Morbid Tales

by Quentin S Crisp

  Perhaps Stephen should have taken what happened at the shrine as a warning, but his investigation, if that was what it was, had built up such a momentum of its own that it carried him along smoothly with it to its necessary conclusion. And perhaps he would have taken warning from the episode, if it had not been for Mariko’s apparition at the side of that curtain of creepers, ushering him out of the clearing and seemingly beckoning him on to something else.

  Stephen had loaded all of his scuba equipment into the boot of the car, and however spooked he might be, he was not going to let this opportunity go. If he had been examined by a diligent expert at that point, they would most likely have found symptoms of a disturbing state of mental health, perhaps diagnosed trauma, and recommended at the very least a period of rest. However, Stephen was aware only of a mental smarting, which tuned his senses more acutely.

  Parking the car sloppily where Komakichi had parked it before, he got out and opened the boot. A sudden anxiety that someone might be watching came upon him, so that he scoured his surroundings with an obsessive thoroughness before undressing and donning his wetsuit.

  Those others, before Stephen, who had swum in the lake and become its victims, had they ever known why? Had they discovered its secrets? Even those who had drowned here would have died before they ever reached the bottom. Could they have seen, anyway, in such water without a mask? It was even possible, given the superstitious fear with which this lake was regarded, that Stephen would be the first person ever to dive in its waters. Stephen walked down to the scummy, lapping wavelets of the lake’s periphery and squeezed his feet into his flippers.

  He thought again of the way the lake had lain spread-eagled beneath the mountain in a great sheet, like a mirror forged out of the very landscape. It was a mirror to the firmament, but while the sun hung in the sky, the fathomless eddying of the universe was locked out of vision by deceptive blue. The lake could only reflect this enigmatic opacity. Were its own putrefying treasures and secrets locked away like the stars during the day? Could it be that with nightfall, when the stars would be reflected in the slick, black waters, the lake would open up, a primal observatory of the clockwork interlocking of the constellations? Perhaps it would be best to wait until then.

  The ever sliding, ever tilting, ever level expanse of the lake had become mundane. But its very murk and ordinariness solidified into a lodestone of irresistible attraction. Stephen splashed into the waters. He began to wade and stagger and the water lurched up to meet him. Only with this lurching did Stephen feel a resurgence of the power dormant in the water. It surged around his limbs and torso, and with an awkward slipping, like the twisting of an ankle, bubbles swirling and spinning where he sliced, overreaching himself, through the marbled underwater cold, he was launched on the water’s bursting Ragnarok of power. He knew in his stomach as the waters supported him that he was on the yawning edge of something—the chill, tingling edge.

  Only one thing keeps the diver alive beneath the water, the most important thing for the diver to remember—slow and steady respiration. It is imperative that he must not lose his calm. To lose calm is to lose the rhythm of breathing and to spiral deeper into dangerous bubbling panic. For a while Stephen’s breathing was jagged and everything was deranged, his limbs as disordered as those of a badly worked string puppet. But slowly he let the terrible confusion and iciness lift him, as he was used to being lifted, and made very little effort of his own. His stentorian breathing slowed, his arms dropped back to his sides. There was nothing now but the vulnerability of his respiration suspended in the filmy water.

  The water was so bleared with whitish green, and so moted with particles, that if Stephen extended his arm full-length in front of him, his hand was just a pale pasty indistinctness. He had brought a torch, but though a torch can illuminate darkness it cannot dispel murkiness. Stephen began to put some distance between himself and the shore, but all he encountered was the continued murk and horrible emptiness. He was not sure quite how he had envisaged the lake’s secret, the thing that linked all the suicides, but he had had some notion of it being something residing within the lake, separate to the lake. However, perhaps the secret was in the water itself. He was immensely grateful that he was wearing a wetsuit. Even the fact that his hands were exposed began to chafe on his nerves.

  Although he could not see more than two or three feet in any direction, he became increasingly aware of a poignant depth of water beneath him, needling his innards. It was time to dive deeper. Stephen’s ears popped as he descended into the iciness. With the murk now above him as well, he was completely isolated in a directionless void. In this watery dislocation it was not only spatial awareness that was upset. Time, too, seemed to exist in complete isolation from the world outside the lake. Stephen thought of the refraction of light in water. In this particular body of water light had been refracted so violently that it had broken utterly away from the rays to which it had once belonged, and now existed in a sourceless, self-contained pocket. Space was refracted, time was refracted, and Stephen himself was now part of that refraction.

  It was then that the thing warped immensely through the water. He registered it as a vague darkening shadow, an almost imperceptible curved band of power, rolling solidly by to the right, with a dead, torpid motion. From this first inkling his awareness was paralysed, so that he seemed to float with the same heavy deadness as the ciliated blur. Then it was looming so close it seemed closer than Stephen himself. He shrank violently away as if stung and spun into grasping, twisting chaos. The mouthpiece dropped from between his teeth, and in his panic to replace it he partially dislodged his mask so that water sprang in up to his eyes. His body jerked and contorted like that of a frightened octopus. His torso and head had corkscrewed round so that they almost faced the opposite direction to his feet. Tentacles of bubbles wrestled him out from all sense of up and down. His life was leaking, wasted, from his mouthpiece, and he was dangling, naked of breath.

  Control had slipped from his once-confident grasp, and he zigzagged from over-compensation to over-compensation in the struggle to right himself. Yet, despite his panic, his knowledge of the correct procedures of diving was sure and he did not quite have time to drown before he carried them through. Arcing his arm in a slow windmill he retrieved his mouthpiece and cleared it of water. Then he tipped his head back, and pulled up his mask as he lowered his head again, letting out the water.

  Even though he was now theoretically safe, the panic did not leave him, and his breathing was unsteady. Now the water was that panic, a churning like long, needle-thin teeth sinking into flesh. It was because of the thing that had just brushed by him and vanished. There was no doubt in Stephen’s mind what it was. It came to him as a kind of knowledge, more complete than anything he had read. It was the great black serpent of the Mamushi cult. It was gone, and yet it was still with him, the very thrilling emptiness of the water about him, a crushing weight of dread, the terrible, devouring serpent whose touch was deadly with a death more sterile and empty than death itself, and before which even death withers away.

  As if sinking inexorably with the weight of this single glimpse, Stephen could only go deeper, deeper, losing count of the fathoms, to the lake’s hidden bed.

  He had to get very close to the lake’s bed before he could see anything at all. He took the torch from his belt to aid his vision. The decayed beam of light fell upon a treasure-trove of deadening horror. Amongst the Medusa coils of misty, humus-coated, lifeless weed, were piled the sunken-eyed carcasses of fish, as numerous as fallen autumn leaves. There seemed to be something prehistoric in their appearance to Stephen, though he was oddly uncertain if this was an objective impression. He was only sure they had been here for a very long time. Even the agents of their decay were dead, so that their disintegration was an infinitely drawn out process, and all the matter that their carcasses shed was now part of the lake—the motes, the murk, the particles. The same deadly, overwhelming anti-climax he had felt when he threw
away the cigarette butt the first time he saw the lake, he felt now.

  The lake bed was a panorama of decomposition, but the topography of this panorama, its enormity, were only disclosed to Stephen’s eyes piece by piece as his beam probed the soundless devastation. In a long monotony of dread he searched until there bloomed before him a vision that enraptured his soul with a horror soft and tender as decay. Bedded upon a hillock of weed and fish there lay, with voluptuous ease, a pale and naked human corpse. The corpse was female, and stretched as she was upon that luxurious heap of putrescence, she appeared to Stephen as a bride upon the hymeneal couch, a pearl of beauty awaiting the groom in the billows of a dream. A veil of spume was even thrown thinly over her face from the surrounding weedy pillow. Just as with the fish, something still and timeless in the water, some fatal touch, had robbed her of natural putrefaction, so that beneath the shrivelling and discoloration of flesh there still lurked a glow of beauty. He examined the corpse with awed minuteness, almost convinced it was aware of his inspection, that there was some liquid intimacy between them. The decay seemed utterly that of water itself, the wrinkling of flesh like the pruning of the skin when one bathes too long, or else a bloating as from being soaked. There was a sick, greenish tinge to the skin, which could have been the same humus that clung to the dead weed. The eyes were sunken, but wide open and bulbous, and together with the wrinkled, water-stewed lips, gave the corpse an eerily fishy appearance. It occurred to him that her particles, too, were part of the water’s cloudiness, and he was floating in her effluvium. Another fascination was the mass of black hair which seemed to become one with the surrounding weed in its waving profusion, and the wickedly long fingernails that curled and twisted erratically. Both hair and fingernails had obviously continued growing some while after death. So spellbound was Stephen by the beauty that remained in the puffed up cheek, that for some minutes he did not recognise the corpse.

  It was Mariko. He detected the dead certainty of her identity in the basic lines of her bone structure. A person has many faces according to light, expression and the influence of time. Some may be so startlingly different to others that they would be unrecognisable were it not for some persistent spirit behind them all, lending them cohesion. That had been the spirit animating Mariko’s apparition, but it was not here in this husk. Just as Stephen had at first failed to recognise the animated image of Mariko, he had failed to recognise the reduced thing that was her remains.

  In the instant that this realisation transpierced him, he felt himself become the pivot for reality to turn on once more. Whatever the spectre was he had seen, and even though the naked drowning he had witnessed agreed uncannily with these discovered remains, this unearthly corpse and that apparition could have nothing to do with each other. Perhaps the animated Mariko had been animated by his imagination only. This must have been what he had come here to find, and he had found it with astounding directness, yet this shrunken form was the utter nemesis of the image that had brought him here. He had tricked and seduced himself. He knew that the lake was dragging him in, and he also knew the attraction to be an unrelievedly morbid one, of nothing but the most unthinkable evil to himself. So he had conjured up Mariko’s ghost from her cadaver to sweeten that dark, irresistible pull. The queasy-sweet knife-edge of the romantic, that he had not even admitted to himself, turned to the taste of sickness in his mouth and the chill of corruption in his guts. Now he was alone with the lurid, unmagical corpse that was all that was left of Mariko and he knew he would never be visited by her apparition again. The glamour had evaporated. He felt the weight of tonnes of water bearing down on him. The moment was like a tiny speck of darkness, a neutron star, infinitely small and infinitely dense, about to cause all around it to collapse into a black hole. The anti-climax became implosion. Then darkness opened kaleidoscopically in the water, or in Stephen’s vision, a transparent darkness that laid bare the lake, piled with its jewels of fish and human corpses. The mountains about the lake became visible too, as a great sounding board on which time echoed. The surface of the lake was a broad, liquid sundial of strange complexity. And when the dome of the heavens opened it was a moving star-dial. The geometric divisions by which it measured time and other dimensions radiated from its centre to the mountains, and now Stephen could see shadows racing round and round the face of that dial.

  There were shoals of primitive fish, shimmering from light to shade and back as they changed direction, until finally they shimmered into a great black ray of light that had fallen upon the water. They wilted away immediately and fell to the bottom like silt. On the mountainside the Mamushi gathered around fires in imitation of the dial. They hung themselves from gallows, let blood from the sides of their crucified fellows, plunged their heads into flames, writhed on the ground from the poison in their bellies. And the shadows accelerated, so that different shadows merged and the bodies on the mountainside became a bloody, glistening fray like a brood of newly hatched serpents, or grubs devouring a corpse. And Stephen saw himself standing among them, holding a knife.

  Some plunged through the surface of the dial itself and were taken into its womb of deathless death, its anti-fecundity. Of these a number were Mamushi, yet others were merely stray victims, drawn in by the lake’s dread power even in their ignorance. Mariko was among them, a child strangled by her own umbilical cord of bubbles. Then Mariko’s fever-bright and empty apparition darted back and forth over and around the dial like a time-lapse spider spinning a web.

  The lake was many things according to perspective. Now Stephen saw once more that it was a dark mirror. The universe was a dead end, ending in a mirror; the universe only existed because it was reflected in that mirror. As Stephen had approached that dead end in time, the images reflecting off it had become more frequent; in particular, that of Mariko. Now he was very close to the dead end, and the images had accelerated to such a rate that they overlapped in a frenzy. The black surface of the mirror was drawing nearer, surrounded by a mantle of the flaming images. He felt he was falling up towards a zero line, like the ceiling of the sky and the surface of the water, a horizon joining two worlds. Would he cease to fall when he reached the line, held at the very axis of gravity? What lay beyond?

  The water was caving in on itself, like sand flowing through the waist of an hour glass, a continuous twisting, pouring through to some other and utterly removed dimension. Stephen was sucked in with it. As it twisted itself so it twisted him inside out. Slowing towards standstill at the peak of this acceleration he arrived at the eye of the vortex, a state of nightmarish distortion and suspension in which he was imprisoned for Eternity. Then he was ejected on the other side. He reverted to his original shape in a burst of stars like bubbles. He was beyond the dead end and in the presence of the serpent.

  Nothing can be retrieved from that fastness save in the form of large myth, since it is a place where nothing has form and words have nothing to contrast with or correspond to.

  The chill of stars sank away into dim obscurity. Stephen observed this as over a period of minutes, and it seemed a slow sinking. Just as the last stars were sadly fading, realisation dawned on him that each star was a galaxy—that he was watching a universe weaken and wane on the backs of innumerable kalpas of twilight.

  Then the universe went out, guttering in its own insignificance, and he was left alone in the stillborn darkness and heavy sibilant hush. The unmasked void was infinitely greater in extent, both temporal and spatial, than the lost universe. It was not mere darkness, nor mere emptiness, but a chilling bottomlessness so great it was all-powerful, the gaping, grinding maw beneath every action and every frozen instant of existence. This was the serpent, not a being, but a simple reality, a physical law in the shape of a dark, mocking wheel, the ultimate sexless power that for its own sake plunges all else into extinction, the perverse triumph of negation, the soundless laughter echoing somewhere at the end of gloating midnight.

  Against the black flank of the serpent, Stephen was cradled in
terror. His naked soul lay in the palm of extinction, a flame that could be snuffed at any moment. He feared to move lest some horrible whim of darkness sweep him up into destruction like a wrathful god. He felt in trembling danger of his very conception being reversed. Yet, as much as he tried to still his movements, he could not still his own heart. He had never known such terror as at the sound of his heartbeat reverberating in that reeling night. The darkness closed around his heart as if to crush it. He felt the touch of the serpent. He felt its breath. Yet the serpent was not so merciful as to allow him to expire of the mere unbearableness of its presence. It brought him instead something more terrible than fear. It brought him knowledge. His undoing was already fixed, it was an accomplished fact. But not here. Not now. Here and now was the warning. Something that never had been was allowed to know, for a while, that it never had been. It was suspended in that knowledge.