Morbid Tales

by Quentin S Crisp

  Two of the mermaids put their arms around me tightly and plummeted into the chiaroscuro of the ocean depths. They dragged me down deeper and as my heart was tortured against my ribcage I felt the solid, heavy beating of their monstrous coiling tails, as thunderously round and powerful as the thighs of any fertility goddess. My breath was leaving me rapidly in the bubbles that raked through my waving hair. Now I felt a darkening panic. I had exposed my heart to these creatures, exposed it in all the weakness and vulnerability of abject, crawling love. In return, they were taking me down to some icy-dark, watery abyss where I was to be subjected to who knows what terrors for the sake merely of their merciless playfulness. It came to me that these were creatures of the deep just as much as the hideous angler fish, the remote and inscrutable giant squid, the electric eel and the swordfish. They were equally far removed from human understanding and sympathy. I thought of the grainy illustrations I had pored over as a boy in yellowing books, pictures of the inhabitants of the ocean bed, how infinitely ghastly and archaic a world it had seemed, barbarous and alien, slippery. These mermaids were as dingily obscure as the murky, dotted pictures of devil-fish in those books. I had fallen in love with something inhuman, something as dark as the slime and silt of the mouldy ocean floor.

  Then the grim vision faded. It seemed the powder I had ingested had been thoroughly absorbed and used up. I was standing once more on the beach feeling a little disorientated and unsteady. The excitement I felt in placing the looking glass and brush in their box and gathering it up under my arm was tinged with a flash of something sinister, as if I were a tomb-robber fleeing the winged shadow of a pharaoh’s curse. This theft, I was sure, would not go unnoticed. I did not want it to. I would brave whatever hell was in store for me if it meant I would achieve my heart’s desire.

  I took the box and its contents, like some mythological prize, a medusa’s head, back to the cottage. It was then, inspired by the harsh and hostile visions I had been granted, that I set out to build an idol in my studio. For some reason I had never before attempted to create a mermaid. Now I had their haunting forms forever behind my eyes to work from. They did not look much different than I had expected as far as physical detail was concerned. And yet actually to see them was a powerful experience that gave my famished mind purpose and made my bony fingers burn with the will to recreate their formidable likeness.

  The work was the most intricate piece I had ever attempted. I don’t know if you would call it art. It was something between religion, love and madness. Eventually it was completed, seashells to scale its tail and seaweed for its hair. In amongst the seaweed I had placed the two strands of hair I had found on the brush. It seemed somehow the most provocatively blasphemous idol since the Golden Calf was worshipped in Biblical times. It was a fish-tailed Whore of Babylon, its obvious sexual attributes made all the more salacious by the appearance the whole thing had of a rotting corpse, rich, glittering, over-ripe and corrupted.

  I placed the objects I had found around the stinking, piecemeal figure, held together with tar, that looked poised with intent, as if about to move. I knelt before it nightly and bowed my head down to the floor in abasement, offering entreaties and prayers born of my own delirium. In two braziers set either side of the idol, I experimentally burnt tiny amounts of the green powder. It burnt well, fizzling under the flame. I hesitate to describe the vapours it gave off as smoke. They seemed almost to be a purely optical effect, a kind of colourful fuzziness, usually pink. Inside the spreading and exotic cameo of this curling vapour there would appear two kinds of scenes. One was composed of sparkling, brassy light and soft hues. These scenes were principally of marine grottoes with walls the texture of the inside of a shell, all roseate and mother-of-pearl. In the grotto would be a mermaid bathing, soap bubbles floating in the air, the wet curls of her hair plastered to her head. The other kind of scene was altogether darker, often showing no more than a vision of many-suckered, thrashing tentacles, a rubbery swirling and squirming inside the gap in the veil opened up by the burning powder. Then again, gazing through this portal to the many-fathomed world it showed, I would sometimes view scenes that were a mixture of the two kinds described above. I would see mermaids, softened by waves, radiant as moonbeams, slip magnificently from caves to cavort and commune with cold-blooded things that would be called monsters if they were not recognised by science.

  These eerie visions, a mix of unearthly beauty and grotesqueness, had an intoxicating effect upon me. After viewing them, I would often step out of the cottage into the blue of the evening to find the sky alive and blazing with stars. The wind would seem to scorch a face turned ruddy, and I would walk along the cliff edge, gazing at the slow, crawling white of the waves against the deeper, dreaming blue, until the waves became to me like the vapours from the burning powder and I began to see all sorts of things in their sapphire sheen.

  The days, however, brought me nothing new, until, one morning, as empty of expectation as any other morning, I finally found her. In fact, now that I think back, the morning was even emptier of expectation than usual. There were clouds, but the sun shone through their scattered whiteness with broken rays and pleasant heat, a peaceful, burning dryness in the midst of so much moisture and grey shadow. When I went to the beach, between the two rocks that form a sort of gateway, and saw her lying spread out upon the small stones and sand, it seemed to me suddenly that all my efforts and struggling had passed. I did not know whether those efforts had paid off or whether they had been irrelevant and now I was simply lucky. I did not care. The darkness and difficulty was over. Now everything had become easy and obvious. It seemed for the first time in my life that ‘now’ had arrived. I trembled as if I had for a long time been carrying a heavy weight which I had put down. I was surprised to find my movements so free, so unrestricted.

  The mermaid had the kind of beauty that on its own seemed to command love. At first, I thought she was dead, and though filled with wonder at her beauty, was shattered that such beauty should be destroyed. Then, in a moment of pure magic, I saw that she was breathing. Let me describe her. With the rocks forming a cot around her, her white form looked soft and vulnerable. Yet with that vulnerability was a strange, wet glow of power and attraction. She had obviously dwelt most in dark places where sunlight was only a weak stirring from a distant corner, a solemn ribbing of rays. Soaked all her days her flesh had gained the appearance of tenderness and plumpness. And then there was her tail. Despite the fact I had been familiar with the image of the mermaid since earliest childhood, to see before my very eyes a body that was half human and half fish was bizarre, and called up within me emotions that were as new to me and as different from the human as was she.

  Wasn’t it a matter beyond strangeness that a creature the kin of dogfish or swordfish should evoke in me feelings of attraction and rapture? But exactly what was this thing the kin of? It felt as if this were a being that had been created before, or at least independently of, womankind. Before Eve she was there, and if ever a man should set eyes on her he would find vestigial organs of emotion operating for the first time like the gills he had never had, but that had lain dormant in him, not even memory, merely potential. So many nameless emotions might thus be awakened in the human frame by a meeting with the alien.

  Her tail looked as if it had been oil painted, rainbow colours glittering among the white streaks of light on the shining smoothness of her scales. Light and colours squeezed from a tube, her tail end spread out impressively delicate and pearly.

  I bent down beside her and carefully put my arms beneath her. Gathering her up with a great effort, I stood and began to walk. Doing just as I wished, alone, carrying the unconscious mermaid in my arms, I felt joy purer than any I had known before. The whole feeling was not one of intensity, but one of unbelievable lightness, as if I was made of light. It was, despite the intensity and deep involvement of all that was to come, the most perfect moment of my existence. Nothing was happening, it was a moment of inbetweenness. But
I was triumphant, fulfilled.

  It did not even occur to me to be stealthy in case I was seen with such a prize. But, as if I had been transported to another world, I met no one on the track up from the beach to the cottage. Perhaps, even if there had been someone, their own disbelief would have rendered me invisible.

  When I finally reached the cottage I placed the mermaid gently in the bath, for which she was too tall, or long, and ran the cold tap. I was afraid that she might die without water. This posed the problem of how I was to keep her. For I meant to keep her, selfish and greedy as it was. There was no human law to stop me, and since I was human, I would recognise no other law. She was like any other wild animal I might have found. I could do what I liked with her.

  It did not take me long to realise that the only possible way I could keep her was to build a tank or pool. It was no use being put off by the difficulty or impracticality of such a project. There was simply no choice. The only space in the cottage large enough to contain a tank was the studio. I made a great many ’phone calls, one after the other, and must have attracted some attention in the village with extravagant orders for materials such as fibreglass. Quite apart from the fact that I had become fixed in the habits and sensibilities of a hermit, I was also insanely jealous of my find, and so was loath to bring in any outsiders. I also felt unable to leave the cottage in case anything should happen to the mermaid. All this was only to make my situation more difficult. But with my dream so nearly secured, any effort was small. The rest of my life and the world that I lived in were negligible and empty things compared to this tangible dream. They had shrunk to a mere bubble clinging to the underside of this stray, unconscious stranger.

  I hoped the attic would prove sturdy enough to hold the weight of water that would be required. Some of the materials too, proved very difficult to get into the studio. I almost despaired. Then, while I was engaged in this panic of activity, that which I had feared interrupted me. She awoke. I heard her cries coming from the bathroom—the same shrill, seagull voice I heard when I had ingested some of the green powder.

  I raced downstairs and hesitated a moment before flinging the bathroom door open. I was overwhelmed by an impression of chaos that momentarily banished all language from my perceptions. Nothing had a name. Nothing could be explained or described. And in that chaos were an aliveness and a beauty that struck me so forcibly I had to summon myself to move, to think, to do anything, lest my mind be blasted into absence and I remain a slack-jawed and docile idiot. It was as if there were more than one being there. I thought at first of gulls swooping on the bloody entrails of some fresh, floating corpse on an agitated ocean. The wings, feathers, waves, the noise and confusion. Then everything resolved into a clearer picture, the mermaid struggling in the tiny bath, her sea-crimped tresses flying. I was still confused by the lingering impression that this was a woman being swallowed by a monstrous and brilliant fish. But that too passed. I saw that in her thrashing the mermaid had splashed most of the water from the tub onto the floor. My presence only seemed to panic her more and I was extremely anxious that she might injure herself. I had no idea of the best way to soothe her and for a while simply stood making ineffectual placating gestures with my hands and repeating that it was all right.

  Driven by desperation quite beyond the restrictions of thought and personality, I found myself freely possessed by a lightning impulse which showed a boldness uncharacteristic for me. I snatched the mermaid’s hand and held it tightly in both of mine. Since I could neither speak nor understand her language, I must rely on a language of the senses. Grasping her tender hand I felt something like a wash of relief. It was really quite as easy as any such a physical action should be. And the rewards were this spreading calm, this profound relaxation. Why had I always felt such a resistance against this kind of contact? If it were merely an illusion it had been a powerful one in my life. But with this watershed I dared to look long and deeply into the mermaid’s green eyes. I wanted to break whatever remained of the resistance inside of me. I have never looked into anyone’s eyes for as long as I looked into hers. There had always been, in the past, the point where, ashamed, I would lower my eyes. Now I realised that all I had lacked was the conviction of my own feelings. I had not been invited to take the mermaid’s hand, but I meant no harm, and if at first she had been alarmed, then after a while, feeling the warm stillness of my palms and the corresponding fearless gentleness of my gaze, she could understand that there was nothing in me to be suspicious of.

  When I finally withdrew my hands and let my eyes stray from her it was not out of a feeling of discomfort, it was because all discomfort had been subdued. Still, I could not help returning to her eyes, now that it was easy for me to do so. They were round and clear, perhaps deceptively so. For the more I looked into them the more it seemed that something in the sweetness of their expression, some lurking charm, drew me in. I would say that sweetness resembled a sort of pleading but the meaning of that word would be subtly wrong. Those eyes did not really ask anything, they were simply hard to resist, and the more frightening because in their limpid green brightness there seemed to be no hiding place for the source of this attraction.

  The mermaid opened her lips and, hesitantly, began to speak. A series of quaint sounds began to fall from her mouth, oddly shaped words, oddly accented, a language as beautifully tooled as hand-crafted Celtic jewellery. With the words an inquisitiveness came into her eyes, darkening them a little, like sadness. I am no great linguist, but of all the languages in the world, hers sounded to me more like Gaelic than anything else. Even that resemblance was remote.

  As she spoke, I remembered the visions that had been induced in me by the green powder, and how I had felt close to comprehending the meaning of the haunting mermaid voices. Suddenly, I felt sure of what I should do. I stood up straight, ‘Please wait, I’ll be right back,’ I said.

  Whether this mermaid knew anything of English or not I felt that it would probably be understood that I said something reassuring, and perhaps even my precise meaning was apparent. I quickly ran upstairs and up to the studio where the mystic powder sat in its box by the idol. I lifted the lid, took a pinch of the power and swallowed it. Once again, I was disturbed by visions of the deep, dark ocean. They surrounded me like a tentacled aura, green and watery. But I managed to take control of myself and make my way back to the bathroom.

  Now that I had half-suppressed the dark mood of the visions, though they still haunted me like a headache, like an addiction, making ordinary objects such as a dresser look like weedy shipwrecks, I was aware of something else. It was simply the rippling of the senses that first occurred when I took the powder, as if everything had become liquid and unstable. The walls I passed were silvery as a mirror, and shivered slightly like plucked harp strings. And in this rippling was a great sense of potential, of traffic between one reality and another, one state of mind and another.

  Feeling like a deep-sea diver in one of those old suits with the great brass helmets and the airline to a distant surface, I once more opened the faintly wavering bathroom door. She was still there, waiting, gleaming like a chest full of treasure. She spoke again, and as I had anticipated, I understood.

  ‘Ah, he has returned,’ she sighed wistfully, ‘but what can I do? There is no use in speaking to a human creature. If only I had some of my Kraken powder.’ She was obviously talking to herself and she was very surprised when I broke in on her private musings with the words of her own language.

  ‘Please, speak to me if you wish. I would like to hear you talk, and I will answer any questions you might have. I’m sure I will have many, many questions too. But at the moment, I am content to listen and answer.’

  ‘Where did you learn to speak the Sunken Tongue? Who are you? Wait, it’s you, isn’t it? You took my box and my glass and hairbrush?’

  It was captivating to listen to her words, falling into the air with splashes of holographic meaning, now that the green powder had liquefied everything.
In fact, it seemed that was the effect, almost visual, almost three dimensional, that the Sunken Tongue must have had for anyone who understood it. It was a remarkable language, constructed almost like music, with chords, melodies, harmonies, different layers of meaning that augment and complement each other. It seems that its earliest usage must have been ritualistic and poetic, so that both those elements are strongly overlaid on any practical usage of the language. In fact, the art of speaking it seems to demand that one keeps harmony with both the poetic and the ritualistic. This mermaid spoke it very naturally and elegantly, so that I seemed to hear in her conversation the reverberation of mighty submarine gongs, struck by some servant of Neptune.

  Her last sentence, as far as I can render it in the Roman alphabet, was something like this:

  ‘Choli yn Xakth en yu hy soflw e ai mesen snonfln yous?’

  But such were the levels and subtleties of meaning in these words that they created new and higher meanings when placed together, meanings that seemed purely decorative, or at least, whose function was specific to a very evolved civilisation. The higher meaning that winked at me elusively like the swish of a fish’s tail in the above sentence translates roughly as: ‘The shell is broken where I hid the pearl. Only small fish and sound of dizzy light. Shadow of heart’s disappointment.’