Viriconium

by M. John Harrison

  By then the lamb had become something that produced a thick buzzing noise, a vibration which, percolating up the bones of his arm and into his shoulder, then into the right side of his neck and face where it reduced the muscles to water, made him feel nauseated, weak, and deeply afraid. Whatever it was he couldn’t shake it off his hand.

  Clearly-in that city and at that age of the world-it would have been safer for Crome to look inside himself for the source of this dream. Instead, after he had woken one day with the early light coming through the shutters like sour milk and a vague rheumatic ache in his neck, he went out into Uroconium to pursue it. He was sure he would recognise the woman if he saw her, or the lamb.

  She was not in the Bistro Californium when he went there by way of the Via Varese, or in Mecklenburgh Square. He looked for her in Proton Alley, where the beggars gaze back at you emptily and the pavement artists offer to draw for you, in that curious mixture of powdered chalk and condensed milk they favour, pictures of the Lamia, without clothes or without skin, with fewer limbs or organs than normal, or more. They couldn’t draw the woman he wanted. On the Unter-Main-Kai (it was eight in the morning and the naphtha flares had grown smoky and dim) a boy spun and tottered among the crowds from the arena, declaiming in a language no one knew. He bared his shaven skull, turned his bony face upwards, mouth open. Suddenly he drove a long thorn into his own neck: at this the women rushed up to him and thrust upon him cakes, cosmetic emeralds, coins. Crome studied their faces: nothing. In the Luitpold Cafe he found Ansel Verdigris and some others eating gooseberries steeped in gin.

  “I’m sick,” said Verdigris, clutching Crome’s hand.

  He spooned up a few more gooseberries and then, letting the spoon fall back into the dish with a clatter, rested his head on the tablecloth beside it. From this position he was forced to stare up sideways at Crome and talk with one side of his mouth. The skin beneath his eyes had the shine of wet pipe clay; his coxcomb of reddish-yellow hair hung damp and awry; the electric light, falling oblique and bluish across his white triangular face, lent it an expression of astonishment.

  “My brain’s poisoned, Crome,” he said. “Let’s go up into the hills and run about in the snow.”

  He looked round with contempt at his friends, Gunter Verlac and the Baron de V-, who grinned sheepishly back.

  “Look at them!” he said. “Crome, we’re the only human beings here. Let’s renew our purity! We’ll dance on the lips of the icy gorges!”

  “It’s the wrong season for snow,” said Crome.

  “Well, then,” Verdigris whispered, “let’s go where the old machines leak and flicker, and you can hear the calls of the madmen from the asylum up at Wergs. Listen-”

  “No!” said Crome. He wrenched his hand away.

  “Listen, proctors are out after me from Cheminor to Mynned! Lend me some money, Crome, I’m sick of my crimes. Last night they shadowed me along the cinder paths among the poplar trees by the isolation hospital.”

  He laughed, and began to eat gooseberries as fast as he could.

  “The dead remember only the streets, never the numbers of the houses!”

  Verdigris lived with his mother, a woman of some means and education who called herself Madam “L,” in Delpine Square. She was always as concerned about the state of his health as he was about hers. They lay ill with shallow fevers and deep cafards, in rooms that joined, so that they could buoy one another up through the afternoons of insomnia. As soon as they felt recovered enough they would let themselves be taken from salon to salon by wheelchair, telling one another amusing little stories as they went. Once a month Verdigris would leave her and spend all night at the arena with some prostitute; fall unconscious in the Luitpold or the Californium; and wake up distraught a few hours later in his own bed. His greatest fear was that he would catch syphilis. Crome looked down at him.

  “You’ve never been to Cheminor, Verdigris,” he said. “Neither of us has.”

  Verdigris stared at the tablecloth. Suddenly he stuffed it into his mouth-his empty dish fell onto the floor where it rolled about for a moment, faster and faster, and was smashed-only to throw back his head and pull it out again, inch by inch, like a medium pulling out ectoplasm in Margery Fry Court.

  “You won’t be so pleased with yourself,” he said, “when you’ve read this.”

  And he gave Crome a sheet of thick green paper, folded three times, on which someone had written:

  A man may have many kinds of dreams. There are dreams he wishes to continueand others he does not. At one hour of the night men may have dreams in which everything is veiled in violet; at others, unpalatable truths may be conveyed. If a certain man wants certain dreams he may be having to cease, he will wait by the Aqualate Pond at night, and speak to whoever he finds there.

  “This means nothing to me,” lied Crome. “Where did you get it?”

  “A woman thrust it into my hand two days ago as I came down the Ghibbeline Stair. She spoke your name, or one like it. I saw nothing.”

  Crome stared at the sheet of paper in his hand. Leaving the Luitpold Cafe a few minutes later, he heard someone say: “In Aachen, by the Haunted Gate-do you remember?-a woman on the pavement stuffing cakes into her mouth? Sugar cakes into her mouth?”

  That night, as Crome made his way reluctantly towards the Aqualate Pond, the moonlight rose in a lemon-yellow tide over the empty cat-infested towers of the city; in the Artists’ Quarter the violin and cor anglais pronounced their fitful whine; while from the distant arena-from twentyfive-thousand faces underlit by the flames of the auto-da-fe-issued an interminable whisper of laughter.

  It was the anniversary of the liberation of Uroconium from the Analeptic Kings.

  Householders lined the steep hill up at Alves. Great velvet banners, featuring black crosses on a red and white ground, hung down the balconies above their naked heads. Their eyes were patiently fixed on the cracked copper dome of the observatory at its summit. (There, as the text sometimes called The Earl of Rone remembers, the Kings handed over to Mammy Vooley and her fighters their weapons of appalling power; there they were made to bend the knee.) A single bell rang out, then stopped- a hundred children carrying candles swept silently down towards them and were gone! Others came on behind, shuffling to the rhythms of the “Ou lou lou,” that ancient song. In the middle of it all, the night and the banners and the lights, swaying precariously to and fro fifteen feet above the procession like a doll nailed on a gilded chair, came Mammy Vooley herself.

  Sometimes as it blows across the Great Brown Waste in summer, the wind will uncover a bit of petrified wood. What oak or mountain ash this wood has come from, alive immeasurably long ago, what secret treaties were made beneath it during the Afternoon of the world only to be broken by the Evening, we do not know. We will never know. It is a kind of wood full of contradictory grains and lines: studded with functionless knots: hard.

  Mammy Vooley’s head had the shape and the shiny grey look of wood like that. It was provided with one good eye, as if at some time it had grown round a glass marble streaked with milky blue. She bobbed it stiffly right and left to the crowds, who stood to watch her approach, knelt as she passed, and stood up again behind her. Her bearers grunted patiently under the weight of the pole that bore her up. As they brought her slowly closer it could be seen that her dress-so curved between her bony, strangely articulated knees that dead leaves, lumps of plaster, and crusts of whole-meal bread had gathered in her lap-was russet-orange, and that she wore askew on the top of her head a hank of faded purple hair, wispy and fine like a very old woman’s. Mammy Vooley, celebrating with black banners and young women chanting; Mammy Vooley, Queen of Uroconium, Moderator of the city, as silent as a log of wood.

  Crome got up on tiptoe to watch; he had never seen her before. As she drew level with him she seemed to float in the air, her shadow projected on a cloud of candle smoke by the lemon-yellow moon. That afternoon, for the ceremony, in her salle or retiring room (where at night she might
be heard singing to herself in different voices), they had painted on her face another one-approximate, like a doll’s, with pink cheeks. All round Crome’s feet the householders of Alves knelt in the gutter. He stared at them. Mammy Vooley caught him standing.

  She waved down at her bearers.

  “Stop!” she whispered.

  “I bless all my subjects,” she told the kneeling crowd. “Even this one.”

  And she allowed her head to fall exhaustedly on one side.

  In a moment she had passed by. The remains of the procession followed her, trailing its smell of candle fat and sweating feet, and vanished round a corner towards Montrouge. (Young men and women fought for the privilege of carrying the Queen. As the new bearers tried to take it from the old ones, Mammy Vooley’s pole swung backwards and forwards in uncontrollable arcs so that she flopped about in her chair at the top of it like the head of a mop. Wrestling silently, the small figures carried her away.) In the streets below Alves there was a sense of relief: smiling and chattering and remarking how well the Mammy had looked that day, the householders took down the banners and folded them in tissue paper.

  “… so regal in her new dress.”

  “So clean…”

  “… and such a healthy colour!”

  But Crome continued to look down the street for a long time after it was empty. Marguerite petals had fallen among the splashes of candle grease on the cobbled setts. He couldn’t think how they came to be there. He picked some up in his hand and raised them to his face. A vivid recollection came to him of the smell of flowering privet in the suburbs of Soubridge when he was a boy, the late snapdragons and nasturtiums in the gardens. Suddenly he shrugged. He got directions to the narrow lane which would take him west of Alves to the Aqualate Pond, and having found it walked off up it rapidly. Fireworks burst from the arena, fizzing and flashing directly overhead; the walls of the houses danced and warped in the warm red light; his own shadow followed him along them, huge, misshapen, intermittent.

  Crome shivered.

  “Whatever is in the Aqualate Pond,” Ingo Lympany the dramatist had once told him, “it’s not water.”

  On the shore in front of a terrace of small shabby houses he had already found a kind of gibbet made of two great arched, bleached bones. From it swung a corpse whose sex he couldn’t determine, upright in a tight wicker basket which creaked in the wind. The pond lay as still as Lympany had predicted, and it smelled of lead.

  “Again, you see, everyone agrees it’s a small pool, a very small one. But when you are standing by it, on the Henrietta Street side, you would swear that it stretched right off to the horizon. The winds there seem to have come such a distance. Because of this the people in Henrietta Street believe they are living by an ocean, and make all the observances fishermen make. For instance, they say that a man can only die when the pool is ebbing. His bed must be oriented the same way as the floorboards, and at the moment of death doors and windows should be opened, mirrors covered with a clean white cloth, and all fires extinguished. And so on.”

  They believed, too, at least the older ones did, that huge fish had once lived there.

  “There are no tides of course, and fish of any kind are rarely found there now. All the same, in Henrietta Street once a year they bring out a large stuffed pike, freshly varnished and with a bouquet of thistles in its mouth, and walk up and down the causeway with it, singing and shouting.

  “And then-it’s so hard to explain!- echoes go out over that stuff in the pool whenever you move, especially in the evening when the city is quiet: echoes and echoes of echoes, as though it were contained in some huge vacant metal building. But when you look up there is only the sky.”

  “Well, Lympany,” said Crome aloud to himself. “You were right.”

  He yawned. Whistling thinly and flapping his arms against his sides to keep warm, he paced to and fro underneath the gibbet. When he stood on the meagre strip of pebbles at its edge, a chill seemed to seep out of the pool and into his bones. Behind him Henrietta Street stretched away, lugubrious and potholed. He promised himself, as he had done several times that night, that if he turned round, and looked down it, and still saw no one, he would go home. Afterwards he could never quite describe to himself what he had seen.

  Fireworks flickered a moment in the dark, like the tremulous reflections made by a bath of water on the walls and ceilings of an empty room, and were gone. While they lasted, Henrietta Street was all boarded-up windows and bluish shadows. He had the impression that as he turned it had just been vacated by a number of energetic figures-quiet, agile men who dodged into dark corners or flung themselves over the rotting fences and iron railings, or simply ran off very fast down the middle of the road preciselyso that he shouldn’t see them. At the same time he saw, or thought he saw, one real figure do all these things, as if it had been left behind by the rest, staring white-faced over its shoulder at him in total silence as it sprinted erratically from one feeble refuge to another, and then vanishing abruptly between some houses.

  Overlaid, as it were, on both this action and the potential or completed action it suggested, was a woman in a brown cloak. At first she was tiny and distant, trudging up Henrietta Street towards him; then, without any transitional state at all, she had appeared in the middle ground, posed like a piece of statuary between the puddles, white and naked with one arm held up (behind her it was possible to glimpse for an instant three other women, but not to see what they were doing-except that they seemed to be plaiting flowers); finally, with appalling suddenness, she filled his whole field of vision, as if on the Unter-Main-Kai a passerby had leapt in front of him without warning and screamed in his face. He gave a violent start and jumped backwards so quickly that he fell over. By the time he was able to get up the sky was dark again, Henrietta Street empty, everything as it had been.

  The woman, though, awaited him silently in the shadows beneath the gibbet, wrapped in her cloak like a sculpture wrapped in brown paper, and wearing over her head a complicated mask made of wafery metal to represent the head of one or another wasteland insect. Crome found that he had bitten his tongue. He approached her cautiously, holding out in front of him at arm’s length the paper Verdigris had given him.

  “Did you send me this?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “No.”

  “What must I do to stop these dreams?”

  She laughed. Echoes fled away over the Aqualate Pond.

  “Kill the Mammy,” she said.

  Crome looked at her.

  “You must be mad,” he said. “Whoever you are.”

  “Wait,” she recommended him, “and we’ll see who’s mad.”

  She lowered the corpse in its wicker cage-the chains and pulleys of the gibbet gave a rusty creak-and pulled it towards her by its feet. Momentarily it escaped her and danced in a circle, coy and sad. She recaptured it with a murmur. “Hush now. Hush.” Crome backed away. “Look,” he whispered, “I-” Before he could say anything else, she had slipped her hand deftly between the osiers and, like a woman gutting fish on a cold Wednesday morning at Lowth, opened the corpse from diaphragm to groin. “Man or woman?” she asked him, up to her elbows in it. “Which would you say?” A filthy smell filled the air and then dissipated. “I don’t want-” said Crome. But she had already turned back to him and was offering him her hands, cupped, in a way that gave him no option but to see what she had found-or made-for him.

  “Look!”

  A dumb, doughy shape writhed and fought against itself on her palms, swelling quickly from the size of a dried pea to that of a newly born dog. It was, he saw, contained by vague and curious lights which came and went; then by a cream-coloured fog which was perhaps only a blurring of its own spatial limits; and at last by a damp membrane, pink and grey, which it burst suddenly by butting and lunging. It was the lamb he had seen in his dreams, shivering and bleating and tottering in its struggle to stand, the eyes fixed on him forever in it
s complaisant, bone-white face. It seemed already to be sickening in the cold leaden breath of the pond.

  “Kill the Mammy,” said the woman with the insect’s head, “and in a few days’ time you will be free. I will bring you a weapon soon.”

  “All right,” said Crome.

  He turned and ran.

  He heard the lamb bleating after him the length of Henrietta Street, and behind that the sound of the sea, rolling and grinding the great stones in the tide.

  For some days this image preoccupied him. The lamb made its way without fuss into his waking life. Wherever he looked he thought he saw it looking back at him: from an upper window in the Artists’ Quarter, or framed by the dusty iron railings which line the streets there, or from between the chestnut trees in an empty park.

  Isolated in a way he had not been since he first arrived in Uroconium wearing his green plush country waistcoat and yellow pointed shoes, he decided to tell no one what had happened by the Aqualate Pond. Then he thought he would tell Ansel Verdigris and Ingo Lympany. But Lympany had gone to Cladich to escape his creditors-and Verdigris, who after eating the tablecloth was no longer welcomed at the Luitpold Cafe, had left the Quarter too: at the large old house in Delpine Square there was only his mother-a bit lonely in her bath chair, though still a striking woman with a great curved nose and a faint, heady smell of elder blossom-who said vaguely, “I’m sure I can remember what he said,” but in the end could not.

  “I wonder if you know, Ardwick Crome, how I worry about his bowels, ” she went on. “As his friend you must worry, too, for they are very lazy, and he will not encourage them if we do not!”