Morbid Tales

by Quentin S Crisp

  However, it was then that Stephen had happened upon a peculiar, yellow-bound volume—a distinctly amateurish production, one step up from a pamphlet, but not quite a fully fledged book. In its coarse and meagre pages he had found an anonymous, inconclusive study of the cult, whose rhetoric more than once strayed from the strictly objective tone of scholarly detachment into a sort of wondering. According to this slight work the cult had existed in various forms and under various names since before the race now known as Japanese inhabited the area. The common thread by which the author defined the cult was simply its geographical location and certain of its practices. Of actual belief or dogma little, if anything, was known. Latterly, or comparatively so, the cult had taken on many of the trappings of Shintoism, erecting a shrine in the Shinto style. However, the cult was uniformly reviled by the heads of other shrines, and since its worshippers were subject to persecution, their practices became furtive. History lost sight of the cult from time to time, as if it had become utterly extinct. But then, as if from nowhere, a revival of its activities would be reported.

  The adherents of the Mamushi were given to strange gatherings at which the more permanent members would work themselves into a prophetic hysteria, their eyes glistening as if they were surrounded by the flames of apocalyptic revelation. In common with certain sects of Buddhism, they focused on a kind of enlightenment or awakening to be sought in the moment. However, there was a decidedly minimalistic slant to the nature of the enlightenment they sought, and their methods for attaining it were far removed from those of the Buddhist sects. They favoured the infliction of pain and the mutilation of the mortal frame. Common practices included flagellation, driving nails into the flesh, burning and scarring with knives. Some of the more advanced members of the cult were no longer able to live in normal society because of the scars that marked them out. Or else they would pass themselves off as ordinary beggars. It was apparently claimed by members that the lake was a mirror in which could be seen all things. The symbols used in the transmission of their faith were surprisingly few, and it was not known whether they worshipped any actual deity. Some mention was made, however, of a great black serpent. Exactly what part this serpent played in their worship is unclear, but the very name of their cult was taken from that of a spurned and poisonous snake.

  What Stephen found impressively significant, however, was the fact that the Mamushi appeared to be some sort of suicide cult. This is no doubt what explained many of its intermittent disappearances. Individuals would kill themselves within the ecstasy of ritual, or consent to be slain by other members. These executions took many forms, of which crucifixion was one of the least brutal. Then, occasionally, as if all the beating, burning, speaking in tongues and sporadic slaughter of self or fellow was only a sort of stoking and stirring of flames to a greater and darker ecstasy, there would come the mass suicide, when all members would ingest poison, or slit their bellies. It was principally from these occurrences that the activities of the cult came to be known.

  It was no wonder that a pall of evil had come perpetually to overcast the lake. No one ever worshipped at the shrine now, or if they did, they did not admit to it. For some reason, though, the shrine still stood intact. It was virtually unfrequented, either by locals or by visitors, who were generally ignorant of its existence. Perhaps people were even afraid to destroy it. The author of the volume had visited the shrine, and claimed to have obtained a great deal of his facts and evidence from the site, although he was curiously silent on the exact nature of this evidence. This alone, and some of the outlandish claims made about the cult, caused Stephen to be dubious as to the soundness of the work’s scholarly foundations. Nonetheless, he could not help feeling that it all fitted somehow with the lake’s brooding lure.

  Stephen’s headache was worsening, the pain concentrating itself in his forehead like ink darkening water. It was a pain almost visible in the shadows that now creased his brow. He was somehow possessed of the sudden and deflating conviction that he had learnt all he could from secondary sources such as these. He folded and pocketed the now insubstantial looking notes. They seemed to have lost all meaning, as if written in a special vanishing ink which allows the significance and not the physical tracings of words to fade. He left the library with the casual swagger of one adrift on an expanse of leisure, and the facts and symbols that had occupied him dissolved and washed away. But once again there returned to his mind the dumb, surging image of the lake, water folded on water, a great stirring instability in which all sense of direction and perspective were lost. Emerging into the sun-washed, teeming streets, Stephen began to stagger. He was taken up with the sloshing, churning circulation of water within itself, defying delineation, the heavy pull of it, the deep, bubbling drag and trawl of its unliving breath. All along the street the sunlight looked like a chaos of splashing waves, sinking the land. The heat was dead and dark and ripe, like decay and the thick droning of flies.

  Komakichi had taken him to the lake in the first place and Stephen calculated he would do so again without any difficulty. Was Komakichi alone oblivious to the lake’s long association with unnatural death? Was he insensitive to the desolation that stood like a heat haze about its environs? This seemed unlikely. When Stephen considered how casually Komakichi had pulled his car into the dusty belt of land between the road and the shore proper, it was almost as if he had discovered a loaded automatic in the glove compartment. Here was something dangerous and nonchalant. Yet it seemed so random, so utterly without reason, that even if there were some danger, like a criminal psychosis beneath a perfectly self-possessed exterior, Stephen could not help trusting Komakichi. Besides, it had been Stephen who had glimpsed the lake from the car window and wanted a closer look. Komakichi had merely complied, the completeness of his indifference seemingly marred only by a touch of boredom. Or was that boredom in fact a knowing remoteness? Finally, it was only important that Komakichi take him there again. What Komakichi may or may not be keeping to himself was beyond speculation, and thus irrelevant. He would not tell Mr Sugimori of this second visit, but if the subject came up he could hardly be accused of hiding his actions.

  Komakichi had a little time at the weekend, so, come Saturday, with the afternoon sun nasty as a wasp sting, they set out as if for a picnic. Stephen had already begun to plan for eventualities and was careful to note each turning they made, storing them neatly in the unsullied chamber of his mind.

  Komakichi parked the car in the same place and seemed to be waiting for Stephen to get out. This was surely more than Japanese indifference to natural panorama.

  ‘I might be some time,’ said Stephen. ‘Are you sure you won’t come with me?’

  ‘It’s fine. I don’t mind waiting.’

  ‘But you might as well come out with me. You’ve driven me all this way.’

  Komakichi shrugged, lit a cigarette and, tugging at the door handle, swung his legs out onto the dusty soil. They walked together to the shore where Stephen had stood alone some days before.

  The lake was never flat, and yet its waves were not the great rolling combers of the ocean. Instead there was the persistent rippling of the surface, a sweeping motion that achieved a static quality. Stephen found himself fascinated by the frozen pattern of this constant motion. A kind of wonder stole over him when he thought for the first time of the mystery of liquid matter. That liquid would support nothing but itself and vessels of air. Anything else would founder. Clearly this was an over-simplification, yet the mystery was the same as if it were the whole truth.

  Stephen nudged a fragment of dead fish with the toe of his shoe. The same exhausted carcasses littered the shoreline, or floated with jarring ugliness on the shallow rocking of the wavelets. Suddenly he felt a grimacing flash of inspiration inseparable from horror. What was it that made the dead fish so ugly? It was a kind of clash, a disharmony. Usually nature devours its own multiplicity with the same consummate invisibility as that with which it multiplies. These fish remained as if reject
ed, unabsorbable, incompatible. They dabbled the margin of this lake like the raw tissue at the edge of a wound. Stephen thrilled and shuddered at the sudden starkness of this ghastly pornography, the slimy, rotting satisfaction of it. There was a dead energy here, dark and powerful and full of anticipation, like the feel and sound of a blade meeting flesh, biting deeply in.

  Close to the lapping water Stephen felt disorientated, unsteady. So when he looked hard at the tilting summer sky above he asked the question as if the words had simply rattled out of his mind and emptied into the blue.

  ‘You know about the suicides?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Stephen glanced across at Komakichi. ‘You don’t seem concerned.’

  ‘I’m not, particularly.’

  ‘Thirteen people have killed themselves shortly after swimming here since 1956. That can’t be coincidence.’

  ‘I imagine that far more people have killed themselves than that.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The local authorities tend to dampen any reports of suicides that could be connected with the lake. They’re afraid that publicity will give rise to copycat suicides. Sometimes a visitor will come and kill themselves, and if the parents think there’s something odd they might make a fuss. I think, though, as much as possible, these things are kept out of the papers.’

  Komakichi wore his long hair in a ponytail, which made him look remarkably like a North American Indian. But at the front some long, straight locks of hair fell away from the rest, and the wind took them up and blew them across his face. He stood straight, impassive, with a distant look in his eyes.

  ‘But you must think there is something odd here, or else why didn’t you get out of the car before?’

  Komakichi laughed. ‘Maybe there wouldn’t be anything odd here if people hadn’t made it that way. I don’t know. Anyway, the lake seems to be the focus of a kind of silent hysteria, and that’s why I don’t trust it.’

  ‘But you don’t think it’s dangerous?’

  ‘I wouldn’t swim in it, but who would in their right mind? It looks pretty dirty.’

  Komakichi was now standing at the very edge of the lake, so that the tiny wavelets that grew transparent towards the shore almost washed the tips of his shoes. Was it a kind of pride Stephen detected in his figure? He stood upon the verge of some dark, gaping hole in the human heart and neither denied its existence nor tried to ward it off with superstitious fear. Was this pride? Or was it another form of loneliness, merely? A loneliness greater, perhaps, than that of those who had succumbed to the darkness and destroyed themselves, however scrupulously honest and positive it might seem?

  With the flat, dusty shore on one side, and the flat sunlight-skimmed surface of the lake on the other, Komakichi looked infinitely isolated, as if he should be shivering with the chill of it. Did Komakichi himself feel lonely? Or was it really Stephen who felt lonely looking at that erect body and the unbowed face from which the day had eliminated all shadows, turning it pale and shallow? But for all his detachment and his eyes that did not seem to see the lake, was there not somewhere in Komakichi a little shadow that marked his own attraction to the lake? Why did Stephen suddenly almost wish it to be so?

  ‘What about the shrine?’ he asked.

  ‘The shrine is on the lower slopes of that mountain over there.’

  Komakichi pointed to the mountain that stood to the north-west where the lake crooked itself into a sort of corner, like that of a tear duct.

  ‘Have you ever been there?’ Stephen asked

  Komakichi shook his head.

  Stephen was restless that evening, and, after some time spent in his room writing disjointed thoughts, he informed Mr Sugimori that he wished to take a stroll, and asked if he might borrow a front door key in case he should come back after everyone was asleep. His room had been humid, and he had felt cramped, but the outside air was hardly refreshing. The night was soggy with vapour and glistened languorously.

  Sitting at his narrow desk he had seen his own reflection in the window. Then a vision of the mountains, made vague and powerful by mist, floated before his eyes as if part of the reflection. He could feel the mountains, bristling with tree tops, rising up uncomfortably in his own chest. What he was feeling was the edginess that comes with a once-in-a-lifetime decision, when it is obvious that one must take the initiative if one’s life is to be real. No, not to live passively—to grasp and be, to feel the slamming exhilaration of doing, by the skin of one’s teeth, something that will only be done once in all eternity. It was a pivotal decision whose inevitable proximity he felt, like the decision to love, or to realise a dream. Reality hinged on this decision. Yet there was a twist to this situation, as if the decision involved one dimension more than the decision simply to seize a life opportunity, and as if that extra dimension had toppled the whole question over so that it swung facing into a zone of darkness. Indeed, without his noticing it, a black fear had banked up before him, a tenebrous wall reared into infinite night. He felt he was brushing up against the wall, fingering its roughness in excitement and dread. How could he make the decision that needed to be made? This wall that stood between him and the carrying out of action was insurmountable and impervious. That was why he felt the streets were closing in like a maze to thwart his progress, to force him to a dead end. At any rate, he had wended unthinkingly into a quaint trap of narrow roads that ran along the gardens of quiet residences, the way swelling here and there in slopes and humps as if warped by the humid night.

  The sky was matted with thick cloud, made membranous by the stifled moon. The clouds clotted from finely-spun wisps of vapour into a charged fibrous darkness, and without warning a shower of large, lukewarm drops was wrung from the sky, which could no longer contain its groaning excess. The shower flapped against Stephen wetly, as if it were water already fallen, simply being shaken from some canopy by the wind. When it ceased he looked down at his soaked trousers. He felt like blotting paper, absorbing the moisture further and further until it was entirely dyed with the water’s damp darkness. There was a heaviness about his legs, dragging him down, making him one with the swirling moisture of the whole night, slowing his movements with the wallowing lethargy of a slurping, sucking tide. Water possesses the tension and cohesion to keep it in drops and beads, but now Stephen felt as if a whole reservoir had been contained in a single drop of water by the delicate skin of surface tension, and the merest touch from him, disrupting that tension, had caused the reservoir to burst and saturate him.

  He was used to thinking of himself as waterproof, air-proof even. That was why he felt so light. That was why he was so confident in his swimming and diving. Immersion in water holds inherent dangers, yet Stephen was normally able to put such fears out of his mind, as if the sea were made for the convenience of mankind and its tides had long fallen under the sway of human reason. All the world was merely a facility to Stephen. In the bubble of this self-confidence Stephen had never really felt the chill, thrilling touch of the water. He had not merely floated in water, or on it, he had actually floated above it. Now, by some fatal touch, that self-confidence had sprung a leak. He had become susceptible. The nature of the things he touched was beginning to adhere and soak in. That watery shadow he had sensed at some distance below as if it were a part of the world, of objective existence, but utterly without relation to him, now felt as if it had swollen and risen from within his own body. Yet how could his frame possibly contain this vast body of water?

  A certain shallow, healthy and unbeautiful asceticism that had kept him lighter than air had now been dragged into sodden, heavy sensuality. The night was spiked with seduction. Whilst it tasted like a sweet exhaustion to his limbs, some instinct in him recoiled from it as it would a demon. Such poignant sweetness could only be a deception, twisting, twisting. It was too sweet. Its touch was addiction.

  Stephen stopped before the veranda of someone’s home, lit by a yellow light. Inside, behind the mosquito screens, were the cosy, silence-st
iffened murmurs of domestic conversation, close yet incomprehensible, like the slow, arrhythmic creak of a rocking chair. There was a small Western-style garden around the house, cultivated with a ramshackle artistry. What looked like a bean row made a tent of the evening gloom. A cat flicked its tail softly in a tangle of leaves and shadow, wallowing in the garden’s untidiness, like that of a child’s playroom. The draggling flora spilled over from the shadows and onto the veranda where it met with wisteria wrapped about the wooden supports, and a great, florid confusion of potted plants, their orange, yellow and scarlet flowers forming a stream of labial disarray. The heads of the flowers tilted at contrary angles, like discarded baskets in a meadow. Many of the petals looked ready to fall. Altogether their colours were like the messy swirls and dabblings of an artist’s palette.

  He must have blinked. Even this was a flimsy explanation. Was it possible he could have been unaware of the presence of the girl even though she had been standing a few feet in front of him? At any rate, one moment he was simply contemplating a cramped but empty bower of flowers, the next moment a girl stood among the blooms as if they had grown up around her. She wore a white dress that left her arms and upper chest exposed. Her skin gleamed palely and her hair shone in tresses like those of a Creole, shiny black as lacquer. She was the very efflorescence of the night.