird or a lizard or I would have reached through the bars and touched it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“There’s nothing in the cage.”
Her face underwent a subtle change and he knew she thought he doubted her on something at which she was expert: the interpretation of sound. On a calm day, she had told him, she could hear a boy skipping stones down by the docks.
For a moment, he said nothing. He couldn’t stay quiet for long. She couldn’t read his face without touching it, but he suspected she knew the difference between types of silence.
He laughed. “I’m joking. It’s a lizard — but it bites. So you were wise not to touch it.”
Suspicion tightened her features. Then she relaxed and smiled at him. She reached out, felt for his plate with her le hand, and stole a piece of his bacon. “I knew it was a lizard!”
He longed to go into the living room where the cage stood atop the table. But he couldn’t, not just yet.
“It’s quiet in here,” he said so ly, already expecting the reply.
“No it’s not. It’s not quiet at all. It’s loud.”
The le corner of his mouth curled up as he replied by rote: “What do you hear, my love?”
Her smile widened. “Well, first, there’s your voice, my love — a nice, deep baritone. Then there’s Hobson downstairs, playing a phonograph as low as he can to avoid disturbing the Potaks, who are at this moment in an argument about something so petty I will not give you the details, while to the side, just below them”— her eyes narrowed—”I believe the Smythes are also making bacon. Above us, old man Clox is pacing and pacing with his cane, mu ering about money. On his balcony, there’s a sparrow chirping, which makes me realize now that the animal in your cage must be a lizard, because it sounds like something clicking and clucking, not chirping — unless you’ve got a chicken in there?”
“No, no — it’s a lizard.”
“What kind of lizard?”
“It’s a Saphant Click-Spi ing Fire Lizard from the Southern Isles,” he said. “It only ever grows in cages, which it makes itself by chewing up dirt, changing it into metal, and regurgitating it. It can only eat animals that can’t see it.”
She laughed in appreciation and got up and hugged him. Her scent made him forget his fear. “It’s a good story, but I don’t believe you. I do know this, though — you are going to be late to work.”
Once on the ground floor, where he did not think it would make a difference if Rebecca heard, Hoegbo on set down the cage. The awkwardness of carrying it, uneven and swaying, down the spiral staircase had unnerved him. He was sweating under his rain coat. His breath came hard and fast. The musty quality of the lobby, the traces of tiny rust mushrooms that had spread along the floor like mouse tracks, the mo led green-orange mold on the windows in the front door, did not put him at ease.
Someone had le a worn umbrella leaning against the front door. He grabbed it and turned back to stare at the cage. Was this the moment that Ungdom andSla ery’s ill wishes caught up with him? He drove the umbrella tip between the bars. The cover gave a li le, creasing, and then regained its former shape as he withdrew the umbrella. Nothing came leaping out at him. He tried again. No response.
“Is something in there?” he asked the cage. The cage did not reply.
Umbrella held like a sword in front of him, Hoegbo on pulled the cover aside — and leapt back.
The cage was still empty. The perch swung back and forth madly from the violence with which he had pulled aside the cover. The woman had said, “The cage was always open.” The boy had said, “We never had a cage.” The solicitor had never offered an opinion. The swinging perch, the emptiness of the cage, depressed him. He could not say why. He drew the cover back across the cage.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind him and he whirled around, then relaxed. It was just Sarah Willis, their landlady, walking down from her second floor apartment.
“Good morning, Mrs. Willis,” he said, leaning on the umbrella.
Mrs. Willis did not bother to respond until she was standing in front of him, staring up at him through her thick glasses. A flower pa ern hat covered her balding head. A matching flower dress, faded, covered her ancient body, even her presumably shoed feet.
“No pets allowed,” she said.
“Pets?” Hoegbo on was momentarily bewildered. “What pets?”
Mrs. Willis nodded at the cage. “What’s in there?”
“Oh, that. It’s not a pet.”
“No animals allowed, pets or meat.” Mrs. Willis cackled and coughed at her own joke.
“It’s not… “ He realized it was useless. “I’m taking it out now. It was just there for the morning.”
Mrs. Willis grunted and pushed past him.
At the door, just as she walked out into the renewed pa er of rain, apparently counting on her hat to protect her, she offered Hoegbo on the following advice: “Miss Constance? On the third floor? She’ll have your head if you don’t put back her umbrella.”
Located on Albumuth Boulevard, half-way between the docks and the residential sections that descended into a valley ever in danger of flooding, Hoegbo on’s store— ”Robert Hoegbo on & Sons: Quality Importers of Fine New & Used Items From Home & Abroad”—took up the first floor of a solid two-story wooden building owned by a monk in the Religious Quarter. The sign exhibited optimism; there were no sons. Not yet. The time was not right, the situation too uncertain, no matter what Rebecca might say. Someday his shop might serve as the headquarters for a merchant empire, but that wouldn’t happen for several years. Always in the back of his mind, spurring him on: his brother Richard’s threat to swoop down with the rest of the Hoegbo on clan to save the family name should he fail.
The display window, protected from the rain by an awning, held a ba ered mauve couch, an opulent, gold-leaf-covered chair (nicked by Hoegbo on, along with several other treasures, during the panicked withdrawal of the Kalif’s troops), a phonograph, a large red vase, an undistinguished-looking saddle, and Alan Bristlewing, his assistant.
Bristlewing knelt inside the display, carefully placing records in the stand beside the phonograph. He had already wiped the window clean of fungi that had accumulated the night before. The detritus of the cleaning lay on the sidewalk in curled up piles of red, green, and blue. A sour smell emanated from these remnants, but the rain would wash it all away in an hour or two.
When Bristlewing saw Hoegbo on, he waved and inched his wiry frame out of the window. A moment later, shielding his head from the rain with a newspaper, he was opening the huge lock in the iron grille of the door, his mouth set in the familiar laconic grin that itself displayed some antiques, courtesy of a sidewalk dentist. A few bu on-shaped mushrooms, a fiery red, tumbled out of the lock as the key withdrew, rolling to a stop on the wet sidewalk.
Bristlewing was a scruffy, short, animated man who smelled of cigar smoke and o en disappeared for days on end. Stories of debaucheries with prostitutes and week-long fishing trips down the River Moth buzzed around Bristlewing without se ling on him. Hoegbo on could not afford to hire more dependable help.
“Morning,” Bristlewing said.
“Good morning,” Hoegbo on replied. “Any customers last night?”
“None with any money… “ Bristlewing’s grin vanished as he saw the cage. “Oh. I see you went to another one.”
Hoegbo on set the cage down in front of Bristlewing and took the ring of keys from him at the same time. “Just put it in the office. Are the inventory books up-to-date?” Hoegbo on’s hand still stung from where the imprint of the handle had branded itself on his skin.
“Course they’re current,” Bristlewing said, turning stiffly away as he picked up his new burden.
By design, the way to Hoegbo on’s office at the back of the store was blocked by a maze of items, from which rose a collective must-metal-ro ed-dusty smell that to him formed the most delicate of perfumes.
This smell of antiquity validated his selections as surely as any papers of authenticity. That customers tripped and frequently lost their bearings as they navigated the arbitrary footpaths ma ered li le to Hoegbo on. The received family wisdom said that thus hemmed in the customer had no choice but to buy something from the stacks of chairs, umbrellas, watches, pens, fishing rods, clothes, enameled boxes, deer racks, plaster casts of lizards, elegant mirrors of glass and copper, reading glasses, Truffidian religious icons, boards for playing dice made of oliphaunt ivory, porcelain water jugs, globes of the world, model ships, old medals, sword canes, musical clocks, and other ephemera from past lives or distant places. Hoegbo on loved knowing that a customer might, in seeking out a perfectly ordinary set of dinner plates, come face-to-face with the flared nostrils and questing tongue of a Skamoo erotic mask.
An overwhelming sense of the secret history of these objects could sometimes send him into a trance-like state. Thankfully, Rebecca understood this feeling, having been exposed to it from an early age.
Emerging from this morass of riches, Hoegbo on’s office lay open to the rest of the store like an oasis of sparseness. Five steps led down to its sunken carpeting — crimson with gold threads, bought from the old Threnody Larkspur Theater before it burned to the ground — and a simple rosewood desk whose only flourishes were legs carved into the shape of writhing squid. A matching chair, two work tables against the far wall, and a couch for visitors rounded out the furniture. To the le of the office space stood two doors. The first led to a private bathroom, recently installed, much to Bristlewing’s delight.
The desk lay beneath an organized clu er of books of inventory, a blo er, a selection of fountain pens, stationery with the H&S logo emblazoned upon it, folders full of invoices, a metal message capsule with a curled up piece of paper inside, a slice of orange mushroom in a small paper bag, a shell he had found while on vacation in the Southern Isles when he was six, and the new Frankwrithe & Lewden edition of The Mystery of Cinsorium by Blake Clockmoor. Daguerreotypes of Rebecca, his brother Stephen (lost to the family now, having signed up for the Kalif’s cavalry on a monstrous but historically common whim) and his mother Gertrude standing on the lawn of someone else’s mansion in Morrow added a personal touch.
Bristlewing had already made himself scarce— Hoegbo on could hear him pulling some artifact out from behind a row of old bookcases stacked high with cracked flowerpots — and the cage stood on the sideboard of his desk as if it had always been there.
Hoegbo on hung his raincoat on one of the six coat racks lined up like soldiers in the farthest corner of the offi ce. Then he took the past day’s book of inventory and purchases and walked to the door that led to the room next to the bathroom. The door was very old, wormholed, and studded with odd metal symbols that Hoegbo on had taken from an abandoned Manziist shrine.
Hoegbo on unlocked the door and went inside. The door shut silently behind him and he was alone. The light that cast its yellowing glare upon the room came from an old-fashioned squid oil lamp nailed into the room’s far wall.
Nothing, at first glance, distinguished the room from any other room. It contained a tired-looking dining table around which stood four worn chairs. To one side, plates, cups, bowls, and utensils sat atop a cabinet with a mirror that served as a backboard. The mirror was veined with a purplish fungus that had managed to infiltrate minute fractures in the glass. He had worried that the Cappan’s men might confiscate the mirror on one of their weekly inspections of his store, but they had ignored it, perhaps recognizing the age of the mirror and the way mold had itself begun to grow on the fungus.
The table held three place se ings, the faded napkins unfolded and haphazard. Across the middle of the table lay a parchment of faded words, so old that it looked as if it might disintegrate into dust at the slightest touch. A bo le of port, half-full, stood on the table next to a bare space in front of the fourth chair.
By tradition, recently-established, Hoegbo on sat there for his daily readings from the books of inventory. Bound in red leather, the books were imported from Morrow. The off-white pages were thin as tissue paper to accommodate as many sheets as possible. The two books Hoegbo on had taken with him represented the inventory for the past three months. Sixteen others, as massive and unwieldy, had been wrapped in a blanket and carefully hidden beneath the floorboards in his office. (Two separate notebooks to record unfortunate but necessary dealings with Ungdom andSla ery, suitably yellow and brown, had been tossed into an unlocked drawer of his desk.)
Yesterday had been slow — only five items sold, two of them phonograph records. He frowned when he read Bristlewing’s description of the buyers as “Short lady with walking stick. Did not give a name.” and
“Man looked sick. Took forever to make up his mind. Bought one record a er all that time.” Bristlewing did not respect the system. By contrast, a typical Hoegbo on-penned buyer entry read like an investigative report: “Miss Glissandra Beckle, 4232 East Munrale Mews, late 40s. Gray-silver hair.
Startling blue eyes. Wore an expensive green dress but cheap black shoes, scuffed. She insisted on calling me ‘Mr. Hoegbo on.’ She examined a very expensive Occidental vase and commented favorably on a bone hairpin, a pearl snu ox, and a watch once worn by a prominent Truffidian priest. However, she only bought the hairpin.”
If Bristlewing disliked the detail required by Hoegbo on for the ledgers, he disliked the room itself even more. A er carefully cataloguing its contents upon their arrival three years before, Hoegbo on had asked Bristlewing a question.
“Do you know what this is?”
“Old musty room. No air.”
“No. It’s not an old musty room with no air.”
“Fooled me,” Bristlewing had said and, scowling, le him there.
III
But Bristlewing was wrong. Bristlewing did not understand the first thing about the room. How could he?
And how could Hoegbo on explain that the room was perhaps the most important room in the world, that he o en found himself inside it even while walking around the city, at home reading to his wife, or buying fruit and eggs from the farmers’ market?
The history of the room went back to the Silence itself. His great-great-grandfather, Samuel Hoegbo on, had been the first Hoegbo on to move to Ambergris, much against the wishes of the rest of his extended family, including his twenty-year-old son, John, who stayed in Morrow.
For a man who had uprooted his wife and daughter from all that was familiar to take up residence in an unknown, sometimes cruel, city, Samuel Hoegbo on became remarkably successful, establishing three stores down by the docks. It seemed only a ma er of time before more of the Hoegbo on clan moved down to Ambergris.
However, this was not to be. One day, Samuel Hoegbo on, his wife, and his daughter disappeared, just three of the thousands of souls who vanished from Ambergris during the episode known as the Silence—
leaving behind empty buildings, empty courtyards, empty houses, and the assumption among those who grieved that the gray caps had caused the tragedy. Hoegbo on remembered one line in particular from John’s diary: “I cannot believe my father has really disappeared. It is possible he could have come to harm, but to simply disappear? Along with my mother and sister? I keep thinking that they will return one day and explain what happened to me. It is too difficult to live with, otherwise.”
Si ing in his mother’s bedroom with the diary open before him, the young Robert Hoegbo on had felt a chill across the back of his neck. What had happened to Samuel Hoegbo on? He spent many summer a ernoons in the a ic, surrounded by antiquities, speculating on the subject. He combed through old le ers Samuel had sent home before his disappearance. He visited the family archive. He wrote to relatives in other cities. His mother disapproved of such inquiries; his grandmother just smiled and said sadly, “I’ve o en wondered myself.” He could not talk to his father about it; that cold and distant figure was rarely home.
His sister also found the mystery intriguing. They would act out scenarios with the house as the backdrop. They would ask the maids questions to fill gaps in their knowledge and thus uncover the meaning of words like “gray cap” and “Cappan.” His grandmother had even given them an old sketch that showed the apartment’s living room — Samuel Hoegbo on surrounded by smiling relatives on a visit.
But for his sister it was just relief of a temporary boredom and he was soon so busy learning the family business that the mystery faded from his thoughts.
When he reached the age of majority, he decided to leave Morrow and travel to Ambergris. No Hoegbo on had set foot in Ambergris for 90 years and it was precisely for this reason that he chose the city, or so he told himself. In Morrow, under the predatory eye of Richard, he had felt as if none of his plans would ever be successful. In Ambergris, he had started out poor but independent, operating a sidewalk stall that sold fruit and broadsheets. At odd times — at an auction, looking at jewelry that reminded him of something his mother might wear; sneaking around Ungdom’s store examining all that merchandise, so much richer than what he could acquire at the time — thoughts of the Silence wormed their way into his head.
The day a er he signed the lease on his own store, Hoegbo on visited Samuel’s apartment. He had the address from some of the man’s le ers. The building lay in a warren of derelict structures that rose from the side of the valley to the east of the Merchant Quarter. It took Hoegbo on an hour to find it, the carriage ride followed by progress on foot. He knew he was close when he had to climb over a wooden fence with a sign on it that read “Off Limits By Order of the Cappan.” The sky was overcast, the sunlight weak yet bright, and he walked through the tenements feeling ethereal, dislocated. Here and there, he found walls where bones had been mixed with the mortar and he knew by these signs that such places had been turned into graveyards.
When he finally stood in front of the apartment— on the ground level of a three-story building — he wondered if he should turn around and go home. The exterior was boarded up, fire-scorched and splotched with brown-yellow fungi. Weeds had drowned the grass and other signs of a lawn. A smell like dull vinegar permeated the air. The facing rows of buildings formed a corridor of light, at the end of which a stray dog sniffed at the ground, picking up a scent. He could see its ribs even from so far away.
Somewhere, a child began to cry, the sound thin, a enuated, automatic. The sound was so unexpected, almost horrifying, that he thought it must not be a baby at all, but something mimicking a baby, hoping to lure him closer.
A er a few more moments, he reached a decision and took a crowbar from his pack. Half an hour later, he had unpried the boards and the door stood revealed, a pale “X” running across the dark wood. He realized he was breathing in shallow gasps, anticipation laced with fear. No one could help him if he opened the door and needed help, but he still wanted whatever was inside the apartment. It could be anything, even the end of his life, and yet the adrenalin rushed through him.
Hoegbo on pulled the door open and stepped inside, crowbar held like a weapon.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air was stale. Windows to the right and le of the hallway, although boarded up, let in enough light to make patches of dust on the floor shine like colonies of tiny, subdued fireflies. The hallway was oddly ordinary, nothing out of place. In the even more dimly-lit living room, Hoegbo on could make out that some vagrant had long ago set up digs and abandoned them. A sofa had been overturned and a blanket used as a roof for a makeshi tent, broadsheets strewn across the floor for a bed. Dog droppings were more recent, as were the bones of small animals piled in a corner. A rabbit carcass, withered but caked with dried blood, might have been as fresh as the week before. The wallpaper had collapsed into a mumbling senility of fragments and strips. Paintings that had hung on the wall lay in tumbled flight against the floor, their hooks having long since given out. A faint, bi er smell rose from the room — a sourness that revealed hidden negotiations between wood and fungi, the natural results of decay. Hoegbo on relaxed. The gray caps had not been in the apartment for a long time. He let the crowbar dangle in his hand.
Hoegbo on entered the dining room. Bri le fragments of newsprint lay sca ered across the dining room table, held in place by a bo le of port with glass beside it. Colonized by cobwebs, by dust, by mo led fragments of wood that had dri ed down from the ceiling, the table also held three plates and place se ings. The stale air had preserved the contents of the plates in a mummified state. Three plates. Three pieces of ossified chicken, accompanied by a green smear of some vegetable long since dried out.
Samuel Hoegbo on. His wife Sarah. His daughter Jane. All three chairs, worm-eaten and rickety, were pulled out slightly from the table. A fourth chair lay off to the side, smashed into fragments by time or violence.
Hoegbo on stared at the chairs for a long time. Had they been moved at all in the last hundred years?
Had freak winds blowing through the gaps in the boarded up windows caused them to move? How could anyone know? And yet, their current positioning teased his imagination. It did not look as if Samuel Hoegbo on’s family had go en up in alarm — unfolded napkins lay on the seats of two of the chairs. The third — that of the person who would have been reading the newspaper — had not been used, nor had the silverware for that se ing. The silverware of the other two was positioned peculiarly. On the right side, the fork lay at an angle near the plate, as if thrown there. Something dark and withered had been skewered by the fork’s tines. Did it match an irregularity in the dry flesh of the chicken upon the matching plate?
The knife was missing entirely. On the le side of the table, the fork was still stuck into its piece of chicken, the knife sawing into the flesh beside it.
It appeared to Hoegbo on as if the family had been eating and simply… disappeared… in mid-meal.
A prickly, cold sensation spread across Hoegbo on’s skin. The fork. The knife. The chairs. The broadsheet. The meals uneaten, half-eaten. The bo le of port. The mystery gnawed at him even as it became ever more impenetrable. Nothing in the scenarios his sister and he had drawn up in their youth could account for it.
Hoegbo on took out his pocketknife and leaned over the table. He carefully pulled aside one leaf of the broadsheet to reveal the date: the very day of the Silence. The date transfixed him. He pulled out the chair where surely Samuel Hoegbo on must have sat, reading his papers, and slowly slid into it. Looked down the table to where his daughter and wife would have been si ing. Continued to read the paper with its articles on the turmoil at the docks, preparing for the windfall of squid meat due with the return of the fishing fleet; a brief message on blasphemy from the Truffidian Antechamber; the crossword puzzle. A sudden shi, a dislocation, a puzzled look from his wife, and he had stared up from his paper in that last moment to see… what? To see the gray caps or a vision much worse? Had Samuel Hoegbo on known surprise? Terror? Wonder? Or was he taken away so swi ly that he, his daughter, and his wife, had no time for any reaction at all.
Hoegbo on stared across the table again, focused on the bo le of port. The glass was half-full. He leaned forward, examined the glass. The liquid inside had dried into sludge over time. A faint imprint of tiny lips could be seen on the edge of the glass. The cork was tightly wedged into the mouth of the bo le. A further mystery. Had the port been poured long a er the Silence?
Beyond the bo le, the fork with the skewered meat came into focus. It did not, from this angle, look as if it came from the piece of chicken on the plate.
He pulled back, as much from a thought that had suddenly occurred to him as from the fork itself. A dim glint from the floor beside the chair caught his eye. Samuel Hoegbo on’s glasses. Twisted into a shape that resembled a circle a ached to a line and two “u” shapes on either end. As he stared at the glasses, Hoegbo on felt the questions multiply, until he was not just si ing in Samuel Hoegbo on’s chair, but in the chairs of thousands of souls, looking out into darkness, trying to see what they had seen, to know what they came to know.
The baby was still screaming as Hoegbo on stumbled outside, gasping. He ran over bits of brick and rubble. He ran through the long weeds. He ran past the buildings with mortar made from bones. He scrambled over the fence that said he should not have been there. He did not stop ru ning until he had reached the familiar cobblestones ofAlbumuth Boulevard ’s farthest extreme. When he did stop, gasping for breath, the pressure in his temples remained, the stray thought lodged in his head like a disease. What had Samuel Hoegbo on seen? And was it necessary to disappear to have seen it?
That was how it had started — following a cold, one hundred-year-old trail. At first, he convinced himself that he was just pursuing a good business opportunity: buying up the contents of boarded up homes, fixing what was in disrepair, and reselling it from his store. He had begun with Samuel Hoegbo on’s apartment, hiring workmen to take the contents of the dining room and transplant it to the room next to his offi ce. They had arranged it exactly as it had been when he first entered it. He would sit in the room for hours, scrutinizing each element — the bo le of port, the plates, the silverware, the napkins haphazard on the chairs — but no further insight came to him. A er a few months, he dusted it all and repaired the table, the chairs, restoring everything but the broadsheet to the way it must have been the day of the Silence. In his darker moments, he felt as if he might be ushering in a new Silence with his actions, but still he came no closer to an answer.
Soon even the abandoned rooms of the Silence lost their hold on Hoegbo on. He would go in with the workmen and find old, dimly-lit spaces from which whatever had briefly imbued them with a ghastly intensity had long since departed. He stopped acquiring such properties, although in a sense, it was too late. Ungdom,Sla ery, and their ilk had already begun to slander him, spreading rumors about his intent and his sanity. They made life difficult for him, but by ignoring their barbs, he had survived it.
Hoegbo on did not give up. Whenever he could, he bought items that had some connection to the gray caps, hoping to find the answers necessary to quell his curiosity. He read books. He spoke to those who remembered, vaguely, the tales their elders had told them about the Silence. And then, finally, the breakthrough: a series of atrocities at one mansion a er the other, bringing him closer than ever before.
Hoegbo on finished reading the ledger, took a last sip of the port he had poured for himself, and walked out of the room in time to hear the bell that announced the arrival of a customer. He put the books back in their place and was about to lock the door to Samuel Hoegbo on’s dining room when it occurred to him that the cage might be more secure inside the room. He picked it up — the handle seemed hot to the touch — walked back into the room, and placed the cage on the far end of the table. Then he locked the door, put the key in his desk, and went to a end to the needs of his customer.
IV
That night, he made love to Rebecca. Her scar gleamed by the light from her eyes, which, at the height of her rapture, blazed so brightly that the bedroom seemed transported from night to day. As he came inside of her, he felt a part of her scar enter him. It registered as an ecstatic shudder that penetrated his muscles, his bones, his heart. She called out his name and ran her hands down his back, across his face, her eyes sparking with pleasure. At such moments, when the strangeness of her seeped through into him, he would suffer a sudden panic, as if he was losing himself, as if he no longer knew his own name. He would sit up, as now, all the muscles in his back rigid.
She knew him well enough not to ask what was wrong, but, sleep beso ed, the light from her eyes dimming to a satisfied glow, said, simply, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said. “Your eyes are full of fireflies.”
She laughed, but he meant it: entire cities, entire worlds, pulsed inside those eyes, hinting at an existence beyond the mundane.
Something in her gaze reminded him suddenly of the woman with the missing hands and he looked away, toward the window that, though closed, let in the persistent sound of rain. Beside the window, his grandmother’s possessions still lay in shadows on the mantel.
The next day, as he sat in Samuel Hoegbo on’ s room writing out invoices for the past week’s exports—
Saphant carnival masks, rare eelwood furniture from Nicea, necklaces made by yet another indigenous tribe discovered at the heart of the great southern rainforests, all destined for Morrow — he noticed something odd. He drew his breath in sharply. He pushed his chair back and stood up.
There, growing at a right angle from the green cloth that covered the cage, was a fragile, milk-white fruiting body on a long stem, the gills tinged red. It was identical to the mushrooms that had appeared in Daffed’s mansion. He cast about for a weapon, his gaze fixed on the cage. There was nothing but the bo le of port. Beyond the cage, the fungus that had infiltrated the cracks of the mirror appeared to have darkened and thickened. Irrationally, he decided he had to remove the cage from the room. The room had caused the fruiting body. Picking up a napkin, he wound it around the handle of the cage and carried it out of the room, to his desk.
He stared across the store, trying to locate Bristlewing. His assistant stood in a far corner helping an elderly gentleman decide on a chair. Hoegbo on could just see the back of Bristlewing’s head, nodding at something the potential customer had said, both of them obscured by a column of school desks.
Slowly, as if the mushroom was watching him, Hoegbo on slid his hand over to the top drawer of his desk, pulled it open and took out a silver le er opener. Holding it in front of him, he approached the cage.
Images of the woman and her son flickered in his mind. He couldn’t keep his hand still. He hesitated, wavered. A vision of the mushroom multiplying into two, three, four came to him. Hoegbo on leaned over his desk, chopped the mushroom off the side of the cage. It fell onto his desk, leaving behind only a small, circular white spot on the green cover, as innocent as a bird dropping.
Hoegbo on pulled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and squashed the mushroom in its folds, careful not to touch any part of it. Then he stuffed the handkerchief into the wastebasket at his side. A moment’s hesitation. He fished it out. Decided against it and placed the handkerchief back into the wastebasket. Fished it out again.
Hoegbo on realized that both Bristlewing and his customer were now standing a few feet away, staring at him. He froze, then smiled.
“My dear Bristlewing,” he said. “What can I help you with?”
Bristlewing gave him a disgusted look. “Mr. Sporlender here was interested in a writing desk, for his son. We’ve a good, solid chair but nothing appropriate in a desk. Anything in storage?”
Hoegbo on smiled, extremely aware of the dead mushroom in his hand. The irritation caused by the handle of the cage flared up, pulsing across his palm. “Yes, actually, Mr. Sporlender, if you would come back tomorrow, I believe we might have something to show you… “ Or not. Just so long as he le the shop — now.
Hoegbo on nudged Bristlewing out of the way and guided the man toward the door, through the crowded stacks of artifacts — babbling about the rain, about the importance of a writing desk, about anything at all, while Bristlewing’s disgusted stare burned into the back of his skull. Hoegbo on had never been more impatient to reach the rain-scoured street. When it came, it was like a wave — of light, of fresh air. It hit him with such force that he gasped, drawing a sharp look from Mr. Sporlender.
As they stood there, on the cusp of the street, the iron door at Hoegbo on’s back, the man stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Really, Mr. Hoegbo on— should I come back tomorrow? Would you truly advise that?”
Hoegbo on stared down at his hand, which was about to rebel and throw the handkerchief and mushroom as far away as possible. Some of the early a ernoon passersby already stared curiously at the two of them.
“I suppose you shouldn’t, actually. We don’t have a desk in storage or anywhere else… I have a condition of sudden claustrophobia. It comes and goes. I cannot control it.”
The man sneered. “I saw what you put in the handkerchief. I know what it is. Will I tell? Why bother—
you’ll be dead soon enough.” The man stalked off.
Hoegbo on immediately began to fast-walk in the opposite direction, past sidewalk vendors, a thin stream of pedestrians, and an even thinner stream of carts and carriages, which the rain rendered in smudges and humid smells. Only a er three or four blocks, soaked to the skin, did he feel comfortable tossing the handkerchief and its contents into a public trashcan. He already had an image in his head of the Cappan’s men searching his store for traces of fungi.
A man was throwing up into the gu er. A woman was yelling at her husband. The sky was a uniform gray. The rain was unending, as common as the very air. He couldn’t even feel it anymore. Everywhere, in the cracks of the sidewalk, in the minute spaces between bricks in shop fronts, new fungi was growing.
He wondered if anything he did ma ered.
Back at the store, Bristlewing was grumpily moving some boxes around. He spared Hoegbo on only a quick glance — watchful, wary. Hoegbo on brushed by him and headed for the bathroom, where he scrubbed his hands red before coming out again to examine the cage. It looked just as he had le it. The green cover was unblemished but for the white spot. There had been no proliferation of mushrooms in his absence. This was good. This meant he had done the right thing. (Why, then, was it so hard to draw breath? Why so difficult to stop shaking?)
He sat down behind the desk, staring at the cage. The inside of his mouth felt dry and thick. Nothing happened without a reason. The mushroom had not appeared by coincidence. This he could not believe.
How could he?
Almost against his will, he reached over to the cage and pulled the cover aside, the green giving way to the finely-etched metal bars, the shadows of the bars le ing the light slide around them so that he saw the perch, gently swinging, and, below it, a pale white hand. Slender and delicate. The end a mass of dried blood. A vision overtook him: that he was Samuel Hoegbo on, staring across the dining room table at the cage, which was the last thing he ever saw… The hand, he had no doubt, was from Daffed’s wife.
What would it take to make it go away?
But then his mind registered a much more important detail, one that made him bite down hard on his lower lip to stop from screaming. The cage door was open, slid to the side as neatly as the cover. He sat there, motionless, staring, for several seconds. Throughout the store, he could hear the hands of myriad clocks clicking forward. No mask could help him now. The hand. The open cage. The fey brightness of the bars. A rippling at the edges of his vision.
Somewhere, Hoegbo on found the nerve. He reached out and slid the door back into position with both hands, worked the latch shut — just as he felt a sudden weight on the other side, rushing up to meet him. It brushed against his fingers and chilled them. He drew back with a gasp. The door ra led once, twice, fell still. The perch began to swing violently back and forth as if something had pushed up against it. Then it too fell still. Suddenly.
He could not breathe. He could not call out for help. His heart was beating so fast, he thought it might burst. This was not how he had imagined it. This was not how he had imagined it.
Something invisible picked up the hand and forced it through the bars. The hand fell onto his blo er, rocked once, twice, and was still.
It took five or six tries, his fingers nimble as blocks of wood, but he managed to find the cord to the cover and slide it back into position.
Then he sat there for a long time, staring at the green cover of the cage. Nothing happened. Nothing bad. The sense of weight on the other side of the bars had vanished with the drawing of the veil. The hand that lay on his blo er did not seem real. It looked like alabaster. It looked like wax. It was a candle without a wick. It was a piece of a statue.
An hour could have passed, or a minute, before he found a paper bag, nudged the hand into it using the le er opener, and folded the bag shut.
Bristlewing appeared in his field of vision some time later.
“Bristlewing,” Hoegbo on said. “I’m glad. You’re here.”
“Eh?”
“You see this cage?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to take it to Ungdom.”
“Ungdom?” Bristlewing’s face brightened. He clearly thought this was a joke.
“Yes. To Ungdom. Tell him that I send it with my compliments. That I offer it as a token of renewed friendship.” Somewhere inside, he was laughing at Ungdom’s future discomfort. Somewhere inside, he was screaming for help.
Bristlewing snorted. “Is it wise?”
Hoegbo on stared up at him, as if through a haze of smoke. “No. It isn’t wise. But I would like you to do it anyway.”
Bristlewing waited for a moment, as if there might be something more, but there was nothing more. He walked forward, picked up the cage. As Bristlewing bent over the cage, Hoegbo on thought he saw a patch of green at the base of his assistant’s neck, under his le ear. Was Bristlewing already infected?
Was Bristlewing the threat?
“Another thing. Take the rest of the week off. Once you’ve delivered the cage to Ungdom.” If his assistant was going to dissolve into spores, let him do it elsewhere. Hoegbo on suppressed a giggle of hysteria.
Suspicious, Bristlewing frowned. “And if I want to work?”
“It’s a vacation. A vacation. I’ve never given you one. I’ll pay you for the time.”
“All right,” Bristlewing said. Now the look he gave Hoegbo on was, to Hoegbo on’s eye, very close to a look of pity. “I’ll give the cage to Ungdom and take the week off.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Right. Bye then.”
“Goodbye.”
As Bristlewing negotiated the tiny flotsam-lined pathway, Hoegbo on could not help but notice that his assistant seemed to list to one side, as if the cage had grown unaccountably heavy.
Five minutes a er Bristlewing had le, Hoegbo on closed up the shop for the day. It only took seven tries for him to lock the door behind him.
V
When he arrived at the apartment, Hoegbo on told Rebecca he was home early because he had learned of his grandmother’s death. She seemed to interpret his shakes and shudders, the trembling of his voice, the way he needed to touch her, as consistent with his grief. They ate dinner in silence, her hand in his hand.
“Tell me about it,” she said a er dinner and he catalogued all the symptoms of fear as if they were the symptoms of loss, of grief. Everywhere he turned, the woman from the mansion confronted him, her gaze now angry, now mournful. Her wounds bled copiously down her dress but she did nothing to staunch the flow.
They went to bed early and Rebecca held him until he found a path toward sleep. But sleep held a kaleidoscope of images to torment him. In his dreams, he walked through Samuel Hoegbo on’s apartment until he reached a long, white hallway he had never seen before. At the opposite end of the hallway, he could see the woman and the boy from the mansion, surrounded by great wealth, antiques fit for a god winking at him in their burnished multitudes. He was walking across a carpet of small, severed hands to reach them. This fact revolted him, but he could not stop walking: the promise of what lay ahead was too great. Even when he began to see his head, his arms, his own legs, crudely soldered to the walls using his own blood, he could not stop his progress toward the end of the hallway. The hands were cold and so and pleading.
Despite the dreams, Hoegbo on woke the next morning feeling energetic and calm. The cage was gone.
He had another chance. He did not feel the need to follow in Samuel Hoegbo on’s footsteps. Even the imprint on his hand throbbed less painfully. The rain cla ering down made him happy for obscure, childhood reasons — memories of sneaking out into thunderstorms to play under the dark clouds, of taking to the water on a rare fishing trip with his father while drops sprinkled the dark, languid surface of the River Moth.
At breakfast, he even told Rebecca that perhaps he had been wrong and they should start a family.
Rebecca laughed, hugged him, and told him they should wait to talk about it until a er he had recovered from his grandmother’s death. When she did not ask him about the funeral arrangements, he wondered if she knew he had lied to her. On his way out the door, he held her close and kissed her. Her lips tasted of honeysuckle and rose. Her eyes were, as ever, a mystery, but he did not mind.
Once at work, Bristlewing blissfully absent, Hoegbo on searched the store for any sign of mushrooms.
Donning long gloves and a fresh mask, he spent most of his time in the old dining room, scuffing his knees to examine the underside of the table, cleaning every surface. The fungus embedded in the mirror had lost its appearance of renewed vigor. Nevertheless, he took an old toothbrush and knife and spent half an hour gleefully scraping it away.
Then, divesting himself of mask and gloves, he went through the same routines with his ledgers as in the past, this time reading the entries aloud since Bristlewing was not there to frown at him for doing so.
Fragments of disturbing images flu ered in his mind like caged birds, but he ignored them, bending himself to his routine that he might allow himself no other thoughts.
By noon, the rain had turned to light hail, discouraging many erstwhile customers. Those who did enter the store alighted like crows escaping bad weather, shaking their raincoat wings and unlikely to buy anything.
By one o’clock, he had only made 100 sels. It didn’t ma er. It was almost liberating. He was beginning to think he had escaped great danger, even caught himself wondering if another rich family might experience a gray cap visitation.
At two o’clock, his spirits still high, Hoegbo on received a shock when a grim-faced member of the Cappan’s security forces entered the store. The man was in full protective gear, clothed from head to foot, a gray mask covering his entire face except for his eyes. What could they know? It wasn’t time for an inspection. Had the man looking for a desk talked to them? Hoegbo on scratched at his wounded palm.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
The man stared at him for a moment, then said, “I’m looking for a purse for my mother’s birthday.”
Hoegbo on burst out laughing and had to convince the man it was not directed at him before selling him a purse.
No customers entered the store for half an hour a er the Cappan’s man le. Hoegbo on had worked himself into a fever pitch of calm by the time the messenger arrived around three o’clock: a boy on a bicycle, pinched and drawn, wearing dirty clothes, who knocked at the door and waited for Hoegbo on to arrive before le ing an envelope flu er to the welcome mat outside the door. The boy pulled his bicycle back to the sidewalk and pedaled away, ringing his bell.
Hoegbo on, so ly singing to himself, leaned down to pick up the envelope. He opened it. The le er inside read, in a spidery scrawl:
Thank you, Robert, for your very fine gift, but your bird has flown away home.
I couldn’t keep such a treasure. My regards to your wife. — John Ungdom.
Hoegbo on stared at the note, chuckling at the sarcasm. Read it again, a frown closing his lips. Flown away home. Read it a third time, his stomach filling with stones. My regards to your wife.
He dropped the note, flung on his raincoat, and, not bothering to lock the store behind him, ran out onto the street — into the blinding rain. He headed upAlbumuth Boulevard, through the Bureaucratic Quarter, toward home. He felt as if he were running in place. Every pedestrian hindered him. Every horse and cart blocked his path. As the rain came down harder, it beat a rhythmic message into Hoegbo on’s shoulders.
The raindrops sounded like tapping fingers. Through the haze, the dull shapes of buildings became landmarks to anchor his staggering progress. Passersby stared at him as if he were crazy.
By the time he reached the apartment building lobby, his sides ached and he was drenched in sweat. He had fallen repeatedly on the slick pavement and bloodied his hands. He took the stairs three at a time, ran down the hallway to the apartment shouting “Rebecca!”
The apartment door was ajar. He tried to catch his breath, bending over as he slowly pushed the door open. A line of white mushrooms ran through the hallway, low to the ground, their gills stained red.
Where his hand held the door, fungus touched his fingers. He recoiled, straightened up.
“Rebecca?” he said, staring into the kitchen. No one. The inside of the kitchen window was covered in purple fungi. A cane lay next to the coat rack, a gi from his father. He took it and walked into the apartment, picking his way between the white mushrooms as he pulled the edge of his raincoat up over his mouth. The doorway to the living room was directly to his le. He could hear nothing, as if his head were stuffed with cloth. Slowly, he peered around the doorway.
The living room was aglow with fungi, white and purple, green and yellow. Shelves of fungi ju ed from the walls. Bo le-shaped mushrooms, a deep burgundy, wavering like balloons, were anchored to the floor. Hoegbo on’s palm burned fiercely. Now he was in the dream, not before.
Looking like the exoskeleton shed by some tropical beetle, the cage stood on the coffee table, the cover drawn aside, the door open. Beside the cage lay another alabaster hand. This did not surprise him. It did not even register. For, beyond the table, the doors to the balcony had been thrown wide open. Rebecca stood on the balcony, in the rain, her hair slick and bright, her eyes dim. Strewn around her, as if in tribute, the strange growths that had long ago claimed the balcony: orange strands whipping in the winds, transparent bulbs that stood rigid, mosaic pa erns of gold-green mold imprinted on the balcony’s corroded railing. Beyond: the dark gray shadows of the city, do ed with smudges of light.
Rebecca was looking down at… nothing… her hands held out before her as if in supplication.
“Rebecca!” he shouted. Or thought he shouted. His mouth was tight and dry. He began to walk across the living room, the mushrooms pulling against his shoes, his pants, the air alive with spores. He blinked, sneezed, stopped just short of the balcony. Rebecca had still not looked up. Rain spla ered against his boots.
“Rebecca,” he said, afraid that she would not hear him, that the distance between them was somehow too great. “Come away from there. It isn’t safe.” She was shivering. He could see her shivering.
Rebecca turned to look at him and smiled. “Isn’t safe? You did this yourself, didn’t you? Opened the balcony for me before you le this morning?” She frowned. “But then I was puzzled. You had the cage sent back even though Mrs. Willis said we couldn’t keep pets.”
“I didn’t open the balcony. I didn’t send back the cage.” His boots were tinged green. His shoulders ached.
“Well, someone brought it here — and I opened it. I was bored. The flower vendor was supposed to come and take me to the market, but he didn’t.”
“Rebecca — it isn’t safe. Come away from the balcony.” His words were dull, unconvincing. A lethargy had begun to envelop his body.
“I wish I knew what it was,” she said. “Can you see it? It’s right here — in front of me.”
He started to say no, he couldn’t see it, but then he realized he could see it. He was gasping from the sight of it. He was choking from the sight of it. Blood trickled down his chin where he had bi en into his lip. All the courage he had built up for Rebecca’s sake melted away.
“Come here, Rebecca,” he managed to say.
“Yes. Okay,” she said in a small, broken voice.
Tripping over fungi, she walked into the apartment. He met her at the coffee table, drew her against him, whispered into her ear, “You need to get out of here, Rebecca. I need you to go downstairs. Find Mrs.
Willis. Have her send for the Cappan’s men.” Her hair was wet against his face. He stroked it gently.
“I’m scared,” she whispered back, arms thrown around him. “Come with me.”
“I will, Rebecca. Rebecca, I will. In just a minute. But now, I need you to leave.” He was trembling from mixed horror at the thought that he might never say her name again and relief, because now he knew why he loved her.
Then her weight was gone as she moved past him to the door and, perversely, his burden returned to him.
The thing had not moved from the balcony. It was not truly invisible but camouflaged itself by perfectly matching its background. The bars of a cage. The spaces between the bars. A perch. He could only glimpse it now because it could not mimic the rain that fell upon it fast enough.
Hoegbo on walked out onto the balcony. The rain felt good on his face. His legs were numb so he lowered himself into an old ro ing chair they had never bothered to take off the balcony. While the thing watched, he sat there, staring between the bars of the balcony railing, out into the city. The rain trickled through his hair. He tried not to look at his hands, which were tinged green. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a rasping gurgle. The thought came to him that he must still be back in the mansion with the woman and the boy — that he had never really le — because, honestly, how could you escape such horror? How could anyone escape something like that?
The thing padded up to him on its quiet feet and sang to him. Because it no longer ma ered, Hoegbotton turned to look at it. He choked back a sob. He had not expected this. It was beautiful. Its single eye, so like Rebecca’s eyes, shone with an unearthly light, phosphorescent flashes darting across it. Its mirror skin shimmered with the rain. Its mouth, full of knives, smiled in a way that did not mean the same thing as a human smile. This was as close as he could get, he knew now, staring into that single, beautiful eye.
This was as close. Maybe there was something else, something beyond. Maybe there was a knowledge still more secret than this knowledge, but he would never experience that.
The thing held out its clawed hand and, a er a time, Hoegbo on took it in his own.
IN THE HOURS AFTER DEATH by Nicholas Sporlender
Nicholas Sporlender has contributed more than a dozen fictions to Burning Leaves over the years, including such memorable works as “The Exchange” (since published as a stand-alone chapbook by Hoegbotton & Sons), “The Smoldering Eye,” “A Nail, Driven Deep” and “The Game of Lost and Found.” Recently, Mr. Sporlender severed his long professional relationship with the artist (and art director of this publication) Louis Verden. The editorial board of Burning Leaves would like to take this opportunity to express its wish that the worthy gentleman will reconsider and provide Ambergris with many more years of macabre delights.
I
In the first hour after death, the room is so still that every sound holds a terrible clarity, like the tap of a knife against glass. The soft pad of shoes as someone walks away and closes the door is profoundly solid — each short footstep weighted, distinct. The body lies against the floor, the sightless eyes staring down into the wood as if some answer has been buried in the grain. The back of the head is mottled by the shadows of the trees that sway outside the open window. The trickle of red from the scalp that winds its way down the cheek, to puddle next to the clenched hand, is as harmless now, leached of threat, as if it were colored water. The man’s features have become slack, his mouth parted slightly, his expression surprised. The wrinkles on his forehead form ridges of superfluous worry. His trumpet lies a few feet away… From outside the window, the coolness of the day brings the green-gold scent of lilacs and crawling vines. The rustle of leaves. The deepening of light. A hint of blue through the trees. After a time, a mouse, fur ragged and one eye milky white, sidles across the floor, sits on its haunches in front of the body, and sni fs the air. The mouse circles the man. It explores the hidden pockets of the man’s gray suit, trembles atop the shoes, nibbles at the laces, sticks its nose into a pant cu f. A metallic sound, faint and chaotic, rises through the window. The mouse stands unsteadily on its hind legs and sni fs the air again, then scurries back to its hole underneath the table. The sound intensifies, as of many instruments lurching together in drunken surprise. Perhaps the noise startled the mouse, or perhaps the mouse was frightened by some changed aspect of the man himself. The man’s chin has begun to sprout tendrils of dark green fungi that mimic the texture of hair, curling and twisting across the man’s face while the music comes ever closer. The tendrils move in concert. The clash of sounds has more unity than raw cacophony, yet no coherence. It seems as if several people tuning their instruments have begun to play their own separate, unsynchronized melodies. Somewhere in the welter of pompous horns and trumpets, a violin whines dimly. The tendrils of fungi wander in lazy attempts to colonize the blood. The music rollicks along, by turns melancholy and defiant. The man hears nothing, of course; the blood has begun to crust across his forehead. The smell of the room has become fetid, damp. The shadows have grown darker. The table in the corner — upon which lies a half-eaten sandwich — casts an ominous shade of purple. Eventually, the music reaches a crescendo beneath the window. It has a questioning nature, as if the people playing the instruments are looking at one another, asking each other what to do next. The man’s face moves a little from the vibration. His fungi beard is smiling. In a di ferent light, he might almost look alive, intently staring at the floorboards, into the apartments below. Bells toll dimly from the Religious Quarter, announcing dinner prayers. The afternoon is almost gone. The room feels colder as the light begins to leave it. The music becomes less hesitant. Within minutes, the music is clanking up the stairs, toward the apartment.
The music sounds as if it is running. It is running. The tendrils, in a race with the music, have spread farther, faster, covering all of the man’s face with a dark green mask. As if misinterpreting their success, they do not spread out over the rest of his body but instead build on the mask, until it juts hideously from the face. The door begins to buckle before a blaring of horns, a torrid stitching of violins. Someone puts a key into the lock and turns the doorknob. The door opens. The music enters in all its chaotic glory. The man lies perfectly still on the floor beside the almost dry puddle of blood. A forest of legs and shoes surround him. The music becomes a dirge, haunted by the ghost of some strange fluted instrument. The musicians circle the body, their distress flowing through their music, their long straight shadows playing across the man’s body. But for a tinge of green, the man’s face has regained its form. The fungus has disappeared. Who could have known this would happen? Only the dead man, who had been looking into the grain as if some mystery lay there. The dead man lurches to his feet and picks up his trumpet. Smiles.
Takes his hat from the table and places it on his head, over the blood. Wets his lips. He puts the trumpet to his mouth as all the other instruments become silent. He begins to blow, the tone clear yet discordant, his own music but not in tune. The faces of his friends come into focus, surround him, buzzing with words.
His friends laugh. They hug him, tell him how glad they are it was all a joke; they had heard the most terrible things; please, do not scare them that way again. They did not know whether to play for a funeral or a rumorless resurrection. Unable to decide, they had played for both at once. He laughs, pats the nearest on the back. Play, he says. But he is not part of them. Play, he implores. But he is not one of them. And they play — marching out the door with him, they play. He is no longer one of them. When the door closes, the room is as empty as before, although the stairs echo with music. Over time, the sound fades. It fades until it is not even the memory of a sound, and then not even that. Nothing moves in the room. The man has been returned to himself. This is the first hour of death in the city ofAmbergris. You may not rest for long. You may, in a sense, become yourself again. Worst of all, you may remember every detail but be unable to do anything about it.
II
In the second hour after death, the man finds himself with his musician friends playing a concert in a public park. A crowd has gathered, some standing, others kneeling or sitting on benches. The trumpet is hot and golden in the man’s hands. With each breath he blows into his trumpet, he feels the surge of an unidentifiable emotion and a detail from his past appears in his mind. The man feels as if he were filling up with Life, each breath enhancing him rather than maintaining him. He remembers his name— the round, generous vowels of it — but resists the urge to shout it out. A name is a good foundation on which to build. The members of the audience are cheerful smudges compared to the clear, sharp lines of his friends as they move in time-honored synchronicity with their instruments. Their names, too, pop into his head — each a tiny explosion of pleasure. Soon, he swims in a sea of names: mother, father, brother, daughter, postman, baker, bartender, butcher, shopkeeper… He smiles the radiant smile of a man who has recalled his life and found it good. This is the pinnacle of the second hour, although not all are so lucky. To some, the knowledge of identity seems to be escaping through their pores, each exhaled thought just another casualty of the emptying. The man, however, is not so truthful with himself. He smells the honeysuckle, tastes the pipe smoke from a passerby, hears the tiny bells of an anklet tinkling through a pause in the music and does not wonder why these sensations are dull, muffled. His friends’ faces are so near and sharp. Why should he worry about the rest? The blur of the world shouldn’t be his concern.
The instruments that seem so cruel, all honed edges, the metal reflecting at odd angles to create horrible disfigurements of his face? Why, it is just a trick of the shadows. The quickness of his breath? Why, it is just the aftermath of musical epiphany. The fluttering of his eyelids. The sudden pallor. The smudge of green that he wipes with irritation from his cheek… When the concert ends and the crowds disperse under threat of night, the man is quick to nod and laugh and join in one last ragged musical salute. An invitation down narrow streets to a café for a drink elicits a desperate gratitude — he slaps the backs of his friends, nods furiously, already beginning to lose the names again: pennies fallen through a hole in a shirt pocket. On the way to the café, he notices how strangely the city now speaks to him, in the voices of innuendo and suggestion, all surfaces unknown, all buildings crooked or deformed or worse. The sidewalk vendors are ciphers. The passersby count for less than shadows; he cannot look at them directly, his gaze a repulsing magnet. He clutches his trumpet, knuckles white. He would like to play it, bring the jovial wide vowels of his name once more into focus, but he cannot. The names of his friends fast receding, his laughter becomes by turns forced, nervous, sad, and then brittle. When they reach the café, the man looks around the beer-strewn table at his friends and wonders how he fell in with such amiable strangers. They call him by a name he barely remembers. The sky fills with a darkness that consists of the weight of all the thoughts that have left him. The man wraps his jacket tight. The street lamps are cold yellow eyes peering in through the window. The conversations at the table tighten around the man in layers, each sentence less and less to do with him. Now he cannot look at them. Now they run away to the edge of his vision like a trickle of blood from a wound. The man’s last image of his dead wife leaves him, his daughter’s memory lost in the same moment. Even the dead do not want to die. Stricken, face animated by fear, he stands and announces that he must leave, he must depart, he must go home, although thoughts of the grainy apartment floor leave a dread like ice in his bowels… This, then, is the last defiant act of the second hour: to state a determination to take action, even though you will never take that action. The world has become a mere construct — a hollow reed created that you might breathe.
You may hear echoes of a strange and sibilant music, coursing like an undercurrent through inanimate objects. This music may bring tears to your eyes. It may not. Regardless, you are now entering the third hour of death.
III
In the third hour after death, all other memories having been emptied and extinguished, the repressed memory of lifelessness returns, although the man denies the truth of it. Denies the sting of splinters against his face, the taste of sawdust, the comfort of the cool floorboards. He thinks it is a bad dream and mutters to himself that he will just walk a little longer to clear up the headaches pulsing through his head.
The man still holds his trumpet. Every few steps, he stops to look at it. He is trying to remember what he once used it for. The third hour can last for a very long time. After awhile, staring at his trumpet, an unquenchable sadness rises over him until he is engulfed in a sorrow so deep it must be borne because nothing better lies beyond it. It is the sorrow of lost details; the darkness of it hints at the echoes of memories now gone. Indirectly, the man can sense what grieves him, but the very glittering reflection of its passage is enough to blind him. To him, it feels as if the natural world has made him sad, for he has wandered into a park and the sky far above through the branches seethes with the light of a restless moon. If the man could only see his way to the center of a single memory and hold it in his mind, he might understand what has happened to him. Instead, from the edge of his attention, the absence of mother, father, wife, daughter, leaves only outlines. It is too much to bear. It must be borne… In some cases, recognition may take the form of violent acts — one last convulsion against the inevitable. But not in the man’s case. In him, the sorrow only deepens, for he has begun to suspect the truth. The man wanders through gardens and courtyards, through tree-lined neighborhoods and along city-tamed streams, all touched equally by the blank expanse of night. He is without thought except to avoid thought, without purpose except to avoid purpose. He does not tire — nothing without will can ever tire — and as he walks, he begins to touch what he passes. He runs his hands through the scru fy tops of bushes. He rubs his face against the trunk of a tree. He follows the line of a sidewalk crack with his finger. As the night progresses, a tightness enters his face, a self-aware phosphorescence. When he leans down to float his hand through a fountain pool, his face wavers in the water like a green-tinged second moon. Passersby run away or cross the street at his approach. He has no opinion on this; it does not upset or amuse him. He is rapidly becoming Other: Otherwhere, Otherflesh. His trumpet? Long ago fallen from a distracted grasp…
Eventually, the trailing hand will find something of more than usual interest. For the man, this occurs when he sits down on a wooden bench and the touch of the grain on his palm brings a familiarity welling up through his fingertips. He runs his arms across the wood. He strokes the wood, trying to form a memory from before the sorrow. He lies down on the bench and presses his face against the grain… until he sees his apartment room and the blood pooling in the foreground of his vision and knows that he is dead.
Then the man sits up, his receding sorrow replaced by nothing. Tendrils of fungi rise from their hiding places inside his body. The man waits as they curl across his face, his torso, his arms, his legs. And he sees the night for possibly the first time ever. And he sees them coming out from the holes in the night.
But he does not flinch. He does not run. He no longer even tries to breathe. He no longer tries to be anything other than what he is. For this is the last phase of the third hour of death. After the third hour, you will never be unhappy again. You will never know pain. You will never have to endure the sting of an unkind word. Every muscle, every sinew, every bone, every blood vessel in your body will relax to let in the darkness. When they come for you, as they surely will, you will finally understand, under the cool weavings of the tendrils, what a good thing this can be. You will finally understand that there is no fourth hour after death. And you will marvel that the world could be so still, so silent, so clear.
A Note from Dr. V to Dr. Simpkin
Dr. Simpkin:
You will find my (almost complete) decryption of X’s numbers below. I did not enjoy tackling this assignment. What began as a lark became an unnerving experience. At first, I fixated on two irritating thoughts: (l) that X had double-spaced his story just to waste paper; (2) that he had written it just to waste typewriter ribbon. As I decrypted the first few sentences, I could not help but feel that X, from some distant place, was peering over my shoulder and laughing at me. (Such laughter was depressingly common during his stay with us.)
My mood of irritation changed as I began to realize the discipline X had brought to his endeavors. The sheer persistence required to translate so many words into numbers impressed me. If the story was this difficult to decode-I began, for example, to experience blinding headaches-then how much more difficult had it been to encrypt in the first place? Had his escape involved the daily removal of a single fragment of brick from the wall of his cell, I don’t believe X could have demonstrated greater patience.
As I continued to work, fatigue transformed my banal task into grim revelation. The shadows grew long; the light left the window of my cramped office. X’s phantom laughter faded and the only sound was the dry scritch of my pen against paper. A belief at odds with the rationality of my profession colonized me: that I was creating the events uncovered with each excavated word. This sensation, so unexpected, made me shiver and suck in my breath. It brought my efforts to a shuddering halt. I literally felt that I was bringing into existence an entire future for Ambergris-a future so horrible I would not conjure it up for all the typewriter ribbons in the world. I threw down my pen; then picked it up and bent it until it broke, as if to guard against any possibility of continuing. That said, I could not bring myself to try to decrypt the final paragraph. I felt the ramifications would be too earth-shattering.
When I summoned the nerve to review my decryption effort (which I call “The Man Who Had No Eyes“), I discovered I had “mistranslated“ at least seven words. I got up to retrieve X’s book from the filing cabinet where I had quarantined it, intending to correct my errors, but immediately sat down again, terror paralyzing me. I could not move or speak for several minutes, frozen from the belief that the book itself had changed and was now writing me. During this negative epiphany, the shadows seemed to undulate like wings. The air was close and thick. When I emerged from my trance state, I knew that the results of correcting those seven words would be unthinkable. (Such an episode, had it originated with one of my patients, would have been the stuff of five or six therapy sessions.) As I type this note, I realize it is nonsense to believe words on a page can affect reality. It is just a story.
It is just X’s final goodbye. However, I cannot bring myself to send the book to you along with the other items. Yes, I do need it for my collection, but there are more important reasons to keep it here.
You should visit us. You could stay a few days, assist us in those areas where we lack personnel, maybe bring us some supplies. I do not think the text that next you read will much resemble what you may remember, but this place is the same, if in worse disrepair.
I wonder if there is already a name for my affliction.
Dr. V
P.S. Some of the words I have translated seem to make no sense-in my haste I have made errors-but the last paragraph has escaped my efforts completely, for reasons I will touch on later.
THE MAN WHO HAD NO EYES
There came a day when the gray caps changed the course of the River Moth and flooded the city ofAmbergris. Abandoning their PLOTTED lair, they came out into the light, put the rulers of the city to flight, and took over the islands that were now Cinsorium once again.
At first, people found that life did not change much under the new rulers. It certainly did not change for the most famous writer in Ambergris. Born in the city, he used the city as his palette, bending every word in the world to his will. He could create paragraphs so essential that to be without their smooth, wise forms was to be without a soul. If his mood was grim, he would create suicide paragraphs: words from the almost dead to the definitely dead. He could, I tell you, describe an object in such a way that forever after his description replaced the original.
Perhaps if he had been less talented, he would have been less APED. For praise rose all about him as naturally as the fog that came off the River Moth and he came to think of himself as unbound by any laws other than those of fiction.
Thus, he felt a growing need to break the labyrinthine rules of the gray caps. He laughed at daybreak in front of the watery ruins of Truffidian Cathedral. After dusk, he distributed his stories on public streets for free. He read his work from a boat above the flooded and now ANONYMITY statue of Voss Bender.
He wrote paragraphs in honor of the Lady in Blue (who, from the underground passages of the gray caps, confronted them with the evidence of their own cruelty).
After the fifth such offense, the gray caps cut out his tongue and threw it into the now BONFIRES River Moth, for the fish had grown fond of such flesh. They plucked out his eyes and used them on their barges. They cut off his hands and used them as candles at their administrative offices. They mutilated his torso with their symbol, in fungus green. Then they sent him to the one-room stilt house of his birth, by the water, so that he could, in GORGEOUS, contemplate his fate where once he had watched swallows fly, snatching insects.
For a long time, no one visited the writer out of fear. His own wife left him because she was not BLINDING enough. Every week, a Truffidian priest would come close enough to leave food and water on his doorstep.
The writer sat in a chair facing the wall as the stories built up inside of him until he was so full that he thought he would die from the SNARL of them in his lungs. But he had no tongue with which to speak.
He had no eyes with which to see the world. He had no hands with which to write down his stories. He lived inside a box inside a box. What now could he do?
For many weeks, he thought about killing himself and might have done so except that one day he bumped against the table on which he set the supplies and a pen rolled off the edge. It fell against his left foot. The touch was cold and sharp. The sensation spread up his leg and up into his torso until, inside the boxes inside his head, something awoke.
The writer spent the next three weeks feeling his way across every inch of his room much as you, dear reader, are feeling your way through this story. He picked up anything that lay against the walls until the table, the chair, the bed, and a few books all stood in the middle of the room. Then, holding the pen between his toes, he began to write on the wall.
It took many months to learn how to write with his feet. It was weeks before the visiting priest could read a single letter and much longer before anything more complex appeared on the walls. Words formed without form: “crashing am worry depends on the continuing earth exists can Zamilon.“ Each letter became an act of will-a playing out in his mind of what it should look like and then making his toes, his foot, his leg, apply the correct pressure to the wall so that the pen did not break and the shape took form correctly.
Over time, the writer covered the walls of his room with the visions that blossomed in the dark gardens of his mind. Words formed sentences, sentences paragraphs, paragraphs stories. With each word, a great burden lifted itself from the writer and he began to feel like himself again. Later, with sheets of paper and more pens begged from the priest, more words spilled out in a jumble, his pages a flood greater than that brought by the gray caps.
I saw one of the stories the writer wrote on the wall-in red ink, surrounded by thousands of other, disconnected words. It read:
There once was a cage in an empty room. A soft, soft sound like weeping came from the cage. After a time, a man entered the room. He was gray and sad. He held a small animal by the ears. It was battling to escape. The cage grew silent. The man approached the cage. He pulled the cage door open, threw in the animal, and slammed the door shut. As the man watched, the animal screamed, its paws sliding off the bars. A wound appeared in its left leg. A wound appeared in its left shoulder. Slowly, the animal was eaten alive until it was just a pile of bone and blood. The weeping became relentless. Everything the man placed within the cage died. Every time, the man felt a corresponding thrill of delight. But eventually the thrill died too. It became ordinary, something he had to do. Would it ever stop? He could not decide.
One day, he grew so bored that he opened the cage to let the nothing out. He expected it would kill him, but it did not. It let him live. It followed him everywhere. Over time, it killed everything he held dear, weeping the entire time. When nothing was left to care about, it abandoned the man. The man sat in his room with the empty cage and made the weeping sound the cage had once made.
Before the gray caps had mutilated him, the writer had published dreams and long, absurd stories. He had published fake histories and travel guides. I cannot say I care much for what he writes now, although he became famous for it. Within a short time, readers began to come from far away to buy a page from him. The writer would be able to continue to do what he had always done. He just had no tongue. He just had no eyes. He just had no hands. Was that really so bad?
At least, this is the story the man wrote for me when, as a traveler to Ambergris-fresh from an encounter with the giant squid that had scuttled my boat-I visited him in his room. Later, others told me that he had been born in his current state and that all of his ideas came from old books by obscure authors, read to him by a friend.
When I first saw him, he sat by a window, his head thrown back as if to receive the light. (I now know he was listening. Intently.) The writer was a wiry man whose face, with its wrinkles and mouth of perpetual grimace, hinted at tortures beyond imagining. His arms did indeed end in nothing. His legs, curled beneath him, were tight with muscle and ended in muscular feet. His toes seemed as supple as my fingers. When I came in, he smiled at me. He uncurled his feet, stood, and held his leg up in a ridiculous position. I thought he wanted to “shake hands,“ but no: he held a piece of paper between his toes.
He nudged it toward me. I took it. What did it say? I could not read it. It was just a series of numbers.
What do numbers mean to a man like me? Nothing.
LEARNING TO LEAVE THE FLESH
I
Browsing through the Borges Bookstore, on a mission for my girlfriend Emily, I am suddenly confronted by a dwarf woman. The light from the front window strikes me sideways with the heat of late afternoon and, when she upturns her palm, the light illuminates all the infinite worlds enclosed in the wrinkles: pale road lines, rivers that pass through valleys, hillocks of skin and flesh. A matrix of destinies and destinations.
Before I can react, the dwarf woman takes my hand in hers and stabs me with a thorn, sending it deep into my palm. I grunt in pain, as if a physician had just taken a blood sample. I look down into her large, dark eyes and I see such calm there that the pain winks out, only returning when she shuffles off, hunchback and all, out of the bookstore.
The walls rush away from me, the shelves so distant that I cannot even brace myself against them. I bring my hand up into the light. The thorn has worked itself beneath the surface and might even burrow deeper, if I let it. I examine the blood-blistery entrance hole. It throbs, and already a pinkish-red color spreads across my palm like a dry fire. The hole itself could be a city on a map, a citadel torn apart by the angry pulse of warfare that will soon spread into the countryside. A war within my flesh.
I leave the bookstore and walk back to my apartment. The boulevard, Albumuth, has a degree of security, but only two blocks down, on graffiti-choked overpasses, young teenage futureperfects carouse and cruise through the night-to-come, courting pleasures of the flesh, courting corruption of the soul.
Albumuth is my lifeline, the artery to the downtown section where I work, buy groceries, and acquire books. Without it, the city would be dangerous. Without it, I might be unanchored, cast adrift.
As it is, I drag my shoes on the sidewalk, taking every opportunity to run my fingers along white picket fences, hunch down to pet cocker spaniels, converse with smiling apple grannies, and stare into the deep eyes of children.
Even now, so soon after, the wound has begun to change. I manage to pry out the thorn. The hole looks less and less like a city in flames and more like part of my own hand. Rarely has a portion of my anatomy so intrigued me. No doubt Emily has traced the lines between my freckles, explored the gaps between my toes, run her hands through the sprawl of hair on my chest, but I have never examined my own body in such detail. My body has never seemed relevant to who I am, except that I must keep it fit so it will not betray my mind.
But I examine my palm quite critically now. The wrinkles do not share consistency of length or width and calluses gather like barnacles or melted-down toothpaste caps. Abrasions, pinknesses, and a few tiny scars mar my palm. I conclude that my palm is ugly beyond hope of cosmetic surgery.
I reach my apartment as the sun fades into the blocky shadows of the city’s rooftops and scattered chimneys. My apartment occupies the first floor of a two-story brownstone. The bricks are wrinkled with age and soft as wet clay in places. The anemic front lawn has been seeded with sand to keep the grass from growing.
Inside my apartment, the kitchen and living room open up onto the bedroom and bath to left and right respectively. In my bedroom there is a window seat from which, through the triangular, plated-glass window, I can see nothing but gray asphalt and a deserted shopping mall.
In the kitchen and living room, my carefully cultivated plants behave like irrational but brilliant sentences; they crawl up walls, shoot away from trellises despite my best efforts. I have wisteria, blossoms clustered like pelican limpets, sea grapes with soft round leaves, passion fruit flowers, trumpet vines, and night-blooming jasmine, whose petals open up and smell like cotton candy melted into the brine-rich scent of the sea. Together, they perform despotic Victorian couplings beyond the imagination of the most creative ménage à trois.
Emily hates my plants. When we make love, we go to her apartment. We make such perfect love there, in her perfectly immaculate bedroom — a mechanized grind of limbs pumping like pistons — that we come together, shower together afterwards, and rarely leave a ring of hair in the bathtub.
II
I suppose I did not think much about the thorn at the time because now, as I lie in bed listening to the dullard yowls and taunts of the futureperfects riding their cars halfway across the city, the wound’s pulsating, pounding rhythm leads me back to my first real memory of the world.
Orphaned very young, my parents lost at sea in a shipwreck, yet not quite a baby to be left on a doorstep, I remember only this fragment: the sea at low tide with night sliding down on the world like a black door. Water licked my feet and I felt the coolness of sand between my toes, the bite of the wind against my face. And: the plop-plop of tiny silver fish caught in tidal pools; the spackle of starfish trapped in seaweed and glistening troughs of sand; ghost crabs scuttling sideways on creaking joints, pieces of flesh clutched daintily in their pincers.
I do not know how old I was or how I came to be on that beach. I know only that I sat on the sand, the stars faded lights against the cerulean sweep of sky. As dusk became nightfall, hands grasped me by the shoulders and dragged me up the dunes into the stickery grass and the sea grape, the passionflower and the cactus, until I could see the ferris wheel of a seaside circus and hear the hum-and-thrum hollow acoustic sob of people laughing and shouting.
Whether this is a real place or an image from my imagination, I do not know. But it returns to center me in this world when I have no center; it gives me something beyond this city, my job, my apartment.
Somewhere, magical, once upon a time, I lay under the stars at nightfall and I dreamed the fantastic.
I have few friends. Foster children who move from family to family, town to town, rarely maintain friendships. Foster parents seem now like dust shadows spread out against a windowpane. I can remember faces and names, but I feel so remote from them compared to the memory of the wheeling, open arch of horizon before and above me.
Now I have a wound in my palm. A wound that leads me back to the beach at dusk, of my grief at my parents’ death, that I had not drowned with them. Living but not moving. Observing but not doing. At the center of myself I am suggestibility, not action. Never action.
My parents took actions. They did things. And they died.
III
Despite my wound — not a good excuse — I drive to work downAlbumuth Boulevard, turning into the parking lot where tufts of grass thrust up between cracks in the red brick. The shop where I work occupies a slice of the town square. It has antique glass windows, dark green curtains to deflect the gaze of the idly or suspiciously curious, and stairs leading both up and down, to the loft and the basement.
My job is to create perfect sentences for a varied clientele. No mere journalism this, for journalism requires the clarity of glass, not a mirror, nor even a reflection. I spend hours at my cubicle in the loft, looking out over the hundreds of rooftops, surrounded by the fresh sawdust smell of words and the loamy must of reference text piled atop reference text.
True, I am only one among many working here. Some are not artists but technicians who gargle with pebbles to improve the imperfect diction of their perfect sentences, or casually fish for them, tugging on their lines once every long while in the hope that the sentences will surface whole, finished, and fat with meaning. Still others smoke or drink or use illicit drugs to coax the words onto the page. Many of them are quite funny in their circuitous routines. I even know their names: Wendy, Carl, Daniel, Christine, Pamela, Andrea. But we are so fixated on creating our sentences that we might well pass each other as strangers on the street.
We must remain fixated, for the Director — a vast and stealthy intelligence, a leviathan moving ponderous many miles beneath the surface — demands it. We receive several paid solicitations each day that ask for a description of a beloved husband, a dying dog, or a housewife who wishes to tell her husband how he neglects her all unknowing:
He hugs her and mumbles like a sailor in love with the sea, drowning without protest as the water takes him deeper; until her lungs are awash and he has caught her in his endless dream of drowning.
Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people’s attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.
Of course, we do not create objectively perfect sentences— sometimes our sentences are not even very good. If we could create truly perfect sentences, we would destroy the world: it would fold in on itself like a pricked hot air balloon and cease to be: poof! undone, unmade, unlived, in the harsh glacial light of a reality more real than itself.
But I am such a perfectionist that, in the backwater stagnation of other workers’ coffee breaks, in the tapa-tap-tap of rain trying to keep me from my work, I continue to string verbs onto pronouns, railroading those same verbs onto indirect objects, attaching modifiers like strategically placed tinsel on a Christmas tree.
By my side I keep a three-ringed, digest-sized notebook of memories to help me live the lives of our clients, to get under their skins and know them as I know myself. Only twelve pages have been filled, most of them recounting events after I reached my fifteenth birthday. Many notes are only names, like Bobby Zender, a friend and fellow orphan at the reform school. He had a gimp foot and for a year I matched my strides to his, never once broke ahead of him or ran out onto the playground to play kickball. He died of tuberculosis. Or Sarah Galindrace, with the darkest eyes and the shortest dresses and skin like silk, like porcelain, like heaven. She moved away and became an echo in my heart.
These memories often help me with the sentences, but today the wound on my hand bothers me, distracts me from the pristine longleaf sheets of paper on the drafting boards. The pen, a black quill that crisply scratches against the paper, menaces me. My fellow workers stare; their bushy black eyebrows and manes of blond hair and mad stallion eyes make me nervous. I sweat. I teeter uneasily on my high stool and try not to stare out the window at the geometrically pleasing telephone lines that slice the sky into a matrix of points of interest: church spires, flagpoles, neon billboards.
A woman who has finally found true romance needs a sentence to tell her boyfriend how much she loves him. My palm flares when I take up the pen; the pen could as well be a knife or a chisel or some object with which I am equally unfamiliar. My skin feels itchy, as if I have picked at the edges of a scab. But I write the sentence anyway:
When I see you, my heart rises like bread in an oven.
The sentence is awful. The Director leans over and concurs with a nod, a hand on my shoulder, and the gravelly murmur, “You are trying too hard. Relax. Relax.”
Yes. Relax. I think of Emily and the book I was going to get for her at the Borges Bookstore: The Refraction of Light in a Prison. Perhaps if I can project from my relationship with Emily I can force the sentence to work. I think of her sharp cadences, the way she bites the ends off words as if snapping celery stalks in two. Or the time she tickled me senseless in the middle of her sister’s wedding and I had to pretend I was drunk just to weather the embarrassment. Or this: the smooth, spoon-tight feel of her stomach against my lips, the miraculous tangle of her blond hair.
So. I try again.
When I see you, my heart rises like a flitting hum mingbirdto a rose.
Now I am truly hopeless. The repetition of “rises” and “rose” knifes through all alternatives and I am convinced I should have been a plumber, a dentist, a shoeshine boy. Words that should layer themselves into patterns — strike passion in the heart — become ugly and cold. The dead weight of cliché has given me a headache.
At dusk, I ask the Director for a day off. He gives it to me, orders me to do nothing but walk around the city, perhaps take in a ball game in the old historical section, perhaps a Voss Bender exhibit at theTeelMemorialArt Museum.
IV
I spend my day off contemplating my palm with my girlfriend Emily Brosewiser, she of the aforementioned blond hair, the succulent lips, the tactile smile, the moist charm. (My comparisons become so fecund I think I would rather love a fruit or vegetable.) We sit on a lichen-encrusted bench at the San Matador Park, my arm around her shoulders, and watch the mallards siphoning through the pond scum for food. The gasoline-green grass scent and the heat of the summer sun make me sleepy. The park seems cluttered with dwarfs: litter picker-uppers armed with their steely harpoons; lobotomy patients from the nearby hospital, their stares as direct as a lover’s; burly hunchbacked fellows going over the lawn with gleaming red lawnmowers. They distract me — errant punctuation scattered across a pristine page.
Emily sees them only as clowns and myself as sick. “Sick, sick, sick.” How can I disagree? She smells so clean and her hair shines like spun gold.
“They were always there before, Nicholas, and you never noticed them. Why should they matter now?
Don’t pick at that.” She slaps my hand and my palm thrums with pain. “Why must you obsess over it so?
Here we are with a day off and you cannot leave it alone.”
Emily works for an ad agency. She designs sentences that sell perfection to the consumer public. Before I ever met Emily, I saw her work on billboards at the outskirts of town: “Buy Skuttles: We Expect No Rebuttals” and “Someday You Are Gonna Die: In the Meantime, Buy and Buy — at the Coriander Mall.”
At the bottom, in small print, the billboards read: “Ads by Emily.” At the time, I was girlfriendless so I called up the billboard makers, tracked down the ad agency, and asked her out. She liked my collection of erotic sentences and my manual dexterity. I liked the gossamer line of hair that runs down her forearms, the curves of her breasts with their tiny pink nipples.
But her sentences have become passé to me, too crude and manipulative. How can I expect more from her, given the nature of the business?
So I say, “Yes, dear,” and sigh and examine my palm. She is always reasonable. Always right. But I am not sure she understands me. I wonder what she would think about my memory of the arc of sky above with night coming down and the sea rustling on the shore. She did not argue when I insisted on separate apartments.
The circle on my palm has gone from pink to white and the way the wrinkle lines careen into one another, the scars like tiny fractures, fascinates me.
Emily giggles. “Nicholas, you are so perfectly silly sitting there with that bemused look on your face.
Anyone would think you’d just had a miscarriage.”
I wonder if there is something wrong with our relationship; it seems as blank as my life as an orphan.
Besides, “miscarriage” is not the appropriate logic leap to describe the look on my face. Granted, I cannot myself think of the appropriate hoop for this dog of syntax to leap through, but still…
We return to our separate apartments. All I can think about are dwarfs, hunchbacks, cripples. I sleep and dream of dwarfs, deformed and malicious, with sinister slits for smiles. But when I wake, I have the most curious of thoughts. I remember the weight of the dwarf woman’s body against my side as she stuck the sliver into my palm. I remember the smell of her: sweet and sharp, like honeysuckle; the feel of her hand, the fingers lithe and slender; her body beneath the clothes, the way parts do not match and could never match, and yet have unity.
V
A most peculiar assignment lies on my desk the next morning, so peculiar that I forget my damaged palm. I am to write a sentence about a dwarf. The Director has left a note that I am to complete this sentence ASAP. He has also left me photographs, a series of newspaper articles, and photocopies from a diary. The lead paragraph of the top newspaper article, a sensational bit of work, reads: David “Midge” Jones, 27, a 4-foot-5 dwarf, lived for attention, whether he ate fire at a carnival, walked barefoot on glass for spectators, or allowed himself to be hurled across a room for a dwarf-throwing contest. Jones yearned for the spotlight. Sunday, he died in the dark. He drank himself to death. Tests showed his blood alcohol level at.43, or four times the level at which a motorist would be charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.
I pick up the glossy color print atop the pile of documentation. It shows Jones at the carnival, the film overexposed, his eyes forming red dots against the curling half-smile of his mouth. At either side stand flashy showgirls with tinsel-adorned bikini tops crammed against his face. Jones stares into the camera lens, but the showgirls stare at Jones as though he were some carnival god. The light on the photograph breaks around his curly brown hair, but not his body, as if a spotlight had been trained on him. He stands on a wooden box, his arms around the showgirls.
The film’s speed is not nearly fast enough to catch the ferris wheel seats spinning crazily behind him, so that light spills into the dazzle of showgirl tinsel, showgirl cleavage. Behind the ferris wheel, blurry sand dunes roll, and beyond that, in the valley between dunes, the sea, like a squinting eye.
The photograph has a sordid quality to it. When I look closer, I see the sheen of sweat on Jones’s face, his flushed complexion. Sand clings to his gnarled arms and his forehead. The lines of his eyes, nose, and mouth seem charcoal pencil rough: a first, hurried sketch.
I turn the photograph over. In the upper right hand corner someone has written: David Jones, September 19—. The Amazing Mango BrothersSeaside Circus and Carnival Extravaganza.He cleaned out animal cages and gave 50 cent blow jobs behind the Big Top.
Jones is a brutish man. I want nothing to do with him. Yet I must write a sentence about him for a client I will never meet. I must capture David Jones in a single sentence.
I read the rest of the article, piecemeal.
In his most controversial job, Jones ignored criticism, strapped on a modified dog harness, and allowed burly men to hurl him across a room in a highly publicized dwarf-throwing contest at the King’s Head Pub.
“I’m a welder, which can be dangerous. But welders are frequently laid off, so I also work in a circus. I eat fire, I walk on broken glass with bare feet. I climb a ladder made of swords, I lie on a bed of nails and have tall people stand on me. This job is easy compared to what I usually do.”
I spend many hours trying to form a sentence, while sweat drips down my neck despite the slow swish of fans. I work through lunch, distracted only by a dwarf juggler (plying his trade with six knives and a baby) who has wrested the traffic circle away from a group of guildless mimes and town players.
I begin simply.
The dwarf’s life was tragic.
No.
David Jones’ life was tragic.
No.
David’s life was unnecessarily tragic.
Unnecessarily tragic? Tragedy does not waste time with the extraneous. A man’s life cannot be reduced to a Latinesque, one-line, eleven-syllable haiku. How do I identify with David? Did he ever spend time in an orphanage? Did he ever find himself on a beach, his parents dead and never coming back? How hard can it have been to be an anomaly, a misfit, a mistake?
Then my imagination unlocks a phrase from some compartment of my brain: David left the flesh in tragic fashion.
Again, my palm distracts me, but not as much. I see all the imperfections there and yet they do not seem as ugly as before. David may be ugly, but I am not ugly.
As I drive home in the sour, exhaust-choked light of dusk, I admire the oaks that line the boulevard, whorled and wind-scored and yet stronger and more soothing to the eye than the toothpick pines, the straight spruce.
VI
By now the plants have conquered my apartment in the name of CO2, compost, and photosynthesis. I let them wander like rejects from ’50s B-grade vegetable movies, ensuring that Emily will never stay for long. The purple and green passionflowers, stinking of sex, love the couch with gentle tendrils. The splash-red bougainvillea cat-cradles the kitchen table, then creeps toward the refrigerator and pulls on the door, thorns making a scratchy sound. Along with this invasion come the scavengers, the albino geckos that resemble swirls of mercury or white chocolate. I have no energy to evict them.
No, I sit in a chair, in underwear weathered pink by the whimsical permutations of the wash cycle, and read by the blue glow of the mute TV screen.
David grew up in Dalsohme, a bustling but inconsequential port town on the Gulf side of the Moth River Delta. His parents, Jemina and Simon Pultin, made their living by guiding tourists through the bayous in flatbottom boats. Simon talked about installing a glass bottom to improve business, but Jemina argued that no one would want to see the murky waters of a swamp under a microscope, so to speak. Instead, they supplemented their income by netting catfish and prawns. David was good at catching catfish, but Jemina and Simon preferred to have him work the pole on the boat because the tourists often gawked at him as much as at the scenery. It was Jemina’s way of improving business without giving in to Simon’s glass-bottom boat idea. Some of the documents the Director gave me suggested that Simon had adopted David precisely for the purpose of manning the boat. There is no record of what David thought of all of this, but at age fifteen he “ran away from home and joined a circus.” He did whatever he had to on the carnival circuit in order to survive, including male prostitution, but apparently never saved enough money to quit, though his schemes became grander and more complex.
“Most little people think the world owes them something because they’re little. Most little people got this idea they should be treated special. Well, the world doesn’t owe us anything. God gave us a rough way to go, that’s all.”
Soon the words blur on the page. Under the flat, aqua glow, the wound in my palm seems smaller but denser, etched like a biological Rosetta Stone. The itch, though, grows daily. It grows like the plants grow. It spreads into the marrow of my bones and I can feel it infiltrating whatever part of me functions as a soul.
That night I dream that we are all “pure energy,” like on those old future-imperfect cardboard-and-glue space journey episodes where the budget demanded pure energy as a substitute for makeup and genuine costumes. Just golden spheres of light communing together, mind to mind, soul to soul. A world without prejudice because we have, none of us, a body that can lie to the world about our identity.
VII
The day my parents left me for the sea, the winter sky gleamed bone-white against the gray-blue water.
The cold chaffed my fingers and dried them out. My father took off one of his calfskin gloves so my hand could touch his, still sweaty from the glove. His weight, solid and warm, anchored me against the wind as we walked down to the pier and the ship. Above the ship’s masts, frigate birds with throbbing red throats let the wind buffet them until they no longer seemed to fly, but to sit, stationary, in the air.
My mother walked beside me as well, holding her hat tightly to her head. The hem of her sheepskin coat swished against my jacket. A curiously fresh, clean smell, like mint or vanilla, followed her and when I breathed it in, the cold retreated for a little while.
“It won’t be for long,” my father said, his voice descending to me through layers of cold and wind.
I shivered, but squeezed his hand. “I know.”
“Good. Be brave.”
“I will.”
Then my mother said, “We love you. We love you and wish you could come with us. But it’s a long journey and a hard one and no place for a little boy.”
My mother leaned down and kissed me, a flare of cold against my cheek. My father knelt, held both my hands, and looked me up and down with his flinty gray eyes. He hugged me against him so I was lost in his windbreaker and his chest. I could feel him trembling just as I was trembling.
“I’m scared,” I said.
“Don’t be. We’ll be back soon. We’ll come back for you. I promise.”
They never did. I watched them board the ship, a smile frozen to my face. It seems as though I waited so long on the pier, watching the huge sails catch the wind as the ship slid off into the wavery horizon, that snowflakes gathered on my eyes and my clothes, the cold air biting into my shoulder blades.
I do not remember who took me from that place, nor how long I really stood there, nor even if this represents a true memory, but I hold onto it with all my strength.
Later, when I found out my parents had died at sea, when I understood what that meant, I sought out the farthest place from the sea and I settled here.
VIII
At the office, I have so much work to do that I am able to forget my palm. I stare for long minutes at the sentence I have written on my notepad:
David was leaving the flesh.
What does it mean?
I throw away the sentence, but it lingers in my mind and distracts me from my other work. Finally, I break through with a sentence describing a woman’s grief that her boyfriend has left her and she is growing old:
She sobs like the endless rain of late winter, without passion or the hope of relief, just a slow drone of tears.
As I write it, I begin to cry: wrenching sobs that make my throat ache and my eyes sting. My fellow workers glance at me, shrug, and continue at their work. But I am not crying because the sentence is too perfect. I am crying because I have encapsulated something that should not be encapsulated in a sentence. How can my client want me to write this?
IX
Emily visits me at lunchtime. She visits me often during the day, but our nights have been crisscrossed, sometimes on purpose, I feel.
We go to the same park and now we feel out of place, in the minority. Everywhere I look dwarfs walk to lunch, drive cars, mend benches. All of them like individual palm prints, each one so unique that next to them Emily appears plain.
“Something has happened to you.” She looks into my eyes as she says this and I read a certain vulnerability into her words.
“Something has happened to me. I have a wound in my palm.”
“It’s not the wound. It’s the plants out of control. It’s the sex. It’s everything. You know it as well as me.”
Emily is always right, on the mark, in the money. I am beginning to tire of such perfection. I feel a part of me break inside.
“You don’t understand,” I say.
“I understand that you cannot handle responsibility. I understand that you are having problems with this relationship.”
“I’ll talk to you later,” I say and I leave her, speechless, on the bench.
X
After lunch, I think I know where my center lies: it lies in the sentence I must create for David Jones. It is in the sentence and in me. But I don’t want to write anything perfect. I don’t want to. I want to work without a net. I want to write rough, with emotion that stings, the words themselves dangling off into an abyss. I want to find my way back to the sea with the darkness coming down and the briny scent in my nostrils, before I knew my parents were dead. Before I was born.
David Jones found his way. If a person drinks too much alcohol, the body forces the stomach to vomit the alcohol before it can reach a lethal level. Jones never vomited. As he slept, the alcohol seeped into his bloodstream and killed him.
My shaking fingers want to perform ridiculous pratfalls, rolling over in complex loop-the-loops and cul-de-sacs of language. Or suicide sentences, mouthing sentiments from the almost dead to the definitely dead. Instead, I write:
From birth, David was learning ways to leave the flesh.
It is nothing close to layered prose. It has no subtlety to it. But now I can smell the slapping waves of the sea and the alluring stench of passionflower fruit.
Before I leave for my apartment, Emily calls me. I do not take the call. I am too busy wondering when my parents knew they might die, and if they thought of me as the wind and the water conspired to take them. I wish I had been with them, had gone down with them, in their arms, with the water in our mouths like ambrosia.
XI
When I open my apartment door, I hear the scuttling of a hundred sticky toes. The refrigerator’s surface writhes with milk-white movement against the dark green of leaves. In another second I see that the white paint is instead the sinuous shimmer-dance of the geckos, their camouflage perfect as they scramble for cover. I open the refrigerator and take out a wine cooler; my feet crunch down on a hundred molting gecko skins, the sound like dead leaves, or brittle cicada chrysalises.
I sit in my underwear and contemplate my wound by the TV’s redemptive light. It has healed itself so completely that I can barely find it. The itching, however, has intensified, until I feel it all over, inside me.
Nothing holds my interest on my palm except the exquisite imperfections: the gradations of colors, the rough pliable feel of it, the scratches from Emily’s cat.
I walk into the bedroom and ease myself beneath the covers of my bed. I imagine I smell the sea, a salt breeze wafting through the window. The stars seem like pieces of jagged glass ready to fall onto me. I toss in my bed and cannot sleep. I lie on my stomach. I lie on my side. The covers are too hot, but when I strip them away, my body becomes too cold. The water I drank an hour ago has settled in my stomach like a smooth, aching stone.
Finally, the cold keeps me half-awake and I prop myself sleepily against the pillow. I hear voices outside and see flashes of light from the window, like a ferris wheel rising and falling. But I do not get up.
Then he stands at the foot of my bed, staring at me. A cold blue tint dyes his flesh, as if the TV’s glow has sunburned him. The marble cast of his face is as perfect as the most perfect sentence I have ever written in my life. His eyes are so sad that I cannot meet his gaze; his face holds so many years of pain, of wanting to leave the flesh. He speaks to me and although I cannot hear him, I know what he is saying. I am crying again, but softly, softly. The voices on the street are louder and the tinkling of bells so very light.
And so I discard my big-body skin and my huge hands and my ungainly height and I walk out of my apartment with David Jones, to join the carnival under the moon, by the seashore, where none of us can hurt or be hurt anymore.
[Article excerpts taken from newspaper accounts in 1988 and 1989 by Michael Koretzky in The Independent Florida Alligator and by Ronald DuPont Jr. in The Gainesville Sun.]
THE AMBERGRIS GLOSSARY
— A —
AANDALAY, ISLE OF. The mythic homeland of the piratical Aan Tribes. According to the tales of the Aan, the Southern Hemisphere once consisted of a single landmass, the Isle of Aandalay, populated solely by the happy, peaceful Children of Aan. Only after a great cataclysm — the nature of which varies more from tale to tale than the weather in that part of the world — shattered the Isle into a thousand pieces did the Aan become warlike, each faction certain they possessed the mandate for restoration of a united Isle of Aandalay. Thus did piracy become rationalized as a quest for a homeland. Some Aan even attacked the mainland, claiming it was merely a huge splinter exiled from their beloved Isle. See also: Calabrian Calendar.
ABRASIS, MICHAEL. The first head librarian of the Manzikert Memorial Library. Abrasis is best known for his collection of erotic literature and lithographs. When he died, in his sleep, his body could not at first be removed from his apartment because the piles of pornography had blocked the only route from bed to door. Oddly enough, by the time Abrasis’ relatives came to collect his things, the apartment had been picked clean. Abrasis bred prize-winning cababari in his spare time. See also: Cababari; Manzikert Memorial Library.
ALBUMUTH BOULEVARD. A rather famous thoroughfare cutting through the heart of Ambergris.
The site of both the Borges Bookstore and the headquarters of Hoegbotton & Sons,Albumuth Boulevard has long been privy to the inner workings of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. During the civil disturbances of the Reds and the Greens,Albumuth Boulevard served as the main battlefield. Certainly the recent armed struggle between Hoegbotton’s publishing arm and the inscrutable Frankwrithe & Lewden could not have occurred without the events that first unfolded on the boulevard. No one can agree on the origin of the name “Albumuth,” or on the limits of the boulevard. As Sirin once said, “Like the Moth,Albumuth Boulevard has a thousand tributaries and streams, so that, ultimately, who can determine its boundaries or the limits of its influence?” See also: Borges Bookstore; Cappers; Frankwrithe& Lewden; Greens; Reds; Sirin.
ALFAR. The ruins of Alfar form, with Zamilon, the only recorded instances of a particular architectural style reminiscent of gray cap buildings. Most structures at both Alfar and Zamilon have been constructed as circles within circles. Alfar, like Zamilon, is of unknown origin, but an additional peculiar tale is told by shepherds in both places: that, on certain nights, Alfar and Zamilon glow iridescent green and red, a sheen that spreads and intensifies so slowly that observers cannot at first recognize the change, but finally cannot doubt the evidence of their eyes. No one has as yet confirmed this claim independently, nor has anyone thought to time these “eruptions” of color, one to the other. What would it mean if Alfar and Zamilon became luminous on the same nights? See also: Busker, Alan; Nysman, Michael; Zamilon.
AMBERGRIS. In folklore, a marbled substance often found on the seashore and thought to be a “sea mushroom.” Actually produced in the intestine of whales, ambergris can only be created when partially-digested squid beaks are present in the whale’s system. Whalers long sought ambergris for use as an aphrodisiac, in perfumes, and as a folk medicine. Since the founding of the city ofAmbergris, however, the popularity of the substance has decreased dramatically. The Truffidian Antechambers discontinued the habit of anointing their ears, eyebrows, and armpits with a tincture of ambergris before holiday sermons. The Kalif no longer eats raw ambergris to stimulate virility, substituting live snails. Male rats, however, still enter a sexual frenzy when they smell ambergris. See also: Kalif, The; Moonrat; Rats.
AMBERGRISIAN GASTRONOMIC ASSOCIATION. Founded during the days of Trillian the Great Banker, the AGA has published a number of books, including One Thousand Squid Recipes and Experiments with Different Types of Grease. The association achieved a degree of notoriety by uncovering the lost ingredients for Oliphaunt’s Delight: 1 pound of cherries, 17 pounds of freshwater squid, 20 gallons of goat’s milk, 5 pounds of fish paste (preferably flounder) and 1 ounce of asparagus. See also: Oliphaunt, The.
AMBERGRISIAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. Completely unlike the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society. The most adventure this group has seen is undercooked flounder at the annual Ambergrisian Historical Society Ball and the occasional paper cut (sweet red relief from boredom!) opening mail sent by similar dullards located in Morrow andStockton. See also: Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society.
AMBERGRISIANS FOR THE ORIGINAL INHABITANTS SOCIETY. Completely unlike the Ambergrisian Historical Society. Never has membership in a historical society been so fraught with peril. Every two or three years, another few members succumb to the temptation to pry open a manhole cover and go spelunking amongst the sewer drains. Inevitably, someone gets stuck in a culvert and the others go for help, or the gray caps, presumably, catch them and they disappear forever. One imagines the hapless AFTOIS members waving their official membership cards at the approaching, unimpressed gray caps. When not conspiring to commit assisted suicide, the AFTOIS publishes The Real History Newsletter. See also: Cappers; Martigan, Red; Real History Newsletter, The.
— B —
BANFOURS, ARCH DUKE OF. Best known for being the first to bombard Ambergris with cannon fire. He ruled Ambergris for exactly 21 days. While sitting at a sidewalk cafe, surrounded by his bodyguards, a waiter casually walked up behind him and slit his throat. There appears to have been no particular motivation for the assassination except for the usual engrained Ambergrisian dislike of foreigner interlopers. See also: Occupation, The.
BANKER WARRIORS. This sect, comprising the most feared of Trillian’s followers, grew out of the predations of highway robbery. Due to the rise of the merchant classes, large quantities of money had to be physically moved from one city to another. Generally, a banker’s representative accompanied this transfer. Early transfers met with disaster. After years of robberies and payoffs to avoid robberies, the position of banker’s representative evolved from paper-pusher to hardened veteran of weapons’ training. By the time Trillian rose to power through the Ambergrisian banking system, the banker representatives had become a powerful, feared security force. Trillian himself named them the Banker Warriors and used them to consolidate his hold over Ambergris. Also influential in repelling attacks by the Kalif. Eventually assimilated into the Ambergris Defense Force, at which time women were excluded from participation. Several of these women (including the noted strategist Rebecca Gort, munitions expert Kathleen Lynch, and fencing master Susan Dickerson) founded their own chain of banks, bought several other businesses, and moved to Morrow, where they became the core of the most feared security force on the continent. The Ambergris Defense Force, on the other hand, perished to the last man during the Kalif’s invasion. See also: Frankwrithe & Lewden; Gort, Marmey; Kalif, The; Occupation, The; Trillian, The Great Banker.
BEDLAM ROVERS. A southern ethnic group, known for living on house boats and incorporated at an early date into the Saphant Empire. These mystics thrived after the collapse of the empire, adopting their nomadic aquatic life to the River Moth and turning their seasonal perambulations into a lucrative business.
Cloaking their mysterious religious tendencies in a veneer of the rational and scientific, the Rovers have developed a reputation as experts on madness and cast themselves in the role of “psychiatrists,” much to the dismay of the mental health establishment in Ambergris. The Rovers’ riverboats, topped with a multitude of light blue flags and crowded with mentally unstable customers, usually arrive in Ambergris for a fresh batch of patients the week after the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. See also: Festival of the Freshwater Squid, The; Saphant Empire, The.
BENDER, VOSS. A composer of operas, requiems, and minor rhymes, who, for a period of time, transcended his status as a cultural icon to become a politician and the unoffi cial ruler of Ambergris. His suspicious death spawned a civil war between the Greens, his most fanatical followers, and the Reds, his most fervent enemies. Famous for his defiant speech to the merchant barons during which he exclaimed, “Art always transforms money!” His many operas include The Tragedy of John & Sophia, The King Under ground,Hymns for the Dead, Wilted As the Flower Lay, and his masterpiece, Trillian. Bender wrote an autobiography, Memoirs of a Composer, which contains more information on his early life. See also: Greens; Midnight for Munfroe; Nunk, Autarch of; Reds.
BIBBLE, MAXWELL. The owner of a restaurant supply business who changed careers at age 35 to become an art critic. Bibble’s specialty was deep psychological profiles of artists based solely on their artwork. Best known for his misguided and fatuous attempts to identifyMartinLake as a member of a squid cult. For a time, Bibble was one of the most influential of the critics associated with the New Art movement, although he was unpopular with most New Artists. However, he died in poverty, using copies of his reviews to feed a fire during one of Ambergris’ freak cold spells. The sculptor William Blaze took a plaster cast of Bibble’s body, pasted his reviews on the outside of the cast, and exhibited the piece as “The Exhaustion of Criticism”—thereby reviving interest in Bibble’s writings. See also: New Art, The.
BLGKKYDKS, HECKIRA. A Haragck military officer today best known for his oil paintings of remote landscapes. He often painted during campaigns and thus the paintings also have historical significance. The night before the Haragck amphibious assault on Ambergris, he completed preliminary sketches for a piece he intended to call “The Sack of Ambergris.” During the ensuing rout, these sketches came into the possession of the Ambergris navy. For 20 years they were displayed at theMorhaimMuseum, but the trader Michael Hoegbotton found them so compelling that, after the Haragck had largely faded as a political/cultural force, he paid Blgkkydks to live in Ambergris for a year to complete the actual painting. Poverty-stricken, the old general reluctantly agreed, but fell so in love with Ambergris that he lived out his remaining years there. He eventually became a fixture ofAlbumuth Boulevard, his craggy visage and rickety easel noted on tourist maps of the period. See also: Grnnck, Haragck Khan;MorhaimMuseum.
BORGES BOOKSTORE. The oldest purveyor of printed words in Ambergris, thrice during its long history burned to the ground. Founded by and named after the Nicean brothers Bormund and Gestrand Kubtek, the Borges Bookstore has served many political and social functions over the years. During the conflict between the Reds and the Greens, Bender sympathizers hid in its basement. Before Festivals, patrons can book “reading slots” along its shelves, for it is well known that the gray caps will not pass the threshold. The westerner Kamal Bakar witnessed the third fire, set by looters during the 300th Festival of the Freshwater Squid, one of the worst in memory: “The sky was darkened by the smoke from the books; burned pages floated up into the air and fluttered back down again like a black snowfall all over the city. Those who caught a sheet could feel the heat and fleetingly read what had the strange appearance of a black-and-white dagguereotype. Once the heat had dissipated, the pages crumbled away between our fingers.” See also: Albumuth Boulevard; Bender, Voss; Burning Leaves; Festival of the Freshwater Squid; Greens; Reds.
BRUEGHEL, MICHAEL. John Manzikert’s nemesis eventually united the islands of the Aan despite several times coming close to total defeat. During his 50 years of rule, Brueghel not only annihilated the Kalif’s troops in three historic naval battles, forever relegating the Kalif’s ambitions to the continent, but also established an oligarchic form of government that served the Aan well for the next three generations. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to collect the remnants of the Saphant Empire under his aegis, preserving scientific and cultural advances that would otherwise have been lost. In later years, descendents of Brueghel, calling themselves Brueghelites, would seize large portions of the River Moth to the south of Ambergris and threaten Ambergrisian autonomy. See also: Calabrian Calendar; Kalif, The; Saltwater Buzzard; Saphant Empire, The.
BUBBABAUNCE, BARON. The real name of the circus performer “Bauble.” See also: Hellatose & Bauble; Kodfan, M.; Madnok, Frederick.
BURNING LEAVES. A controversial arts journal, known for publishing macabre, disturbing fictions and illustrations. Published by the Borges Bookstore until the editors printed their infamous Black Tract, which included a perverse “map” of Voss Bender’s naked body, diagramming the various worth of different parts and with short-short stories written about each part (most infamous: Sporlender’s “Tree with Nuts”). Since then, the journal has been funded entirely by advertising and newsstand sales. Burning Leaves published the first works by such future luminaries as Louis Verden, Nicholas Sporlender,MartinLake, and Janice Shriek, as well as the obscene mechanical diagrams of the eccentric inventor known simply as Porfal. The premiere issue featured Corvid Quork’s short story “The Madness of Bird Masks.” See also: Bender, Voss; Borges Bookstore; Sporlender, Nicholas.
BUSKER, ALAN. Busker, long known as a fanatical (and often quite critical) traveler in both the north and south, may also have been a spy for theKingdomofMorrow. Certainly, there was a time when Busker’s travels among the northern cities resulted in disaster — Stockton, Belezar, Dovetown, and Tratnor all fell to Morrow shortly after Busker’s visits to them. Most famous for attempting to enter the Kalif’sHolyCity by impersonating the Kalif himself. Some historians believe Busker spent a number of months in Alfar and Zamilon, his other journeys undertaken to provide cover for his true activities — research into the link between the gray caps and the monks of Zamilon. See also: Alfar; Kalif, The; Stockton; Zamilon.
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CABABARI. Long-snouted, foul-smelling, fungus-eating, dirt-seeking pigs instrumental in the ouster of Trillian the Great Banker as ruler of Ambergris. See also: Fungus; Trillian the Great Banker.
CALABRIAN CALENDAR. A wonder of inefficiency that used an estimated count of the various islands the Isle of Aandalay had fragmented into as the number of days in its year. Months were named after the nearly unpronounceable monikers of old Aan leaders, but the names of months changed as new leaders rose and fell, with the result that many Aan towns employed month-tellers whose sole function was to untangle the knots of names. Making the situation more confusing, each group of Aan on each island began to name their months differently. The charts created by the month-finders began to dwarf those used by mathematicians and mapmakers. Several wars were fought over the allocation of days and months, including the famous War of the Three-Day Weekend, which left over 10,000 people forever unable to enjoy even a one-day weekend. Eventually, under the rule of Michael Brueghel, a reunited Aan people scrapped the Calabrian Calendar altogether in favor of the Kalif’s calendar, itself based on the old Saphant Empire’s calendar. Thousands of month-finders had to seek out other careers. Their color-coded charts still reside in many wealthy art collectors’ mansions, although the largest collection can be found in theMorhaimMuseum. See also: Aandalay, Isle of; Brueghel, Michael; Morhaim Museum.
CAPPERS. Individuals hired to clean the sewers. The profession requires nerve and cunning, due to the likelihood of encountering gray caps. The most dangerous duty involves rolling a huge metal-and-wood ball down the main stretch of Ambergris sewer, which runs roughly the length ofAlbumuth Boulevard. The purpose of rolling the ball (nicknamed “The Monster”) — an invention of Porfal’s — is to remove all impediments from the sewer. Sometimes, those rolling the ball will be surprised by a semi-crushed but still deadly piece of fungus or gray cap. The leaders of capper teams are called “martigans.” See also: Albumuth Boulevard; Martigan, Red; Monster, The; Porfal.
CAROLINE OF THE CHURCH OF THE SEVEN-POINTED STAR. A heretic from Nicea who left the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star to found her own religion. Unlike the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star, the Church of the Seven-Pointed Star believed that God had seven points rather than seven edges.
Therefore, rather than worshipping the journey toward self-realization symbolized by the edges, they worshipped the goals of self-realization as symbolized by the points. The specific points Caroline adhered to were: celibacy (during certain times of the year, if absolutely necessary), truth, beauty, self-realization, self-worth, love of others, and good hygiene (in some translations from the sacred text, literally, “negation of body odor through soapy immersions”). Adherents to the Church of the Seven-Pointed Star used swords with sharp points but no edge, while the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star used swords with sharp edges but no point. Alas, edges proved superior to points in most battles fought in the streets of Nicea.
Caroline’s followers were forced to either commit sacrilege and switch to edges, or become meals for the ever-present saltwater buzzard. Proving, one could say, the point of the edges. See also: Mikal, Dray; Saltwater Buzzard.
CHURCH OF THE FISHERMAN. Fish worshippers who abstain from eating “our watery brethren”
but attain religious ecstasy by catching them and setting them free. Although the Odecca Bichoral White Whale is a mammal not a fish, the biology-challenged adherents of this religion have made it the centerpiece of their spiritual life. The high priest, or Fish Head, delivers his sermons from a lopsided marble altar chiseled to resemble the whale’s head. Of late, Church of the Fisherman worshippers have been implicated in a series of crimes, from stealing dead fish on display at the markets and releasing them back into the River Moth, to freeing Odecca whales from the Daffed Zoo. See also: Citizen Fish Campaign; Daffed Zoo; Odecca Bichoral White Whale.
CITIZEN FISH CAMPAIGN. A practical joke, staged by the writer Sirin, seeking to replace the current Truffidian Antechamber with a stinking, five-day-old freshwater bass during the Holy Elections (held every decade). Sirin and his New Art friends created campaign posters featuring the dead bass, delivered stirring speeches in its name, and paraded the candidate around Ambergris on a cart. When the dead fish placed second as a write-in candidate in a field of eight, Sirin and his cohorts had to flee the city for a short period due to threats of physical violence. Groups offended included the Truffidian priesthood and the Church of the Fisherman (which felt Sirin’s real aim was to ridicule the fish they held sacred). See also: Church of the Fisherman; New Art, The; Sirin.
COOKS OF KALAY. A clan of professional cooks who lived in the far western reaches of the Kalif’s Empire, near the mountain fortress of Kalay. During frequent famines, these cooks learned to prepare meals from such unlikely items of sustenance as shoe leather, belts, grass, flowers, shirts, dirt, earthworms, and insects. Such was their prowess, according to legend, that when the famines passed, people still came to Kalay just to eat dirt. They became so famous that the Kalif forcibly transplanted the entire family to his palace at Vonaril, where they still languish, forced for generation after generation to cater to the Kalif’s every craving for a midnight dinner or afternoon snack. See also: Kalif, The.
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DAFFED, XAVER. An excellent observer of animal behavior whose reputation in recent years has been sullied by accusations he became too intimately involved with his subject matter. Daffed published numerous books on animals of the southern climes, including Diaryof an Aardvark, My Life Among the Sand Turtles of the Moth River Delta, A History of Animals, Vols. I–X, and The Hoegbotton Guide to Small, Indigenous Mammals. He was found dead, of an apparent heart attack, in the tropical mountains near Nicea, wearing only a wooly monkey suit, several perplexed wooly monkeys watching from the nearby bushes. See also: Cababari; Daffed Zoo; Hoegbotton Guide to Small, Indigenous Mammals, The.
DAFFED ZOO. Founded by Xaver Daffed shortly before his death, his work completed by daughter Sarah Daffed, the Daffed Zoo has, over the years, hosted a wide assortment of the strangest animals ever seen, including the common banded snakblooter, the pigmy sanfangle, the red-and-white slout, and the metigulamated ratpig. Specializing in exotics, the zoo has at times fallen into disrepair and been closed for the public’s safety. The zoo has also suffered from such outlandish claims as those promulgated by Xaver’s great-grandson, Thomas Daffed, who, shortly before his death, hosted a rather redundant fungi exhibit that was to include a “fungal creature” he claimed to have caught near the ruined monastery-fortress of Zamilon, but which never made an appearance. More recently, the zoo’s Odecca Bichoral White Whale exhibit was ruined when, in a daring raid, members of the Church of the Fisherman stole the centerpiece of the exhibit: the world’s only captive Odecca Bichoral White Whale. See also: Church of the Fisherman; Daffed, Xaver; Odecca Bichoral White Whale; Zamilon.
DEFECATION, ORDER OF. The most reviled of the orders, although perhaps not the most disgusting. See also: Living Saints.
DISPOSSESSED. Some of the Ambergrisians “dispossessed” of their families because of The Silence became strange and fey to their friends. They would dig up animal bones, eat strange fungus, and visit graveyards, claiming to hear their brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, calling to them from the ground. In later years, these individuals became the official Dispossessed, wandering from place to place and burying the bones of their dead in the walls of buildings that others had boarded up after The Silence. For more than 70 years, these urban nomads roamed like lost souls, living by ever more desperate means, their numbers dwindling until they finally disappeared from the city. See also: Fungus.
DREADFUL TALES. A magazine of horror adventure tales published and edited by exploiter extraordinaire Mathew Palwine. Palwine’s stable of authors included such hacks as Rachel Thorland, Gerrold Picklin, and Saltzbert Flounder. Dreadful Tales became popular chiefly due to the proliferation of typographical errors among its pages, which made it the darling of the “found object” adherents of the New Art movement. Nicholas Sporlender, among others, found cruel sport in writing letters to the editor on such subjects as “Why the Untoward Removal (Twice!) of a Very Important Vowel From the Word ‘Countless’ in Saltzbert Flounder’s Story ‘Tortured Love in the Middle Distance’ Renders the Author’s Vision Bleak Rather than Maudlin.” See also: Midnight for Munfroe; New Art, The; Sporlender, Nicholas.
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EJACULATIONS, ORDER OF. The most pleasurable yet socially-unacceptable of the Orders. See also: Living Saints.
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FESTIVAL OF THE FRESHWATER SQUID, THE. A celebration specific to Ambergris that has, on occasion, led to untoward incidents.
FIGHTING PHILOSOPHER, THE. See: Peterson, Richard.
FISH HEAD. Holy. Or rotting. Incidental to the Citizen Fish campaign. See also: Church of the Fisherman.
FLATULENCE, ORDER OF. The most deadly of the Orders. See also: Living Saints.
FRANKWRITHE & LEWDEN. A devious and conniving publishing company run by L. Gaudy and his family. Known for their insidious marketing strategies and accused by some of collaborating with the gray caps. Frankwrithe & Lewden was founded during the waning days of the Saphant Empire and claims to be the oldest publisher still extant on the Southern Continent. Books published by F&L have been banned by the Truffidian Antechamber of Ambergris 43 times. Most recently, as F&L has expanded into areas other than bookselling, it has been engaged in what amounts to a war with H&S over ownership ofSophiaIsland. See also: Albumuth Boulevard; Banker Warriors;Manzikert Memorial Library; Midnight for Munfroe; Saphant Empire, The;SophiaIsland.
FUNGUS. A type of spore-reproducing “plant” that is usually quite harmless. One of Samuel Tonsure’s favorite words — the most frequently-appearing word in his journal after the words “the,” “a,” “and,” “that,” “blood,” and “fear.” James Lacond, backed by evidence discovered in Marmey Gort’s copious notes, has postulated that the gray caps have grown a giant fungus below the southern half of Ambergris. According to Lacond, this fungus started as a single spore but, using black shoestring filaments to expand, now covers 2,000 acres and has a width of three feet. By mapping fungal concentrations of the golden mushrooms that pop up after rainfall — the physical manifestation of the “Monster” as Lacond calls it — he drew a controversial outline of its expanse that is strikingly similar to a mushroom in shape (now on display at the Morhaim Museum). Many trees in the city may actually be hollow husks, according to Lacond, their insides infiltrated by fungal spies. Lacond has not offered any theories as to the purpose behind this huge fungus, whether evil or benign. See also: Cababari; Dispossessed, The; Gort, Marmey; Lacond, James; Monster, The;MorhaimMuseum.
FUNGUS SHIP, THE. See: Thrush, The.
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GALLERY OF HIDDEN FASCINATIONS. A gallery often considered the flagship of the ideals of the New Art, founded by Janice Shriek. When it closed, the New Art movement lost its momentum and eventually fragmented into a number of splinter groups, including the Found Art movement, the Body Art movement (enthusiastically endorsed by the Living Saints), and the controversial Shadow Art movement.
See also: Living Saints; New Art, The; Shadow Art Movement, The.
GLARING, MAXWELL. The author of Midnight for Munfroe, The Problem With Krotch, Munfroe’s Return, Krotch Strikes Back, Munfroe Reborn, Krotch Reborn, Krotch’s Triumph,Munfroe’s Legacy, Krotch’s World, Son of Munfroe, Krotch’s Last Stand, A Krotchless World, Krotch’s Legacy, Son of Munfroe II, Krotch and Munfroe: The Lost Memoirs, and, posthumously, The End of the Legacy of Krotch and Munfroe. See also : Bender, Voss; Krotch; Munfroe; Midnight for Munfroe.
GORT, MARMEY. Marmey Gort kept minutely detailed records of city inhabitants’ sanitary habits, including their storage of refuse. A typical entry reads: “Subject Z — outhouse use increase: av. 7x/day (5 min. av. ea.); note: garbage output up 3x for week: connex?” Gort even managed to track gray cap garbage pickup habits and concluded that if the gray caps were using the vast amounts of garbage as food or as mulch to grow food, the gray cap population under the city could exceed 300,000. No one listened to him. No one likes bad news. But Gort didn’t care that no one listened to him — he went right on with his research, leaving behind 6,000 pages of observations when he died at the age of 70. Later, the Kalif would use the journals to successfully invade the city. See also: Banker Warriors; Fungus; Occupation, The.
GRAY TRIBES. Successors to the Aan in theSouthern Islands. Implacable, cultured and barbaric at the same time. Thrilled to the opening of a book as much as to the opening of an enemy’s throat. Denied a foothold on the continent by the Arch Duke of Malid, who thrilled only to the opening of throats and therefore put more enthusiasm into the endeavor. See also: Aandalay, Isle of; Malid, Arch Duke of; Saltwater Buzzard.
GREENS. A political movement and amateur military force intended to defend the interests and person of the composer nee politician Voss Bender. The remnants of the Greens ended their days as part of a music guild that provided piano lessons to youngsters. See also: Bender, Voss; Borges Bookstore; Manzikert Memorial Library; Reds.
GRNNCK, HARAGCK KHAN. Responsible for the failed amphibious attack on Ambergris during The Silence. Grnnck had complicated tastes. Utterly ruthless and without peer in the arts of deception, he was also enamored of frogs and all things connected to frogs. He may have possessed the largest collection of frog art in the world, from paintings to sculptures and wood carvings. Torn from his youth in the Southern swamps to join the Haragck who invaded his remote homeland, Grnnck quickly rose through the ranks until, by a stroke of luck, he managed to best the old Khan in single combat and replace him. No doubt love of frogs, a vestige of his youth he did not wish to relinquish, proved his downfall. Who can doubt this love made the idea of an amphibious invasion of Ambergris so attractive? See also: Blgkkydks, Heckira.
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HELLATOSE & BAUBLE. Although real enough, this squid-and-man circus act reached its zenith of popularity as a cartoon strip inked and written by the reclusive M. Kodfan. See also: Kodfan, M.; Madnok, Frederick.
HOEGBOTTON, HENRY. A good friend and accomplice.
HOEGBOTTON, RICHARD. After several false starts, the Hoegbottons finally established a foothold in Ambergris due to this member of the clan. Over a period of 20 years, Richard Hoegbotton crushed Slattery and Ungdom, his main competitors, and established the beginnings of a mercantile network that today spans from the Southern Isles to the lands of the Skamoo. See also: Hyggboutten.
HOEGBOTTON GUIDE TO SMALL, INDIGENOUS MAMMALS, THE. The definitive guide to the fascinating variety of small, indigenous mammals found in the southern climes, including the tarsier, the wrinkled-lip bat, and the moonrat. The lengthy and rather dramatic chapter on the mating dance of the wooly monkey has long been considered an eccentric classic. See also: Borges Bookstore, The; Cababari; Daffed, Xaver; Moonrat; Trillian the Great Banker.
HOLY LITTLE RED FLOWER, THE. One of two central ideas behind the unnamed faith created by the fighting philosopher Richard Peterson, the other being the destruction of the “Strattonist bicameral brain followers.” Peterson told the story of “The Holy Little Red Flower that Grows by the Side of the Road” at most of his gatherings, formal and informal. Taken from the third volume of his Dodecahedron (Book of Petals, Chapters 3–411, inclusive), published privately by the Holy Brotherhood of the Red Stamen, the tale is generally incomprehensible without the proper religious training. See also: Peterson, Richard; Strattonism.
HYGGBOUTTEN. A clan of nomadic horsemen originating in the far west, near Nysimia. A ruthless people driven east by the even more ferocious Haragck. The Hyggboutten forced the peaceful Yakuda peoples out of their valley and assimilated such Yakuda skills as weaving into their own culture. After driving the Haragck out of the Kalif’s empire, the Kalif’s armies turned their attentions to Yakuda, destroying the Hyggboutten and their bondsmen as a political and cultural force. The remnants of the Hyggboutten fled to the frozen north and eventually became assimilated into eastern cultures in such places as Urlskinder, Morrow, and Nicea. Some clan members changed their name to the more eastern-sounding “Hoegbotton” and, over time, descendents such as Richard Hoegbotton founded the Hoegbotton & Sons trading empire. The Hyggboutten were renowned for their skills with horses and their elaborate burial rites. After death, Hyggboutten leaders were flayed from head to foot, their organs scooped out and mummified. Priests purified the remaining skeleton and flesh by laying it out on a litter to dry. The priests also treated the skin with a preservative and a clan artist tattooed it with scenes from the leader’s exploits while alive. The mummified organs were then placed back within the dried skeleton and the skin stretched over the bones and grinning skull. The next phase of burial included the ritualistic slaughter of the leader’s horses, his servants, and his wife. The horses were transformed into spirit beasts by attaching antlers to their heads and scrawling sacred symbols across their skin. The Hyggboutten then dug a huge pit, built a small house in the pit, planted shrubs and trees around the house, and placed the leader, horses, servants, and wife inside the various rooms of the house. A period of ten days of mourning followed, after which the pit was filled in, burying the house and the dead alike. The Hyggboutten would wait for two weeks before building an identical house above ground on the same location as the buried house. This house would be filled with small pebbles carried by fast riders from any nearby sea or river and delicately placed within the house by virgins no older than 18. Once the house had been filled with pebbles, a Hyggboutten priest consecrated the ground and a tent stitched together by a dozen Hyggboutten women was placed over the house. The leader’s eldest son or daughter would then set fire to the tent cloth, the flames also devouring the wooden beams of the house and leaving a pile of scorched pebbles. Each member of the clan would then take a pebble, while still hot — to remind them of the pain of their loss — to keep with them for the next six weeks, after which they would be required to bury the pebble wherever they had camped for the night. Then each member of the clan would carve a stick with the likeness of the fallen leader’s “animal of power” and drive it into the ground to mark the location of the pebble. If the clan returned to that site in a year’s time and all the pebbles were found, the leader’s soul had passed on to the after-world successfully. However, if even one pebble could not be found, the Hyggboutten were duty-bound to return to the place of burial and build another house full of pebbles atop the site, stitch together another tent, and repeat the entire process. Over time, and as they were dispersed by the Kalif, the Hyggboutten abandoned this ritual simply because they did not have time to observe it. See also: Hoegbotton, Richard.
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IBONOF, IBONOF. A heretic once named simply Ibonof. A former member of the Truffidian Church. Excommunicated after having a vision in which he appeared to himself and proclaimed himself “divine.” Spent the rest of his life talking to himself and seeing double.
INSTITUTEOFRELIGIOUSITY. See: Morrow ReligiousInstitute.
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JERSAK, SIMON. An unusually socially-mobile individual who eventually became known for his funny and insightful pamphlets about tax collecting and tax collectors. Although usually attributed to Sirin, the quote “those days when taxation has become a thing of beauty” was first written by Jersak. His advice to ordinary citizens is studded with laconic satire: “When a traveler came to some narrow defile, he would be startled by the sudden appearance of a tax-gatherer, sitting aloft like a thing uncanny.” See also: Sirin.
JONES, STRETCHER. A poet and blacksmith born in Thajad, a southern province of the Kalif’s Empire, who rose to become a leader of men. Driven to fight by the predations of Truffidian priests and the Kalif’s troops upon the poor, Jones raised an army of his impoverished peers and, for a time, captured the southern expanse of the Kalif’s Empire. A brilliant tactician and yet a gentle soul, his is a tragic story, too long to summarize here. If Stretcher Jones had been victorious, he would have led us all to a better place. There are still those in this world who hold fast to his ideals. His most famous speech was his shortest, to the satrap of Thajad demanding justice:
I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything in this world, but I know everyone does not see alike. To the eyes of your tax collectors, a sel is more beautiful than the sun and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. To the eyes of your soldiers, the shedding of blood brings tears of joy that might in others be brought forth only by the sight of a tree heavy with fruit. Some see in man’s nature only ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce remark on man’s nature at all. But to the eyes of the true, this is not so. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers. You certainly mistake when you say that such visions are fancy and not to be found in this world. To me, this world should be all one continued vision of goodness.
See also: Masouf; Nadal, Thomas; Oliphaunt; Saltwater Buz zard.
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KALIF, THE. Any one of 80 anonymous, sequential rulers of the great western empire. Known for taking great risks incognito. Often killed in freak accidents of a macabre but humorous nature. One of the more absurd theories put forth is that Samuel Tonsure was an incognito Kalif. Over time, the Kalif’s scientists have invented such modern conveniences as the microscope, the gun, the telephone, and the cheese grater. See also: Ambergris; Banker Warriors; Brueghel, Michael; Busker, Alan; Cooks of Kalay; Royal Genealogist;Saltwater Buzzard.
KODFAN, M. The creator of the popular Hellatose & Bauble cartoon strip. Kodfan was never seen by the editors of the broadsheets in which his inked antics were eagerly consumed by children and adults alike. As one editor remembers, “Every third day of the week, a messenger would arrive at my office, usually on a unicycle for some reason. It was always a different messenger, perhaps because the unicycle is hard to master. I never saw Kodfan. One time I asked the messenger what he looked like. He told me Kodfan looked ‘hooded.’ I asked what on earth that meant. The lad said ‘Kodfan had a hood on.’ I never found out anything about him except that he was fond of squid. Then, one day, the messenger stopped coming. I never heard from Kodfan again. We had to hire that Verden character to ink the strip.
It was never the same — Verden wanted Hellatose to pontificate about Strattonism. Eventually, I had to put a stop to it and we discontinued the cartoon altogether. That was when I began to have the fuzzy ribbon dreams, but that is an unrelated issue.” See also: Hellatose & Bauble; Frederick Madnok; Strattonism; Verden, Louis.
KRETCHEN, THE GRAY CAP HUNTER. Around the time of The Silence, rumors began to spread of a man, cloaked in shadow, mystery, and something fashionably black with a silver lining, who went underground to kill gray caps. Some said he was the cousin of Red Martigan, seeking revenge. Others, that he was half gray cap himself and sought only to find his mother. Regardless, Kretchen never bothered to leave the shadows long enough to take a bow and so historians have placed him in that purgatory known as “possible but not probable.” The cappers, on the other hand, have adopted him as their patron saint, putting out “scarecaps” dressed in long black cloaks. See also: Cap pers; Martigan, Red; Disappeared, The.
KRISTINA OF MALFOUR, LEPRESS SAINT. With each little bit of her that fell off, she came a little bit closer to Sainthood. Other than her ability to shed body parts with apparent nonchalance, no historian has ever found any reason why she should have been sainted by the Truffidians. She appears to have sat around a lot and eaten hundreds of servings of rice pudding while watching her family work in the fields of the communal farm outside Ambergris. See also: Living Saints.
KROTCH. The villain of Maxwell Glaring’s Krotch and Munfroe action/detective series. Krotch is described in the first book, Midnight for Munfroe, as “a tall man, so slender that sideways he might melt into the shadows that had already taken his soul. His gaze, when he brought it to bear upon a man, would show that man the dissolution of his own morals, so dead were they and carious. His mane of black hair cowled him in his evil.” Yet by Krotch’s Last Stand, Krotch is described variously as “stout,” “portly,” “emaciated,” both a “black, scuttling beetle, low to the ground ” and a “wisp torn from the wind in his ethereal height,” with “dirty blonde hair” and later “reddish-tinged locks that hung like snakes to his waist.” Perhaps signaling that Glaring had grown tired of the series. See also: Glaring, Maxwell; Krotch; Midnight for Munfroe; Munfroe.
KUBIN, ALFRED. A psychologist who specialized in the study of the underlying causes of squidanthropy. Over time, he came to comprehend these causes all too well, becoming a frequent patron of the most nefarious squid clubs. When a Truffi dian priest refused to marry him to a female squid he met in a club’s wading pond, Kubin became violent and set fires all across the city during one delirious night of arson. Several historic institutions, including the oldest of the Hoegbotton safehouses, sustained severe fire damage. When finally captured, Kubin was incarcerated in the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute alongside his former patients, many of whom reportedly laughed uproariously before administering a severe beating. See also: Madnok, Frederick.
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LACOND, JAMES. An eccentric historian whose theories of the gray caps have largely been dismissed (unfairly) by the reading public, other historians, and even by the unemployed carpenter who for years haunted the sidewalk outside Lacond’s apartment overlooking Voss Bender Memorial Square. His pamphlets have been exclusively distributed by the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society. Among his writings is the essay “An Argument for the Gray Caps and Against the Evidence of Tonsure’s Eyes. ” Known for his frequent visits to Zamilon. See also: Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society; Rats; Zamilon.
LEOPRAN, GEORGE. A Scathadian writer and diplomat best known for his seven-page account of his journey to and from Ambergris. Also the author of the 3,000-page novel A Sliver of Time, which covers one day in the life of a lonely goat herder. In minute detail. The novel includes a 200-page diatribe castigating Manzikert III as an example of the abuse of power. See also: Scatha.
LIVING SAINTS. The long history of the Living Saints predates the Truffidian religion, which embraced the saints for their own purposes. Based on the premise that bodily functions are the most sacred signs of God in human beings, Living Saints endure solitary lives of poverty. There are four orders: the Order of Flatulence, the Order of Ejaculations, the Order of Defecations, and the Order of Urination. The saints spend years perfecting their particular specialty and thus honoring “the God that made us mortal” as the scriptures read. Many other religions hire these saints as guards because they are so disgusting they scare away criminals. Manzikert III was once mistaken for a Living Saint in the Order of Flatulence. See also: Kristina of Malfour.
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MADNOK, FREDERICK. A flamboyant amateur squidologist of some renown who belonged to the sporn-spurn religion. (The numbers of this particular cult dwindled significantly upon the formal declaration of their views, due to a number of unexplained disappearances.) Suffered a nervous breakdown when, due to a printer’s error, octopi images were placed in one of his squid monographs. See also: Hellatose & Bauble; Kodfan, M.
MALID, ARCH DUKE OF. Once upon a time, the Arch Duke of Malid was a little boy who tortured insects and small animals. He kept journals of these activities that have survived down to the present day (and which are of great interest to insect collectors and taxidermists for the intense detail of their descriptions). At first, the Duke’s father applauded the Duke’s industriousness in keeping a journal. No doubt he felt differently when he discovered himself, a little too late, on: “Note to self: Above a battlement, on a wall, on a spike, the bloody head of my father.” See also: Gray Tribes, The; Saltwater Buzzard.
MANDIBLE, RICHARD. One of Ambergris’ foremost early economists and social scientists. Unfortunately, Richard’s respectable reputation has been eclipsed by his brother Roger’s artwork, which was at the center of the New Art’s Great Earwax Scandal, as some wags have called it. Roger, it turned out, procured earwax from the lithesome ears of his sleeping lovers and mixed it into his paint; thus the marvelous amber tint to the sunsets on display at the Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. When the source of the amber tint was discovered, Roger suffered little career damage, but staid Richard, scandalized, never fully recovered from the incident. See also: Gallery of Hid den Fascinations; New Art, The.
MANZIISM. The rat-worshipping heretic religion inadvertently founded by Manzikert I near the end of his life. This cult has had little or no influence on history while inexplicably continuing to thrive, at least in Ambergris. Nothing sticks in the throats of Truffidian priests in the Religious Quarter more than the sight of rat bishops, rat clerics, and just plain old rat-bastards paraded down the street during the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, a-glitter in their specially-made robes and silver crowns. See also: Manzikert VI; Manzikert VII; Manzikert VIII; Moonrat; Rats.
MANZIKERT VI. Death by bliss. In all fairness to the sixth Manzikert’s moral fiber, he never really wanted to be Cappan of Ambergris. He was only too happy to retire to a monastery, especially a Manziist monastery. In those days, the only difference between a Manziist monastery and a brothel was that the latter attracted more priests. See also: Manziism; Manzikert VII; Manzikert VIII.
MANZIKERT VII. Death by an extreme miscalculation while flossing. Of his actual reign, the less said the better. See also: Manziism; Manzikert VI; Manzikert VIII.
MANZIKERT VIII. Death by tire tread. An expert at staging extravaganzas, Manzikert VIII had no notable political or military victories during his reign. He has the dubious distinction of being the first historical personage to be killed by a very early form of steam-powered motored vehicle (during the Festival). An entire line of motored vehicles was later named The Manzikert. See also: Manziism; Manzikert VI; Manzikert VII.
MANZIKERT MEMORIAL LIBRARY. Oddly enough, the ineffectual Manzikert III established the Manzikert Memorial Library. He established the library to house his ever-expanding collection of recipes and cookbooks. Since that time, the library has grown to include a healthy selection of fiction, secret documents, and erotica. The position of chief librarian has often been a political as well as administrative position, as when, during the conflict of the Reds and the Greens, the library became a repository for Voss Bender sheet music. Built in the same location as the gray caps’ original “library,” the Manzikert Memorial Library has experienced some of the strangest fungal outbreaks in Ambergris’ history. See also: Abrasis, Michael; Frankwrithe & Lewden; Fungus; Greens; Reds.
MAP, BRANDON. An unfortunate splotch.
MARTIGAN, RED. Leader of a doomed underground expedition against the gray caps. This victim of his own curiosity would otherwise have passed out of history altogether. Instead, due to his overwhelming stupidity, Ambergris remembers him as being somehow larger-than-life. He is frequently an inhabitant of horror and ghost stories — in a sense, more substantial in memory than in the flesh. See also: Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society; Cappers; Kretchen.
MASOUF. The general who finally defeated Stretcher Jones and personally slew the great rebel leader.
He is said to have wept over the body of his adversary. After so many years of battling Stretcher Jones, Masouf was distraught to have finally destroyed the only man who had been his equal in military skill and tactics. In his journal entry that fateful day, Masouf wrote, “As I stared into that pale, bloodied face, as I cupped his head with my hands as he breathed his last, I felt as if I were staring into my own face, into an ill-fated reflection, and as the life flickered out of his eyes, so too the life briefly seemed to have left me as well.” Masouf relieved himself of his own command three days later, and after an unsuccessful suicide attempt left his wife and children and spent the next 20 years as a recluse in the self-imposed solitude of Zamilon. He would eventually take up Stretcher Jones’ struggle and for a brief time liberated the Kalif’s western-most vassals from servitude, before being defeated by a general more brilliant than even he.
Masouf died when his horse, spooked by a rabbit, threw him as he fled the battlefield. See also: Jones, Stretcher; Zamilon.
MIDNIGHT FOR MUNFROE. The first volume in Maxwell Glaring’s series of novels detailing the adversarial relationship between the anti-hero Munfroe and the criminally-insane Krotch. Voss Bender once considered writing an opera based on this book, but abandoned the idea after reading the complete series. Bender’s purported reason? “There is too much Krotch in the world already.” The book first appeared as a serial in Dreadful Tales, which may explain the staccato “voice” of the book — its high number of cliff hangers and near-escapes. Glaring found the story’s success inexplicable and, vowing never again to write a Munfroe-Krotch story, proceeded to churn out a large number of them. See also: Bender, Voss; Dreadful Tales; Glaring, Maxwell; Krotch; Munfroe.
MIKAL, DRAY. Randomly chosen to be the Petularch by a ceremonial bull, as is still the custom. Let loose by the Priests of the Seven-Edged Star, the ceremonial bull was allowed to roam free until it had chosen a Petularch. The selection process consisted of any “sign” from the bull deemed suffi ciently conclusive by the priests. Although the “sign” from the bull in this case has been lost in the garbage heap of unimportant facts, it is known that Mikal was a fruit-on-a-stick vendor before his Ascension. He had immigrated to Ambergris from a small city north of Morrow called Skaal. Luckily, the position of Petularch has been largely irrelevant ever since the overthrow of the Church of the Seven-Edged Star several centuries ago. See also: Caroline of the Church of the Seven Pointed Star.
MONSTER, THE. Depending on the context, either a huge sewer ball or a huge ball of fungus. See also: Cappers; Fungus.
MOONRAT. A pure white rat, about the size of a terrier, that gathers at midnight to drink from tributaries of the River Moth. It feeds on honeysuckle nectar and fungi (to which latter food is attributed the fact that some moonrats glow an intense green in the dead of night). Sacred to the Nimblytod Tribes, the moonrat is also of some significance to Manziists, who every year make the dangerous pilgrimage to the southern rainforests to observe the moonrat in its natural habitat. The moonrat’s mating call is sonorous and deep, akin to the sound that emanates from the long horns used by the monks of Zamilon. The symphony created by the moonrat in concert with the Nimblytod’s mouth-music is said to rival even Voss Bender for its odd mixture of vulnerability and strength. See also: Bender, Voss; Manziists; Nimblytod Tribes, The; Zamilon.
MORHAIMMUSEUM. A repository over the years of many strange and eccentric treasures, from first editions of Vivian Price Rogers’ Torture Squid books to gray cap knives. Thomas Daffed’s priceless five-thousand specimen collection may be theMorhaimMuseum ’s crowning glory. The Morhaim family has remained sharply a-political throughout the years and thereby gained the confidence of many influential figures in Ambergris. See also: Daffed Zoo; Fungus; Rogers, Vivian Price; Spacklenest, Edgar.
MORROW RELIGIOUS INSTITUTE. Although Ambergris is the city of religions, Morrow is the city of religious studies. As Morrow is in all ways removed from the lustful thrust of real life, so too is it removed from its spiritual heart to the extent that it holds its faith at arm’s length, the better to examine faith’s anatomy. The Morrow Religious Institute is the most famously able at this dissection process. However, despite producing some famous religious figures and teachers, a disturbing number of its graduates, once exposed to religion-in-the-raw, have either “gone native” or succumbed to the pleasures of this too mortal flesh. Formerly theInstituteofReligiousity. See also: Menites; Signal, Cadimon.
MUNFROE. The ever-weary anti-hero of Maxwell Glaring’s Krotch and Munfroe series, Munfroe is a protean sort whose past changes from book to book. First the son of humble farmers who travels to the city to become an accountant, Munfroe later becomes the son of accountants who travels to the country to become a humble farmer. Other incarnations include parents who serve stints in the circus, the army, as doctors, and as carpenters, variously. Only one thing is for sure: Munfroe had parents. See also: Glaring, Maxwell; Krotch.
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NADAL, THOMAS. He who died in infamy, his fate too sad to relate here. Let him rest in peace as he could not in life. Faithful to his lover and faithful to his city. A curse on all of those who would defame him for his sole moment of weakness. See also: Jones, Stretcher.
NEW ART, THE. An oxymoron. See also: Burning Leaves; Gallery of Hidden Fascinations; Mandible, Richard; Shadow Art Movement, The; Sporlender, Nicholas; Verden, Louis.
NIMBLYTOD TRIBES. This tree-dwelling people, wiry but strong, has inhabited the southern rainforests for centuries, weaving their bird-like huts in the crooks of sturdy branches. Oblivious to the efforts of Truffidian missionaries to convert them, the Nimblytod still worship the sacred moonrat and the plumed thrush hen. Members of the tribe can make flute-like sounds without instruments and the concerts that often break the silence of the tree cover can seem “like the songs of beautiful angels,” as one shaken missionary put it. The Nimblytod confirm their independence by blowdarting anyone who enters their territory. (Most casualties in recent years, however, have been Manziists.) The poison used in their blowdarts results in a prolonged period of fever, followed by malaise and then a sudden and intense passion for whatever object the sufferer happens to gaze upon at that moment. Eventually, dementia and death follow, like sullen cousins. See also: Manziists; Moonrat.
NUNK, AUTARCH OF. Although a real historical figure, the Autarch is more commonly known to children and adults as the happy fool of Voss Bender’s Nunk poems, which contain such rhymes as “The Autarch of Nunk/ Was a collector of junk/Which he kept in a trunk/Beside his pet skunk” and “The Autarch of Nunk/Loved to get drunk/And, in the grip of a sudden funk,/Pass out fitfully on his bunk.” Several critics have complained that a less famous personage would not have been able to get such doggerel published, but the illustrations by Kinsky in the omnibus version amply make up for the simplistic verse. Recently, amongst the few possessions left by Michael Abrasis to the Manzikert Memorial Library, archivists discovered a second set of Nunk poems, decidedly more adult, as this excerpt demonstrates: “The Autarch of Nunk/Liked women with spunk/To wiggle and tickle/His enormous pink pickle.” (Although some historians believe this is a gardening reference.) See also: Abrasis, Michael; Bender, Voss.
NYSIMIA. A western city known for death, dust, beer, and, more recently, for ridiculous theories involving pony-riding invaders, old dead men, and the gray caps. See also: Hyggboutten.
NYSMAN, MICHAEL. A native of Nicea, Nysman was a high-ranking Truffi dian priest. Although ostensibly sent to Ambergris to assuage the suffering of those who had survived The Silence, documents unearthed since his death clearly indicate that the Truffidian Church had sent him to Ambergris for other reasons entirely. Nysman’s mission was two-fold: to research The Silence to determine its cause and also to develop a psychological profile of people in extreme distress and deliver a written report to the Antechamber of Nicea on ways to exploit this distress for converts. Nysman’s report on psychological distress is less interesting than his report on the cause of The Silence, which includes the following sentences: “With all due respect, I do not know what good it will do us to find out the cause of this affl iction. Surely the truth will be too horrible for any of us to hold within ourselves, and yet we could not loose such knowledge upon the world. The only words I can use to describe the utter despair that settles over me in this city are ‘without God.’ I feel entirely without God in this city.” Later in the report, Nysman writes that around the time of The Silence several sheep herders saw strange lights during the night, emanating from Alfar. Nysman finds this fact to be of supreme importance, but instead of visiting Alfar, he abruptly changed his itinerary to visit Zamilon, for reasons that are lost to us. See also: Alfar; Zamilon.
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OCCUPATION, THE. The term given to the 100 days during which the Kalif’s troops occupied Ambergris. With the exception of The Silence, The Occupation was the bleakest period of Ambergrisian history. If not for the ingenuity and pluck of ordinary citizens, The Occupation would have lasted much longer. As this letter from David Ampers, the owner of a local tavern, The Ruby-Throated Cafe, to his cousin in Morrow (the infamous “fighting philosopher” Richard Peterson) demonstrates, the Kalif’s troops did not have an easy time of it:
Why, I had just said to my old friend Steen Potter (you remember Steen from your last visit — the watch salesman?) as we sat drinking at the Cafe and sharpening our knives to an unparalleled sharpness — I had just said that the city, our beloved Ambergris, had been stuck in a sort of malaise, a doldrums, the whole summer, when what should I and every other citizen of the city find nailed to our doors but a barbaric sheet of paper from the Empire of the Kalif that read thusly:
“Noblest of the Gods, King and Master of the whole World, Son of the previous Kalif, the new Kalif, to Ambergris, his vile and insensate slave: Refusing to submit to our rule, you call yourselves lord and sovereign. You seize and distribute our treasure, you deceive our servants.
You never cease to annoy us with your bands of brigands. Have I not destroyed you? I suppose I must destroy you more utterly than you have ever been destroyed before. Beware Ambergris!
Beware!”
Oh, I thought to myself, now this was promising. An ultimatum! This promised to shake us out of our rut — a real threat! And backed up too! So of course Ambergris spread her arms to the aggressor, the better to love him to death. The messenger prior to invasion was a broadsheet boy who ran past screaming, “Armies of the Kalif cross the river, crush the free armies of the Cappan!” In a stroke, Ambergris had fallen, after five years of snapping at our flanks by the Kalif — such a tease. All right, we could live with that, but did the boy have to scream it out to the world? There is such a thing as pride, my cousin, and although perhaps Steen over-reacted a little, no one complained when he took aim, let fly, and dropped the lad with a stone thrown to the head. Pride is very important to us here, although you may not understand that, not having been born in the city…
So the Kalif’s troops invaded and we all came out to lineAlbumuth Boulevard for the obligatory Parade of Conquerors. It was a bright, breezy day and the swallows flew through the sky like knives. The Kalif’s men formed a supposedly impenetrable wall on either side of the street, armed with spears, swords, and small cannons. It appeared they thought the local population might cause some sort of problem. Steen and I exchanged a meaningful glance. All we wanted to do was welcome the invading army to our city.
The Kalif’s general, the Great One as he was called, made for an impressive sight, with his emerald turban, white ostrich plumes, silver spurs, and the eight gray oliphaunts that lurched along behind him. At least, he was impressive until someone in the crowd sent a blade flying through his throat. My, what a lot of blood he had in him — and it certainly seemed as red as anyone else’s would have been in a similar situation. Alas, the assassin slipped away in the resulting turmoil.
When order had been restored, we crowded up the palace steps and watched as the mayor, the defeated Cappan at his side in chains, relinquished, in a formal ceremony, the keys to the city, and gave the sacramental sword to the new Great One (hastily recruited from among five resplendent if fiercely sweating officers). The Cappan performed these duties with a slight smirk and a conspiratorial wink to the crowd. The Cappan’s personal bodyguards, too, were in a particularly mirthful mood, considering the circumstances. Indeed, one would at times during the ceremony have had difficulty determining who was slave and who was victor… The Great One, as he looked out on the crowd, seemed discomfited by the applause, the ready smiles, as we showed our teeth. A flicker of fear flashed across the Great One’s face before tranquility once again overtook those fine, western features.
It didn’t last long, of course, although I shall, in the interests of saving my hands from gripping this pen for hours and you of reading into boredom, summarize the events of the next 100 days.
Inevitably, the second Great One was poisoned and the third found garroted in his palace, so the Kalif had no choice but to order the mayor of our fair metropolis hanged by the neck until dead.
I’m sure he did not expect what happened at the hanging: We all cheered as our mayor went to a better (or at least cleaner!) place. We’d never much liked him anyway, and would probably have done the deed ourselves in a few more months. But then, following the execution, we rioted and killed many of the Kalif’s soldiers because, after all, he was one of us, even if he had been an incompetent, embezzling bastard.
From then on, it was just a matter of time. Each dawn saw another set of foreigners’ heads on spikes down by various city fountains. Each sunset was occasion for mingled screams and pleas for mercy. Everywhere they turned: the confluence of fate and malice in the ancient stone face of the city. When they came to my establishment, why, I treated them like kings, using a slow-acting poison to kill several of them over a period of days. Some trickster they trusted told them that the red flags strewn across the city were flags of defiance, so the Kalif’s men tore them up, angering the gray caps, who stirred and clicked amongst themselves before “disappearing” the Kalif’s men in droves. The zoo keeper let the big cats free right into the barracks of the Great One’s personal guard. Store owners crept up to the Kalif’s cannon after dark and poured sand and glue in the muzzles. Priests in the Religious Quarter stoned patrols to death for violating obscure, out-of-date rules and then pleaded exemption from punishment on grounds of conflicting faiths.
Finally, one day, they simply left, cousin, and never returned. We boxed the bones they had left behind into the walls of abandoned buildings. We burned their carts. We appropriated their horses. We scrubbed the palace clean. We re-instated the Cappan. And, once again, we cheerfully settled down to govern ourselves, ever so refreshed by this little interlude, this experiment in occupation by a foreign empire… So you should come visit again soon, cousin. The cafe is doing well and we would be glad to have you. The city is beautiful this time of year.
Fondly,
David Ampers
See also: Banfour, Archduke of; Kalif, The; Oliphaunt; Peter son, Richard.
ODECCA BICHORAL WHITE WHALE. The most intelligent of sea-going mammals, venerated by the Church of the Fisherman, prized by zoologists, and possessed of a brain so large that its skull is lopsided. Odecca Whales must always swim at a diagonal, their heads preferably resting on the surface while their massive stern fins churn relentlessly. If they stop swimming for even a minute, the massive head will cause them to sink to the bottom and drown. By necessity, the whale is a surface feeder. See also: Church of the Fisherman; Daffed Zoo.
OLIPHAUNT. One of Tonsure’s favorite mammals, these great gray creatures almost ended Stretcher Jones’ rebellion at the outset. Their sudden introduction into battle, brought from the jungle plains of the far southwest, caused such panic at the Battle of Richter that Jones was lucky to escape with his life. Xaver Daffed found this usually gentle mammal so compelling that he devoted two volumes of his A History of Animals to it. Manzikert III found oliphaunts so succulent that toward the end of his reign he ate their flesh to the exclusion of all else. The Kalif, upon his temporary subjugation of Ambergris, planned to build a palace that would have represented the apogee of the oliphaunt motif in architecture: a vast structure in the shape of an oliphaunt. The plans included hindquarters fashioned to resemble a glen with its own running brook and a theater in the front. See also: Ambergris Gastronomic Association; Daffed, Xaver; Jones, Stretcher; Occupation, The.
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PEJORA, MIDAN. The most famous architect in Ambergris’ history. He holds primary responsibility for the grandest buildings in the city, including the Cappan’s Palace. Pejora could best be classified as an “idiot genius.” From an early age, he erected incredible models of buildings out of wood, sand, and rock, but he could not even graduate from grade school. His parents eventually taught him as best they could at home, and many were the times neighbors would complain because Pejora had erected some new architectural monstro-city in the family’s front yard.
PETERSON, RICHARD. Founder of an unnamed faith that preaches the story of the little red flower that grows by the side of the road. The faith uses a calendar of 12 months comprising 30 days each. Each year ends with the five-day Festival of the Holy Little Red Flower, which includes the Day of Seed, the Day of Root, the Day of Stem, the Day of Leaf, and the Day of Bloom. (A splinter faction called the “Scientific Reformists” inserts the Day of Budding before the Day of Bloom every fourth year, rather than the universally symmetrical five-year cycle recognized by the true followers of the faith. Violent confrontations have been known to occur during this false celebration of the Day of Budding.) The Five Volumes of the Dodecahedron represent the only true written teachings of the Faith. Each volume is divided into twelve books (Petal, Sepal, Stigma, Style, Ovary, Pistil, Stamen, Pollen, Anther, Filament, Nectar, and Calyx). Each book is divided into 240 chapters with 30 verses each. Adherents are generally recognizable by their trademark red sashes and precise pentagonal tonsures. The Brotherhood of the Red Stamen, an order of the Faith, is famous for its scholarship and teaching. Specializing primarily in geometry and horticulture, the gardens which surround each of the five monasteries of the order are justly renowned and lead many thousands each year to join the faith. An unfinished cathedral devoted to expressing the Dodecahedron in physical form may one day supplant the gardens as a mechanism of mass conversions. See also: Holy Little Red Flower, The; Strattonism; Verden, Louis.
PORFAL. An inventor best known for his Porfal Memory Capsule, a festival necessity. Porfal also developed a coin shaped like a knife, issued by Hoegbotton & Sons as a commemorative item and hastily discontinued after numerous stabbings occurred at the subsequent Festival. His most controversial inventions were erotic in nature, including the honey-powered Orgasm Machine, the Mechanical Toe-Sucker, and the infamous Inverted Maiden, into which hapless men in search of ecstasy descended only to find the demands of pleasure too great for their hearts to withstand. See also: Burning Leaves; Cappers; Monster, The; Spacklenest, Edgar.
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RATS. In sewers. In religions. In words like pirate, desperate, and narrative. Rats infest this glossary as surely as words and mushrooms. See also: Ambergris; Lacond, James; Manziism; Moonrat.
REAL HISTORY NEWSLETTER, THE. A fringe publication that has allowed many historians in exile to have their say under the safety of pseudonyms. See also: Ambergrisians for the Real Inhabitants Society; Lacond, James.
REDS. Originally founded to oppose the interests of the composer nee politician Voss Bender, the remnants of the Reds ended their days running a small tavern on the southern edge of Ambergris and hosting dart competitions. See also: Bender, Voss; Borges Bookstore; Greens; Manzikert Memorial Library.
ROGERS, VIVIAN PRICE. Brought up on a farm as the only girl in a family that included eight brothers,Rogers revenged herself on her unruly, brawling brethren by re-imagining them as the Torture Squid. For many years the Torture Squid books outsold even the works of Henry Flack in Ambergris’ many bookstalls. In later years,Rogers accepted an honorary position at the Borges Bookstore while her brothers continued their lives of dawn-till-dusk drudgery back on the farm. See also: Borges Bookstore; Morhaim Museum.
ROYAL GENEALOGIST. A position in the Kalif’s Empire much shrouded in secrecy. Only the Royal Genealogist knows the true identity of the Kalif, but can publish only the vaguest facts about the royal personage. Although the theory cannot be proven, many historians, this one excluded, believe that on more than one occasion the Royal Genealogist has actually been the Kalif. See also: Kalif, The.
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SABON, MARY. An aggressive and sometimes brilliant historian who built her reputation on the bones of older, love-struck historians. Five-ten. One-fifteen. Red hair. Green, green eyes. An elegant dresser.
Smile like fire. Foe of James Lacond. In conversation can cut with a single word. Author of several books. See also: Lacond, James.
SAFE HOUSE. A place, usually controlled by Hoegbotton & Sons, where travelers could seek shelter during the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. Most safe houses provided little packets of useless products and information to assuage the fears of its temporary tenants. This packet usually included some insipid festival “story.” See: Verden, Louis.
SAINT PHILIP THE PHILANDERER. A Living Saint who was kicked out of the Order of Ejaculation because he bathed too regularly. See: Living Saints.
SALTWATER BUZZARD. The main beneficiaries of battles between Stretcher Jones and the Kalif, the Kalif and Michael Brueghel, Michael Brueghel and Manzikert I, Manzikert I and the gray caps, the Brueghelites and the Gray Tribes, the Gray Tribes and the Arch Duke of Malid, the Arch Duke of Malid and the Kalif, the Kalif and Ambergris, Ambergris and the Haragck, the Haragck and Morrow. Scavengers, saltwater buzzards mate for life, have an average wing span of 10 feet, an average life span of 20 years, and are distinguished from other buzzards by the flashes of red and green on the tips of their otherwise black wings. See also: Brueghel, Michael; Gray Tribes, The; Jones, Stretcher; Kalif, The; Malid, Arch Duke of.
SAPHANT EMPIRE, THE. As empires go, this one made the Kalif’s holdings look pathetic. The Saphant Empire lasted for 1,500 years and encompassed most of two continents at its zenith. Its rulers, elected by an oligarchy, demonstrated an uncanny ability to mix negotiation and ruthless military force to consolidate their successes. Under the centralized stability of Empire, an unprecedented wealth of advances in technology and the arts threatened to make the Empire a permanent institution. However, a series of inbred, weak rulers coupled with crippling attacks on shipping by Aan pirates eventually broke the Empire into five pieces. The last Emperor’s chief advisor, Samuel Lewden, did his best to hold the central government together, but the five pieces became 30 autonomous regions and then splintered into even smaller kingdoms. Until finally only ghost-like cultural echoes remained of the once-great empire. For more information, read Mary Sabon’s one excellent book, The Saphant Legacy. See also: Bedlam Rovers; Frankwrithe & Lewden; Sabon, Mary.
SHADOW ART MOVEMENT, THE. Movement was actually anathema to the Shadow Artists, who, with their bodies and the late afternoon sun, created works of great beauty and grandeur inTrillian Square, shaming the Living Saints who also gathered there. See also: Gallery of Hidden Fascinations; Living Saints; New Art, The.
SHAPISM. A deviant branch of mushroom science that uses the shape of mushrooms to determine toxicity. Not very popular. See also: Fungus.
SHARP, MAXIMILLIAN. Possibly the most talented and yet most obnoxious writer ever produced by the South. Of all the infamous tales told about him by publishers and editors, the only one backed up by actual documentation concerns his association with Frankwrithe & Lewden. Sharp published his work regularly in F&L periodicals and as stand-alone books and pamphlets. On one occasion, he apparently did not appreciate Andrew Lewden (his editor) characterizing him at a dinner party as “somewhat arrogant” and sent Lewden the following missive (Lewden, by all accounts, read it once, smiled, threw it away, and promptly remaindered all of Sharp’s books):
Dear Lewden:
1. My Lord Sharp thanks you for your appreciated, if rather short and wretched letter of last week and begs me to tell you (as he is himself involved in Extremely Important Matters of Writing and Editing, and has no time to deal with editors hailing from squalid and distant corners of the world) that although he appreciates the copy of your latest magazine with His exalted story “The Glory That Was Me” printed therein, you have failed to place his name in large enough type on the cover — nor have you situated His name first and to the detriment of all other (lesser) names on said cover. Furthermore, His story was not published as the first story in the magazine, nor was it given an elaborate illustration, and, finally, the biography which accompanied the piece was not long enough, did not adequately cover Lord Sharp’s career, and did not state (as is common enough custom for Lord Sharp’s work, and certainly common knowledge) that Sharp is “The Premier Writer of His, or Any Other Generation.”
2. These are grave misdeeds, Mr. Lewden, and Lord Sharp, while not altogether concerned, owing to the low circulation and low pay associated with your magazine, is perplexed as to why you should seek to draw His Lordship’s wrath upon you. Certainly deigning to present to you an Exalted Reprint from several years past, he has laid upon you the gravest of all duties: the proper representation not only of the Sharp Fiction but of the Sharp Image. If no illustration were available, Lord Sharp, through his many underlings, would have been glad to provide you with a glossy representation, in three-quarters profile, of His Famous Visage. This would not only have been adequate, it would have been more perfect, due to the marvelous perfections of the Sharp Visage, than any illustration (unless, of course, such mythical illustration had been of His Lordship).
3. In any event, due to the Extreme Kindness of Lord Sharp, I am instructed by His Lordship to officially Forgive You Your Trespasses and to let you know that you may, if you ever visit Lord Sharp’s estate, be allowed to kiss His hand, and even to keep a crumpled piece of paper from one of His Lordship’s abortive rough drafts.
4. Finally, as you say, Mr. Lewden, mere mortals may include appropriate return postage for a manuscript, but as your sentence implied, Lord Sharp is, like the unbroken string of Kalifs, most exceptionally Immortal, in that most enduring of ways: through the glory of the written word. Therefore, on a related topic, we ask that you immediately relinquish a tear sheet, to use a vulgar term, of the review of His Lordship’s Greatest Book, A Testament, for His perusal. (He will not, in fact, read it, but one of His many underlings may read it to Him; or, as is more likely, one of His underlings gifted in the Word shall rewrite the review so that it flows like liquid gold rather than liquid shit and thus shall not distress in any way His noble ears; there is nothing that harms his Lordship more than a badly-turned phrase.) 5. In closing, I shall simply remind you, Mr. Lewden, that it will soon again be time to pay the annual tribute to His Lordship. This year, as you should know, it consists of three days of reading Lord Sharp’s works aloud, two days of studying them silently, and one day of transcribing them by Your Own hand, that you may more fully understand how Genius doth descend upon the World.
Your Obed. Ser.,
Gerold Bottek (one of Lord Sharp’s many underlings) P.S. His Lordship would like to convey to you His appreciation for your previous (if distant) kind words in various broadsheets which He has, through his underlings, perused; they have, I am told to tell you “a rough eloquence quite unlike the bastard, no doubt inspired by my works.” He so appreciates this attention that He has commanded me to tell you that you may skip one of the three days of reading His works aloud.
See also: Frankwrithe & Lewden.
SHRIEK,DUNCAN. An old historian, born inStockton, who in his youth published several famous history books, since remaindered and savaged by critics who should have known better. His father, also an historian, died of joy; or, rather, from a heart-attack brought on by finding out he had won a major honor from the Court of the Kalif.Duncan was 10 at the time. Since then,Duncan has never died from his honors, but was once banned by the Truffidian Antechamber. Also a renowned expert on the gray caps, although most reasonable citizens ignore even his least outlandish theories. Once lucky enough to meet the love of his life, but not lucky enough to keep her, or to keep her from pillaging his ideas and discrediting him. Still, he loves her, separated from her by the insurmountable gulf of empires, buzzards, bad science, and an arrogant writer. See also: Rats.
SIGNAL, CADIMON. A most curious man of religion who combined elements of common crime with the utmost respect for the spiritual life. He taught the most successful missionaries ever to graduate from the Morrow Religious Institute and spent 10 years studying with the monks of Zamilon. Famous for his fervent lectures on Living Saints and martyrs. See also: Morrow Religious Institute and Zamilon.
SIMPKIN, WILLIAM. The head of Ambergris’ labyrinthine centralized mental health facilities and the chief psychiatric interrogator for incoming cases. Simpkin wrote fiction on the side, publishing several volumes about an evil imaginary kingdom ruled by a mouse. At base, a heartless bastard. See also: Bedlam Rovers.
SIRIN. A writer and editor originally born near far-fabled Zamilon. He is primarily known for his series of fictions supposedly describing various aspects of Ambergris history. Infamously involved in the Citizen Fish Campaign. See also: Citizen Fish Campaign; Fungus; Shriek,Duncan; Zamilon.
SKAMOO. A proud, aloof people well-adapted to the snow of the frozen northern regions. Some historians have tried to link the Skamoo to Zamilon, claiming that the forebearers of the Skamoo built the fortress-monastery. See also: Zamilon.
SOPHIAISLAND. An island named after Manzikert I’s wife, located in the River Moth, to the north of Ambergris. Long ago ceded to Hoegbotton & Sons by Ambergris’ last Cappan, John Golinard, in exchange for much-needed monies,SophiaIsland served for many years as a base for Hoegbotton mercantile operations. However, some 50 years ago, H&S leased the eastern half of the island to Frankwrithe & Lewden, in exchange for trading rights to Morrow markets. In recent years, the island has become a battleground between H&S and F&L forces, slowing traffic north and south as both sides exact ever-more ridiculous tariffs on boats wishing to pass through. See also: Frankwrithe& Lewden.
SPACKLENEST, EDGAR. Author of the cult novel Lord Hood & the Unseen Squid. Spacklenest came from “old money” and lived in a mansion in the marshes to the west of Ambergris with his mother, grandmother, and sister. From his third-story room overlooking the Moth, he would write for hours in a black notebook, every few months sending another tale to Dreadful Tales, which rejected his work because the editors did not understand it, or Burning Leaves, which rejected it because it was too traditional. Eventually, a friend of the family convinced the Ambergris Department of Broadsheet Licensing Publications to print Spacklenest’s first collection of stories, entitled Scars & Other Weapons. Published in hardcover, the collection sold only 25 copies and the Ambergris Department of Broadsheet Licensing Publications dropped Spacklenest from their stable of safety pamphlet authors. For several years, Spacklenest did not attempt publication again, instead pouring himself into writing the classic stories that would eventually be issued in the posthumous Frankwrithe & Lewden collections Nights Beyond Night and Dark Sings The Lark Beyond the Veil. F&L would also publish his Lord Hood novel posthumously, a work which sold well and has led to Spacklenest’s current cult status. After writing Lord Hood, a dejected Spacklenest abandoned both fiction and his ancestral home, relocating to a small apartment off ofAlbumuth Boulevard and accepting an archival position at theMorhaimMuseum. In later years, under the pseudonym “Anne Sneller,” Spacklenest published a number of nonfiction books, including A Historyof Traveling Medicine Shows & Nefarious Circi. Lord Hood and his short stories were discovered among his personal effects when he died of stab wounds inflicted by a Porfal coin knife during a particularly violent Festival. See also: Burning Leaves; Dreadful Tales; Frankwrithe & Lewden;MorhaimMuseum; Porfal.
SPORE OF THE GRAY CAP, THE. The tavern in which much of Duncan Shriek’s Early History was written. A marvelous hide-away more fully described in The Hoegbotton Guide to Bars, Pubs, Taverns, Inns, Restaurants, Brothels, and Safe Houses.
SPORLENDER, NICHOLAS. The author of over 100 books and instructional religious pamphlets, including Sarah and the Land of Sighs, Truffidian Votives for the Layperson, and A List of Daily Sacrifices for Members of the Church of the Seven-Edged Star. Many of Sporlender’s books incorporate the ideas of the “fighting philosopher” Richard Peterson. Sporlender frequently collaborated with the artist Louis Verden before a violent disagreement ended the relationship. In his memoirs, he wrote of the break up: “It’s not like we didn’t know when it started. It was Verden’s obstinence that started it. And his insipid obsession with Strattonism. He simply could not let it be. It was always Stratton this, Stratton that. I’d ask him, ‘Please — lay off the Strattonism. I’m trying to write.’ Eventually, I took up Peterson’s teachings just to block out the Strattonism. But he wouldn’t stop.” A five-time recipient of the Southern Cities’ most prestigious literary award, The Trillian, Sporlender moved to Morrow in later years with his wife and three dogs. See also: Burning Leaves; Caroline of the Church of the Seven-Pointed Star; Dreadful Tales; New Art, The; Peterson, Richard; Stratton ism;Verden, Louis.
SPORN. The term commonly used throughout the Kalif’s Empire to refer to the gray caps. The Kalif’s people refer to the gray caps’ sacred symbol as the “zetbrand” and their underground land as the “zetland.” See: Fungus; Kalif, The.
STOCKTON. Even more boring than Morrow. Might as well be populated with monkeys or Oliphaunts than with people. Not even a religious institute to save it from boredom. Incidentally, the city ofDuncan Shriek ’s birth. See also: Busker, Alan.
STRATTONISM. Believers in the mythos of the bicameral brain, Strattonists have always been in conflict with the followers of Richard Peterson, primarily because neither religion can understand its own teachings, let alone those of its opponent. A typical entry from the guiding text of Strattonism, The Consciousness of the Origin of the Bicameral Breakdown, reads “The compresence and prehension of a monism in keeping with the gravitational relinquiships and syntaptic revolutions of the mind cannot be undersuaged in any discussion of concantimated narratizations or even when considering slorbenkian bilateral mandates.” One diagram in the book depicts a brain with arrows pointing to “The Bandaic Hallucinatory Pit,” “The Bilateral Convulsive Impulse,” and “The Origin of the RP Heresy.” The belief that the brain can talk to itself has led to some confusing conversations at Strattonist meetings. See also: Peterson, Richard.
— T —
TARBUT, ARCH OF. Richard Tarbut was a wealthy man who liked to have things named after him.
The Arch of Tarbut is one of those things. The Tarbuts moved to Ambergris from Morrow, where they sold, among other items, stoves and canaries. Tarbut named only one condition for giving money to construct the arch: that, by means of a ladder, he and his family be allowed to hold a party atop the arch upon its completion. This, indeed, he did, but, bothered by a mud wasp, lost his balance, and fell to his death, attaining a condition very close to that of Brandon Map. See also: Map,Brandon.
THRUSH, THE. A doomed ship in the Ambergrisian navy, commissioned during the reign of Trillian the Great Banker. At that time, even oak-built ships succumbed to rotted timbers because the alternate wetting and drying of wood created favorable conditions for the growth of fungi. Reports from the naval command to Trillian stated that “In building and repairing ships with green timber, planks, and trennels, it is apparent by demonstration to the ship’s danger and by heat of the hull meeting with the greenness and sap thereof immediately putrefies the same and draws that ship to the dock again to repair within six years what should last 20 years.” Directly prior to The Thrush leaving port, an even harsher report stated “The planks were in many places perished to powder and the ship’s sides more disguised by patching than usually is seen upon the coming of a fleet after a battle. Their holds not cleared nor aired but (for wont of gratings and opening their hatches and scuttles) suffered to heat and molder until I have with my own hands gathered toadstools growing in the most considerable of them, as big as my fists.” Despite this, The Thrush was sent down the River Moth toward Nicea. Within five days, the crew complained of a general itchiness. Within ten days, the ship was so encrusted with fungi that the crewmembers were trapped inside. Forced to eat the fungi for sustenance, they began to mold and the ship collapsed and sank far from shore on the twentieth day. No one survived. See also: Fungus.
TRILLIAN THE GREAT BANKER. One of the greatest rulers Ambergris has ever known. Under Trillian, Ambergris became a miniature empire, but more importantly, a center for business and finance. Ambergrisian banks spread across the continent and at one point accounted for 75 percent of all financial transactions in the South. Trillian, more than any ruler before him, was able to snuff out the power of the Brueghelites through a methodical process of depriving them of capital and resources. Strangely enough, his downfall came at the hands of cababari pigs. A slave in love to his mistress, he bristled over a perceived insult handed to her by a cababari breeder and signed an order that cababari would no longer be considered fit for eating and would be banned from the city. Just six months later, a group of Cappan Restorationists funded by a powerful pig cartel ousted Trillian. See also: Cababari.
— U —
URINATION, ORDER OF. The most annoying of the Orders. See also: Living Saints.
— V —
VERDEN, LOUIS. This talented artist first established his reputation with gargoyle-inspired jewelry (the highlight of many a Festival parade). From jewelry, Verden progressed to book illustration, illuminating such popular texts as The Physiology and Psychology of the Giant Squid. He served for many years as the contributing art director for Burning Leaves. A fervent acolyte of Strattonism and a prize-winning hedgehog breeder, Verden has for many years headed up the Ambergris chapter of the Free Thinkers Guild. His most famous quote might be “I’m working on your damn illustrations!” directed at his long-time collaborator Nicholas Sporlender and published in the “Heard in the Mews” section of Burning Leaves. Laypersons will be most familiar with his work for the festival booklet, The Exchange. See also: Burning Leaves; New Art, The; Safe House; Sporlender, Nicholas.
— Z —
ZAMILON. A ruined monastery-fortress still inhabited by monks. This vast complex of buildings and defensive fortifications is ancient beyond memory. No one knows who built the original structures. The monks who live there possess a page from Samuel Tonsure’s Journal and believe that, if the words on that page are read in a particular sequence, the page can serve as a door to another place. See also: Busker, Alan; Daffed Zoo; Lacond, James; Masouf; Skamoo.
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