This short piece was written almost four years ago.
To the city of Edinburgh, its light, its shadow, and all the people in my life there that kept the sun shining.
致 Iris
Walking down Cowgate at twelve in the morning and my coat snaps at my legs, pulled tight against my chest. Winter’s chill hangs in the air like a detective waiting to break the news of her husband’s murder to a widow. My clothes are frosted, and I brush icing from my shoulders more from habit than discomfort.
Head bowed and shoulders hunched, I focus on obliterating continents of snow stained as last night’s slurry crumbles under the weight of my boots. Overhead on Southbridge snatches of conversation drift below the cobblestones. They’re punctured by an old and sad song I should have remembered, crooned by a drunkard possessed by the soul of a poet. My head bristles with late-night Trainspotting-phobias, the vague fear of muggers lunging out at me. Distant figures huddle together on the steps of houses or stagger into alleys. Obscured by blinking lights they are gargoyles squatting in the fog, backs crooked with regret.
A young girl (she looks about my age) walks past. Mascara dribbles in rivers of black ichor down her face. I feel my hand reaching out to stop her, ask if she’s all right. I watch her stumble past in a fog of shame and reasonably expensive perfume. Stupid of me, really. I realize how I must look: black coat smudging into the shadows like printer’s ink, lamplight catching on my glasses and transforming my eyes into owlish discs. I stand there for a few seconds. The echoes of her sobs hang back awkwardly as if waiting to start a conversation.
For some reason, I still haven’t moved. I don’t, until the last hints of grief dissipate into the night. Gone, along with the cigarette fumes from the crooked L of a man pressed up against a wall away from the wind. Then I keep walking.
There’s a mist hanging off the pavement, steaming out the corners of the slabs like vapour from an athlete’s body. When I look at the windows of slumbering pubs, take-out joints, karaoke bars and restaurants my reflection fights to keep up. I leave it behind, watch it pause, a child lost at a supermarket. When it catches up to me, I cannot help but shudder.
It’s around this time I realize I’m all alone, and I can’t recognize my own face no matter how hard I look at it. I run my fingers over the pale skin, pinching the bruised bags under each eye from one too many all-nighters and wonder if this is some kind of costume. It might be the lack of sleep, but I can’t help but wonder if a human being can be haunted by themselves.
I stare down my wavering twin in the oily window of a kebab joint. At any moment that figure might step outside the panes, straddle the gap from shadow to man. The thought twists in my stomach and catches on something. It’s a sick trick, a Ghost of Christmas Present prematurely dredged up on an October evening. I forage ahead, but the shade waist in my computer after every short story deleted in disgust slithers at my boot-heels. It coalesces in parked vans and the black of hibernating road-signs. A passing motorbike’s headlamps spill over me and I see that thing sucking in icy breaths, savouring them.
Can a person be haunted by themselves? Maybe if every 3 a.m. insomniac thought, every i buried resentment festered into bitter pus, an ectoplasmic ooze that dribbled from every pore. Perhaps, like the best kind of ghost, it is something to be summoned. Dragged from a Limbo of unseized opportunities and squandered second chances.
I’ve reached the Royal Mile at this point, having turned up one of Cowgate’s forked, sloping wynds, taking the long way back to my accommodation. I nod imperceptibly at the other stragglers ambling up and down the stretch of road. The wraiths come thick and fast, rushing into the faces of strangers I feel I should have known.
The Ghost of Semesters Past gives way to the Ghost of Wasted Futures. That long-haired guy in the leather jacket leaning his girlfriend’s head against his shoulder, I’m just his other half. The warning shown to a Dickensian hero if he doesn’t mend his ways. The youth in the poster for a book-signing at the John Knox house…. I could see strokes of myself in that dimpled smile. A chattering student blows past me, moving in a cluster of his mates to another party, another nightclub. His name, lost in a peal of snickers, sounds like mine. Shuffling my feet, I wait for the traffic light to change at a crossing by the World’s End pub. There are no cars. In the sanguine glow of the STOP sign, I’ve become the phantom, dogging the footsteps of those merry travellers of the night.
I’ve turned right, down, breezed past the roundabout leading up to Pleasance, passed my accommodation. I can’t risk seeing that apparition again, ten feet tall in the windows of the building. By the time I’m aware of where I’m going, I’ve overtaken Dynamic Earth’s squat, hedgehog scaffolding and am at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. The curves of its hills dwarf me and just then the noise building up behind my forehead stops. Obliterated by the mass of earth and stone stamped against the skyline.
Grass squelches softly underfoot as I make my way alongside the Seat, a wavering comma framed against trees and bushes. Maybe another time they would have pawed at the cuffs of my trousers, running brittle fingers over my clothes. Here, amidst the silver fog and the whistle of the wind they scatter the boggarts cackling in my mind.
Deep breaths: long, quiet, inhalations that suck up an air that escaped petrol fumes, cigarettes and ripening trash.
This is not the quiet of a bated breath before a murderer strikes, but the rise and fall of a cat’s chest as it curls up on its side. There is no noise save the beating of my heart, marking out its verse in iambic pentameter. Mist spills over the sides of the hills like a bed-side confession. Deep breaths. There are no reflections to hide brooding spectres here, no fun-house mirrors to distort regret. There is no one left to haunt, and the condensation on my brow is a baptism.
New apparitions form out of the wisps of smoke: a trek with a crew of high-school friends, new companions and flat-mates, a makeshift picnic of battered takeaway feasted on whilst the April sun set in the horizon. A spring-time evening cushioned among flowers and another semester bid adieu. The banshees of past, present and future slink away. I shrug and let the thin faced phantasm lurking behind me slide from my shoulders.
Before I turn home, I indulge myself. Night restores the ruin of St. Anthony’s chapel into Camelot. From the haze I see a child (small even for his age) emerge, running breathless along the knolls. He is brandishing a stick, battling Balrogs alongside bearded wizards and knights in shining armour, striking left and right. His blond hair is dipped in quicksilver under the moon, glasses slipping off the edge of his nose. Two other shapes sprint to join him, a fellowship of three. I watch them crest over the hill, whooping, bickering, giggling, fading. Yes. Some parts of myself are worth bringing back from a grave I dug far too early.
One last haunting. I am long gone to my bed, but I leave the ghost of my smile among the Scottish peaks.
It was the tourists that were the hardest to deal with.
A stereotype for sure, and a cheap one at that. Yet it was a well-deserved cliché, and its subjects had embraced it wholeheartedly. Isabela Cristóbal liked to privately hand out scores in her head as she worked, watching foreigners wallpapered with sunscreen, tinto de verano on their lips and fingers stained a jaundiced yellow from paellas devoured in the pounding heat of an Almeria summer.
The tiny chiringuito was packed to bursting day in and day out. Open all night, ever since the July holidays had sent the collective pasty hordes of Europe charging to the beaches of Spain. Now the streets of the forgotten towns abandoned by Mr. Marshall teemed with crimson lobster-people, their tread muffled by the abominable union of the sock and flip-flop.
Isabela was aware of the xenophobic dimension to her grudge against the children of Albion (yeah, she read a lot-what, a waitress can’t have an education?) but her fellow Europeans were fair game. It was the travellers treating the country like a Mary Poppins painting to be hopped in and out of without consequence, living by the creed that cash could make up for any amount of trashed nightclubs, vandalised streets and sleepless locals that drew her ire. The British and their American cousins came thick and fast, a farcical inversion of the fourteen-hundred-ninety-two-sailing-of the-ocean-blue, leaving crumbling sandcastles mosaiced with beer cans and wilted cigarettes where once North African fleets had brought mosques and palaces.
It should not have bothered Isabela as much as it did. Yet there was an inescapable bitterness that had festered in her, fanned by a day-to-day of smug customers barking out orders, of smarmy college students pinching at her backside and spewing grammatically mangled catcalls: cuerpo muy buena, mucho guapa, mucho sexy. Horndogs, minds warped by fantasies of commercialized Hollywood Latinas, seeing in Spanish Isabela the muted but still very much fuckable reflection of their Salma Hayeks (Mexican), Ana de Armas (Cuban) and Sofia Vergaras (Colombian).
She had begged the restaurant manager, Arturo, to be allowed to wear something else other than the gauzy white shirts that were the standard uniform of the female waiting staff, but he had not budged. Isabela would have been willing to stomach the added heat if it meant respite from the trailing fingers of another pack of middle-aged, potbellied creeps, gazes perpetually trying to slip past the protective shield of Isabela’s notebook and down into her skirt. The ends of their orders punctuated by the inevitable flirtations, give us a kiss love, ‘camon, mucho sexy indeed.
She hadn’t felt sexy in years. Hell, she would be prepared to say that she hadn’t felt human in years. Dashing across the restaurant every day even after the sunset bled its runny yolk over the sand, her feet spongy and cracked, the back of that ridiculous shirt peeling to her skin. Smiling, enduring the whinging complaints, the outraged squawks and casual harassment. A death by a thousand cuts administered with every neglected tip (‘I just don’t believe in that kind of thing’) and euro note tossed her way as if she was nothing but a cheap prostitute.
Sheer spite kept her going, a perpetual motion machine of suppressed anger that refused to let the Universe have its way with her. So, she cried in the cool and saline dank of the supply closet, dabbing at her puffy eyes in the obsidian mirror of the paelleras. Isabela’s father had always said: ajo y agua, a joderse y a aguantarse and rent did not pay itself. So, like an automaton, she trundled herself out to laugh at the jokes that weren’t remotely funny, forced a blush at the sexual innuendos of speckly teens who thought that leaving a big tip meant she might go home with them, when’s your shift end bonita?
She would try to tell herself that, to a certain degree, her resentment was misguided. More sensible to direct her anger at the apathetic boss rather than the strangers just looking to spend their money for a month somewhere with cool waters and a sun that never quit.
A friend of hers, Bea, had told her she should never ascribe intention to people’s actions. Maybe the snot-nosed kit throwing his plastic trucks at her head was working out a hidden family trauma. The sour-faced couple refusing to pay for their meal because it had arrived ten minutes late when the restaurant was at full capacity might be needing to save money. For all she knew the shrieking drunk who had demanded Isabela apologize to her in public (and Arturo that miserable son of a bitch had forced her to, because the lady’s table were spending upward of fifty euro on drinks alone) for ‘acting slutty in front of my boyfriend’ was actually deep down just angry because her dog had died or the Flying Purple People Eater had gobbled up her sister.
But if she so much as opened her mouth, if Arturo’s ears detected the quivering intake of breath that signalled the beginning of an opinion, his finger would jab at the slogan placed behind the counter of the chiringuito bar. The One True Commandment, a tablet adhered to in the service industry with more severity than any scribbles lugged down the rocks of Mount Sinai: THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. This was no guideline, but a reality-altering spell able to reshape truth itself. Under its influence, it did not matter if the especially miserable individual Isabela had seen pluck one of his own hairs into the salmorejo had actually done it or not: he got his meal on the house, and Isabela got her pay docked and a reminder of how generous Arturo was for not firing her.
Now it was almost midnight, and the restaurant had been mercifully emptied. Rows of tables crowded around Isabela like sheepdogs as she tidied up. At this time of day most of what was left to clean were drinks and cocktail glasses, the bitter slivers of alcohol curdling as tiny kernels of ice melted into slush. It was boring work, but it was oddly satisfying to see everything packed up and folded away. For a time at least. Isabela could not shake the feeling that this was but a temporary truce. That the cracked red plastic chairs with their Cruzcampo slogans and wrinkled tablecloths pinned to the tables by plastic clips merely lay dormant. Slumbering until they grew hungry again and opened their gaping maw in supplication for a greater sacrifice of time, energy, dignity….life.
Isabela leaned against the bar, breathing slowly. Today had been a pretty bad day alright. A troop of partygoers had decided to start their pre-game drinking session right when the restaurant was operating on a skeleton crew. One of the merry band had careered right into her, sending a riot of cocktails to shatter onto the floor and Isabela scrambling on her hands and knees to a backing track of idiotic howls of laughter and the inebriated customer’s mumbled words of encouragement (fuckin’ blind bitch….whachwhereyagoing….fuck). She fancied she would never be able to get rid of the echoes of derision that had cascaded over her as she scrabbled pathetically to tidy the mess.
She was supposed to be minding the bar, but Arturo had left early and he could hang for all she cared. His insistence on keeping the place open was an idiotic idea and usually it was only the occasional drunk or insomniac who stumbled in for a midnight refresher. Plus, all the girls agreed that the place was just a bit creepy after the sun went down. Under the curtains of night, with no sounds save for the metronome screeches of cicadas, it was difficult not to imagine things emerging from the shadows, towards the light-house glow of the chiringuito sign. Alone, and always in the distance, the susurration of the ocean, a siren-song beckoning the lonely to sit on the wet sand and stare into those sheets of ink that had outlived them all.
When Isabela stared out at the sea she felt as if each crash of the waves was dragging a piece of her out with it. How tempting to think of nothing else, not of essay deadlines, feet cramps, back pains, minimum wage, bastard landlords, stinking hands and the jeers of tourists. How tempting to imagine that the sea could just wash out all the bad, the same feeling Isabela got when she rinsed leftover food into the sink. A girl could dream, right?
She lit a cigarette, its tip a firefly wavering slightly in the sky. The night advanced, lashed ever onwards by the whips of the waves. She hugged herself just as a reminder that she had not disappeared yet. The lifeguard’s chair at the lip of the beach was a spindly nightmare, its towering, arachnid legs skittering over the sand. Isabela sighed and put out her cigarette, a funeral pyre to an overactive imagination.
“You shouldn’t smoke, even if we’re outside.”
Isabela didn’t scream, though her whole body seized up. She had realized there was a customer outside with her. Strange-she’d just finished cleaning up every table and there had been no-one sitting by the terraced seats. As Isabela calmed down, she felt a distinctly sour twist in her stomach at the thought of the stranger watching her in silence, enjoying his private view. She turned slowly, not willing to give them the satisfaction of seeing her rattled.
She could not help but feel a little underwhelmed. The man was as unassuming a portrait of a tourist as there ever had been. He was sitting down, slouching in his chair, one arm hanging over its back like a discarded jumper. The other arm was a pendulum swinging lazily by his side. He was wearing a garish Hawaiian t-shirt, bedecked with brightly coloured palm-trees and riotous hibiscus flowers.
“I appreciate the concern,” said Isabela. Usually, she’d be unable to avoid a hint of sarcasm into her voice, but the stranger’s demeanour was less a sleazy performance of cool and more the lazy routine of a housecat stretching out on a sunbeam. “They’re for the nerves,” she said, wiggling the cigarette and shrugging her shoulders in a life’s a bitch, but hey, what can you do about it? sort of gesture. The stranger blinked. Feeling a small, shameful warmth in her face, Isabela could not help fixating on his eyes. They were the sluggish, treacle hue of honey, a deep and soft amber, almost caramel in the dark.
“Are you nervous often?”
Isabela shivered. His voice had a rumbling purr hiding behind its edges, crouching between stalks of yellow grass. It rolled over your skin and quiver inside your stomach. Nevertheless, Isabela couldn’t help but laugh.
“That’s the understatement of the year sir.”
“There’s no need to call me sir.”
“I can’t call you anything but sir if you don’t give me your name, sir.” Isabela’s lips were tugging slowly but insistently upwards into a smile. The newcomer was also grinning.
“Names are important, young lady,” he said. “Not all have to walk around with them stapled to our chests.”
Isabela was momentarily taken aback at this-by her calculations the man looked to be only slightly older than she was. His face was coloured by the beginnings of a bronze tan, his cheeks pebble-dashed with pale freckles. Fine blond hair tumbled up to his shoulders like dunes cascading over the horizon. Isabela filed the young lady away for later. In any other circumstances this would have come across as unbearably patronizing but the matter-of-fact conviction behind the speaker’s words had been so casual that something made her hesitate. If anything, she was still trying to figure out why the way he spoke was so weird. Instead, she decided to keep the atmosphere light.
“On the run from the law, are we? I can’t recommend a place like this to hide though, but before the Guardia Civil comes to haul you away I will suggest the specials.”
“I thank you for the discretion, Ms. Cristóbal, though I have no quarrel with the law. If it is a name you want, you may call me by my city of origin. They shape our identity as much as our parents or teachers do. Memphis will do quite nicely if you please.”
Memphis. An American then, judging by his looks, but one who spoke very good Spanish.
“Well then, Memphis, may I get you anything to eat, or drink? Our kitchen closes in half an hour.”
“Nothing for me, thank you.” He pulled a crisp twenty-euro bill from the pocket of his cream-coloured shorts and lay it flat on the table. “I’d rather you join me for a drink. My treat of course.”
“That’s very kind of you, but I’m still on duty.”
“Yes, the place is packed, I can see that,” noted Memphis dryly. “Just a couple of drinks, courtesy of a worn-out tourist with more money than he knows what to do with. It’ll do a wonder for those pesky nerves, and you look like you could use it more than I do.”
Isabela’s hand shot self-consciously up to her dishevelled hair. Suspicion was creeping into her like lead flowing down a thermometer. Was this guy trying to sleep with her? It wouldn’t be the first time.
“With all due respect, Mr. Memphis”-
“Just Memphis will do.”
“With all due respect, Memphis, I’m not interested in going home with any customers tonight. I have a boyfriend.” This last part was complete fiction, but it couldn’t hurt.
“Oh no, no, please, don’t assume my intentions are so low,” assured Memphis hurriedly. “I wouldn’t presume to attempt to take advantage of a fine young woman like yourself.” There it was again. She supposed Memphis was just trying to flatter her.
“So you’re treating me purely out of the kindness of your own heart?”
“I would never have guessed that was so hard to believe.”
“Not in this line of work. People want me to serve drinks, not sit down with them and join in for a quick chat.”
“There’s a first time for everything. Consider this then a rare olive branch between customer and host. No strings attached, on my honour. Just a well-earned reward for a hard-working young lady, a small thanks in a job so often thankless.”
Isabela shifted uncomfortably on the spot. It was something about Memphis’ manner of speech. It seemed to trail dust in the air like the spine of an antique book. His words never matched his boyish, collegiate features, and there was that smell the wind carried from him…. dry and hot, loaded with a coppery bite that made some long-forgotten ancestral gene think, incredibly, of blood.
“Look, this is extremely kind of you, but I really have to get back behind the bar, my boss sent me out here, like, fifteen minutes ago and he’ll be really upset if I spend my time gossiping with a customer”-
“Arturo Muñoz Tomás left early tonight, Isabela, and is currently in his apartment watching a football match on Canal Plus. He is drinking his way through his sixth beer of ten, which he waters down from his tap to save money. He will not make it to the end of the match. As is usual, he will instead call his friend Guzman del Pino to talk about scalping tickets to next week’s UD Almería game. Then, adhering to routine, he will smoke two cigarettes, shower and masturbate whilst imagining you in uniform fellating him in his office, a fetish picked up from the pornographic magazines sold at his local kiosk,” said Memphis, looking bored. “If you do not wish to talk to me, simply state your truth. Lies are of no use.”
When he moved the overhead lights flickered in his eyes. They were shining disks of gold.
“That-you can’t talk to me-this isn’t funny you know! If this is some kind of stupid game Arturo put you up to then till him that…that I’ll quit tomorrow if he keeps up this crap!”
“No, Isabela you will not. You cannot afford to quit, in as literal a sense as possible. As for Arturo, I have never met the man in my life. I simply know that he will do what he does because he does it every-day. The same way you watch telenovelas even though you feel you will be judged for enjoying them, use red bands in your hair to remind you of your friend Bea and still sleep with a stuffed elephant named Pedro. Your father gifted him to you when you visited the zoo in Madrid aged five.”
Isabela’s face had drained of colour, stiff and pale as a used napkin. Jesus Christ, she had run into a psycho, a stalker, some kind of freak who’d followed every aspect of her life and tracked her down to where she worked, why wasn’t she screaming. It was like trying to call for help in a dream. She should be screaming.
“The truth is not something you can hide. Candour is a virtue all humans should aspire to. The ability to cut through deceit, that is the skill of heroes. It is something I have long taken an interest in: to find those worthy of favour is to find those able to penetrate to the centre of truth. I think you may be worthy.”
Isabela nodded mechanically. There was no one in sight. The cooks would be packing up by now and leaving through the back door. She was, for all intents and purposes, alone with a deranged lunatic. She settled on going with the flow of his ramblings-if she humoured him for long enough, she might be able to think of a way to escape.
“I think you’ve got the wrong person, sir, I’m not worthy of anything,” croaked Isabela.
Memphis tutted, shaking his mane (oh my god, that was what it was like, a bedraggled old lion shaking itself awake in the African sun, just like that) and narrowing his eyes.
“Don’t give me that,” he said. “You have shouldered every petty humiliation ever thrust your way, you have clung to your convictions and your dreams in a world that thinks such things can be changed on a whim by euro bills or foreign exchange dollars. If that is not worth, then I could not tell you what is.”
“This is a gameshow, right? One of those hidden camera ones, ahahaha, right, I see, I’ve won some sort of prize, the hard-working waitress gets a big windfall, great for views.”
“No, Isabela. A game-perhaps, in a sense-but you have not won anything. Not yet. You are at a crossroads in the journey of your life, and the straightforward pathway has been lost. Now a beast bars your way, and you must find how to continue. It is an old story, you are a smart girl, you will know of it. A predator awaits the side of the road; it waits for everyone at some point in their life. Life is dangerous. Life will question you, menace you, challenge you, but can you see through the fog of lies?
Can your knowledge tame the wild beast, or will end as a helpless victim? I do not ask this lightly.”
Thin tears were burning down Isabela’s cheeks. A single thought blared a hurricane siren behind her skull: this man was threatening to kill her.
Isabela leaned one hand on the table. The alternative was collapsing, because he was right, she did know this story, pretty much everyone did. That Ancient Greek yarn about the soon-to-be incestuous king. Waiting by the entrance to the gilded city of his birth, the human-feline monstrosity. The invincible guardian who, indeed, sought truth above all things, the truth to a question that had endured long since the myth had crumbled into dust and the ruined king had marched, blind and bloody eyed into the wilderness.
“Well then,” said the man who came from Memphis, not that city of Graceland memorials, but a city half-forgotten. Buried under the sands of a kingdom held aloft by the plundered husks of tombs built for men who were Gods. A country overseen by a four-legged protector, noble even with the scars of time’s rhinotomy ravaging its face.
“Because I like this place. It reminds me of a home I had, one lost under a wave of Coptic converts, Macedonian conquests and Jesuit missions. I …enjoy this country. It is full of dying legends, much like me. I hope to test people like you, to see if they can finally kill these legends. Do not forget, Isabela, my roots: I am a guardian first and foremost, long before I was a bandit waiting to assault the unwary as they went along the path of their lives. Yet only those able to survive the ambush may claim my protection. A hard truth, I know, one for savages and wild animals, but have you never wished for bright claws and fangs to fend off the jackals that scavenge from you every day?”
“Yes…but…there has to be another way. There’s always another way.”
“No.” Memphis smiled. Except he wasn’t smiling. He was showing her his teeth, brilliant white rows that tapered to fangs in the darkness of his mouth. He had not blinked once, his body leaning forward, hands prowling across the table. Isabela’s stomach turned. She controlled her breathing, her eyes never wavering from the pale suns in Memphis’ skull. He was no different from all the others, just more dangerous. Another predator slinking over the dunes, half-mad with hunger, starved of its worship, denied its attention.
“You bastard,” whispered Isabela. Memphis shrugged, a picture-perfect mirror of her earlier apathy. Life’s a bitch, but hey, what can you do about it?
“I am a monster, young lady. My cruelty is a kindness. You have already been forged in the fires of this summer, now it is time to see if your blade will hold firm under the hammer and the anvil. A quick lesson in etymology first,” said Memphis. For all of his talk of finding righteous, worthy heroes, he was having fun. Like a kitten tossing a mouse in the air before it rips its head off, except she could not let her guard down, because the real big cats always lunged straight for the throat.
“My name, my real name, derives from sphíngō. It’s Ancient Greek, it means ‘to tighten’ or ‘to constrict.’ One only gets the most juice from fruit by squeezing them dry, Isabela, coals form diamonds only when crushed by the weight of the underworld itself. Will you become a diamond, young lady, or let yourself be shattered?”
“This isn’t right”-
“The customer is always right,” snapped Memphis, his words tailing off in a throaty snarl that Isabela felt in her spine.
“That’s just a word on a sign, it doesn’t mean anything,” said Isabela, her rage carrying her into the realm of suicidal bravery. “It’s…bullies like you who give it power, it’s not true.”
“Then show me, show me how you can come to the truth,” said Memphis.
“I don’t need to prove anything to you.”
“Prove it to yourself then. Slay the monster, defeat the beast, dispel the darkness, that is what heroes do, is it not? Hear the riddle, solve it, wash your hands of it, but know you can only live if you truly grasp what it means.”
Isabela made a fist to stop her hands from shaking. If Memphis was speaking truthfully (and he was, that was the whole point) what choice did she have? To run? Impossible, that wasn’t an option, because it was precisely when you turned your back on the world that the animals pounced and held you down until you bled out. Because you had submitted and for them to submit meant you deserved to die. What she deserved…. what she deserved was to be able to binge Betty la Fea, finish her essay on Cela, go nightclubbing with her friends next weekend, maybe get laid, pet a dog on the street, buy a Coke by the beach, swim in it, sunbathe, do her hair properly. All of this stretched in front of her until it was a thin, pebbled road. Lying on it, licking its reddish fur, a thin, starved lion with golden eyes and sandy hair.
“All right then,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Memphis nodded curtly, interlacing his fingers. He intoned the riddle without decoration, a teacher reciting a problem as he set it out on the blackboard.
“Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed in the morning, two-footed in the evening and three-footed at night?”
Isabela’s first impulse was to laugh. There was no way that it was easy as this: the sphinx had recited the most famous riddle in all of history! Even kids knew the answer to it. Isabela hesitated for a second, coughing to clear her dry throat. She was waiting for the twist.
Yet the creature only looked at her, waiting patiently. As she dithered, Isabela realized there was no trick. This was an ancient creature, a being bound by conventions so old most people had forgotten why they continued them in the first place. It was a thing that sought truth above all things, to the point of pontificating its importance to a tired waitress in the dead of night as seriously as if it had been talking to a titan of legend. Isabela chuckled madly.
“Well, uh. Man. That’s the answer, right? It’s man. We crawl on all fours when we’re babies, walk on two legs when we grow up and then use a cane when we’re old and tired. Everyone knows that one….”
She stopped as she saw that Memphis was nodding slowly. He sighed deeply, like a lover reaching for a cigarette in bed.
“Very good. Now tell me what it means.”
“I-I don’t understand, I just did”-
“No. You described it to me, gave me the answer. Now tell me what it means. Why this, of all riddles? Why not question you of that which has a bed that never sleeps, or a horse named Friday? Why after centuries, no, millennia, do my kind always fall back to answering that famous question, and why, even after guessing it correctly, are still so many deemed unworthy?”
“Well, it’s just a gimmick, right? It’s phrased in a way that is meant to mislead you, designed to make you think of something else. Like a prank.”
“Incorrect, Isabela. You have two more guesses,” said Memphis calmly. Isabela gasped.
“Hey, hold on, that’s not fair, I told you the answer”-
“Indeed, now tell me what it means,” repeated Memphis.
“It, well, the riddle is about human life, right? It’s about the different stages of growing up, split into a trio-the three different times of day.”
“Good. Continue.”
Isabela fiddled nervously with the hem of her skirt, trying to think ahead and convince herself that the way Memphis’ fingernails seemed to be blurring into points was just her imagination.
“Three different times of day…it all happens in one day. It’s gradual but it all ends by the time night falls, like a mayfly or a bug. Twenty-four hours. Because…because…in the grand scheme of things, to something like, well, you that lives forever, that’s all we get. A day if we’re lucky. Hell, a few minutes if we’re not. By the time that sunrise starts to darken we’ve already forgotten what it was like to crawl.
We blink and, damn, all we can remember is using a stick, or even having four legs again but with wheels and electric engines this time. But…but there’s not another morning. Not for us anyway. The riddle doesn’t start again, the sphinx…leaves.”
Isabela met Memphis’ gaze.
“It leaves because the way ahead on the road is free now and why bother? It’s going to end somewhere, Thebes or whatever, but the road’s going to finish and there’s no point in the monster coming back. The creature gets to three-legs, and the riddle stops, because the answer was a human life, and…that’s it. You worked so hard to figure out the solution that by the time you got it, all that was left was walking the few miles to the final destination.
The End. El Fin.”
Isabela’s tears splattered dully by her feet, but they didn’t sting like before. Instead, she saw Memphis through a clear film. It was only then she properly noticed that he was, indeed, a lot older than she had given him credit for. The freckles on his cheeks mingled with spotted brown bruises, and his tawny hair was flecked at the edges with dirty grey. Isabela wiped her face and realized she’d been too quick to assume he lived forever. Thousands of years, certainly, but…maybe not eternity. And she wondered about what he had said earlier, about finding someone who could let legends die. Maybe all the beast had been looking for was someone who could reassure it, like a mother reminding her son that she loves him before tucking him into bed and turning off the lights.
Memphis had gotten up from the table, brushing himself down with the dignity of a prince. “There,” he said softly. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? “He folded the twenty-euro bill and slid it towards Isabela, adding an ample stack of bills to it. Isabela could not help but gawk: they were all five-hundreds. Memphis waved away her incredulous spluttering.
“It’s not the usual treasure trove or magic sword we beasties usually relinquish, but take it, young lady. All over in one day, my dear. It may not seem like it now, but it will. Walk down your road knowing the truth, unafraid of lions and the wolves. They don’t matter. By the time the sun sets, nothing will. A word to the wise, from an old fairy-tale like me: don’t waste your mayfly days in a place like this. It may be open all night, but you most certainly are not. There is a life outside of these walls and you have two legs still; walk on them far and wide, and lean on your third when you can walk no more.”
“Where are you going now?” asked Isabela softly.
“Who knows? Perhaps it is time for me to solve a riddle of my own,” grinned the sphinx. “Do not despair, you will have your reward. Name it, and it is yours. I can kill those who mocked you, stalk and slaughter the ones that trod on you, make it so that they never arrive to any truth at all,” said Memphis. “I started life as a protector, remember. Speak the word, and I will do so.”
Isabela blanched. It wasn’t just that the creature’s proposal was shocking. What had truly shaken her was how quickly she had considered saying yes. She could visualize Arturo and his disgusting fantasies, pulped beneath the paws of the monster, was tempted at the prospect of her daily tormentors being savaged in one fell swoop. Yet how long before more came along? She could not mindlessly crush her problems underfoot, hoping they would go away.
With a twist of shame, she realized how quickly she’d forgotten every kind word, every curious question, compliment, generous tip and joke she’d ever received: they were fewer yes, but they were still there. What kind of world would she be willing to accept, if every grievance was paid back a hundredfold in a blizzard of gore? A life condemned to hunkering by the roadside, lying in wait, transformed into just one more reflection of the brutes that knew no other form of sustenance than to gorge themselves on suffering. Isabela laughed weakly, shaking her head.
“Sorry, I don’t think I can accept that. You said that long ago you were a protector. You should be one, not an attack-dog. That’s all I ask. Something to keep me safe is all. No need to hurt anybody.”
Memphis nodded, tugging at one of his locks of hair, which came off. He placed the warm golden curl into Isabela’s palm, patting her hand gently.
“Wear it on your person, and you will not come to any harm. It will bring luck to you and…misfortune on those with ill intent. An eye for an eye, yes? I couldn’t deliver on those drinks in the end but consider this a just reward from a dusty myth,” He winked, a circle of shimmering gold.
“Congratulations, Ms. Cristóbal. You have defeated the legend. You have arrived at the truth. Do not let it go to waste.”
Isabela clutched the hair close to her heart. It smelled earthy and hot, like a cinder heap after a bonfire. She gave the sphinx a curt nod, who tipped an imaginary hat in her direction, wandering out of the hazy electric light and into the night, towards the expanse of the beach. The darkness rushed over him and the sands stirred in a gust of wind, leaving behind the copper tang of blood and the sweat-laced traces of musk.
—
The very next day, Isabela used the sphinx’s money to pay two months of rent in advance and stored the rest for later. She had already called the girls, promising (in a streak of unusual generosity) that drinks tonight would be on her.
Shampooed and clean, her face pink after a long bath, she lay back on the couch, reaching for the remote, fiddling with golden curl of hair as she did. They had been given the day off work. Plus, Isabela had a feeling she wouldn’t be marked down for a late-night shift for quite some time.
Arturo had called from the local hospital early that morning, his voice strained and high over the phone. He’d taken a tumble in the shower after slipping on a bar of soap, where he had broken a leg, as well as split his groin.
The child is barely old enough to remember his own name when the dog attacks. Chained outside the smithy, the creature has strained all day against the iron that chokes the breath from between its blackened teeth. The hammer of its caretaker, Chulainn, personal blacksmith to King Conchobar, screams against the anvil. The shrieking clang whips the mongrel into a frenzy. Soon, it knows, it will be let loose to prowl through the night to hunt any intruders who have slipped behind the village walls. Yet the creature is impatient, driven mad by the leaden rhythm of the forge. Drool pools from between dark lips pulled tight over jagged fangs.
Its bindings have weakened. The brute can understand this. Quivering snout, tarred with snot and rabid ooze smells…. something, small, young… approaching. The chain shatters. The dog barrels forward, rushing, gasping, leaping through the shadows, and the child is there. Something is wrong. The animal realizes it before its leap has been completed. Its haunches lock in an instant of sudden, instinctive terror. Other shapes are bursting from the dark, larger ones, yelling in shock. A small hand grabs the dog by a tattered ear. A whine turns into a splatter, turns into a thud, and the shape of the beast goes limp, becomes a thing of dripping meat.
The men of the village of Emain Macha shrink back in horror. The child, breathing heavily, watches bits of the animal’s skull fall from his fingers like sea-shell shards. A buzz of whispers. The beast is dead. The beast that kept Ulster safe from wolves, bears and roaming brigands, the terror of Ireland that kept our enemies at bay, is done for.That monster-child again. Always destroying. Always stained in blood. The dog’s handler emerges from the smithy, wailing at the ruined corpse. His hammer is a dark mushroom in his fist as he whirls on the child, the strange thing, half-mortal, faery touched.
The wyrd boy with the horrible eyes.
What will keep us safe in our beds now? The men take up his cries. What will guard us from the dooms of Ireland?
The child, still quivering with fear, replies as only a boy would.. Desperate to stop the angry hisses, the snarls of disgust. The child gives up the name he can barely scratch out on a piece of slate. Please. I will guard us. I will take the creature’s place. I can make it better; I can be a better attack-dog than he ever was. I will be Cú Chulainn, thedog of the smith. Please.
This he swears. This is his oath. This is his curse.
I shall be the Hound of Ulster.
The mist was cold silk trailing low against the grass as the chariot drew to a halt on a sloping hillock. It rattled gently when it stopped. A thicket of spears bristled from its sides, fitting plumage for the war-cart of King Conchobar’s fiercest warrior: Cú Chulainn, he who was born of mortal, God and faery. Mightiest champion of the Emerald Isle, first and only son of Lugh the flame-clad god of battle. Stood at the reins, the familiar seat of his boyhood service to the hero, was Láeg, master of horses. He slowed the beasts down with a flick of his wrists. In the pale glow of dawn hot breath steamed from between the horse’s tombstone teeth. The first horse bent his neck and began to graze. His companion followed suit. Now there was no sound across the plains, save for the champing of teeth tearing jade hairs from the back of the rain-fat earth.
Láeg dismounted from the chariot. The raven-feather mantle of his jerkin bristled with the sweat of the early morning. The lad, his cheeks still downy with fluff, fussed over the stallions as they ate, whispering in their twitching ears and tracing the bony ridge of their snouts. He had been given to Cú Chulainn by Conchobar as a reward, years ago, a gangly brat who had only ever heard the stories of how the demigod had butchered the invading hordes of their war-ready neighbours of Connacht, polluting the river crossing of Ulster with the slain. Give a dog his bone, the King had joked. If Láeg resented his role as a tool, he did not show it. Flitting between the beasts, he was limber and loose in a way he had never been whilst surrounded by the rough and lusty bannermen of Ulster.
At the back of the chariot, his master gazed at the boy through rainbow eyes.
It was the first thing that struck any mortal when they met Cú Chulainn. Not the red gold of his mane, curling like the hidden heart of a hearth’s flame, or his beardless chin which refused to sprout hair, though he was no longer a young boy. Not his size, which dwarfed even the most strapping Ulsterman, or his curious way of moving, as if calculating how to leave a hair’s width of space between himself and the world.
No, it was those eyes, that shimmered with the jewelled hues of a river’s spray touched by a bough of sunlight. The half-moon stare of a wildcat that had traced the end, in the gloom of midnight, of so many of the would-be-heroes of Connacht. Mortals could not boast such diamonds to stud their heads. Grown warriors, hardened by axe-blade and spear-tip into chips of flint, feared to meet them. Even under the covenant of a meal of bread and salt, the most hallowed oath of all. They would mumble into their beards, flinch if he stood up too quickly, burn their tongues in their eagerness to be done. Their daughters would turn their backs to him when they made love. He could sense them trembling involuntarily as he went to cup their waists, had felt a rabbit shake like this as it waited for its neck to be broken. These days his hands seldom strayed from his person.
Now Cú Chulainn looked across the plains. Faint blotches were starting to deepen under his eyelids. It may have been a trick of the light, but his frame seemed to sag momentarily, before he righted himself. He turned his head upwards, studying the sky.
A lone raven was flying in circles overhead. The raven croaked its curses to the heavens and perched on a rock. There was a red strip of meat in its mouth. It matched his stare, jerking its head to the side. Come and see. His fists clenched on the sides of the war-cart. When he withdrew them, the imprints of his fingers had dented the bronze edges.
The chariot rocked slightly as Cú Chulainn stepped off. Láeg did not look up from his horses. He had accompanied his master too many times to bother questioning him. To stray from the war-cart would be to spit in the face of a bond written in bloodied axles and the cracked skulls of men ran under the hooves of a demi-god’s steeds. Before he left him, Cú Chulainn planted a kiss on the youth’s brow. When he touched his shoulder, the pads of his fingers barely brushed against the flesh. Láeg did not freeze as the hero’s hand settled over the bone. The kiss burned quietly against his freckled skin. No other words needed to be spoken. If they had, it would not have meant anything.
Cú Chulainn turned away quicker than expected. His head kept moving to where the bird was waiting. The raven beat its wings, scattering feathers. The demigod glanced over Láeg’s shoulder. He had been doing so, at brief intervals, the entire journey. The bird hooted its impatience. Cú Chulainn sighed, straightened himself to his full height, and began to walk.
Absentmindedly shooing the damp muzzle of a horse away, Láeg watched Cú Chulainn as he moved across the plain. His quicksilver stride carried him across the slippery dirt with inhuman speed, so that he seemed to be skating on the mist. His red cloak fluttered at his heels, following the trail left by the spectre of the sunset. Then the fog swallowed him for good.
Cú Chulainn crested another hillock and came upon what he had expected to see. At least, something of the kind.
All around him were the spider-web walls of haze, a cushion pressed over the mouth of the world. Had he been here before? The day that his fever broke, as they tended to his wounds after the battle with Connacht, he had stopped by in a place like this, lingered, and left. The fog flickered with traces of warmth, orange brushstrokes against pearl.
Cú Chulainn wrapped the cloak around himself tighter. Was the fog streaming from his ears, pulled out of his head? Druids could craft such a trance. For a moment, he heard the far-off sound of the sea. He frowned, concentrating. His eyes shimmered. There were shapes in the mist. Ah. Yes, of course. Her. The smoke parted.
A campfire was crackling merrily in a ring of stones, burping embers as kindling snapped and popped. Next to it, a beautiful brown heifer, speckled white and with inky, mournful eyes, was chewing at its curd. Three teats swung near the grass as she fed. There was a stool by the campfire and a pail of water and an old woman whistling to herself through puckered lips as she washed pieces of armour. It was armour Cú Chulainn recognized well, for it was his own.
A muscle rippled in his neck as his jaw clenched. An old set from his boyhood that he had outgrown. He did not think he would have ever seen it again. Not since they had sliced him out of the mail and leather glued onto him with the crust of his injuries after the victory over Connacht.
The grandmother looked up at him as he approached. Her withered face peeled open into a grin. Her sleeves were rolled back, revealing arms lined like rocks after a century of winds. There was a smell about her that Cú Chulainn remembered from the bones in a box he had been told was his mother. The tips of her fingers were bronze where they rubbed at the bloody streaks that crossed his leather jerkin. Gray, ashy locks fell across the grandmother’s brow, black beads of lice crawling across the thinning parchment of her scalp.
She had begun to sing a song he knew from the nursemaids in the village of Emain Macha. The lullaby was interrupted when Cú Chulainn spoke. He did not raise his voice. It cut through the surrounding sounds, humming with the crystal pitch of a wet finger drawn across the rim of a drinking glass.
‘Greetings, seanmháthair.’ Even though he had used the proper form of address for the aged stranger, he kept his hands on the hilt of his sword. The crone looked up from her work again, feigned surprise, and bowed her head deferentially.
‘Ho there, young ‘on, beardless boy, scarlet-clad hero,’ cawed the old woman.
Overhead, the raven screeched. It was hard to tell which voice belonged to who.
‘Strange day to polish armour,’ noted Cú Chulainn. The crone shrugged.
‘No stranger day than any other, lad. The right day, awk, many might say, had they the imbas forosnai, the trance of all-seeing and truth-telling,’ she remarked.
Cú Chulainn clicked his tongue.
‘So then, old mother, you are cursed with the poet’s gift?’ he asked. ‘Yet you waste it, washing the garb of the fiercest of the Gaels, though no blade has opened him since he was a lad.’ The old woman wrung her hands, spraying the fire with droplets of water. They hissed where they touched the flame, filling the air with the stink of charnel.
‘Whether I clean or not, it makes no difference to a gore-painted pup,’ she rasped. ‘Were you to remove your cloak and stand before me like the day you were born, you would still be bloodied.’ The raven landed on the back of the cow. It ruffled its feathers and picked a strip of skin from the heifer’s spine. Cú Chulainn’s eyes narrowed, but he was smiling wanly, the grin of a man who finds himself accompanied by someone who, though not a friend, is at least a familiar face.
‘And you would still dabble in riddles. Speak true. Is it one of the shapes of the Mistress of Fate and Death that stands before me?’
The old woman’s laugh was toothless. When next her eyes met Cú Chulainn’s, they were the dark purple of ruined king’s shrouds. A more fitting look for the Phantom Queen, the Goddess of Destiny and Despair that had shadowed Cú Chulainn with black-feather footsteps ever since he toddled from the cradle.
‘Right, you is, young ‘on,’ she purred. Cú Chulainn stood his ground, even as he felt something stalking up to him from behind, creeping with vulpine patience. He dug his heels into the soft clay of the land. He did not break eye contact, even when he could have sworn that hooked hands were starting to tug at his cloak. Chulainn let go of the sword. There was a proper way of doing these things. Besides, this was not the first time he had encountered the Goddess, though when they had initially met her chosen form had been far more welcoming. He cleared his throat.
‘Then I name you the Morrígan, Great Queen of our Gods, the Tuatha Dé Dannan. Shadow of the Emerald Island, rider of dark clouds. I name you Raven of the Slaughter-Field, maiden, mother and crone, she-who-is-three,’ intoned Cú Chulainn. The crone nodded.
‘Awk, then I name you Cú Chulainn, he who renounced his human name, thrice-born son of Lugh. I name you the Distorted One, dread wielder of the Gáe Bolga, battle-dog of the Ulstermen,’ replied the Morrígan.
The feeling, heavy and thick that had permeated the air as they spoke, leeching out of the fog, vanished suddenly. Once the Oldest Game, the naming of things, had been completed, both parties could rest easy. To be named was no trivial detail. It was to be seen, confirmed, distilled and understood. Cú Chulainn brushed his cloak further over his shoulder and sat down opposite the campfire. There was something of the princely swagger of his heyday in the squaring of his jaw, yet as he shifted the scarlet cape it spoke of a gesture grown more practiced than passionate.
A pot was bubbling over the flames, lumps of grey meat stewing in broth. The Morrígan left the pail of water, letting the armour soak. With shaking hands, she grasped the pot, though if she felt the pain of the searing hot metal against her naked flesh, she did not show it. She spooned out the meat into two earthen bowls, sprinkling the meal with a dash of salt. Cú Chulainn watched her as she worked. There were rules to this sort of thing. Forces greater than either of them were quick to hurl calamity onto the heads of those rash enough to dishonour the rules of hospitality.
‘Eat up, eat up, you have grown thin since last I saw you. Have a little more, laddie, just a bit,’ she fussed, funnelling more food from her bowl into his, gesturing for him to take it. He accepted, but did not eat. Even without trying, he moved so quickly that the bowl was in his hands before the Morrigan’s fingers had even finished opening. She gave no reaction.
‘Surely child, you knew it was I when you saw me,’ rattled the Morrígan.
Cú Chulainn nodded. ‘I guessed as much when I saw the raven.’
‘Yet still you decided to play, like a wee ‘on, at guessing games?’
‘It has been a long time since we did, Great Queen. Not since you came to me in a different guise, the day I began the struggle against the Connacht men. Maybe I missed your tricks.’
The Morrígan cackled and spat into the fire. ‘A right devil you were, young pup.’ One crooked finger tapped at the yellow flesh under her eye. ‘It still smarts sometimes, from where you tore it out.’ She spoke of her mutilation as one would recount finding a hole in their boot. ‘Awk, mouths should not flap, they should feast, come, eat.’
Cú Chulainn smiled thinly. The Morrígan gestured with her steaming bowl, breaking crumbly bread for the two of them as she did. Cú Chulainn inspected the stew closely, raising a spoon with a glob of meat before his rainbow eyes.
‘The smell is odd,’ he muttered. ‘You would regret it if poison had found its way into my bowl. The Gods have a way of settling debts with oath-breakers. Even one of their own.’
His voice was low but throbbed with the memory of broken ribs and gouged out eyes. The Morrígan was watching him, her violet pupils’ pinpricks in her sunken face.
‘Fret not, It is a meat that suits you well, Distorted One. What more fitting a meal thana real hound, served to the war-dog of Ulster?’
Cú Chulainn set the bowl down by his feet with a dull thud. His other hand drifted as if pulled along by a mind of its own to the weapon strapped to his back. At first glance it seemed an ordinary spear, its shaft polished ash, handle a ghostly ivory. Yet there was something deeply wrong about its head. Serrated edges bit ravenously at the air, and when they caught the sunlight, they darkened it, gangrene blossoming putrid tendrils from a wound.
Cú Chulainn’s fingers hovered over it, but his back had stiffened. His hands trembled as they neared the wood, as if they were loath to touch it. The Gáe Bolga, cursed weapon passed down by the warrior-woman Scáthatch to her worthiest pupil after a year of training. Wielded by Cú Chulainn, the nightmarish thing had accrued such infamy that Conchobar would urge the warrior to hide the spear whenever emissaries visited court. More than one messenger had fled Emain Macha when they caught sight of the weapon, driven out of their wits by the legend of its carnage.
‘Oh?’ clucked the Morrígan, her mouth the gummy maw of a snake. ‘You would strike me down, puppy?’
‘You know why, Great Queen. The enchantment I was born with, the fae-charm that grants me victory in battle, forbids me to eat dog-flesh. Why now, of all times, would you have me break the geas that binds me? Revenge? The battlefield where first we met has long passed. I did not think the gods held such grudges.’ His hand had not moved from the spear.
‘Bah, nothing so petty,’ said the Morrígan primly. ‘I bear you no hatred child. Even as a son of Lugh, your life is a snowflake in spring to the likes of the Tuatha Dé Dannan. Your geas needs be broken because that is what your fortune commands. Fate has decreed it so. I am merely she who ensures destiny has its due. Put up your blade and your spear, wee’on.
Would you skewer the rain for falling, or the moon for rising in the night? It is the way things should be, and thus will be. You have known this since it was foretold to you by Cathbad the druid, that day you took the arms of Conchobar.’
Cú Chulainn sat back, letting his arm fall. Cathbad, that little old man with the watery eyes and dusty grey beard, a playground for spiders. He had always adored children, yes, even Cú Chulainn, who at six years had been deadlier than a man fully grown. Oh, and how he had loved telling stories, shrouded in the fog of his hut, spinning yarns to the gawping brats that crowded around his lap. Stories of the faery Sidhe, the wee folk. Stories of travellers that sailed over the rim of the world, a stone with a hole that gave you second-sight and a fish whose flesh granted all-knowing, and a story that prophesized that he who could bear arms as a child would become the mightiest of the Gaels.
Well, why wouldn’t he have tried it, then and there? Who could have blamed him for dashing off to find weapons, instead of waiting, shifting his feet impatiently, for the old goat to finish his tale? Sat across from the Morrígan, as he stared at his calloused palms, he could hear the wood splintering and the metal bend. How bronze shattered and bows split as the hands of Cú Chulainn the boy mangled them. No common weapons had sufficed for the son of Lugh, none save the ivory-hilted blade of his King, Conchobar.
When he had lifted it above his head, his smile had sparkled with the light of boyhood deeds and story-book promises.
He should have stayed and let the druid finish the story. He had left before Cathbad revealed that, though the wielder of arms would be immortal throughout song and legend, his body would soon lie cold in the dirt, cut down before old age by the caprice of destiny. The kindly little man had wept into his beard when they told him of Cú Chulainn’s impatience. He had sat down to explain his doom, hugging him, actually touching him, oh lad, oh you poor, sweet child. Later that night, alone where no one could see him, for the first time in his life clear rain had fallen from those rainbow eyes, soft and silent. They had not fallen ever since, no matter how thick they welled in his throat.
War-dogs do not weep. The Great Queen’s words had found their mark. He had guessed her purpose once he saw the foul, black bird, just as he had known her identity. Now he was certain. What had she said, when first he crossed path with the Mistress of Ravens?
‘It is at the guarding of thy death that I am; and I shall be,’ said the Morrígan across from him, and now her words were doubled by the echo of a much younger woman.
Cú Chulainn picked the bowl up again.
‘You have broken bread and salt over this meal, Morrígan,’ he noted. ‘I have no choice. I must eat: the covenant of a shared hearth gone unhonoured will doom me far more than the breaking of a geas would.’ He took up the spoon. ‘Subtle. You have outdone yourself.’ Cú Chulainn felt no malice towards the wizened hag squatting on her stool. They had fought, and more, in the past. It had been a game he had accepted his part in the moment he took up arms. He would not throw over the board and sulk in the corner with his toys when he lost. The hot meat rested comfortably in his stomach. When he had finished his meal, he felt the geas withdraw, an oily sheen peeled slowly from the skin. His death was lurking in the edges of the fog, watching him. Come a little closer.
Cú Chulainn looked at his hand. Was it shaking? Maybe for a second. He wondered if the mist was dulling his fear. He caught his reflection in the pail of mirrored water. The raven fluttered into it. He saw his face dissolve and was relieved to no longer have those multihued eyes staring back him. Oh. Was that how people felt? He breathed out slowly.
‘So, what will happen now?’ he asked the Morrígan. He knew she already had the answer but did not care.
‘You are pursued by Prince Lugaid, son of Cú Roí, King of Munster. The hound has become the hunted, harried across the fields of Ireland. His executioner burns with the fire of an avenging son and brings a great war-host behind his chariot, thick as salmon in the stream.’
‘I know. I have managed to stay ahead, this far. Each day he gains more ground. It is…unsurprising. Ever since I struck his father’s head from his shoulders, I imagined that this day would come.’
‘How noble, hound. I thought you only savaged those your masters loosed you upon,’ giggled the Morrígan. Another voice, high, playful, and devoid of the creak of old age was bubbling out of the hag.
‘This was…different. There was a woman. The daughter of another king. Bláthnat.’ Her name sounded wrong on his lips, as if he should have asked permission to dare speak it aloud.
‘The great Cú Chulainn, brough low by a woman,’ laughed the Morrígan. Something that could have been a flicker in the air, and now where a hunchbacked hag had sat, there was a young lady, the Phantom Queen’s maiden form. She wore a dress of many colours that scattered, swift as fish, into one another. Her black hair tumbled, spilled ink, across her collarbones. The liver-spotted skin had become smooth, the scrawny purple eyes swapped out for polished amethysts.
‘You should have eyes only for me. I have known you longer than any of those doe-eyed tarts,’ she pouted with ill-concealed jealousy.
‘This was no mere woman,’ muttered Cú Chulainn. The worst truth of all was that he had loved her. At least, he thought it was love. A secret affair, unspooling during the princess’s visit to Emain Macha, not the romance of husbands and wives holding each other in the village square and counting herds of clouds in the sky. Love. Cú Chulainn was not sure that he could speak of such a thing, but it had been different…. had it not? She would let him pick her up, effortlessly, giggle as he whirled her around. She had braided flowers into his hair and kissed him with an open mouth, where others pursed their lips as if fearing that their tongues would be devoured. Yes. She had given herself to him in the way only a young girl who knows a man will someday ruin her can.
The Morrígan’s change had not shocked him. He knew what was coming, from his youth. Yet still he stiffened as she threw her arms around him. Soft lips grazed his ear. Her hair smelt of hills in the morning, lilacs and the fresh sweat of sex. The hem of her dress had fallen to reveal the curve of a thigh. It made Cú Chulainn remember the wet grass clinging to her naked flesh the day Connacht attacked, as she cleaned herself with a wet cloth and he walked his fingers down the length of her spine. Her, the Goddess of despair, death and carnage, him, the bringer of ruin. It made sense that she had sought him out: what human lover could satisfy the Queen’s divine whims? Ingrate. He should have been grateful for her warmth.
The Morrígan was running her fingers through his hair, white bone dipped in red gold. ‘No mere woman,’ she laughed. ‘I would not have taken you for a romantic. Where were all these pretty words when Fate clamped her legs around that fiery head?’
Cú Chulainn gasped raggedly. He wanted to squeeze her, constrict, press, thrust, choke. That sugary scent, ground-up flowers, too much, gagging, the sickly-sweet fragrance of spoiled meat, hello old friend, corpses. Nothing like Bláthnat winding her arms around his waist, letting her head rest in the hollow of his shoulder. Around him, the smell of the sea, spraying, jets of blood, warm foam, salt. Tears. He pushed the Morrígan off him roughly, leaving her sprawled on the grass with her skirt around her hips. She laughed again, sticking her tongue out at him.
‘She never wanted him,’ he continued. ‘Given over in marriage like a herd of sheep gifted to a neighbour, she didn’t want-he was…. hurting her. Conchobar forbade me to follow. He did not wish to risk more bloodshed; I was expected to obey. What need does a war-dog have for a wife he told me. I would have listened, done my duty, but day after day, locked up in his castle, every night…. there are laws, bonds to be followed between husband and wife, I know, yet…I…I couldn’t. It wasn’t right.’
‘Oh?’ The Morrígan adjusted the hem of her dress, stopping to consult her reflection in the pail of water. It winked. She blew it a kiss. ‘And the women taken against their will by the Ulstermen, as you led their hosts and slew their husbands, I had thought that was right,’ she said.
Cú Chulainn leaned forward to stare into the fire.
‘I am the Hound of Ulster; I do the bidding of my masters. That is my vow. I just…I thought maybe, this one thing I could do, one kindness…maybe it would matter.’ His gorge rose as he heard his own words. They were so hollow they echoed. He felt like a boy again, stammering out apologies as the village folk gasped and pulled their sons behind their legs, his hands covered in the blood of children, we were just play-fighting, I wanted to help, I’m sorry, I just wanted to play, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
‘So, you killed Cú Roí.’ She yawned, her face a crescent of strawberry-daubed lips. ‘Oh, you silly boys.’
Cú Chulainn laughed, a metallic rasp. ‘No. That would have truly made me an oathbreaker. She stabbed him in the throat with a hairpin before I had even broken down the door. I took his head, bade her leave, bore the deed on my shoulders. Conchobar will not ride to my aid, though I am sure he trusts I will survive. Maybe he hopes I will kill Lugaid too, spare him the need to declare open war. Then I can return to his service, chastised, meek. Does it matter? I walk alone.’
The Morrígan arched an eyebrow. ‘My, my, such sacrifice. Yet even so, the girl still took her own life.’
Cú Chulainn’s fists clenched. He remembered the girl, crazed out of her mind, still clutching the bloodied dress she had worn the first of many times Cú Roí had ravaged her. Teetering on the edge of a cliff as the sea frothed below, leaving behind only the memory of yellow hair, the ghost of a scream. The dull thunder of the waves.
‘Just another soul damned by the Hound of Ulster, is that what you wanted to hear, Great Queen?’ asked Cú Chulainn. The Morrígan looked up from where she had been winding a lock of hair across one finger.
‘So now, for your kindness, for a murder you never committed Lugaid bears down on you,’ said the Morrígan. Cú Chulainn nodded slowly.
‘Does the boy know? The fresh-faced one who loves the horses? He’s pretty.’
‘No. Though I think he begins to understand. I did not wish to burden him with curses heaped on my head.’
‘You lead him, blind, to a battle you cannot win, another sacrifice on the altar to your glory?’ sneered the Morrígan, her face twisting. ‘Silly, silly boys, all broken promises and bloated confidence.’ Purple eyes rolled like dice. ‘Mothers tell their daughters never to trust a man can change. When will your thirst for leading young men to their deaths be sated, Cú Chulainn?’
Cú Chulainn pinched his forehead. Imprinted behind his eyes as if with hot needles were the mangled corpses of the boy troop of Emain Macha. Those foolish lads had charged at the hosts of Connacht to defend their land whilst he coupled with the Morrígan. If he had been there, he could have saved them. Instead, he had built stinking walls of rotting flesh from the savaged corpses of the soldiers who had slain them, dyeing the river water with bile, blood and leaking pus. He had given in to the ríastrad, the warp that made his body swell and grow and crack into a slaughter-beast, but it had not saved the boys.
The Great Queen did not lie. An eternal legend could not win back the stolen years from a graveyard of beardless youths doomed by the song of Cú Chulainn.
‘Why not let him go?’ probed the Morrigan. ‘Release him from his service?’
‘The boy…. he was entrusted to me. He understands me, or something of the kind.’
‘Understands?’ she snorted.
‘No. He is not scared of me, even though he should be. He is unwilling, or unable. I would like for him to be by my side, until the end. I would like to die without staring into the face of fear. I remember it more than I do my own mother.’
‘You tongue was never this loose when we first met,’ said the Morrigan.
‘What sense is there in hiding fear from you? It is your domain.’
‘True. I know of your despair, Cú Chulainn. All men dread meeting their end alone and unloved. How mortal of you.’
‘To be mortal is to be selfish,’ he barked back. ‘Why need I be any different? Was my birth not penance enough? A life made up of stifled screams when they meet my gaze and gooseflesh when I reach out for a touch. I have forgotten what a smile sounds like, Morrígan. Our kings take their trinkets and jewels with them beyond the grave. Is it so terrible to try and bring love with me?’
‘You loved me, once,’ said the Morrígan.
‘Once.’
Hound of Ulster and Phantom Queen sat opposite the campfire, and the hollowness of pain wrote itself quietly on their faces.
The ghost of sounds and images hovered in front of the fire. Once, after the battle-frenzy had consumed him, Conchobar’s druids had laid a glamour over his eyes so he would fight the ocean that slammed against the shore and spare the hosts of Ulster his maddened rage.
The foam had reared like stallions, the roar of the waves had trumpeted with battle cries, and Cú Chulainn had battled with the tides until sleep overtook his body. Just like going to sleep. No matter how hard he fought, the water had rushed ever onward, and it had covered him in a blanket of brine when he collapsed into the sand. A lifetime of guilt spent on a foe that still mocked him from the beaches of his home, waving taunts from seagull-speckled rocks.
‘There is no love for the butcher,’ he said. ‘No more.’
It was what the Morrígan had been waiting for. Another flicker in the air, now accompanied by a noise, like hair tearing from the scalp of a keening widow. Where a young girl had stood there was now an older woman, her face scarred with the first crows-feet of age, her violet eyes thickened by grief. Her dress of many colours was tattered at the hem, and one breast, heavy with milk, spilled from her bosom. The Morrígan whirled on Cú Chulainn, her cheek lined with the ragged wounds of fingernails, her eyes streaked with grimy tears. When next she spoke, her voice was thunderous. Rage pulsed from her form like a dark red halo.
‘Aye, Cú Chulainn, widower, maker of orphans,’ she snarled. ‘Know thee well your legacy. Why shed you tears over the killing of one son, when so many have been buried at your hand?’ she raged, her hair crackling as it shook. ‘Hound of Ulster, breaker of homes, ruin of young loves and old bonds, rabid beast, where is your will?’
‘I told you. You know it. I had no choice. It was my duty to them, to my name,’ snarled Cú Chulainn, but the Morrígan’s laugh was the scream of a murder of crows.
‘Duty, you say, Warped One. How fares your precious duty? Can it make you whole again, if it ever did? Can it buy a stolen future?’ She spat on the ground. ‘Answer me this, hound of the smith.’
Without realizing it, Cú Chulainn had begun to weep. He had sworn a vow that night, cold and shaking in his bed, that never again would he debase himself by shedding tears. Yet his was a history of broken promises, and now they fell, fat and thick, down his cheeks as he sat heavily on the ground.
‘I didn’t want to do it,’ he rasped hoarsely. ‘It was the oath. Until I die, I am not a man, Great Queen. I am the mongrel mutt of Conchobar, and I will fight the sea itself until it scours the flesh from my bones. I didn’t want to do it.’
‘So, this is how you will live your life, or what remains of it, Cú Chulainn,’ spoke the Morrígan. ‘A blood-stained dog with no say in what throat it tears, knowing only that it must bite whoever stands opposite the chain that holds it.’
‘I will not live much longer,’ said Cú Chulainn a sickly smile at his lips. It did not reach his eyes. ‘It’s for the better, wouldn’t you agree? I think there are many out there who would. Look around. This is no age of heroes, Morrígan. Ulster’s wars are finished. Even Lugaid’s grudge is but a tantrum, a hammer swung against one ant. It is time to surrender the world to the farmers and weavers, the poets and the bards.’
Cú Chulainn tilted his head back, taking in the heavens, wiping away the traces of his shame with one finger. He sighed, softly, not a complaint but the quiet realization of a man finding out all that is left for him to do in life is rest. To make truce with the waves he had wrestled with and let them carry him beyond the shimmering light of the horizon to find out where the sun makes its bed.’
The Morrígan’s fury had abated. She was looking now at him with something that could have been pity.
‘I see you will come willingly. Yet…you are no fool, you could have left me before I broke bread and salt. You could have kept your geas, buy you did not.’ For the first time since they had met, the Morrígan looked genuinely confused. Only for a second, but Cú Chulainn saw the puzzled eyes of her younger form blink, not understanding.
‘Why?’
‘Because I killed a hundred fathers, and a thousand sons. Because I cheapened the love of good women, whose mercies I never earned,’ said Cú Chulainn.
‘Because this is no age of heroes,’ he repeated. ‘My oath binds me until my death. Now fate has delivered me something I might call…. freedom? Think of it as the last, great deed of Ulster’s war-dog. I will leave them with the story, but not the man. For the story to work, it needs to have an end. Ah, Conchobar, the men like him, I am certain they will rush to begin a new tale, find their fresh slaughter-beast, who knows? Yet, Morrígan…. maybe, just maybe, when I am long dead and buried…perhaps another child will hear of the fall of Cú Chulainn. Pause, for an instant, before rushing to take up arms, and he will grow and age and die happy on the sick bed of a man, not the lair of a dog.’
His hand shook in a fist by his side. They had stolen his name from him, made him pledge himself to the banners of Ulster, all for a rabid mutt. He had just been a boy; he had been scared. Was still scared.
A leathery hand fell on his shoulder, jolting him out of his panic. Cú Chulainn realized that his jaw was clenched, and that he was trembling. He looked down at the Morrígan, and into the creases of wrinkled skin that was an old and matronly crone. She took his hand gently.
‘Easy now, wee one,’ she said, leading him over to where his armour lay. The pail had disappeared, and now it shone, bright and bloodless on the grass of Ireland. Slowly, but surely, she began to dress the warrior, buckling straps, tightening leather, lacing his jerkins with practiced ease. The armour changed as it touched his flesh, growing to fit his frame, shone to a mirror-sheen, until it was unrecognizable as the tarnished suit he had dirtied as a young man. Not once did those old fingers tremble.
As she circled Cú Chulainn, she was now a mother, absentmindedly tucking and straightening the edges of his cloak, brushing grass from his shoulder. Now she was a maiden, feet white and bare against the earth, placing a belt of bronze, iron and gold around the hero’s waist. Cú Chulainn looked down at the image of the girl, her hair shot with the dark purple of crushed flowers.
‘Will you be there?’ he asked. Just to hear her answer. Hoping for her word. The Morrígan brushed her lips against his, standing on her tiptoes to reach. He thought it would be cold. It was not.
‘Always.’
She called out to him, one last time, before he left. Her voice rang out, chiming with the three shouts of the maiden, the mother and the crone.
‘Goodbye, scarlet-clad hero!’ And then, a name, the true name Cú Chulainn had almost forgotten was his own.
‘Goodbye, Sétanta!’
Sétanta, who had been Cú Chulainn, laughed, the high, wild laugh of a child and the sun was in his cheeks, and in his hair, and stars danced in his eyes where it reached his tears.
It happened in a place called Knockbridge. The sky was clear and blue when the war-host of Lugaid, son of Cú Roí, rode him down.
The demigod rode alone in his chariot. The child clad in raven-feathers was nowhere to be seen. As the soldiers began their attack, Láeg slept by a campfire of ringed stone, a light bruise forming at his temple where his master had gently struck him. When he woke, maybe he would mourn him. Maybe he would hate him. Probably, in time, he would forget him. Yet he would be alive when he did so and time would snow upon his chin until a beard grew from his fuzzy lips.
In his place, Sétanta held his rampaging horses together with one arm, the reins wound about his wrist. The cart shrieked across the turf. Death loped behind him in fierce pursuit, tumbling and sprinting, swords rattling, horns yawping their monstrous tantrums to shatter against the hilltops.
Yet the dog of the Ulstermen did not return their baying chants. A flash of black wings darted through the clouds. Spears flew from the chariot of Sétanta, slicing into feet, arms, hands, pinning men to the dirt. When he had run out of spears, he leaned out of the chariot and grasped at rocks. Stones wailed through the chilly air. Wood splintered, horses shrieked in terror, the chariots careened into the distance. All the men at Lugaid’s side had waited for the ríastrad. They had waited for the Hound of Ulster to unleash his battle-fury, the berserker rage that twisted his body into a hollering fiend. It had not happened. No distortion rippled across his body. Perhaps if it had, he would have lived.
The first of Lugaid’s spears sent the horses tumbling to the ground. A flash of white silver was enough for Sétanta to slice his arm free from the reins and leap to safety. The son of Lugh drew the barbed, blackened thing from his back then. He hefted the Gáe Bolga. It was a miracle that the war-host did not scatter. It was close. Every man present had heard of that weapon. The unlucky few who lived through the raid of Connacht to see what it did ran first, scattering madly for cover. One man’s hair turned white on the spot as his mind broke from fear, sending him gibbering and hooting towards the forest where he would live among the beasts and birds until the end of his days.
Sétanta balanced the spear sideways across his toes and tossed it high into the air, stepping back. Lugaid let out a shrill bellow of terror and dive from his chariot. His loyal charioteer lunged in front of his master, now guarding only empty space, hefting an enormous shield. Just as the Gáe Bolga fell to the height of Sétanta’s knees he kicked out, striking the butt of the spear with his heel. Where his foot slammed against the wood, the grass blew back. The dread weapon roared across the length of the plain, a dark streak that screamed as it went.
Yet…. the spear had gone high, streaking through the upper rim of the shield and past the boy’s neck. The Gáe Bolga punched into a tree and stuck fast as it worked its gruesome magic, jagged barbs of bone shooting from the tip, bursting from the brittle oak. Had the demigod missed? Impossible. The weapon never failed to find its mark. The bards told this in their songs, and songs cannot lie.
Lugaid’s final throw took the hero in the side.
Sétanta dragged himself over to a standing stone, a relic of a forgotten time. He stood, even as his entrails fell around his hands and tied the raw pink bands three times around the stone, binding himself upright. His legs buckled and gave way. The war-host advanced towards the stone. The dying champion was muttering something to himself, again and again. Then he threw his head back and drew a rush of air into his lungs. The younger lads got the worst of it. The older and more experienced warriors had just enough time to clap their hands over their ears.
Sétanta screamed.
The closest man to the stone keeled over instantly, unconscious, black blood spurting from his ears. Those that were lucky would feel a sick, throbbing in their heads for almost a month. Sétanta’s chin drooped, finally touching his chest. A sigh whispered from his mouth. and his eyelids closed. As his head lolled to the side, the war-host stood paralyzed. Surely, at any moment, those sleeping eyes of many-coloured fire would snap open and they would be torn from limb to limb.
The eyes did not open. A look, oddly like that of a sleeping child untroubled by the future, was frozen on the warrior’s face.
A while later, Lugaid and his company marched up to the stone, eager to claim a trophy from the demigod’s corpse. When he reached out to take the ivory-hilted sword still clutched in Sétanta’s fingers it slipped, taking Lugaid’s arm off at the wrist. The body stood upright against the rock, unarmed.
A raven landed on Sétanta’s shoulder and began to nuzzle its beak against his neck.
Strangely, the bird looked like it was greeting an old friend.
It was Tuesday on a sluggish June afternoon in 1956, and Samuel Cohn sat and smoked a cigarette, waiting for a dead man. Well, not truly deceased, yet dead in that peculiar fashion unique only to the clients that Mr. Cohn dealt with on a day-to-day basis.
Samuel gave his watch a cursory glance and clicked his tongue softly. His right foot, squeezed into an oily Oxford wingtip, swung back and forth like a metronome. A daintily manicured finger sprinkled a fine rain of ash over an ashtray. His eyes trailed across the room apathetically, flickering now and then with smug condescension. Samuel was man who knew full well he would never grace such a backwater dive if he couldn’t help and was happy to remind people they’d do well to remember this.
But Andy had insisted. It would be impolite to neglect the wishes of the recently departed.
Cohn sucked on his cigarette, its orange embers a beacon under the heavy fog of tobacco- smoke. A patina of sap had accumulated on the surface of the battered tables and floorboards, years of congealed booze, spit and sweat sucking hungrily at the soles of his shoes. The place Andy had chosen had the quaint name of New Babylon, a title undoubtedly chosen by a Greenwich entrepreneur trying to conjure what they must have figured was a chic atmosphere of hedonism. As far as that went, the most Cohn could see was the odd couple giggling by the restrooms (this was the Village after all). Apart from that, the dive was all but empty. A group of young black teens were clustered in a dimly lit corner, joking around as they slid pennies into the ailing jukebox.
Cohn shifted nervously. It wasn’t that he disliked that kind of people, he’d managed a fair hand of coloured acts. He just preferred them more when they wore a nice suit and stood behind a microphone. He took a quick sip of his drink, making a face as the cheap whiskey crawled down to his stomach. After five minutes in a place like this, Cohn could feel the urge to peel his own skin off in sheets and run them under a tap. For God’s sake, he’d been having dinner at the Four Seasons a month ago……
With a start, he noticed the figure of Andy Prescott, picking his way through the forest of spindly chairs and patrons. The miasma eventually coughed him out, and he hurriedly pulled aside a seat opposite Cohn. Samuel let smoke hiss from between his teeth. He’d been made to wait for ten more minutes than scheduled in this dump, and he wanted Prescott to feel every second twist by, tight as thumbscrews.
Andy fidgeted in place. He’d been blessed with features that gave him a reassuringly handsome look of honesty, complete with cocoa-brown eyes and hair ripped straight from a magazine article on What Kind of Boy You Can Bring Home To Papa. Only the hints of a five-o-clock shadow and the puffy skin beneath his eyes betrayed him. That and the slight furrows in his cheeks. He’d lost weight since the last time they’d met.
If his face told a story, his clothes could have been a feature-length picture. A tatty brown single-breasted suit cut with three buttons draped itself on Andy’s frame like dirty clothes strewn over a chair by the side of the bed. A threadbare tie with a hideous polka dot pattern completed the sorry image, vainly attempting to suggest that its wearer was disposed of a cheery personality. Death had not been kind to Andy Prescott. Time’s relentless assault had whittled his image down to something even Willy Loman would have been embarrassed to be seen in. Not that this deterred Andy in any way: backed by the seemingly endless supply of optimism God had cursed the man with, he’d contrived to act like his bankruptcy was just a day in the life of good ole Andy. Sitting opposite the man, Samuel felt like the first peasant to notice that the emperor had left his drawers at home. He held his tongue. There was a disturbingly frail air to Andy, the tentative silence of a morgue. Cohn had the feeling if he broke it, Andy would burst.
“You’re late,” he said slowly, stubbing out his cigarette. Andy winced, scratching the back of his head.
“Sorry about that Sam,” he said, trying for a smile.
“It’s just-you know, no chauffeur or anything no more, I sort of lost track of time, and I still don’t know the subway that well or the Village-”
“That’s alright Andy,” sighed Samuel. He ordered a drink from the fat black waiter that was ambling by. Andy needed it. “Some place you picked out for us.”
Andy licked his lips, chuckling weakly. “I know it’s not like the usual joints Sam, but you know I’m not exactly a Rockefeller at the moment,” he joked, snatching the glass placed down in front of him. Samuel raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t the drinking that caught him off guard (Andy could outperform Dean Martin in that department) it was the slight change in Andy’s voice. A tinge of an old Polish accent had crept in towards the end of his sentence. Andy only slipped when he was very angry or very nervous. Hearing Andy’s New Jersey tones, meticulously polished from a childhood spent scrounging in the Ironbound sections of Newark, beginning to disintegrate worried Samuel a lot more than any ratty tie or poorly shaven chin.
He’d always known Andy’s career was on the rocks. Samuel had watched Andnej Popowicz, shy Polish immigrant, transform into a suave swing sensation overnight. He’d supervised the radio shows, the concert hall performances, the Christmas specials, meticulously managed his marriage to a bubbly and beautiful Hollywood starlet with more breasts than sense (Cohn’s decision, one he had been quite proud of) dressed up his singing doll in crisp suits to croon ballads about young love and meetings by moonlight.
But it was a flash in the pan-the disasters had lined up one behind the other, dominoes waiting to splatter Andy in rapid and terrible succession. First the ponies then, because Andy didn’t pick very fast horses, the exorbitant loans borrowed to afford a small palace on Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side (that was what America was all about, Andy had insisted, as his ledger dripped with red ink) plus another for his ailing Babcia. Then the utter fiasco of a divorce from his wife, who had picked Andy clean and come back for second. Finally, there was just the simple, ugly fact that, though his music was passionate, loud, bombastic, Andy had just…. stagnated.
His natural charisma was unable to prop up increasingly vapid albums (Swing Summers! New York Nights! The Sweet Sounds of Swing!) which had left Columbia records with a gaping lack of sales, and Samuel Cohn with a bitter hatred of alliteration. Andy hadn’t been as creative as Sinatra, with his obscene success on the silver screen and his record-breaking run with Capitol. Andy had cried during From Here to Eternity and whilst listening to In The Wee Small Hours, but for all his tears he’d replicated his idol’s success. The final nail in the coffin was his wild idea for a Hanukkah album. It was a popular holiday, wasn’t it, and surely there were enough Jews around to turn a profit? A Catholic Polack singing songs about dreidels and menorahs: the album had gone down about as well as the cardboard parachute. The critics had savaged it with the innate malice of a big cat lunging for the jugular. Samuel had cancelled every one of Andy’s subscriptions to the papers, but he’d found out anyway. The guy always had a natural talent for self-destruction.
And now, all Andnej Popowicz had left was Andy Prescott, a name created only because Samuel had pointed out no Yank deserved to be exposed to that many letters at once. It wasn’t as if he was a stranger to new identities either: he himself had been born Sean Gallagher, a wee lad from the Emerald Isle. Then he’d stepped off that stinking boat onto Ellis Island and onto the shores of the promised land. And lo, the promised land had said unto him: JOBS WANTED: IRISH NEED NOT APPLY.
So, Sean Gallagher had become Samuel Cohn, after an old drinking friend of has told him it was the Jews that had all the money in this country. Yet over the years Samuel Cohn had grown to be far more real than Gallagher ever was, as had Andy Prescott. It was like how the fat glass diamonds in the movies seemed more valuable than the real article. But you had to work hard to keep the trick alive, like a fat man sucking in his stomach for a photograph. Andy was floundering, his ego flaking away under the ruthless onslaught of life’s current. And no matter how dead he was, if Andy Prescott fell back into being Andnej Protopowicz then there was truly no coming back.
“Have another drink,” said Samuel, more an order than a suggestion. He signed for a fresh glass with a casual flick of his wrist. Andy ignored it however, swirling the amber contents of his cup and staring dead ahead.
“I can’t keep going like this Sam,” he whispered. Samuel blinked. He had expected this meeting to descend into the usual histrionics of struggling, entitled talent. His early annoyance dissipated: this was dangerous territory. Samuel would never have considered himself a sentimentalist, but he certainly wouldn’t abide a suicide on his conscience.
“There’s nothing to worry about Andy. You’ve just hit a bit of a bump on your career, that’s all, nothing that can be sorted out, I mean you’ve still got your voice, your looks, you’re a young fella, barely a day over thirty-”
“Thirty-six,” corrected Andy glumly.
Samuel hardly missed a beat. “-still in the prime of his life, that’s what I’ve always said, and trust me, we’ll look around, book a few gigs, maybe an army show, that always goes down well, a charity ball or two….” he was striking out wildly and he knew it. The charity balls were their best option, but the last thing Andy needed for his already ailing image was to be seen around rooms of geriatric old grandmas tossing their lace hankies on stage. But God’s sake, at least it paid–
“No, no Sam none of that,” said Andy firmly. “I won’t live out the rest of my days as a circus act, or, or some glorified gigolo.”
“Yes, well the thing about the circus is,” sighed Samuel, “they make money. As do gigolos. Quite a bit more than you do now.”
“I can tighten my belt a bit more Sam. I can’t afford another embarrassment just to snag a quick buck, you know how the critics are, they’re circling like sharks and if they so much as get a whiff of another Happy Happy Hanukkah situation….”
Sam raised one hand to his temple. Andy was right. Christ Almighty, it would be a lifetime before he’d be able to turn to the reviews column of The New York Times without breaking into sweat.
“So, what then, Andy?” It was becoming more difficult to keep the exasperation from his voice. “We make a bid for T.V? A surprise appearance on I Love Lucy?”
Andy ignored the jibe. Samuel paused for breath then stopped altogether. There was a look of steely determination in the man’s eyes, a look suffused with grim, lean hunger, one that Samuel knew all too well. He had seen it in the gaze of a young man named Sean Gallagher when he stepped off that boat all those years ago. Without noticing, Samuel realized he’d sat up straight.
“What I need, is energy,” stressed Andy. The Polish burr had vanished. “Everything I do from now has be done with total confidence. At the slightest sign of weakness, they’ll bury me for good, hammer the nail down so far it’ll sink into the dirt. I can’t budge, not an inch, or it’ll be over like that!” snarled Andy, slamming his palm down onto the table. “Failure isn’t an option, Sam; I’ve tasted too much of that already and I’m ready to wash my mouth out. No corny stunts, no gimmicks, no pandering.”
“Meaning……?”
“Meaning no charity balls, no song and dance for the good old American boys, no TV dinner ads or detergent jingles.”
“Well, that’s all well and good Andy,” Samuel conceded, “but you’re flat broke, and it sounds like whatever scheme you’re cooking up is worth a lot of cash. Dollars, Andy. Capital, fundusz, whatever you want to call it.”
“Money doesn’t have to be an issue,” assured Andy, ignoring Samuel’s shocked burst of laughter. “I’ll sell the Chevy, I’ll pawn off the Rolex, whatever it takes, just to get me in that recording booth, just one more time, it’s all I’m asking for.”
“You’re talking about a comeback? An honest-to-Gods comeback?” spluttered Samuel. He had expected Andy to beg for a loan or reveal another hellish chapter in his ongoing marital issues, but this? “Andy, buddy, I’m telling you this because of our history together. You’re almost forty and singing swing music, it’s just not gonna cut it.”
“Sam,” said Andy firmly. “Have you noticed something?”
Samuel’s brow creased. Andy smiled wanly. “We’ve been talking here for nearly thirty minutes, and not a single person has realized who I am.”
It was obvious once he said it aloud. The usual whispers and shocked squeals that had accompanied Andy’s entrance into any public place, back in the Good Old Days, were absent. No rustling of fingers digging through handbags in search of handkerchiefs or grocery bills to be autographed, no turning heads creaking. He’d become so accustomed to that reliable, steady background noise whenever the two met that its silence was disconcerting. Patrons around them were chatting, laughing and drinking, their eyes sliding through and past Andy as if he had been made from steam.
Andy leaned forward. For someone who’d just pointed out how little the world cared for him, his face was aglow with the feverish excitement of a small child with a new toy.
“No one remembers me Sam,” he said. “No one here cares about the old, sad Andy Prescott with his dance albums for suburban moms and his sappy concert hall performances. Don’t you see what this means? We can start again, turn over a new leaf, we have a whole blank slate to work on!”
Samuel made sure to maintain his usual air of tentative skepticism, but a smile was tugging at the edge of his lip.
“So, assuming we do have this blank slate-not to mention we somehow find some actual money-” began Samuel with forced nonchalance, lighting another cigarette, “what would you, say, draw, for lack of a better word, on this blank slate?”
Andy took a swig of his drink, smacking his lips appreciatively. “I’m thinking something for the younger crowd-”
“Jesus Andy, I thought you said no gimmicks.”
“No, no, not for kiddies, ugh, I’m talking something with some pep in its step, music people will want to dance to without worrying about slipping a disc,” continued Andy, his words unfurling with the aplomb of a magician revealing the card concealed in his sleeve.
“I’ll still stick to swing, but we ditch the big band high-society stuff, bring in some jazz horns, some sloppy, dirty brass, a pianist that can play Sam, really play not tinkle out show-hall tunes, maybe even some backing vocals like you hear in those Beale Street records!” Andy was almost levitating off his seat with excitement, his eyes sparking with an intensity Samuel had only before seen in the religiously insane.
“That’s a hell of a step away from your usual stomping ground Andy,” Sam pointed out. “Jazz horns? Beale Street? It sounds to me like you want to put together a record for darkies Andy,” said Samuel.
“Yeah?” said Andy, perplexed. “And what’s wrong with that?”
“You’re white.”
“Negros still buy records, Sam,”
“So do Jews, Andy, and I don’t need to remind you of how that ended,”
“That was because the music was bad, Sam,” insisted Andy. “The songs were crap; we all knew it. But if we put real effort into it Sam, genuine passion I don’t see why it wouldn’t work!”
“You would be an easier sell than a coloured act….” murmured Samuel, half to himself.
“Exactly! And look, Sam, that kind of music’s always been popular with the younger crowd, we’re talking about a whole new audience here! New buyers, with money to spend, and old ones, who’ve been waiting for me to do something fresh and exciting and dangerous!”
Sam clicked his teeth together. “A lot of your old listeners might not like this,” he warned, but his heart wasn’t in it. Behind his pale blue eyes, numbers, figures and names were locked in vicious battle as they fought to pave the fastest way to El Dorado.
“Ah, c’mon Sam, you and me both know I haven’t made a good record since ‘49. Any “old listeners” I still have left will be in the obituaries by the time we make this.”
“We’d have to reshape your image a little…. The New And Improved Andy Prescott, not mom and pop’s music, something cool….” Samuel pondered. “You don’t go to the ponies anymore, do you?” he inquired suddenly.
Andy flushed red. “I’m not that man anymore Sam, I wouldn’t have called you here if I was.”
Samuel nodded to himself, satisfied. “A new kind of swing record, for Negros and white folk looking for a little danger, a little more life when they go dancing,” Samuel grinned, his smile all canines. For the first time in quite a long while, he felt excited in Andy’s presence. The dead could walk again, with a little push and two electrodes jammed into their skull. Andy had found a spark, and now it was his turn to pull the lever. “It just might work.”
“It has to work,” stressed Andy. “Trust me Sam, I won’t let you down on this. Just one more push, and no more meeting in dirty bars in the Village, no more loans and mortgages. Back to dining at the Ritz and rolling through 59th street in nice cars with pretty girls,” laughed Andy. The frail man that had sat down at the table had been replaced, his body inflated from within with the fierce blaze. Sometimes collapsing stars can burn, one last time.
“Oh, what the hell,” chuckled Samuel, and stuck out his hand. Andy gripped it in a vice ridged from the memories of New Jersey steelworks, a leathery hiss emanating as calloused palm met calloused palm. They shook, more for the hell of the thing than for any genuine reason, and then Samuel ordered another round of drinks, his eyes gleaming with the far-off halls of El Dorado.
It was later in the evening, around eight p.m., and Samuel and Andy were in Andy’s temporary apartment in the Village. The windows had been cracked open against the muggy heat that carried the stench of garbage and exhaust fumes on its back, and both men had discarded their jackets, sleeves rolled up past their forearms. Sweat stains spread from beneath their armpits. Ties had been loosened, and both men were in animated conversation around the dingy kitchen table, a bare lightbulb flickering anemically as it buzzed.
A steady flow of excited babble came from both mouths as they jotted down names and ideas in Samuel’s notebook, his pencil skittering manically to keep up with the torrent. Presently, a cracked plastic phone was found for Samuel, who paced around the room, fingers blurring as they turned the dials, the New York air outside the apartment punctuated by intermittent burst of flattery or vicious swearing as deals were made, favours called in and demands insisted upon.
After a while, Andy located a bottle of cheap champagne. The makeshift roadmap of their future was completed, the first foundations laid for the New Andy Prescott. Both men sat down in the sweltering apartment, and raised a toast to God and to country, to dollar bills, to America, to youth markets, cheap booze, studio musicians, red-headed actresses, Negro pianists, Frank Sinatra, penthouse suites, new beginnings, new names, and the new age of swing. The pop of the champagne cork was a firework.
As the bubbles fizzed, in the apartment across the street a young student was watching T.V. the muted sound from the screen barely audible over the cacophony of traffic and the repeated clinks of champagne glasses and celebration from the opposite kitchen.
The Milton Berle show was playing, and the student was frozen in his seat as if nailed there through the feet. He was watching a stickman gyrating with animal ferocity, tossing a head of ink-black hair, snapping back and forth. At any point it seemed like he’d tear his way free from the confines of the television set and stride out to claim dominion of the world. On the TV, the figure whooped and hollered and shook like a thing possessed.
The following chronicle was cobbled together from a patchwork of archival documentation, medical records, and letters related to the life of the once-celebrated Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste. I would like to thank Monsieur Auguste’s estate for graciously providing access to the late Commander’s private journal.
I will reluctantly admit that I cannot provide any comments as to whether the events recounted here are credible or not. History, mendacity, and superstition shape this epistolary puzzle: I leave it to my trusty readers to be judges, juries, and (dare I say it?) executioners of time’s sordid legacy. But enough from me-—it is time for the living to hold their tongues, and for the dead to speak.
Report drafted by Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste, Second Franco-Mexican War, 2nd of August 1865.
“Frightful business with a spot of local unrest. Juárez loyalists took up arms to storm the munitions arsenal. Attack was quickly thwarted. Minimal French casualties sustained. Loyalists apprehended.
One civilian death reported, a young native girl. Unable to properly ascertain the culprit. Most likely an accident.
Family has been duly compensated for the cost of the burial. Men are in high spirits after the victory. There seems to be no indication of further violence.
Glory to the Emperor and may God have mercy on our souls.”
Private correspondence of Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste to Madame Madelaine Auguste, 3rd of August 1865.
“They hanged the brigands today in the courtyard, as the sun was setting. Oh, my dove, what a beastly hour to take the life of a man! A condemned man should be permitted to leave this earth beneath a clear sky. Instead, they shuffled onto the gallows, stained blood-red by the dying light of the evening. They cast great shadows for men so small.
I hope these words I write are not too displeasing. I appreciate your desire to be informed of my doings overseas, but I can make no promises as to the content of these letters. The work of a soldier is grim business, and our duties here in Mexico are a far cry from the parades in honour of the emperor back home. I still remember the blush on your cheeks as I strutted in that silly dress uniform. Good heavens, I looked like a wedding cake! I would rather you hold onto on to that image of this proud fool who loves you too much for his own good, than that of the battered, tired man who writes this now.
The crowd did not cheer when the brigands swung. I am not sure if it would have been better if they did.
I simply wish for this confounded war to end. One can only hope that braggart Juárez sees sense and forfeits the debt these Mexicans refuse to pay to the Crown! My palate is more refined for our evening treats at the Boulangerie Viennoise than these base offerings of blood from a gaggle of Cains.
Oh darling, that I could once more see fields of dew-slick grass, feel the grey mist of an evening rain! I struggle to put it into words, but this country’s soil does not agree with me.”
Excerpt from the personal journal of Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste, 3rd of August 1865.
“I watched as they buried the young girl, though I knew I was not welcome. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to see it with my own eyes, as they lowered the coffin into the red clay. I think I buried the family dog in a similar fashion, stuffed inside a crate once used for storing milk.
I could not tell Madelaine. I fear I have already upset her with my grisly talk of executions. Besides, women take the sufferance of children quite poorly. I cannot help but wonder whether they are more sensible for this. It is difficult not to ponder how I would have felt, had it been a daughter of my own sepulchered beneath the dirt. Try as I might, I could not coax out any tears.
The natives said nothing of our presence there, but I feel that for the first time since our arrival we are seen. Before they simply stared, but did not look, those vacant, simple black eyes flitting over uniforms and flags, like a gentleman sighting a vagrant begging for alms on the side of the road. Acknowledging that he is there (as a stone in your path is) but not recognizing him as a thing that lives. I fear the natives see us clearly now, and anything that lives, one knows, must also bleed.
The searing winds have picked up, and they unearth a putrid smell. My only hope is that any threat of further violence is buried quietly alongside the coffin. It would be a terrible thing indeed for them to lose more daughters, now that they have no fathers left to raise them.
The native girl’s mother did not weep at all throughout the burial. Instead, she simply stared mutely at the earth.
Before I departed, she moved to toss a final clod of parched mud onto the mound, my shadow spreading out to mingle with hers. Native and Frenchman, intertwined by an umbilical stretch of darkness, knotted over the remains of a murdered girl.”
Private correspondence of Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste to Madame Madelaine Auguste, 9th of August 1865.
“…. a most unusual occurrence was bought to my attention this morning, my darling. It appears that one of the men, Maxime Dupont, refuses to participate in drills as expected of him.
I investigated further myself, as the lad in question has always been a most noble, patriotic, and proud fellow. I am sure that if you think back hard enough, you will remember Monsieur Dupont, darling, for he was present at on our wedding day. A rather tall, brown-haired chap with crooked teeth, very polite. I recall you remarking that his manners quite impressed you, so you will also share my puzzlement.
Upon being questioned as to the nature of this bizarre attitude, Monsieur Dupont refused to explain himself properly. He appeared to be melancholic and convinced that he was under severe risk of being harmed. Monsieur Dupont’s condition was serious enough that he has been temporarily placed under the care of our physician.
Most likely, this is the consequence of too much time spent underneath the sun. That, or there may be some thuggish behaviour carried out underneath my nose by scoundrels harassing Monsieur Dupont. Regretfully, it would not be the first time this has happened within the army, though I pray such shameful deeds are not the cause of his distress.
I do hope you are taking care of yourself, my dove. The French heat is often as merciless as the brands of Mexico. It heartens me that you took my last letter so well, though I feel I must apologize for indulging in gory details. Do try out the new hat I have sent if it has arrived already. I am certain it will be the envy of all your reading society.
I tried to look over the Baudelaire you enclosed for me, but I confess I do not really understand it. It will fall to you to help me through it when we are in each other’s arms once more.
Your love, and faithful servant, Jean-Jacques.”
Report drafted by Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste, Second Franco-Mexican War, 11th of August 1865.
“……. Dupont’s case continues to worsen. Has been isolated away from the rest of the men for his own safety, and theirs. Have ordered him to be physically restrained. He insists on incurring grievous wounds upon his own person. Ordered his quarters to be lit constantly.
He is at his most demented in the presence of darkness. No certain diagnosis as of yet. Cause of madness is still unexplained. Private Dupont is physically in perfect health and has yet to see battle.
Have instructed for the old well to be inspected, and a new well to be dug. Contamination in the water may explain Dupont’s behaviour. Have also issued an investigation following frequent reports of whoring and men soliciting the services of native girls. I would not be surprised to discover that the diseased patient is hiding the initial symptoms of syphilis.
This unfortunate circumstance has taken a toll on morale. However, I am confident order will be reinstated soon. Have personally attempted to interview Dupont, but there is nothing of value to report in his testimony.”
Entry from the personal journal of Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste, 14th of August 1865.
“Monsieur Dupont passed away this evening. The poor man resorted to chewing out his own tongue to end his life. There is little in this world more pitiful than suicide, but even this defies belief. The physician found him drowned in his own blood, the pink stump of flesh a bulging mass inside his throat. It was wedged so firmly in the poor devil’s gullet that they had to slit it open for removal.
This is not the handiwork of a syphilitic lunatic, and I confess, to my great disgrace, I have not been entirely honest in my reports of Dupont’s behaviour. Yet, in my defense, there are certain happenings so outlandish that to relay them to my superiors would, at best, question my authority and, at worst, my own sanity.
The day before he bit out his own tongue, Monsieur Dupont fainted, screaming in fear of a little girl.
A widespread search was conducted as to whether any of the native population had managed to infiltrate the barracks. No foreign presence, never mind a little girl, was located. I would be remiss not to mark the unsettling echoes of the Mexican child buried two weeks ago, but it would be preposterous to fall into the waiting jaws of superstition. It is a ravenous beast that gluts itself on paranoid delusions and self-fulfilling prophecies.
That being said, I find it hard not to attach any importance to Dupont’s words the night before he expired. All the while, he shrieked the same three words repeatedly. Even when fatigue overcame him, he moaned them out in a stupor: Solid. Dark. Shadow. Solid. Dark. Shadow.
The bizarre nature of this…incantation has kept me from further reporting the event. After all, the words make so little sense.”
Shields, Frederick James; Hamlet and the Ghost; Manchester Art Gallery.
Emergency message delivered to Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste by Chasseur Hugo Verne, 17th of August of 1865.
“…whilst on sentry duty this evening, me and Garnier and I spotted movement from up on the garrison. The watchword was asked for. No answer was given. No reply or any more movement was noted.
Later, around midnight, movement again. Garnier and I observed a solid, dark shadow on the Eastern wall. I note solid, Commander Auguste, begging your pardon, as this wasn’t a trick, and Garnier can back up my statement.
Lost sight of the intruder before we could get any closer. No evidence of the stranger’s presence could be found, no footprints or anything of the kind.
I believe it is for the best, if you don’t mind my speaking out of turn, Commander Auguste, to consider more security along the walls. The ease with which this intruder fooled both me and Garnier is……. troubling, as on my honour as a Christian, neither of us were neglecting our post or sneaking a drink that night and were both on the highest of alerts.”
From the personal journal of Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste, 17th of August 1865.
“I do not know what to make of Monsieur Verne’s report. Recent circumstances leave me shaken to my core. I have prayed to God for assistance in this matter and asked Him to dissuade these fancies that threaten to plunge me into the raving world of witches and lunatics. He remains silent as the crowd that saw those brigands hang, a mute disgust watching me with sable eyes. Quietly measuring out a noose to circle my neck.
It was those words again, in Monsieur Verne’s tale. Words said in sequence, that he could not have possibly heard from the departed Monsieur Dupont, who howled them out only to a physician and to me.
Solid. Dark. Shadow. Solid. Dark. Shadow. What on earth does it mean? Is this a code or cipher, a motto whose significance I am simply too slow to understand? Yet there again it appears, creeping through the flow of his speech like mold, slowly spreading from beneath its dank abode, solid, dark shadow, solid, dark, shadow, a redundancy made manifest. Nevertheless, I find myself repeating it as I would my nightly prayers.
How can I not peer into the folds of night and imagine, hidden in them, a shape, biding its time, observing me in silence, waiting for my back to be completely turned to lunge at me in fury?
The longer that I squint into the shadows, the more they seem like slippery coils of matter coalescing and drifting apart-but no, no, they do not yet appear dark, or solid, though shadows they may well be. The candlelight strikes at their questing tendrils and whips them back. What fear is there for a soldier of the Empire that quelled this dry and savage land when faced with goblins, ghouls, and childish inventions?
Ours is an age of reason, and to reason I must pledge myself as servant and crusader.”
Private correspondence of Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste to Madame Madelaine Auguste, 24th of August 1865.
“Though it pains me to admit it, Madelaine, I exhumed the child’s corpse yesterday, alone, under the cover of darkness. Of late these days, I have been more than a little dishonest both to you and to my superiors. I understand this must confuse you, but all I ask of you is to try and to understand.
It was my bullet that ended the poor thing’s life, a terrible accident. I would never have committed such an atrocity in good conscience-you know how much I love children, oh Madelaine, how can I make you see it? The smoke, the shouts, the haze of gunpowder…. a stray bullet, but nevertheless, one from my own gun. It was dismissed as a tragedy, a slip-up. You are the only soul that knows this, the only soul that I can trust to lead me with your perfumed hand through this field of thorns.
Please, if the holy bonds that join us as man and wife could ever be called upon for a matter such as this, let me call upon them now.
Should I have come clean, admitted the murder to be my fault? Would my superiors have cared? We all knew the bullet that the physician removed from her heart was of French make. Yet no uproar was raised, no guilt doled out-we all witnessed it, but only I saw. Madelaine, my love, the world will never know it was my rifle, the. The world does not want to know, but I will always bear that memory upon my shoulders, splinters, and all.
And now all this talk of specters and shapes and death, it is choking me, Madelaine. Even now I question the decision, but it is for the best neither the Mexicans nor my men know of my momentary lapse of good conscience. I had to know, had to ensure that shame and rumour did not run amok any longer through my garrison. The chaos would be unimaginable. I rest easy with mud beneath my fingertips rather than innocent French blood staining my palms. Some doubts are best put to rest expeditiously and without fanfare.
The fire that burnt what remained of the native girl left nothing solid indeed. Though try as I might, no matter how high I fanned the flames, I could not quite dispel those infernal shadows.”
Report taken from the medical journal of Garrison physician Jean-Baptiste Rochefort, 26th of August 1865.
“Deceased have been identified as Chasseurs Hugo Verne and Charles Garnier. Monsieur Verne’s wounds point to a shattered skull and broken neck. Body was found at the bottom of the stairs leading to the watchtower.
Little blood found on the stairs themselves, indicating Monsieur Verne threw himself, or was thrown, impacting beside the final steps with tremendous force. Vertebrae in the neck completely pulverized. Serious lacerations observed on Verne’s hands, torso, and feet. Bite-marks and scratches from a human hand, some deeper injuries, from a blade of some kind. Unable to accurately identify marks as those of an attacker or self-inflicted.
Monsieur Garnier found impaled through the jaw on the bayonet of his service-issued rifle. Blade lodged firmly in the top of the cranium. Gunpowder burns on Garnier’s hands and face are evidence of an attempt at discharging his weapon. Angle of entry of the blade proves Monsieur Garnier was aided by gravity. Monsieur Garnier’s torso and extremities bear signs of grievous corporal punishment.
Presence of unusual blemishes in the eyes of both deceased. Cloudy bruises on the surface of the pupil are reminiscent of a solid, dark shadow.”
Private correspondence of Garrison Commander Jean-Jacques Auguste to Madame Madelaine Auguste, 5th of September 1865.
“This will be the last letter I send to Paris, my darling, not because my love for you has dimmed in any way, but because I believe it is best you separate yourself from a wretch such as I before it is too late. You may weep when you read these words, you may call me cruel, but it is the necessary cruelty of the monk who shreds his back to ribbons in the pursuit of salvation.
As it is, I have resigned myself to the knowledge that even in death, we will not be reunited. I will still remember you fondly, though my eyes be blinded with hot blood from the boiling lakes of Hell. I sleep next to the fire now, for its blazing light is infinitely preferred to the cold, the teeming, wet womb of shadows that slide themselves over my skin, seeking to pour into my ear, thrice blasted and thrice infected for the purpose of my ruin.
Yet I confess myself a coward, for still I wince and turn away when the edges of the fire’s tongues lick at my cheeks and fingers. If I cannot even stomach these flames, what will I endure in the dungeons of Tartarus?
I did not mean to kill that little girl. It was an accident; I could not have seen her!
But…I saw her the other night, in the hallway outside my quarters. Scoff at my words, denounce them as the fevered delirium of a madman driven insane by guilt. She-she? No, it was just… standing stood there, the silver mist of moonlight hovering like a miasma behind it.
Before I had dismissed the reports of my men of the “solid, dark shadow” but now I know what they meant. That slight figure did not move, but even surrounded as it was by its brethren, the shadow of the girl hung in space, a rip in the fabric of the world.
Perhaps the worst thing about it was its weight. The thick, heavy feel of its shape that belied it as something tangible, something set in its place and its purpose. Not an airy, specter that could be passed through, but a creature whose hands could touch andg rasp and feel and hurt and choke and scratch………its footsteps leaden thuds advancing onwards at the call of twilight, fingers smudging their blackened grime on doorknobs forced open, sabers shattered, rifles broken.
Even then I understood that though it could be touched, it could not be killed. Any round discharged at that chest would be devoured by the hungering dark. Within the shape of that thing there dwelled the entrails of midnight, a corruption that had leeched its shadows from our hearts and minds and gorged itself, waiting to multiply.
Had it been lying in wait, spreading like gangrenous rot ever since the winds blew that rancid stench from within the murdered girl’s coffin? Or maybe, like a seed, like grain, it was we who had carried it. Packed it in straw, sealed in crates, stuffed tight alongside the cannon, the rifles, the swords, the mortars, the grapeshot, and gunpowder sent over in droves on the emperor’s boats to germinate in this world of unspoken, bloodied truths.
I had stared at similar shadows on the prow of my ship as it crossed the Atlantic, dripping from the folds of the tricolore, I had glimpsed it crawling inside shell-casings and lurking behind my shaving-mirror, wearing my face as a carnival mask. It must have helped me dig up the girl. The task had seemed faster that night, as if some being was scrabbling at the wood of the coffin from below, eager to be free.
I ran. Why bother denying it? I ran, tearing down the corridor, bolting back towards the fire, towards the light that could beat back the shadows. It did me little good. It never will. This terror that stalks us all is not a foe to be vanquished by any means of reason, for we have always been endarkened.
I can feel it within me now, from where it peeled off and slipped into my own shade. The filth is a second skin, sewn onto my back. It hovers over my head, stretching and dancing on the walls as it catches the light, doubling my every move like a mime, an ape with a thousand forms. How could I possibly return to France, nestling this parasite in my bosom, a prodigal son of lies returned to the place of its birth? It would flit from host to host, trailing the blossoms of its tarnish in its wake, curdling the souls that already hide the kernels of that self-same seed.
I will not be the father to a legacy of shadows.
I love you Madelaine, though you wish I never had. Remember the gilded uniform, remember the walks by the Seine, the pastries shared by lamp light. Please remember my face, one last time, before its features run melt into a pall.”
Excerpt from medical records obtained from Charenton Asylum, Charenton-Saint-Maurice, 28th of October 1865.
“Monsieur Auguste’s mental state has not shown any significant indications of improvement. Almost a month has passed since his internment and transportation from Mexico, and he continues to be stricken with active and severe attacks of melancholia.
Recently discharged from the infirmary after a case of self-mutilation, Monsieur Auguste flayed chunks of his own feet with a stolen kitchen knife. Claims it was to cut away his shadow.
Fear of the night has repeatedly been observed being his most obvious and frantic concern. Monsieur Auguste has been moved into solitary quarters for his own safety.
Admittance today of a new lunatic. Assaulted several prostitutes due to bouts of psychosis likely triggered by a prolonged abuse of absinthe. Request for further medical examinations for possible venereal diseases carried by the patient: his body is covered in unusual blemishes, like solid, dark shadows.”
Felix Lazar wiped his mouth with the back of one pale hand and threw up. There wasn’t much left to puke: a thin film of bile peeled from his lips, a trembling spider web. He swallowed hot phlegm, getting to his feet shakily, steadying himself against the edge of the table as he rose. Stubby, well-manicured fingers scrabbled to find the bottle, pawing at the ridged plastic child-proof cap. One pill, then two, no, fuck it, three. The chalky texture of the medication dissolved in Felix’s throat; the chunky aftertaste of vomit mixing with the bitter paste of drugs. The room swooned, and he was down on his knees again, forcing yellow slime from an empty stomach. The pills gleamed at the bottom of the basket like discarded change.
Moaning softly to himself, a keen whimper that trailed off into a sob, Felix made himself stand up. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and nearly broke it then and there. His skin was fungal grey with shock, deep chunks of puffy blue-black flesh boring into the space beneath his eyes. The silk shirt his viewers loved was stained with filth, and his tie hung around his neck like the rotting trophy of a savage in an adventure movie. White flecks peeked industriously from behind the black gunk Felix smeared on his hair every morning. This only served to complete the portrait of a man whose dignity had been forced out of him and into the rubbish along with his lunch.
Blearily, his eyes landed on the enormous, framed portrait near his desk. The old Felix Lazar beamed a toothy grin back. Too pristine to be fully natural, the kind of work discreetly done in an expensive LA dentist’s chair. Everything about the figure in the photograph suggested someone who had slowly and methodically erased any identifiers of age. Next to Felix stood a shabby little man in a lab-coat that would have been put to shame by a Halloween costume. The scientist was a foot shorter than Lazar; his blonde hair combed torturously over the wide dome of his head. Nevertheless, his smile was completely genuine, threatening to devour the photographer in one bite.
His name was Doctor Paul Nassar. Of course, the bastard was happy. He had saved the world.
Not that Felix was in a congratulatory mood at the moment. In fact, it took all his strength not to throw a paperweight and shatter Paul fucking Nassar’s smug face.
Felix resigned himself to collapsing into his chair. Pinching the bridge of his nose was enough to stem the flow of tears, but only just. More than anything, he tried not to look at the surface of his desk where the thing was waiting, squatting by his laptop like a dormant snake. It sat primly within a lilac-envelope, as innocent as a Christmas card from his grandparents, the type he’d rip apart, pretending to read the trite message within as he counted the money inside. Felix had been in no rush to open this envelope. Surely no one ever was.
Deep down, Felix had always known that one day it would happen. There were only so many people on this earth (less now, not like before, not like the bad times with their swarms of refugees, immigrants, tramps, looters, criminals….) so it was natural the lot would fall on Felix sometime. He knew it better than anyone, had spent the greater part of thirty years endorsing Nassar’s revolutionary procedure on his program, eagerly cashing in the state subsidies crammed weekly into his mailbox.
Felix had dedicated almost every waking moment to pushing Nassar’s population-control operation to be implemented worldwide. As far back as the early days, when the smug, brilliant little geek’s experiments had been pilloried and lambasted by the scientific community and the horrified public. That was when people could afford to sniff down their noses, before even the most self-righteous had been forced to kill and eat their high horses to survive. Nassar had been able to secure the last laugh, then the Nobel Prize, and then the position as the leading medical expert in the entire country. Not to mention unlimited protection as the head of the Commission for World Health and Sanitized Depopulation. Felix hadn’t just sat idly by-ever since his first tentative foray into show business, he had been pulled along by the nose, bestowed with a prodigious gift for sniffing out the nearest windfall. He’d crammed the procedure down the throats of the masses until their teeth cracked. It was exceedingly easy, standing in the sterile light of his studio set, reeking of cologne, plastering on that piranha grin. People were tired, broke, rabid, desperate. More than that. They were hungry, and Felix had been the first to point them in the direction of a land of milk and honey.
So, yeah, there would have to be some sacrifices and? You had to give up a few souls here and there for salvation. It was in the Bible or something.
At first, when The Lazarus Pit had hit the air, he had been attacked for it. Not just the usual keyboard crusaders raking him along the coals on online forums and in hysterical video rants. That was part and parcel with the territory, especially in a program Felix had meticulously designed to thrive off controversy. As if controversy had ever been in short supply. Even back in the days when there were no breadlines outside supermarkets and the middle class that had followed the dinosaur and the dodo bird still remained, terminally online losers could always be trusted to find something to whine about. He hadn’t been deterred by the dog-turds rammed underneath his door, the bricks through the window of his old house, the flat tires in his car and the crudely drafted death threats rife with spelling errors and red crayon. What had been a real shock was the wave of support he had quickly received, the hashtags and the online trends backing the procedure.
After all, Sanitized Depopulation on the scale Nassar had theorized was a pretty stark novelty. It was euthanasia, plain and simple, no use beating around the bush. Lazar never used that term on air. Too many associations with fascist-eugenics-Hitler-Nazi crap.
Yet the arguments in favour were irrefutable, or so his allies pointed out. Sanitized Depopulation would reduce waste, break down the monopolies on food and resources cultivated by the greedy. In the hands of a single, efficient state, food would become what it always should have been: plentiful. Anyway, everyone knew that those who attacked the procedure were just insane radicals who cared more about themselves than helping other people. It was outstanding how quickly people’s indignation vanished when they were able to relax by themselves in their own flat, no longer shared with thirty other stinking, crying, coughing strangers. No longer reduced to counting ration coupons with trembling, hoarder’s fingers, and look how fast complaints dried up, when people could sit down to a steak dinner!
All you had to do was try not to think too hard of where it came from.
For thirty years Felix had hoped he was exempt from the Depopulation draft. Dimly, Felix registered that perhaps he had only survived for three decades because of his unflinching, rabid defence of the entire damn process. Now, it seemed The Powers That Be had decided to reward him for his keenness.
In bold, simple type, the envelope proclaimed cheerily:
CONGRATULATIONS CITIZEN! YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED TO TAKE PART IN THE ACTAEON SOLUTION.
There were no two doubts about it. His full name, occupation, address, civil status-they were all printed in neat little rows along the top of the envelope. As was usual for a medical record, the document had helpfully noted down his blood type (B-), which no-one ever really bothered remembering.
“Maybe it’s good to know,” he muttered to himself. “Maybe it improves the flavour.” Then he laughed hysterically. He howled at the absurdity of it all, at the sheer, cosmic indignity. At some point, he started crying. Then he threw up again.
Congra-tu-fucking-lations alright. Felix didn’t have to open the envelope to find out what was in it. He had examined maybe a thousand of them live on air, calmly talking his audience through the process, wisecracking and winking at the camera to ease the tension. A ghastly image assailed Felix, of a pudgy man with dyed hair and a silk shirt, quipping and teasing, his face a jack-o-lantern of pooling shadow and Botox corpse paint in the glare of the set-lights.
I guess you really are what you eat! -cue tinny, canned laughter- It could be worse, it could be Arby’s!”-more robotic screeches of mirth- I wish Congress was still around, I’ve never tried jackass! –renewed howls from the speakers, yuck, yuck, yuck.
Every shitty joke he had ever made was penned by scriptwriters. It was easier that way. It made it feel less genuine after every episode wrapped and the lights dimmed, Felix the showman fading into the darkness, save for that neon-white smile, we’re all mad here, yes sir, you can say that again. Staring at the hateful little package helped ground Felix in the present. He knew what would happen next: the envelope would contain a date, a time, a place. A picture of an animal. And a bland message of thanks.
Thanks! For the first time in his life the sheer audacity of it hit Felix with the force of a freight train. As if this was just a one-time favour. As if you had a choice! Though, oddly, some people did volunteer, displaying a suicidal eagerness to hasten what they thought was their own martyrdom. They loved posting about their appointment dates online, spending hours shaming others to follow in their benevolent footsteps. At the height of The Lazarus Pit, they had been the suckers Felix loved to have on his program. Their manic cheerfulness was disturbingly infectious, the perfect poster-boys for normalizing San-Depop and stamping down on the dwindling spoilsports that continued to insist on stirring up controversy around the Solution.
Felix remembered something his father had told him, about the days when the slaughterhouses were still running. How the workers led the animals to their deaths with the help of one goat, who would herd them to their demise. The beast, however, would be spared. It was the easiest way of doing it. His father had called it “the Judas Goat.” Slowly, Felix reached into the drawer of his desk, grabbing the state-issued cheque that had arrived a week before. It was a very large number. There were many zeroes. Quite a bit more than thirty pieces of silver.
He’d once been granted the privilege (what a privilege!) to see the procedure carried out in person. It was meant to be an event; the public was never shown any footage or photographs of the process. Ignorance is bliss. It was one of his show’s most repeated slogans. Felix had lifted this pearl of wisdom from The Matrix. But building up hype was easy: The Actaeon Solution, the miracle of modern science that had kept food on the tables of the world, that had rescued mankind from the jaws of destruction when the granaries ran dry!
All you needed was a person. A person strapped to a steel table.
Not sedated of course: drugs spoil the taste.
The machines would do the rest. It was hard not to watch when they started, whirring and buzzing, screeching and glinting. Long, spindly arms quivering, all hooks and claws and knives and drills and peelers, saws and scalpels and hammers. They could take a person apart with the efficiency of a school bully on the playground. Nassar had told Felix not to worry: the sound he thought was screaming coming from the lucky citizen was just air and gases escaping his body. The whole process was totally painless, that was what was crucial for the public to remember. After enough minutes, guided by steady beams of radiation and injections of mutagenic sludge, the person would be stretched, pinched, stamped, sliced and carved into something, well, different, something useful. Disinfectant fog and sprinklers would wash the blood splattered walls clean, and the machines would have gunk wiped off their tools.
The citizen would be…. changed. Not to the extent San-Depop or Felix had led everyone to believe. Turning people into actual living, breathing animals was far-fetched even for Nassar, not to mention wildly inefficient. There was more to eat on some 169-pound lardass than on a pig or sheep. Instead, the machine settled for warping human tissue into an imitation carcass, an exact replica of animal meat. Absolutely indistinguishable from the real deal all the way down to the texture, structure, and most importantly, the taste.
Still, it was a necessary white lie for the masses. Easier to chow down on a burger if it was something inhuman, it’s not like it’s cannibalism, hell no! Plus, there was a weird poetic flair to it that people seemed to like: mommy got to be a bunny rabbit, look, Uncle Joe’s going to be a crab! Felix had never understood it, but he had been more than content to let folks concoct whatever cooky, little stories they needed to stop from going insane. Whatever helps you sleep at night, right? Everyone with sense swore by the quality of the meat: it was healthier, had no added preservatives or hormones, it was more humane and didn’t crowd poor animals into filthy pens. Of course, it was very good for the environment. Obviously, it turned Nassar an enormous profit.
Excess mass was easier to dispose of. Felix knew on good authority that there was a roaring trade in the less appetizing organs (what does a spleen do, anyway?) to hospitals and Universities across the country. As for everything else… well, bones become glue, fat was processed into soap bars, skin cured for shoes and belts. Hair was perfect for designer wigs; teeth were handy accessories and made excellent cufflinks. Felix’s own waistcoat had cost him five hundred dollars and was studded with buttons melted down from the gold molars of an old man he had seen turned into a ‘mallard.’
Felix could not resist the urge to look in the envelope. Sooner or later, he would have to. The personal details printed on it weren’t just for the benefit of the post office. It was a simple, crude reminder: we know where you live. We know where to find you.
For an instant, Felix considered packing a suitcase and bolting out into the night. The ridiculousness of the idea crushed him moments later. He was one of the most well-known men in the country, no, the world. His hoarded millions were worthless for escaping: any cheque he tried to cash would immediately be picked up by the appropriate San-Depop authorities. Not to mention his legions of fans would be quick to string him up for his his selfishness. Had he not been the first to point the finger at those who tried to dodge the procedure, raving at their cowardice? His viewers had lapped it up, locating and destroying every persona non grata with a speed worthy of a swarm of locusts.
Felix started to hyperventilate. His face bulged with the bug-eyed shock of a man who has spent his entire life pulling on a dog’s only for it to dive at his throat the second he lets go of the leash.
The envelope rasped as he ripped it open. Felix Lazar drew the paper out gingerly, painfully, like a child slowly peeling off a scab on his knee. He ignored the address, the date (two days, Jesus fucking Christ, Mother Mary and Joseph, only two days) and saw only the cute, brightly coloured animal next to his name.
A deer, prancing on the page with saccharine glee.
Felix Lazar could not think of deer. Instead, he remembered the whirr of machines, the crimson mist from the operating table. Screams. Just…gas, air escaping from the body, it was painless, you didn’t suffer, that was what he’d always told the public, just a few quick seconds, well…. more like minutes….some pretty long minutes-there sure was a lot of air in a person, huh-the shrieking sound that wasn’t screams, just gas-it sure didn’t let up did it-he wasn’t a scientists what did he know? Maybe it didn’t hurt, it probably didn’t, only two days until he found out, fancy that, no way it hurt, Nassar wouldn’t lie, he’d told everyone it was painless.
The next thing Felix Lazar saw was the bottle of pills still open at his desk.
Doctor Paul Nassar sat at his desk, bathed in the blue glow of his laptop. He finished drafting his report and sent it, smiling wanly as he heard the computer whoosh. He’d be rewarded handsomely for this; there was probably another Nobel Prize on the horizon. Gosh, he’d have to start using them as doorstoppers at this rate.
Nassar rang his butler, ordered dinner, and waited for his meal, checking his phone as he did, busy, busy, busy. He saw that the host of The Lazarus Pit had passed away, and that the program would be replacing him soon. Paul could vaguely remember meeting Francis or Frank Lazar, whatever his name was. An OK guy, a bit full of himself. Kind of smarmy, nothing worth writing home about. If he spent every waking moment reminiscing about every media personality that he’d ever meet, then he’d be at his desk until the cows came home. Any important messages from the more powerful ministries were handled with quiet efficiency, and he left the remaining interview requests, business meetings and university conference bookings for his secretary to wade through.
There were big changes on the horizon. His breakthrough (tentatively branded Cadmus) had been so obvious, he had no idea how it hadn’t occurred to him before. The first machine he’d designed only worked on living tissue–what a waste! All the dead, the suicides trying to escape the draft, the buried millions just rotting away into mulch-talk about a waste of resources! The machines had been readjusted, an expensive undertaking, but the payoff was immense. Now necrotic tissue could also undergo the transformation process.
It wasn’t perfect, unfortunately. Corpses from the terminally ill or the long-deceased were useless, no good at all for the quality of the meat. San-Depop would continue to run its lottery on living subjects until the kinks were worked out, though Nassar wasn’t quite sure they ever would be. The modifications would ideally pick up the slack and meet the livestock demands, but boy, despite everything, people were still out there, going at it like rabbits. Population growth was nowhere near as before, but darn it, things weren’t exactly peachy. Paul Nassar exhaled through his nose and rubbed his eyes. Some days it seemed like all his hard work was for nothing.
Still, this was a step forward. Paul had always fancied himself a glass-half-full kind of guy. There was definitely a Nobel Prize to look forward to, a medal maybe. Perhaps they would give him another island in the Caribbean. Martha had been bothering him about a second honeymoon for years. Paul Nassar hummed the chorus of an Elton John song under his breath as his meal arrived. Venison stew with thyme, butter, garlic, red jelly, mashed potatoes and a glass of wine to help. Still singing under his breath, Paul Nassar tucked into his dinner, thinking of Martha, the new report, which interns he’d sign off on tomorrow at the lab, what movie to watch tonight (a toss-up between Age of Innocence or Evita) and a spy-thriller he was looking forward to buying. He thought of all the files left to sort through, of ice cream for dessert and whether or not it would rain tomorrow.
Paul Nassar thought about all these things, but never about the food. He just chewed and swallowed, pink juices running down his chin.
Beneath the earth they dug, shovels scraping away at the loam. Above them, the war raged on, a staccato heartbeat of artillery shells that rattled the filth packed tight against their heads.
They did not care about the noise. It had become a creature comfort for them, a tether to a new normalcy drilled into their minds by the white-hot brand of tracer-fire and machine gun rounds. All they had to do was dig. So, they did, their faces corpse-masks sculpted from muck, hovering in the dark. Yellow streaks of lamplight cast a jaundiced sheen on bloodshot eyes that skittered as they moved forwards. Where their shadows merged, their silhouettes became monstrous moles. Bestial, blind, scrabbling with calloused hands towards the depths.
Cadan Hughes tried to avoid looking at his surroundings as he worked. Instead, he focused on the bite of his pick as he swung it. He braced against the tremors that ran eagerly up his arm. Better to fixate on the little things; the way the damp leg of his trousers rubbed up against his ankles like the family cat begging for treats back home, the way Broderick always coughed three times before he sniffed, or how, without noticing and without fail, Aidan’s shovel dug in time to the phantom tune of “Sosban Fach.”
Cadan furrowed his brow and struck the wall. Maybe it wasn’t good to remember home. It conjured images of a warm pub keeping out the fog that hovered over the mountains, of drinking games they played, before marching off to the blasted heaths of Belgium. Away from all that was good or green. As he jostled against his fellow miners, their sweat ran and streaked together. He stepped aside to let Gruffydd lurch past with a bucket. They weren’t strangers to mining. Cadan’s mighty arms had garnered him something of a notoriety in the coalmines back home, and the feel of a spade in his hands had been familiar to him even before the rattle. At least that was his father’s joke.
This was different. The coalmines were hot, rough work, but softened by jokes and gossip (miners gossiped more than housewives, broken up by breaks taken in clouds of obsidian dust that settled on their brown paper bags as they compared packed lunches and drank cold, sweet tea from metal flasks. After each day, there was always the prospect of coming home and soaking in a hot tin bath then heading down to the pub to play cards and sing and dance.
Cadan could not remember the last time any of them had sung.
The thought of it was lunacy. You did not sing in the tunnels. You did not talk in the tunnels. Because the enemy also knew how to dig, and they were forever stalking through the soil. Prowling in searching for sappers, to break their bones and split their skulls and leave their corpses sepulchered by the blood-stuffed loam of no-man’s-land.
Occasionally they would stop, drawing in tight, quick breaths. The muggy air would grow thin, cracking from the strain as their ears perked up, searching for the tell-tale thuds of the enemy as they mined. In those moments, the roots oozing from the sludgy roof became fingers poking through the walls in search of victims, and the trickles of dirt slithering around their boots whispered, anticipating screaming hordes erupting from the walls. Cadan had never killed a man. None of the team had, but every one of them knew their luck could only last for so long. At any moment the tools of their trade could become instruments of butchery.
Cadan would not have ordinarily said he was afraid of dying, but the prospect of meeting his end in the tunnels was a different story. It was every miner’s greatest fear: to be claimed by the earth they had ravaged, to be buried yet forgotten. The pressure of the earth trapping the soul for eternity where it would harden, crumble, blacken until it was just another lump of coal. As he shuffled forward, sloughing through the sod, Caden looked from man to man.
Cold grey water wept in streams of pus from the puckered earth. In the half-light a dozen pair of eyes burned with gold to pay the ferryman.
Rhys, in the lead, raised a hand, calling for silence. The miners froze. It was only until several seconds had passed that it began to dawn on them that there was nothing to listen for. Worse still, all the rats had gone.
They always took the rats for granted. The war-machines of monkeys never deterred them. Their fat, mangy bodies were a common sight, paddling through the tunnels, chittering, black fur glittering with blood. Red-eyed gargoyles perched on the wooden support beams and laughing scornfully at the slaves that toiled below their kingdom, the trench rats were fearless beings. No matter how many of their brethren were impaled, crushed or dashed into pieces, still they returned, their pink, puppet hands grasping at any scrap of waylaid food they could pilfer. What could cause the vermin to flee?
Cadan had never even considered there could be something worse down here with them. The realization was an icy jolt to everyone present, the creeping anxiety of returning home only to realize that all the furniture had been moved out of place. This was the silence of the womb; a wet, dull cocoon that signaled the beginning and the end of all things.
The quake of the guns had ceased. Cadan pressed himself against the nearest man, digging his shoulder-blades into his back. The tunnel had become impossibly small, it was too small, the walls flexing, pulsing, closing in, a mouth ready to chew them up and spit out their bones.
At his side, Gruffydd let out a yell. Something had moved up ahead.
All they could see for now were its movements, but that was enough to understand that whatever had shifted in the gloom was not human. It was a sudden, primitive understanding relayed instantly to all present. Now the lamplight was the weak, crackling flame of the campfire, and the hunched and ragged men were once again cavemen huddled together against the terrors of the night.
A shape was approaching from within the scummy water-no, it was the water. It defied any attempt at categorization, any clumsy desire to label or confirm. It rushed toward them with the implacable tread of shadows emerging from beneath a child’s bed. All the miners could do was stumble backwards, battering uselessly at the dark.
From the ground a being surged, growing before their eyes, blossoming like cancer. Grey, viscous liquid churned. Within it floated the ravaged corpses of rat and man alike, splinters of yellow bones and leathery flesh mixing, merging, separating. The organism’s body towered above them, its recesses throbbing with a million nameless dead. In the seething recesses of the beast Cadan could see the broken names from grimy labels, trailing broken stitches from where they had been peeled off jackets and trousers, the tattered shreds of handkerchiefs, photographs, rusted lockets and amulets, smothered together into a mess of death. Remains trawled from the filth, animated by a consciousness that smoldered with the pain of dying stars.
None of them could move.
Cadan felt his knees knock together, clattering like dice on the stones of the schoolyard. Around him he heard the moans of his fellow men strike up in chorus. The stink of fear was worse than the sweat. Cadan tried to look at the thing, but something inside his brain resisted.
To understand it was futile. What remained was a weight, crushing down on them, driving them into a hapless quiver, the grindstone of despair. It stared down at its prey with hard, black withered eyeballs and spread tendrils of dented bullets, pockmarked teeth and rusted bayonet shards towards the nearest man.
Then it was the man, it was on Rhys, seizing him by the waist and tearing away his side. Rhys didn’t even scream. Undulating fingers, tipped with shattered dog tags and bent crucifixes pierced through the helpless victim’s jaw and stabbed into the back of his head. It pulled him upwards, the corpse’s feet trailing in the air like a hanged man. Butchered on the altar to the damp and the dark.
The beast held the dead man before the miners, and those stubs that might have been hands began to move his jaw up and down. Rhys wept blood in black rivers, and then the body spoke in a voice that was both its own but also something else. Brittle diamonds, an order filtered through the apish sludge of the human mind. The beast sounded out the commandment, ripping through the quiet and forcing its glass-tipped speech from the throat of the murdered man:
Know Me.
The command was everything. It bellowed its way inside every man, rushing like filth erupting from sewer-grates. It surged, crawling into their ears, forcings itself down their gullets, burbling past chapped lips. Worming between the moist cracks of tear ducts and quivering nostrils, it gouged and grubbed, spreading its barbed roots into the crevices of their mind until only it remained
One by one, the being moved from man to man. Bowing over them, drinking from the froth of madness that spilled from their lips. Supping on the blood that ran from their wounds as they tore at each other’s faces, ramming shovels and pickaxes into their skulls to beat out the voice that squirmed within them.
And Cadan understood. As the creature loomed before him Cadan learned of the solitude of obliterated galaxies. Ruined worlds, consumed by the frosted crystals of space, leaving behind a whirling, shrieking mind screaming for the answer to its existence. Begging for a response to a call that would let its name live just a few years more. Acknowledged by nothing. Collapsing onto a distant ball of earth, immured beneath the clay. Fossilized, disturbed, awoken, reduced to a relic of a savagery thought forgotten, cobbling together the rotting remains of a legacy from discarded trash, even as it crumbled into the muck.
The other miners were on their hands and knees, retching, gibbering, bawling. They groveled in the mud, choking on the earthen clumps, gargling the stagnant water in supplication, bone-white faces peeking from where the hot tears they wept swept away the grime. A chorus of Gaelic, English, Latin warbled out. In the snatches of words, God and Mother and Home ran together like ink and blood.
The beast ebbed and flowed from miner to miner, snatches of a face or the shape of a body visible for mere seconds. Its eyes whirled, burning wheels, fallen comets. Now a cry filled the recesses of the tunnel It was the drawn-out scream of throats raised in symphony with this thing. Yells, welcoming the unknown as the wetness crawled over their bodies, sucking them in. Faces within, stretched with howls of glee. Theatre masks, rolling their eyes in milk-white circles, champing and screaming. For a moment, the beast was whole, but then the connection was severed, and Cadan was a monkey again, except seconds ago he had been a God, and he thrashed, coughing hot blood. He wept in the agony of remembrance of what it had been to feast on quasars and couple with stardust. He hugged himself tightly, hating the thick, hairy arms that hung by his side, retching at the stubby fingers. The unbearable stink of his humanity was too much. The thing bore down on Cadan and his first impulse was to let it take him, but no, he would mingle his foul corruption with it, make it lesser, he would join it but not remember it, it would not be fair.
He ran, the lantern crashing against the floor. Darkness rushed after him, like hunting-dogs scrambling along the length of the tunnel. The thing was moving behind him, but Cadan tore down the path, splashing through the muck, laughing and screaming as he went. He was in the stomach of some great, hungry worm. Its walls shivered at his touch as he stumbled blindly down their length.
Up ahead-a noise. Cadan threw himself against the source. He had no shovel, he had forgotten his shovel, but he could still dig, he needed to dig.
In the dark his arms and hands bent, twisting into paws.
It was a German team that found Cadan Hughes, staggering in one of their tunnels, buried in dirt, stumbling towards them. The captain of the team ordered his men to stay back, hefting the sharpened edge of a trench-spade in one hand.
The approaching figure seemed like a shell-shocked soul, until it collapsed into the light, and they saw his eyes. The eyes of a blind man, clogged with mist. The figure reached out towards the captain, and where his fingers should have been there were only torn and savaged stumps, caked in gory muck. Shards of bone scraped feeble lines into the air.
In the distance, one could hear the slow rush of water, and the silence of the rats. The apparition gurgled. Know Me.
The captain drove the shovel into its head, and the madman died. The Germans moved on, walking over the corpse. Already, the mud was seeping over it, drawing it further and further downwards. Thick boots stamped the figure into the slime.
The mining team disappeared into the recesses of the tunnel. Overhead, the guns began to boom once more. A dull gleam from the broken figure stamped into the clay may have been a dog-tag.
Blanketed by ooze, the name etched into it had disappeared.
The first time John McCoy died was on a dust-speckled street by the saloon in Agua Templada. Luckily, it didn’t stick. Which, depending on how one looks at things, was either a blessing or an abominable curse, for the Creator would have been hard pressed to concoct a more miserable backwater for a condemned man to have to live out the rest of his days.
Many would be inclined to agree that Mr. McCoy did not deserve his fate. The older folks amongst you may know him as Six-Shot McCoy, a name dear to every liquor salesman from Texas to Oregon. As the astute reader may have already guessed, this sobriquet was not in honour of the oiled firearm at his hip, but rather a testament to his formidable prowess with the bottle. For many years, McCoy had been meandering through the ramshackle towns of the Old West, seeking the adventure that would transubstantiate his flesh and blood into the titanic fodder of legend, but legend was a fickle mistress. She had decided that in this age of steam-trains, oilrigs, and flash-photography, there was no longer a place for her extravagant folly. She had grown tired of this virgin country cluttered with the dusty memories of gunpowder duels, cutthroat fugitives with ten-gallon hats, stagecoach battles and cemetery stand-offs fought in the name of buried treasure.
John McCoy would often think back fondly to the days when roaming gangs of bank-robbers used to thunder through town, steel in their fists and murder on their minds, in such numbers that the sheriff had been forced to set up a timetable system to avoid a congestion of brigands. Those were the good old days, you betcha, but nothing good ever lasted. The game had changed: the Wild Bunch were on Valium, the Lone Ranger had tied the knot, and the Magnificent Seven successfully filed for trademark, forcing McCoy to reluctantly abandon his motley vaqueros, because “The Spectacular Septet” just didn’t have the same ring to it. Last week he wasted three hours riding to the rescue of a household of honest prostitutes only to find the fine ladies had gone ahead and unionized, and could take care of themselves, thank you very much.
Nothing made sense anymore. The purtycountry-maidens traded in their gingham dresses for an education, the gold rush was slowing to a trickle, and there were barely any mail-coaches to defend from robbers now that the telegraph poles had been installed. At certain times, usually between shot number four of the six that had given McCoy his name, he wondered if perhaps him and his fellow gunslingers were left behind by time like a child abandoned in a game of hide-and-seek, alone with his eyes screwed shut whilst the footsteps of his departed friends fade into the air. Perhaps that was why men like McCoy still haunted their old watering holes, trying to look bored or mysterious. It was the feigned apathy of that self-same child who, realising he was stuck in a game he was never going to win, tried to act as if he wasn’t interested in playing anyway.
The truth of the matter was that there were no guns left in the valley indeed: they were in the hands of the army and the lawmen. There were no more dastardly crooks and cunning fraudsters to duel mano-a-mano at sunrise. They had graduated from the paltry fare of robbing bank-vaults, besieging villages, or holding steam-trains hostage, and now they ran the banks, owned the land the houses were built on, and the train-carriages were stamped in fancy copperplate with their company names.
So, putting the ‘desperate’ in desperado, John McCoy came to his senses and stopped riding fences, leading his horse, Ford, away from the cities of tomorrow. The sun burning its disapproval onto his back, he packed up his favourite white hat and shirt, a bygone relic kicked from the streets of Laredo (which now had a school, barbershop, pharmacist and even a library), a spirit of the West trailing whiskey instead of rattling chains, roaming in search of a final resting place.
It was almost sundown when John McCoy rode into the town of Agua Templada (pop. 43, chief export: dysentery) a place found on no map, not due to the negligence of cartographers, but out of a sense of decency for the common man.
It had not rained in the desert for forty years and a half, so now the armies of sand, grit, and dirt were locked in a three-way war of attrition against the crumbling wood of the four or five buildings that made up a single high street. The mouldering settlements were eerily silent. The local pastime of the townsfolk consisted of racing to see who could die in their sleep first, to the point that vultures had stopped roosting on the roofs of their houses. Even scavengers like a challenge.
As he trotted down the street, John McCoy tried to avoid the gaze of the few inhabitants who waited in the shadows of their porches. Ford also found himself bowing his head self-consciously. John had heard of one-horse towns. By Agua Templada standards, they were impossibly bourgeois
In the distance, a tumbleweed trundled along its scraggly path, noticed it was about to enter the town, and swerved violently away. The only person who acknowledged McCoy’s existence was the coffin-maker, who looked up from his hammering, taking in the stranger and his stallion. The dead, at least, would never be in short supply here.
John nudged Ford in the direction of the local bar. The sign above it was nearly broken down, losing an ‘S’ and an ‘A’ meaning the building proclaimed itself as ‘Loon.’ Dismouning, he tied Ford next to a trough. There was another horse outside, a beautiful, dark creature. Ford and the stallion shared a sheepish glance. Horses have standards too.
Falling into the languorous, rolling swagger of the inveterate cowboy, John McCoy pushed past the swinging saloon doors. One fell off its hinges and smashed onto the ground.
Coughing awkwardly, McCoy ploughed onward into the gloom. The saloon was a dank, claustrophobic little place, underscored by the elderly creaking of a water-powered ceiling fan that did nothing but spread dust more evenly around the room. The floor, at least, was somewhat clean: cockroaches avoided the town like the plague, lest staying overnight sully their reputations. A couple of folks looked up at the stranger. One grizzled man with a ragged beard attempted to lift his head from the table, trying to peel his cheek away from its sticky, beer-saturated surface, and promptly gave up. In the corner, where someone should have been hammering at a pianola, a wizened old woman was chiming away at a triangle.
McCoy ambled up to the bar, where a sallow-faced gentleman was cleaning a cup with a cloth.
“Howdy, partner,” said John McCoy, tipping his hat. The bartender nodded, spat into the cloth, and continued wiping.
“Howdy yourself,” was the gruff reply. “What’ll you be drinking? Assuming you have the coin to pay for it, of course.”
“Gimme a stiff whisky,” said John, setting a silver dollar onto the bar-top, where it stuck fast.
“One whisky, coming up,” grunted the bartender. He set down a series of cracked shot-glasses and a faded bottle of amber swill next to McCoy’s hand.“You with the other fella?” inquired the bartender.
“Huh?”
“The cowboy with the fancy horse,” said the bartender, jerking his head toward the door.
“No Sir, I’m all here by my lonesome,” said McCoy. “In fact, I was looking to see if I could inquire as to a bed to lay my weary head upon in this, uh, fine town of yours.”
“Got one room. S’already taken,” said the bartender.
“What? Already? By who?” said McCoy. The bartender repeated his nod in the direction of the horses by way of a reply. McCoy took another drink.
“Well, I’m awful tired, and a man needs a place to put his boots up. I’m sure this fella, whoever he is, could be persuaded to share one little room, just for a night. For a price, of course,” he added, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together.
“Not sure about that,” mused the bartender. “The man ain’t the sharing kind.”
“Ah, come on now partner. Every man got a price,” winked McCoy. “Who is this stubborn fella anyway?”
“That would be me, partner,” came a hushed whisper that nevertheless carried its way across the saloon-the speaker’s rasping tones were the rustle of a rattlesnake creeping through dry grass. A man had materialised at the foot of the bar. McCoy took in the apparition with more than a little awe. His face had the texture of a worn saddle. Two eyes, beady, black and glittering, the sting of a scorpion, ran over McCoy’s skin. The cowboy’s hat was a dark arrowhead, and his boots could have been dipped in an oil-well. A thin cigarillo was clamped between the gunslinger’s teeth. He seemed to have appeared from a cloud of acrid blue smoke and fiery embers.
“The name’s Lee Leone,” drawled the man in black. McCoy tried to hide the look of admiration on his face: Leone was posing like a born cowboy. In turn, McCoy leaned against the bar, feigning nonchalance.
“Is that so? Well, pleased to meet you Mister Leone. The name’s McCoy. Six-Shot McCoy.”
“Is that so? Well, Six-Shot, around these parts, folks like to call me The Taxman. On account of how I always settle debts, and that no man can escape me.”
McCoy swore quietly. Leone’s nickname was cooler than his.The Taxman walked up to him, resting one elbow on the side of the bar. Never breaking eye-contact with McCoy, Leone poured himself a shot of whiskey and kicked it back. Not one to be outdone in the arena of chronic alcoholism, McCoy threw back his own shot. It missed his mouth completely, splashing all over his collar, cheeks, hair and even his sleeve.
“You know,” said McCoy awkwardly, gently sliding the whiskey bottle out of sight, “too much liquor’ll kill you.”
“I don’t plan on ever dying son,” sneered Leone.
“I hear you’re not keen on sharing that there room,” ventured McCoy.
“Way I see it, finders keepers,” snickered Leone, blowing smoke in McCoy’s face.
“Those are fighting words,” replied McCoy. He straightened up from where he had been languishing across the bar, wincing as a patch off the pack of his shirt ripped, glued to the mucky railing. Sensing that he was rapidly losing control of the situation, he attempted to salvage some masculine pride by snatching the cigarillo out of Leone’s mouth. Its end caught on the booze-soaked edge of his sleeve, promptly setting it on fire.
“I’m a fighting man,” said Leone slowly, thumbing his holster. McCoy never broke eye contact, one hand straying toward his guns, the other slamming against the side of the bar to put out the flames on his wrist. A fly flew between the stares of both men and dropped dead.
This was what McCoy had been waiting for. True, a shootout over a spare room in a saloon was not the most righteous of battles but he would settle for what he could take. McCoy recognized a kindred spirit in Leone. They were both like lonely men milling around aimlessly as the bar was about to close, willing to go home with whoever so much as looked in their direction. The air quivered with the memory of white-hot bullets and sullied honour. Both men spoke the fated words at the same time.
“This town ain’t big enough for both of us.”
Things moved quickly after that: The duel, once declared, could not be taken back. Now, outside in the high street, under the watchful gaze of the ‘Loon, their shadows reaching out to touch each other as if even they could not control their violent urges, John McCoy and Lee Leone faced one another. A small crowd had gathered at the sides. The coffin-maker was absent, at home in his workshop working on a “Two for the Price of One” bargain sale to commemorate this special event. The sun leaked red blood from its cracked skull as it receded underneath the cold, hard line of the faraway dunes. Leone let his hat fall, the black disk skittering across the parched earth. McCoy shifted his stance.
It happened as it has done a thousand times. No need to detail the shared, twitchy glances, the tension, thick and humid in the air. No need to count down the seconds. At some moment, both men drew. Both men fired. Both men dropped to the ground, dead. The gravediggers earned their keep that night, and that was all she wrote for Six-Shot McCoy and Lee “The Taxman” Leone.
Or, it should have been.
Because the Universe has a sense of humour about things like this, the bodies of the doomed gunslingers were dumped into a shared grave. Agua Templada’s miniscule dimensions meant its real-estate crisis extended beyond the world of the living, and its burial plots did not lack for tenancy. Competition for space was rigor-mortis-stiff. The dead men tumbled onto one another inside a cheap coffin, and were buried. The smattering of bored townsfolk who had gathered for the last rites of the crazed strangers slouched off into the distance. The local musician contemplated composing a ballad to commemorate the battle but soon gave up after he ran out of good rhymes for ‘McCoy.’ Night blossomed in the sky like pus unfurling in water, and as the people went to sleep, they surrendered the world to the mercy of cicadas and roaming packs of coyotes.
Yet, six feet deep, something was happening to the two men’s bodies. For though the people of Agua Templada lived their days in a lazy haze, their dying hopes, their crushed aspirations, the petty malice that finds its home in any community had all coalesced over the years and bled into the soil of the graveyard. Ensnared by the mortal coil that had silenced their muted cries, spectres writhed beneath the earth, dozens of forgotten, dishonoured, cast-away dreams mixed with a cocktail of banality and caustic envy that seeped its poison into the undergrowth and searched like hungry roots. And where it searched, it found the intermingled blood of two men who had died unfulfilled.
Now the ground was bulging like a tumescent fungus. In the anaemic light of the moon, a hand burst from the earth, slowly giving way to disgorge a human being in a sick mimicry of birth. Dragging himself into the cool night breeze, John McCoy let out a gluttonous gasp as he reached the fresh air, not realising he no longer had any use for it. His spotless shirt was ruined, his hair matted with mud and sprinkled with worms. His once smooth complexion had drained of blood, and the only spot of colour on his person was the crusted red firework spattered above his heart.
Groaning, McCoy stretched his limbs, patting his body until all was present and accounted for. He was disoriented, angry, and his mouth felt like something had crawled into it and died, which wasn’t too far from the truth. Christ, he could use a drink. The last thing he could remember was butting heads with that smug bastard Leone at the saloon. Well, he’d show him. As soon as he had a little firewater running through him, he’d blast that crooked smile off his face, yessir. Moving with renewed vigour, if a little rigidly, McCoy tottered toward the distant shape of Agua Templada. A low, reedy whistling sound followed him as the breeze fluted into the bullet-hole in his heart.
When he reached the outside of the ‘Loon, he found, much to his chagrin, that it was closed. Sighing, McCoy stumbled over to his horse Ford, who was still tied beside the trough. He stopped as his trusty steed whickered nervously when he reached for its bridle, eyes rolling madly in its head. McCoy frowned in puzzlement. Then he heard it, an insistent drip, drip, drip. He looked down at his chest, and realized he was leaking: a thin red stream was gurgling from the ruin of his breast. McCoy gingerly stuck a finger inside. It went: glup. He was not used to going glup. He fought to recall what had happened after the argument at the bar: there had been spectators…. Leone standing opposite him…. he had reached for his guns and then….um…well….
“Stand and deliver, McCoy,” hissed a voice behind his ear. It had the same haggard rasp to it, but with a throatier touch that made the speaker sound like he was gargling gravel. Lee Leone was a black ghoul framed against the ghastly radiance of the moon. Blue veins drew roadmaps across his cheeks, and his squinting eyes were two crimson cigarette ends in the darkness. A round hole about the size of a coin had burrowed into his forehead and past the other side. For an instant, McCoy could see the distant cluster of grave markings behind him. John stared in mute disbelief at the man.
“Leone? Jesus Christ, I thought you were—”
“Dead? As if,” scoffed Leone. “A green boy like you couldn’t put me down.” A mosquito buzzed through the hole in his skull.
McCoy gulped. “Leone, partner, listen, I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding—”
“Misunderstanding? From where I’m standing, you’re the one who should be rotting in the ground McCoy,” snarled Leone, jabbing an accusatory, ice-cold finger at McCoy’s chest. “Now I don’t know what kind of trickery is afoot, but ain’t no one ever crossed The Taxman and lived to tell the tale.”
“That’s kinda the thing Leone, well, I don’t exactly think I did live,” said McCoy.
“Bullshit!” roared Leone, expectorating a glob of mud at his feet. “You’re standing there, clear as day!”
“Maybe you missed?” tried McCoy with desperate optimism. The bullet-hole said: blurp.
“Two things, McCoy,” said Leone. He lifted a clenched fist, grunting with exertion as he snapped two fingers up to stand to attention. “One: Lee Leone don’t take kindly to jokesters. Two: Lee Leone don’t miss.”
“This ain’t a joke!” cried McCoy. He sighed. “Look, here, lemme try something…”The townsfolk had very graciously buried both men with their weapons. McCoy drew his gun and shot Leone in the leg. Leone gawped in shock.
“What was that for?” he bellowed. His hands flew to his injured leg, then stopped as his brain caught up to his body. There had been no pain. Not only that, but he was still standing, when such a wound would have incapacitated any normal man.
“See? Something happened to us. I think…I think we died,” said McCoy gravely, stowing away his gun, and then Leone shot him through the hand.
McCoy goggled at the chasm in his palm, whirling on Leone, whose gun barrel was still smoking.
“The hell are you doing?” he squawked. Leone stuck out his tongue. A centipede crawled out from under it and down his neck.“That’s for shooting me.”
“I was trying to prove a point!”
“You didn’t know it was gonna work!”
“Lee Leone, you’ve got a goddamn hole in your head!” shrieked McCoy. Leone shuffled his feet awkwardly in the dirt, caught off guard.
“Didn’t know for sure,” he mumbled, “didn’t know there was a hole in my head, could be a, y’know, a trick of the light, one of ‘em optrical illusions.”
“Whatever,” muttered McCoy. “Optrical illusion or not I’m going home. You can have the room, I don’t give a damn, far as I’m concerned our duel is over partner, we’re square.”
He went back to mount Ford but was interrupted by the thud of Leone thumbing the hammer of his revolver. The gunslinger’s ruby eye-sockets were glimmering like an arsonist’s fire.
“Not so fast, McCoy. We’ve unfinished business.”
“Unfinished business? We’re dead, that’s about as finished as business can get.”
Leone squared his jaw. “You took my spot in the grave.”
“The hell are you talkin’ about—”
“My spot, my spot in the grave, that was meant for one person, for me!” Leone roared, the gun vibrating in his hand. “Goddarn it, I was the one who shot first, I should have been given the honours, there’s a code. First you try and muscle into my room and now you take a man’s final resting place—”
“Woah, easy there partner, I didn’t have any say in who was buried where,” blustered McCoy. Then his eyes narrowed as he thought about what he had just said.
“Hey, hold on, whaddaya mean you shot first? Let’s not get our stories twisted here friend. I clearly put that bullet through your brain before you fired. Yours was just a lucky shot, a reflex action.” He puffed out his chest, sending a fresh jet of claret to spray along the floor.
“Lucky shot, he says. Lucky shot my left foot, I got you right in the ticker, bullseye, if anything you were the one that got lucky. I was just distracted, that’s why you got me. Cheap shot if you ask me.”
“Oh? Oh? Distracted? And what, pray tell, distracted you, partner?”
“I’ll have you know, there was a very fine damsel in the crowd that I had been romancing. Before you came of course. You wouldn’t know her,” sniffed Leone, avoiding eye contact.
“Really? What was she called then?”
“Miss. Uh…Miss…Sippi. Yeah, Miss Sippi,” said Leone. Dark, blotchy spots of congealing blood sprouted from behind both of his cheeks.
“That’s the name of a fucking state you moron!”
“Nuh-uh, nuh-uh,” jeered Leone, returning to the tried and tested rhetorical brilliance of the schoolyard.
“I shot first, and it’s my grave if anything,” said McCoy pompously. “Though I’d be willing to make an exception out of the kindness of my heart and show a little pity by letting you share it.”
“I told you, finders keepers,” said Leone. “I was dumped in there first, it’s my land. If you got a problem with that McCoy, you can let our irons do the talking. This town ain’t big enough—”
Both men reached the same conclusion before Leone finished. Simultaneously, two guns flashed in the moonlight, trumpeting their charges of smoke and lead. For the second time, both bodies crumpled and hit the ground. Overhead, a lamp flared to life in a nearby window, as the town awoke.
The next day the people of Agua Templada buried the cowboys again, making sure to douse holy water (just a flask of rum) on the dirt to ward off evil spirits. After a week or so, any wayward traveller would have been able to hear the muffled sounds of thumping and swearing from inside the coffin as both men kicked and punched and clawed their way to freedom. An unlucky spectator would have been graced with the sight of a dreadful beast with two heads and four arms wriggling out of the earth, elbowing, kneeing, and biting itself. McCoy was missing an eye. Leone had a fresh bullet-wound in his throat, causing him to cough and wheeze incessantly.
Their guns had been soaked through with the damp rot of the grave, so they blundered into town, sending the few souls lounging in the heat shrieking into their homes in terror. Leone tripped McCoy, who crashed to the ground, several teeth clattering like dice from his mouth. McCoy staggered to his feet, ramming his enemy into a nearby post, where his eye popped out and flew into a nearby drunkards’ beer, bobbing like an olive in a martini glass. Cursing and swearing, both men burst into Agua Templada’s only firearms store, whose proprietor quickly passed out at the sight of the ruined, grey-faced corpses. Both men seized guns. Brittle fingers fumbled with bullets. Sights were checked, safeties, of course, swiftly removed. McCoy spat a beetle into a nearby spittoon, where it collided with a ding!
The duellists lumbered into the middle of the street, facing one another.
“Ready to hand that grave over to me?” rattled McCoy.
“Not on your life,” croaked Leone. He twirled his pistol in a silver blur between his fingers, three of which fell off.
You know the drill: both men shrieked out battle cries. Their guns rang out their familiar song, squarely hitting their targets and killing them both on the spot. Third time, I am sad to have to report, my dear reader, was not the charm.
The whispers of the dead, from beyond the dark fog of the underworld:
“Ow, ow, ow, damn it McCoy that’s my hair—”
“You ain’t got no hair to pull Leone, and stop whinging, you can’t feel shit—”
“Move, move you moron, I’m trying to dig here—”
“My foot! My foot, you’re scratching my foot!”
“I’ll kill you for this McCoy, just you wait—”
“Kill me? Kill me? Oh, real original, I can tell you’re serious about it this time, what part of we’re already dead don’t you get, jackass?!”
It is hard to say for how long this state of affairs continued. Certainly, the residents of Agua Templada cannot be called on to verify the truth of what happened in that godforsaken hovel. Many of them were killed by the demented, duellist revenants, caught in the crossfire of their unending feud. Again and again, they would rise, shambling towards the nearest firearm, stealing or scavenging any and all weapons and then turning on each other, until the chorus of gunshots became as natural to the surroundings of Agua Templada as birdsong.
The already dilapidated buildings shattered under the unrepentant onslaught of rifles, pistols, crackling sticks of dynamite and shotguns as the withered shades of what had been Lee Leone and John McCoy continued their vendetta from house to house. The surviving townsfolk, tormented by this most unholy and bizarre of visitations, swiftly packed up and left, leaving what little remained of the settlement firmly in the hands of the dead.
So, McCoy and Leone fought, and died, and fought and died. As their surroundings piled up with sand and dust and spiders ran amok in their new palaces, the cowboys remained. Most of history forgot them, freezing the dingy town and its desperado tormentors in the unknown.
The rest of the world passed them by. Travellers were told to steer clear of the haunted ruins of Agua Templada, and America was content with stranding what remained of that accursed civilization in its own quiet nook of eternity. Yet still the cacophony of starving coyotes and screeching vultures was accompanied by the raucous interruptions of the battlefield.
Presidents rose and fell, Confederacies reared and crumbled: still the cowboys oozed from the grave to meet in the high street, re-enacting through perpetual civil war that unfortunate past the country had sought to bury, but that refused to stay down.
Under the watchful eye of high noon (because there were still rules, important ones to this kind of thing) what could have once been tentatively called men swayed opposite one another. Lee “The Taxman” Leone was a gaunt reflection of his former self. The myriads of bullet-holes that riddled his body had been stuffed with handkerchiefs and cotton bales, but he nevertheless let out a sound like a woodwind orchestra as he shuffled forward. One arm was completely gone. The other was roughly tied to his shoulder with belt-straps, twine and held in place with iron nails. His good fist was a mangled lump, a mere two fingers. A rotting scarf was tied around his neck, and his mouth hung open stupidly from where his jaw had been blown off. His skin was a runny green.
John McCoy was holding his own head in his left hand, glaring at his nemesis. The head was wearing a white sombrero. A gnawed peg-leg kept him on his feet, and his enterprising fingers had welded rough plates of metal in the gaps where one of Lee’s shotgun blasts had peppered his torso to shreds. McCoy’s other hand reached into his own mouth, plucking rusted bullet casings from the gaps in his gums where he had taken to storing that oh-so-handy ammunition.
Finally, a piece of tumbleweed dutifully bounced its path across the street. McCoy would never have admitted this aloud, but despite his eroding body he could not help but enjoy himself. He was finally where he wanted, away from those pesky, civilized cities with their stuffy laws, boring jobs and their messy, twisting, morals. Here he could loop back into the past that he had feared he would never again be able to relive. Pistol in hand, he could cling to the comforting familiarity of this existence, white hat vs. black hat, good vs. evil, a struggle as old as legend itself.
The world could choke on its crummy enlightenment: he was a goddamned cowboy, through and through, and he had achieved an immortality more real than any myth of the Old West.
“Well then partner.” McCoy’s voice was the crackle of old worm-eaten books. He glared at his eternal rival with his one good eye. “Ready to hand over that grave?”
Lee Leone raised his one good arm, creaking like an old hinge. No sound came from his shattered jaw. The single finger he raised in McCoy’s direction got his point across just fine. McCoy smiled a 45. Calibre smile and lunged for his gun.
Within a blasted desolation in a best-forgotten corner of the United States, some say the undead cowboys still do battle, dutifully enacting an obsolete ritual of bloodshed and blighted honour. Perhaps these shades are nothing but the product of eager minds seeking to build a canon of myths for a new-born continent.
Perhaps the men known as McCoy and Leone really did die that first, fateful duel, and the fanciful story-book tales of their exploits are simply the dwindling swansong of a breed long gone extinct. And perhaps, if you strain your ears into the yawning expanse of the desert, what seems at first to be far-off blasts of thunder, may well be the echoes of the last gunslingers of the Wild, Wild West.
Content Warning: Mentions of suicide, discriminatory language.
Santiago Caballero sat with his elbows resting on his thighs, staring at the cold floor locker-room floor. Nothing existed but the pair of boxing shoes that stretched out before him, impossibly big, the boots of a clown done up with black laces and corporate logos. It took him a while to register that they were his feet, that he was there, and that all of this was real.
A few photographs had been taped to the rusted inside of Santiago’s locker. Not that he had put them there. That was Edu’s doing. The largest photograph showed a young man leaning against the picket-fence-white hull of a boat. His profile was turned against the wind, brown ringlets of hair fluttering, muscled forearms ridged in sunlight as he rested against the railing. It had been taken on their trip to Seville, along the banks of the Guadalquivir. From another picture, a youth, all bony elbows and gangly legs, glowered at no one in particular from behind the confines of a dusty Andalusian boxing ring. Faded as the photograph was, the child (a teenager, sure, but a child nonetheless) spat venom from behind his eyes.
Santiago felt anger crackle in his chest and dwindle like the blackened edges of a burnt-up newspaper. He tried to tell himself that he was once again on that boat, river spray beading in his hair in tiny pearls, the sun washing his face. The days of bloody noses and split lips were over, surely, yet still the phantom echoes of abuse prodded him, barbed needles whispering maricon, puto, pluma. The day after he had broken a bully’s jaw, leaving him in the hospital to choke on his insults, Santiago had imagined that spell the end of that chapter in his life. To his dismay, he had found out that the snotty, spindly inquisitors of his boyhood had been traded out for enemies who had sharpened their malice upon a grindstone of age and experience. The promoters who had refused to book fights for him, the waiters with curling lips who served him and Edu at restaurants, the tutting abuelas with their quiet contempt whenever they held hands on the street. The contenders and champions who made sure to hiss in his ear just before their blows landed: cocksucker, fag, poof, queer, spic, fairy, fruit, faggot. Shakespeare’s English had put the language of Cervantes to shame.
Who to turn to besides Edu? His father, cold in the ground? His mother, still sheltered in her spiderweb of disappointment and rosary beads? Damn it. Some figure he must cut, huddled up waiting by that thick grey door. A schoolboy waiting for the principal’s office to swing open as herald to his punishment. Memories came to Santiago in flurries of static. Memories of screaming crowds and boxing rings transformed into marble altars. Of faded books written by an old man in love with Iberian shores who wished to conquer the sea. Those stories had passed on a dream of hard, strong men who won their legacy pound for pound with muscle and force to a young kid with wobbly brown knees and stringy arms reading in the Almeria sun.
Santiago had never forgotten Hemingway, had carried him with him across the waters of the Atlantic. Yet try as he might he could not reconcile himself with those images of chain-smoking matadors and Republican revolutionaries who kicked back whiskey and drank a salute to death as if it were an old friend waiting at a train station. Santiago, the warrior could not live in the same body as the fading soul who only kept on battling because peace would mean having to accept the quiet of living with himself. He was not sure he could deal with the prospect of autumn years spent going to bed with his self-loathing and the tattered scraps of rejection, piled at his feet by those who still only saw him as a faggot kid with boxing gloves and broken English.
Fitting then, that Santiago should find himself in this this melting pot of neither-nor, Indian soil speckled with the fingerprints of Spanish hands: Los Angeles, San Francisco, El Paso, even here, Las Vegas. McDonalds facsimiles of conquistador graveyards, mirage reflections of an ersatz home (Madrid-Iowa, Toledo-Ohio) that split Santiago into disparate chunks.
On the one hand there was The Spain-That-Was: gritty sand, baking heat, Cola-Cao breakfasts of chocolate powder and boiling water given to a kid so poor his bus to school had been a donkey: a Juan Ramón Jiménez education. The secret kisses of boys playing at men behind Arabian ruins and the agony of a closeted mind reenacting civil war with itself; angular, painful shrieks of a personal Guernica. Then, as seen in travel agency windows and bad Hollywood movies, The Spain-That-Is, ignorant mess of ‘Murican confusion spread so pervasively it had long since become fact. Squashing, mixing, mistaking Castilian with Mexican, Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, Guatemalan, the whole lot one and the same. A billboard country populated with guitar-strumming womanizers, trotted out to the tune of Toreador and gaudy, plastic castanets. The Spain that strong-armed Santiago into nightmarishly faux brand deals for sangria commercials and paella recipes until his entire purpose in life seemed nothing more than to be a sandwich-board advertisement in the skin of a fighter.
Finally, there was The Spain-That-Could-Never-Be, the product of an American mind once again, built like an origami swan by pages riddled with typewriter ammunition. It had filled Santiago’s head with smoky tabernas where men diced and drank aguardiente, and the streets were filled with stoic picadors and fiery widows. Where boxers and fighters took their blows in silence and died with dignity. Released, perhaps for good, from this anarchy of self: this limbo of unreal, impossible expectations that had turned him into a blur of performed identities and buried resentments.
He could feel his conviction waning and could not understand why. He had pictured this moment in his head a thousand times, rewinding the spool of film repeatedly; he had traced out every step of his journey so far with the meticulous attention of a cartographer setting out to the undiscovered country. That old man had ended his life with the roar of a shotgun and splattered his ichor into eternity with a burst of smoke and fire and blood. At times like this, as Santiago ran his eyes over the thin white scars that crossed his features, so alien from the willful, smiling reflections of his past, he asked himself why he should not envy a fate such as that.
Boxing Abstract Art Oil Painting (Digital Art)
Santiago was acutely aware that his body would fail him eventually; it had held on for too long, creaking bag of mucus and sinew stapled together by shards of bone and a muddled brain. It sought nothing more than freedom from the life of the bull of the corrida, sent out to bleed hot gore into the arid sands. Better to place the agency in the hands of another, pass the burden to a fellow fighter. These violent delights have violent ends, was that not the phrase?
It was one thing to kill himself, quite another to be killed. Iberian chauvinism and half-remembered Catholic dogma still lingered on him like cigarette smoke, and it could not stomach that damning, cowardly label: suicide. Santiago’s homeland was one where men fought giants regardless of the certainty of defeat and where corpses rode out to battle, swords strapped to their hands and heads held high. Pride was his bridle and the bit tore at his mouth, leaving him to march on, spitting scarlet froth from between his lips, for Santiago could imagine death was quiet but also that it could be boring, and that scared him most of all.
Wham. He had struck himself on the side of the face, jerking his head to the side with force. Planting himself firmly in place, his whole body tensed, he fought the wild urge to let loose. To mash his nose and break his teeth and splinter his jaw and shatter his chin until the noise in his head leaked out of his ears and was still, still. His eyes blurred, quivering in their sockets.
Respite came as the door swung open and Edu walked into the room, his slightly pudgy stomach tight against his shirt. His belt was buckled too firmly, through the fourth hole instead of the third. Edu stopped as he caught sight of Santiago, and Santiago winced at the flash of terror that creased Edu’s tanned and friendly features. He lowered his guard, letting his fists swing at his side.
“They’re calling for you,” said Edu gently.
“Already?”
“Already.”
“Right,” grunted Santiago. He was trying not to meet the eyes of the man before him.
“You’ll be fine,” assured Edu. It was a refrain that Santiago had heard many times. He still wasn’t sure who it was for.
“He’s a tough son of a bitch.”
“You’re tougher,” reminded Edu, gripping him by the shoulders, his fingers touching Santiago’s skin with an urgency greater and more terrible than when they made love.
“That’s the problem, Edu.” Santiago smiled wanly. “It’s the tough guys like me who have to keep going.”
“Don’t be stupid,” snapped Edu. “Not now, Santi, not just before a fight. Not ever. So, what if you keep going, I’ve gotten you this far, no?”
“You have,” admitted Santiago. Hay amores que matan. In silence Santiago reserved his greatest curse of all to love, that bastard child of resource and poverty. He could not tell Edu, could never reveal the truth, as real as a spoken secret, that as far as they had come, he could go no further on this road of phonies, fighters, and castaways. Yes, for now, a part of him still resisted, still feared, but he could go no further. Maybe – maybe dying wasn’t that bad a thing, yes, and he would step into that ring and slip quickly away, follow the path of those boyhood novels, across the river and into the trees, where he could be hurt no more.
“ And it will stay that way,” Edu said firmly. “I’m still here, Santi, remember? I don’t care how far you go, I’m still here.”
Santiago reached out towards Edu’s face, but his hand was a crimson lump, his boxing glove a grotesque paw that could only clumsily brush against the stubble of Edu’s cheek. He could not remove it from where they had sown it on, could almost imagine the tendrils of twine slipping beneath his skin, drawing tight around the bone. Flesh and leather becoming one until they would be cut away and he would be allowed to be a man again.
Edu was patting him on the back, leading him in the direction of the door. Outside, he could hear the hushed, expectant roar of the amphitheater, imagine the clusters of the waiting crowd guzzling warm, over-priced beers and tramping their feet on a floor sticky with congealed syrup, soda and spit. Santiago began to march his way down the corridor, the rest of his team falling in practiced step behind him. The cowl of his hood had been drawn up over his head, and Edu had quietly tied the belt back around Santiago’s waist from where it had loosened in the locker room.
A slogan in a jagged, lurid black font snaked its way across his broad shoulders, proclaiming the bearer of the robe as El Príncipe de las Tinieblas, a cartoon demon scowling on his back. Santiago had always hated that ridiculous slogan, and the mascot to boot. Edu had insisted that his fans loved it, and Edu was always right. Most of the time.
Marked by the devil and with his words still lingering in his mind, Santiago moved forward. The baying of the crowd was a wall now, but he breached it and the throat of the corridor opened to cough him into the arena. From either side pasty faces bore down on him, whooping, cursing. The jumbotron was reflecting a stranger in a red robe back at him. How small he looked, how thin and insubstantial that man with his heavy fists and bronze flesh was, refracted on plastic screens and lit up with burning pyrotechnics. A puppet devil in a high-school production of Hell.
All that he could focus on was the ring. Before the night was over, he knew that it would mean his death. Perhaps, in a way, it had always had, and all those years of amateur antics slugging phonies and green boys had simply been the dress rehearsal for this final tragedy. Santiago’s rival was waiting in the other corner of the ring already. His shorts were bright green, dotted with gold shamrocks. Even in his state, half-mad with adrenaline, Santiago could not repress an inward groan. He had watched his opponent’s fights back-to-back, committed his frame to memory in the fashion of a lover tracing the contours of their darling in their mind’s eye, but a part of him had almost expected something less farcical. Declan Byrne: the Irishman, holy terror to every Protestant who ever walked the Emerald Isle.
A Devil pitted against the leprechaun. Despite the gloomy pall that clung to him, Santiago began to feel light-headed, as he had before, after the kind of good laugh that made your eyes smart and your stomach hurt. Standing where he was, a black speck in the hierophant white of the ring, it dawned on him how stupid it all was, how little all of this mattered.
Once, a week before the fight, when the noise in his head had been especially loud and Edu had gone shopping, Santiago had stood at the edge of the kitchen sink, knife in hand, and hovered it over his wrist. He hadn’t really meant to do anything, just see if he…could. The tip of the blade had wavered as he imagined it carving into the skin, sawing bluntly at stringy muscles and rubbery arteries, thick crimson blood bubbling to the surface. But his hand had not moved, and it had not been easy, as easy as he would have guessed it to be, and he let the knife fall to the floor and collapsed next to it. Then he laughed and laughed without being able to stop and never spoke of it again.
It felt something like that now, only different, because now Santiago was sure knowledge that when he died, he would simply break like an action-figure, all decked out in his ruby shorts and corny slogans. Byrne was talking animatedly with his corner-man, casting fleeting glances at Santiago with watery blue eyes, his left hand reflexively hovering in place as he chattered. The man was a southpaw, a type of boxer Santiago had barely ever fought against. The announcer was taking his position with his microphone, the crowd rising to meet him as he did. By his side hovered the referee, a balding, self-serious man who looked like a waiter at a cocktail party.
Santiago blocked it all out. He knew how it all went, the posturing, the mania, even the way the announcer rolled his “R’s” like a drill-bit whirring in place, and the precise flourishes of his arms as he introduced both fighters in each corner. Santiago ambled up to the middle of the ring, watching Byrne grow bigger as he approached. The Irish man’s rather pronounced jaw was thickly set, and his eyes glittered. From his experiences with the man at press conferences and the weigh-in, Santiago had found Byrne to be unexpectedly professional. Still, he steeled himself. Kindness displayed in the open was normal, but it was in the heart of the ring that true colours were quick to show.
Byrne was right on top of him, his flaxen hair a choppy fringe over his brow. One of his front teeth was slightly crooked. Their eyes met. Byrne gave him a curt nod and extended his fist. The two boxers touched gloves, reaching out to one another like the figures on a Roman ceiling.
Before the bell rang out, Santiago cast one look back at Edu. Edu flashed him a smile of encouragement, which only wavered for an instant. He worried too much; it was one of his quirks that Santiago had always felt ashamed of disliking: he could never quite shake the suspicion that it was some kind of joke. He could not truly fathom that he was someone worth that much care.
And then they had begun, and Santiago was moving forward, guard up, tight and compact. Byrne circled him warily, firing off a few tentative jabs which ricocheted off Santiago’s thick forearms. Another jab cannoned towards his face, but Santiago batted it aside and rewarded Byrne with a short, sharp blow to his side, the Irishman skittering back instinctively. His recovery from the surprise was extraordinary, and for a second Byrne became a flash of green as he stepped in quickly, his glove slipping past Santiago’s guard. The punch hammered into Santiago’s stomach, his guts jolting as a cold, lump of lead coagulated inside his chest. The first blow had been a feint, and Byrne had followed up with a ridiculous display of speed.
Christ, the man was a monster.
A hook scythed into Santiago’s field of vision. His head rocketed to the side, cables in his neck standing in tortured relief as he tried to stabilize himself. He barely managed to swing out of the way of the next punch, firing back with one of his own that nicked the tip of Byrne’s nose, but the bastard was good, his head bobbing from side to side like a gyroscope, denying Santiago a clean hit. Again, that step-in. In an instant Byrne was on top of him, watery eyes hardened to chips of flint. Santiago raised his guard but was it even worth it, did this all even matter? Byrne’s fist sunk into his diaphragm and the air rushed out of Santiago’s lungs in one great scream.
The follow-up punch felt like it was ripping his head off. For an instant he was looking upwards at the burning circles of the stadium lights. His mouth guard had clattered to the ground. Blood was trickling down his lips.
Oh, right, he was on the ground. Blearily he saw the silhouette of the referee standing between him and the green flicker that was Byrne, the boxer stepping from foot to foot in anticipation. Through the haze of his vision, Santiago could hear the count begin, hear Edu swearing and calling to him in Spanish, and wished that he would simply fall through the mat and lie there forever, cease to be. No, no, it wasn’t good enough, not like this, not in the first round. Hating himself for it, he had begun to push himself upwards on his knuckles, tottering to his feet in a creaking, jumbled mess. The crowd was thundering, the referee standing in front of him, asking him if he could go on and somehow, he could, and he was slotting the mouthguard into place, swallowing his own blood and then he was off again.
Byrne flew at him, battering away at his guard, pushing him back. The crowd was hissing and booing, and Santiago’s shoulders were aflame, bones rattling with every impact. All he could do was dodge and crouch and deflect but the ring had shrunk since he fell and now the ropes were at his back. In a desperate bid to finish things, Santiago lunged at his opponent. He knew what would come next: Byrne had been waiting for him. The counterpunch blew Santiago’s head back in a shotgun blast, a flurry of sweat and gore that exploded from his nose and splattered onto the ring. The audience groaned as Santiago lolled from side to side and here came the follow up, slicing into his liver.
Santiago’s body froze, jittering spasmodically as his nerves crackled with electricity. This time he barely managed to avoid crashing into the floor by falling back onto the ropes. Byrne’s shadow was drawing his fist back and then the bell rang. Stumbling back into his corner, Santiago collapsed onto the stool. In a second, his team was on him, the cutman ready with the epinephrine that stung and fought back as it was daubed onto his cuts. A wet towel flicked over his face, like mist from the Guadalquivir.
His nose was leaking dark reddish goop, but it wasn’t broken, and already the flow was slowing. A water bottle was jammed near his mouth and Santiago sucked on it greedily, spitting out pink phlegm into a waiting bucket. Edu was right in his face, snapping his fingers, begging him to pay attention, he had to concentrate, he was getting slaughtered out there, he wasn’t going to last one more round fighting like this. Hands were massaging his muscles, coarse towels were wiping away his sweat, he felt like a race car being pulled apart and screwed back together in the pit. With a jolt, Edu slapped both hands around his face, their foreheads touching.
“It’s ok,” slurred Santiago. “It’s ok, I’m good, I can go.”
He felt a shiver as Edu put his lips by his ear, whispering hurriedly now. “He’s tearing you to shreds out there, but he’s not exactly spry either.”
Edu jerked his head in the direction of Byrne in his corner. The Irishman was slick with perspiration, sweat burning from his muscles, stomach heaving as he gulped down water.
“He wants to finish this quickly, but if you hold out a little longer, he’ll end up burning himself out completely. It’ll hurt like the devil but soak it up and when he falters…let him have it. Wait for however long it takes but let him have it.”
Santiago nodded groggily, more out of habit than anything.Edu gave a quick nod to the referee, who motioned for the fighters to prepare to begin once again. Before he stepped out of the ring, Edu gave Santiago’s wrist a squeeze. His kiss burned like an ice-cube pressed against a bruise.
“I’m still here,” he repeated. “Remember? I’m still here.”
The bell rang, and they started, and one round went by, then it was two, now three had passed and moved into four and somehow, Santiago still stood, but this time he could see it, could see the window of opportunity creak open. A few more minutes and he could finally rest easily, something more than a gladiator dispiritedly chasing a wooden sword. The gurgling river and whispering trees clustered, warm and safe, waiting to welcome him into eternity, to follow that old man who had traded in the happiness of mortals for the tragedy of icons on terms decided by his own hands.
Byrne was pummeling him again, eyes rolling madly with the first hints of desperation, breath roaring out like a freight train, but it no longer hurt anymore. All Santiago could focus on was the light, hot, bright and burning. The mat was the frost white of the snows on African mountains he had dreamed of but never seen. This way he would never die, they would drink to him and pour their libations on the cracked Spanish clay and maybe then something he had done would matter more than this farce of gaudy colours. With each blow he could feel his anxieties carved away, leaving only the certainty of oblivion.
And yet.
And yet, what if it wasn’t certain? What if what awaited him beyond the mortal coil was crushing, boring nothingness, what if there was no peace but instead the hollow emptiness of lying in a dark room, wondering if there was more you could have done?
Santiago felt his chest rising and falling as he began to hyperventilate, and it all came crashing down on his shoulders in shards of glass that cut him and brought back the memories of the thugs, the bullies, the champions that had mashed his face in the dirt and torn his books in half and busted his lip in the courtyard and the playground and the ring. Santiago was not winning anything, deciding anything, he was letting them win. Santiago was still there; Edu was still there. He was yelling and crying. Edu always cried, the big worrier, whenever Santia go was losing.
The worst thing of all was when Santiago realized that he hadn’t thought about whether Edu would miss him.
Byrne’s fist fell in an arc, but he had moved too eagerly. His feet tripped over one another. With a wild savagery Santiago rammed his knuckles squarely into Byrne’s face as the Irishman tried to. Santiago would not let him recover; his teeth were fangs as he gritted them and pushed past the pain. His barrage tore into Byrne, and Santiago began to dismantle him piece by piece like he had seen his father do to the family van the week it broke down. His knuckles were hooks, ripping greedy chunks from his rival’s stomach and abdomen and cheeks. The announcer was in hysterics, the crowd were on their feet, screaming. Santiago realized that he was screaming too, a guttural roar of terror and rage and he realized that just because he did not want to live did not mean he wanted to die, he did not want to die, he did not want to die.
The ropes of the ring spat Byrne back at Santiago as he careered against them, and Santiago’s fists were waiting. He felt the Irishman’s jaw give way like a soda bottle crushed under foot, paid him back in turn for the nose, then began to work on his chest, tenderizing the flesh, registering nothing but shapes and screams and the man in front of him. They later told him that the referee waited a full thirty seconds before stepping in.
He saw Byrne raise his hand in a gesture that might have been supplication, but the adrenaline was at the wheel. Santiago snapped Byrne’s head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth and then the referee was pushing him back into the corner and Byrne had slammed into the ground and when Santiago looked at him, he had no face left.
The crowd’s cheers had died down, replaced with horrified silence. Byrne was being swarmed by his team. Medics were vaulting the ropes, rushing the ring. Santiago heaved, gasping in the corner, gloves dipped in crimson, hair plastered over his skin with sweat. Edu was staring at him with appalled admiration, one hand clasped tightly over his mouth, but he was alive, alive, and Hemingway could wait.
Slumping back onto his stool, Santiago did not even hear the announcer, did not even stand. As Edu scrambled into the ring, Santiago began to weep softly, head cast downwards, shoulders slopes of stone that shook as he bawled, and laughed and bawled again.
Edu was on him, kneeling in front of him, grabbing his knee, trying to jolt him out of it. “What is it, Santi?” he asked. “You won! You’ve won, what’s wrong?” Santiago stared into the eyes of his lover, still sobbing and howling, tears streaking paths down the gore on his face, bloody stigmata dripping onto his lap.
“I’m still here,” he cried, burying his face in his hands.
Dante Alighieri, Supreme Poet and third crown of Italian literature blinked slowly, trying to take in his surroundings. A few moments ago, he had been in the arms of his beloved Beatrice in the silver halls of Paradise, basking in the soft golden light of a seraphim’s wings. Screwing his eyes up against the wall of blistering heat that shimmered from the ground, he made his way forward. The pungent bite of sulphur stung his nostrils, and a dark shape was coalescing from the clouds of red, sparking mist that enveloped him, a looming shadow waiting like an augury of death.
Yes, he recognized this place. It had come to him centuries ago in his sleep. The most important sleep of his life.
The gates of Hell yawned open in a silent scream. Its pillars pulsed with the agonized faces of condemned souls bubbling in a diseased sea of torment. Dante fell to his knees, looking around frantically, and realized he was alone: the virginal kisses of Beatrice were a cold memory, the warm hand of his Roman guide the ghost of a dream long forgotten. He almost raised his voice in desperate prayer but stopped just as soon as he began. It was as the letters wrought in burning metal above the portal proclaimed: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE .
Yet, how strange…. another inscription had been added just below the infamous legend. Instead of gothic, towering script, a bright red sign proclaimed:
As seen in The Divine Comedy!!
Dante rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. No, he had not imagined things, the odd sign was still there. Now he started to notice the addition of new slogans adorning the gate. Creeping slowly up to the infernal portal, he peered at a large plastic rectangle propped up next to the bronze doors. On it was a picture of a devil, holding a pitchfork in one hand. The imp’s other hand was held out, palm at about the height of Dante’s midriff. Some kind of white circle was emerging from between the imp’s fangs, filled in with the words: Must Be This Tall For Eternal Damnation. Another sign was hanging limply on a piece of string from the nose of a bellowing skeleton: Closed For Repairs.
Hell? Closed? Something was amiss, and all that remained was to get to the bottom of it. Well, that wouldn’t be too hard; he had completed this trek before (albeit in his dreams) so it should not prove too arduous of a task to do so again. Steeling his nerve, Dante marched right up to the gates of Hell, scanning their expanse for a possible entrance. He found none, but what he did find was a series of silver buttons set above a metallic grille. Small, thin plaques were placed beside each button, with one catching the poet’s eye: Management.
Dante pressed the button quickly. A sharp buzz, a pause, and then a dry crackle from the grille. A voice, dripping boredom through the metallic slats, oozed into Dante’s ears.
“’Ello? City of Dis, Sixth Circle of Hell, Inferno Incorporated, how may I help?”
Dante shuffled his feet. “Um…yes, good sir, apologies, I am seeking entry into Hell.”
Dante imagined he could just about hear the eyes rolling in the speaker’s skull through the grille.
“Read the sign, will ya? We’re closed.”
“Well, yes, I understand, but this is a matter of supreme importance.”
“Sir, if you have any complaints please solicit and fill out a form from our Customer Satisfaction department,” recited the voice. “If you have been damned and are seeking compensation, we are temporarily providing half-off bargains on entry to Limbo, until the fires of Hell are back in business.”
“No, you’re not listening, I have not been damned. I should be in Heaven right now”-
“Oooooh, no kidding? Pull the other one, mate, it’s got bells on. Like we haven’t heard that one before.”
Dante had never considered himself a violent man. Nevertheless, took a step back and counted slowly to ten. “My name,” he declared, “is Dante Alighieri. I have been chosen for salvation by the Lord himself. I demand an explanation.”
A stunned silence echoed from the mouthpiece. Dante craned his neck forward, pressing his ear against the queer device. He could hear a muffled, thick chatter squeaking from it, as if the voice had quickly pressed its hand down on the speaker. There was the faintest suggestion of another voice now, icy tones that clipped away at each vowel with the pincers of a surgeon. A fresh rasp of static and the first voice returned now, wheedling and apologetic.
“Beg your pardon, Mr. Dante sir, your honour, you should have said so earlier. We very much regret any inconvenience caused and Inferno Inc. would like to take this opportunity to offer you a complimentary gift package”-
“Just let me inside, will you?” sighed Dante. His head hurt, his lips were beginning to chap from the heat, and already his robes had secreted clammy ponds underneath his armpits.
There was a brief pause, and then a hideous cacophony as the Gates of Hell swung open with the slow weight of oblivion. Dante made his way along the sooty cobblestones, wincing as the Gates roared shut behind him. He knew what was to come, could prepare himself for what to expect (he had written it, famously, hadn’t he?). Dante braced himself for the leering, hollow-eyed stare of Charon the ferryman, for King Minos and the leathery rasp of his serpentine tail condemning sinners to their justice. He felt a ripple of goosebumps as he remembered Cerberus with his sixfold bilious eyes, his maw dripping with filth. What he hadn’t expected was the train.
Not that it really was a train. A thin track of rails snaked off into the red fogs of Hell, and a plastic awning had been erected as some kind of miniature station. The ‘train’ was nothing more than six cars, with no roof and small enough to hold four people each, the outside of the carriage painted in a lurid scarlet. Dante sidled over to the nearest car and crawled in, feeling exceedingly stupid. His knees were pressed uncomfortably up against the seat in front of him.
The piddly little train gave a juddering start and began trundling jerkily along the tracks, as a disembodied female spectre, addressing Dante from somewhere inside the vehicle, cooly reminded him to always keep his hands within the ride. It puttered along, leaving Dante to gawp at his surrounding as they passed him by. Fields belching fire and pitch, putrid swamps writhing with cancerous mangroves, their leaves dripping with scorpions. Brittle forests leaking bloody sap. In the sky, the imps were a murmuration of defiled angels, black batwings casting leathery shadows as they swarmed, chasing down stumbling, naked sinners. Sinners, yes, everywhere Dante looked he could see them. Whipped and scourged against toothy rocks, dashed against the cliffsides and splattered in a gale of icy wind. Groaning sinners laden with gangrenous sores, skewered sinners stacked neatly atop one another in the heat of an unending sun, and from their throats a Babel of tongues crying out in languages from every corner of the Earth.
The train was playing a tune that chimed merrily from an invisible speaker. Dante couldn’t catch all the lyrics over the incessant misery of the damned, but he thought it went something along the lines of It’s A Small World After All.
Mercifully, the train slid to a creaking halt soon enough, depositing Dante outside of a towering building that appeared to have been pinched at the base and stretched upwards as far as possible. Dante did not have to wait too long: a shadowy figure was moving towards him from inside the building, masked by its translucent glass doors. They swung open to reveal what appeared to be a man like Dante
The demon (because what else could it be?) was wearing a crisp white shirt, stapled tightly in place against his chest by suspenders with silver buckles. His shoes were slick leather arrows, his tie a bloody slash dripping down from his neck and his face was lined with the thin, stretched wax of a Botox operation. The demon’s grey-flecked hair had been combed back in a sheen of oily gunk and some kind of perfume reminiscent of paint-thinner was crinkling the air around him.The fiend was on the bemused Dante in a flash, grasping his hands in a manicured vice. The poet noticed that the devil’s sleeves were winking at him: tiny metal pitchforks held his cuffs in place. Dante also caught a glimpse of the laminated badge pinned to his breast:
Hi! My name is: Beelzebub.
“The man himself,” beamed Beelzebub, sewing a smile onto his face that was all canines. He did not give the spluttering Dante any time to recover, clapping the poet amicably on the shoulder and steering him towards the door of the building, ignoring his squeaks of muted Italian protest.“Honestly, you don’t know how much of an honour this is-sorry about that unpleasant business at the entrance, Paimon is still a bit new to the job-but of course once we heard it was you, well, we’d move Heaven (excuse my French, aha) and earth for Dante Alighieri,” drawled Beelzebub. He stopped at a desk right before a pair of elevators, behind which a bored looking woman with frazzled hair was clacking away at a computer.
“Straight up to Management, Lilith, be a doll,” said Beelzebub, winking at the woman, who responded with a look probably older than Hell itself. The nearest elevator dinged open. Beelzebub all but thrust Dante into the clammy box, leaning against the opposite wall. The demon was smiling so widely Dante feared his head would split open.
“This is really super, just brilliant, the big boss has been bugging me for aaaages to get you down here, a gesture of gratitude, you know how it is-”
“G-gratitude?”
Beelzebub flicked a fly from the edge of his nose. “Well of course!” he laughed, “none of this would be possible without you. I mean, talk about free publicity!”
“Publicity?”
“Yeah! We haven’t had a win for marketing like this for centuries. Sure, there’s always a couple of good ones that come along: Rimbaud was alright, and that Milton guy gave us some good press”-Beelzebub extended his hands out, as if visualizing a giant billboard- “Satan: But He’s The Good Guy! Imagine that! The Big Boss had a field day with it, he hasn’t shut up about it since.”
The elevator chimed to a halt. Dante blinked in the drab light from the humming lamps on the roof. As far as the eye could see stood cohorts of plastic boxes. Gray, apathetic faces blurred and shambled along the way as they went, the colourless ocean only occasionally broken up by gaudy nick-nacks, post-cards and fading photographs. The smell was a pervasive miasma of stale coffee, acrid ink, paper stewed in the printer and “pinewood” air freshener fighting an unending battle with stinking ventilation. A large corkboard to Dante’s right showed a grinning demon in a suit and tie sitting eagerly at a desk, flashing a thumbs-up at the invisible audience, chirpily announcing “BETTER TO REIGN IN HELL THAN SERVE IN HEAVEN!” Underneath, someone had taped up a sticky note with the less inspiring legend: ‘Turkey sandwich in fridge is mine-Samael.’ There was a coffee mug that had been left out in the nearest cubicle. It was unusually long and bore the inscription “You don’t have to be eternally ripped from the loving bosom of the Lord to work here-but it helps!”
Dante pinched his nose. This wasn’t making any sense.“Sorry-The Big Boss?”
“Oh, that would be the leader of the old guard. You know, Lucy.”
“Lucy?”
“That’s what his friends call him,” preened Beelzebub, inflating with the barely concealed smarm of someone who knows people in high places. “Unfortunately, he can’t be here to meet you-there’s souls to corrupt, humans to damn, you know the drill, he never lets up, but that’s the boss-man for you. He’s a busy guy, been running this gig since…. well, since…zero, I guess you’d call it.”
“The rebellion of fallen angels?”
“Pssh,” snorted Beelzebub, making a face. “Rebellion of the fallen angels’-classic union busting is what I’d like to call it. There’s no justice in the world,” sighed Beelzebub. His eyes took on a mad sheen. “Well, except for us.”
“And us is……?”
“Inferno Incorporated, silly! Though I don’t like all that corporate slang. I prefer to think of us as one big, happy family, not a company,” purred the demon. Dante took in the swarm of haggard faces scribbling away in their cluttered cubicles, every sluggish scrawl of a pencil a symphony of despair. There were probably families like that, Dante could concede, though the kind that would leave the drinks cabinet locked during Christmas dinner and be unable to get to dessert without a nervous breakdown from Mum.
“Fine, but what is it you do here?”
“Oh, same old, same old, infinite damnation, torture beyond the limits of human imagination, etc, etc,” said Beelzebub. “We do a pretty mean guided tour now though-did you like the train ride? Though of that one myself, though I tell you it was a drag to be able to get the song”-he elbowed Dante playfully and painfully in the ribs- “those Disney guys, huh? And I thought we were bastards,” he snickered in a way that made Dante suspect Beelzebub memorized a lot of comments of the kind for moments like these.
“We like to think of ourselves as a modern company, ya know? Ah, here we are, this is what I wanted to show you!”
They had stopped in front of a room flanked by a large plate-glass display case. Dante shuffled into the room, squinting at rows and rows of shiny plastic racks bedecked with paraphernalia. A bunch of scratchy T-shirts caught his eyes. They were emblazoned with pathetically desperate attempts at jovial wit, the kind of thing that was comedy gold to beer-swilling dads looking to inflict fresh agonies of humiliation onto their cringing teenagers. One said: “MALEBOLGIA? I HARDLY KNOW HER!” Another said: “I VISITED THE CITY OF DIS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.”
Dante rifled through a couple more (“I’M USED TO HELL: I’M MARRIED, AREN’T I?” “NUMBER ONE SUCCUBUS SEDUCER”) smiling weakly at Beelzebub, who was watching Dante with the look of a small child who had just handed their parents a drawing done in crayon.
“Pretty neat, right?” said Beelzebub. “Though of course, we don’t actually have any Succubae anymore, not after all that women’s-lib crap, ya know?” Beelzebub did not wait for Dante to reply and instead slunk over to a large coffee table laden with pyramids of glossy books. “And look, here we go!”
He handed Dante a book . It had flames on the cover, and a golden title in a rather overdone font: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. A sticker read: “NOW A MAJOR COSMOLOGICAL ATTRACTON!”
“Not too shabby, if I do say so myself,” said Beelzebub, cracking his suspenders like gunshots. “Got bumped up to Head of Marketing a couple of centuries back. It was supposed to be Mephistopheles but he left to strike out on his own in showbiz, all the fame went to his head after that Dr. Faustus nonsense,” muttered Beelzebub, stopping as he noticed Dante. The poet was looking at the book with disgust. “You OK?”
“This-this says the Divine Comedy.”
“Yeah…..?”
“This is only Inferno !”
“So?”
“But-but it’s a trilogy,” wailed Dante. “What about Purgatory, what happened to Paradise? The long, painful but redemptive struggle to salvation, the journey from despair to hope?”
“Oh no one gives a shit about that, it barely sells,” snorted Beelzebub. “You humans want all fucked-up karmic justice contrapasso stuff, why else do you think we made this place? Anyway, I thought you’d be happy,” said Beelzebub. He set down the mug and began flicking through a copy of the Inferno. “I mean, you came up with all this stuff, right? Could have reached out to us about the title though, not sure about this Divine Comedy stuff-not exactly a laugh a minute. I thought you were a funny guy?” said Beelzebub. The demon flipped to a random page and made a face.
“Terribly inaccurate too if you don’t mind constructive criticism. I mean this place used to just be your run-of-the-mill lake of fire. Funny thing is, sinners would start showing up and have all these questions, all these complaints: what about the Seven Levels of Hell? Is the Forest of the Suicides a dog-friendly zone? Where are all the icy wastelands, don’t all the flames get a bit repetitive? Blah de blah de blah, you get the idea. Wouldn’t be a good idea to disappoint the customers, right? Dealing with the contractors alone was-well, aha, –Hell. I mean come on, seven levels. Overkill man, real overkill,” tutted Beelzebub, sticking his hands in his pockets.
“We had to fly in a Cerberus, now that was a chore, I’ll tell you. Three different rabies shots, fed nine times a day and those PETA goons still aren’t happy. All that Greco-Roman stuff you put in there too, we’ve had to outsource half our workforce to centaurs and harpies, plus they’re all undocumented. Though between you and me,”-Beelzebub lowered his voice to a stage whisper- “they do twice the work for a third of the pay, so it all turned out well, eh? Still, it’s no picnic,” he sighed, with the world-weary heaviness of a boss who is utterly convinced they’re the only person doing any work.They had left the room during this monologue, and now Beelzebub was leading Dante down another corridor. The demon lit a gold-tipped cigarette, a burst of flame licking from the tip of his finger.
“Naturally we had to change a few things, got rid of the more…problematic elements of the old Inferno. Not that I personally care, but you know how it is with all that ‘wake’ nonsense or whatever. Some of those sins were just plain nasty, and antithetical to the inclusive, diverse and modern image Inferno Inc. wishes to project to its loyal consumers.” This last part was recited in a dry rattle reminiscent of a bored schoolboy reading out lines in detention.
“You can’t just change my work!” squawked Dante, flushing. Beelzebub shrugged.
“Take it up with them,” he said, flicking his wrist in the direction of a door. Dante wandered over and cracked the door open. Inside was a series of massive wooden crates, squirming with wailing, naked humans bound and gagged in chains. The crates were labelled FUEL and FOOD. Dante closed the door and read its brass plaque:
HUMAN RESOURCES.
He fell back in line behind Beelzebub, who wrapped himself in a fresh, smug fog of tobacco smoke. They had come to the end of the room, in front of a mahogany door with Beelzebub’s name written neatly on it in gilded script. Beelzebub opened the door for Dante to come inside. The room had large glass windows with a view of the cracked, crimson mountains of Hell, flashes of lightning throwing shadows periodically along an enormous desk no less polished than the demon’s smile. A gleaming red phone squatted on the tabletop next to a kitsch Chinese lamp, a blocky computer and an angular trophy proclaiming the recipient as employee of the Millenia.
In the centre of the room a strip of acid-green turf and a small hole in the ground marked a miniature indoor golf set. An actual bag of golf clubs, bristling with iron, was leaning against the side of the desk. The walls were filled with boring looking leather volumes that had long ago given up trying to suggest that their owner had actually read them. A woman in a sensible black skirt and pressed white top was in the room, ordering discarded files on Beelzebub’s desk. She looked up as the two men entered.
“Thanks for the help, but can you give us the room darling?” said Beelzebub, holding the door open. The woman’s lips thinned but she said nothing, leaving briskly. There was a painful ‘crack’ as her hand slapped Beelzebub’s questing fingers away from her backside.
“My secretary, Ishtar,” said Beelzebub, rubbing his hand. “Nice enough girl, Babylonian or something. Diversity hires, I swear man, this affirmative-action shit is killing me, but you didn’t hear that here,” he said sourly, winking conspiratorially at Dante. Beelzebub collapsed into his chair, putting his feet up on the desk, puffing away at his cigarette.
“So, man, can I offer you anything”-
“No. I’ve really wasted enough time as it is already,” said Dante brusquely. He had put up with this bizarre charade for quite enough time already and was ready to go home, away from this smarmy demon and his unctuous speeches, away from this bastardization of his poetry running on crushed dreams, dirty money and poor air conditioning.
“Well, yikes, man, we just wanted to let you get to know the place for old times’ sake,” said Beelzebub. “It’s not like we can actually keep you here. We wouldn’t want to make the Big Man Upstairs upset,” he added, and now a truly ugly look that was a little hate and a lot of fear flashed across the demon’s face.
“Just say the word and we’ll buzz you right back up.”
“Thank you,” said Dante . “I’m sorry to offend, but I will always prefer Heaven.”
“Me too pal,” said Beelzebub, and smiled slyly. “But we get more visitors.”
Dante was about to leave. Then he remembered something. “Before I go-I would want to work something out.”
“Oh?”
“It’s about the Inferno. Well, my Inferno. The way I see it, you’re all using my ideas, my images, my poetry to sell your shirts and your books. Clearly this is not an…unsuccessful endeavour, and though I am humbled, my pride as an artist forces me to inquire as to why I was never approached about any of this.”
Beelzebub was sitting up straight in his chair, squinting at Dante. “Well, the way we see it, we were here for quite a bit of time before you even put pen to paper, pal. Inferno Inc. claims exclusive rights to all intellectual properties pertainingregarding Hell,Tartarus, or any other domain of eternal damnation.”
“They’re still my ideas. As you said, before this was all just a lake of fire. I transformed it into something eternal. No, not just eternal. Something iconic. And I’ll be damned if I continue to receive no compensation for the use of my work.” Dante wouldn’t budge. Remembering the song on the train, he decided to take things a step farther. “We wouldn’t want to make the Big Man Upstairs upset, is that not what you said?”
Beelzebub bit his tongue, steepling his fingers. “I can make no promises, Mr. Alighieri,” he said, the ice returning to his speech. “That being said, have a pleasant return to Paradise. I promise, Inferno Inc. will be in touch…. presently, to discuss any subsequent concerns you may have with copyright with our team of legal advisors.”
Nodding curtly to the demon, Dante turned to the door but stopped again.
“Legal advisors…. You have lawyers in Hell?” he asked. Beelzebub threw his head back and laughed so hard his cigarette flew out of his mouth.
“Oh man,” he hooted, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, “I knew it! You really are a funny guy!”
Pablo Lacalle Writing 