Irregularity

by Nick Harkaway

  The trunks were my fortune. I’d bartered every other thing I owned to get that damned boer to haul me and my cases and jars back to the Cape with its hellish summer winds. With every mile my monies bled away. The oxen, the guns and the wagons, the servants… all those seemed now like outrageous riches, as opulent as the Countess’s silver dinner service.

  I’d even sold Venter my precious Systema. He had put it next the Bible on his chest carved of yellow wood. I doubt very much the man could read either book. But it comforted me that Linnaeus’s pages were not blowing through the veld, catching on thorns, being used to light pipes around campfires. At the last, the scoundrel pressed his collection of pelts and bones upon me; that at least was something.

  Neuroptera, Mineræ, Muraena, I breathed through my nausea. I glimpsed through the blue porthole a long head turned towards me, obscured by the slow flap of a leathery wing, riding the hot wind from the Cape. At other times it followed beneath the ship. Once, in the early morning, I heard a deep boom shiver through the body of the vessel and I knew: it was pounding its head against the keel.

  But when I went on board later that day, the men explained: “Cannonballs. Did you not realise? But we are safe now, by God’s grace.”

  Corsairs. I laughed, and the sailors looked at me strangely.

  In my notebook I tried to scratch a sketch of the creature I saw in my dreams, its serpent neck, its gaping jaws. Amphibia, Vermes, Hydra. The words were fading from my mind. The pen skittered away from me, the inkpot spilled.

  In the third week at sea, the captain, a melancholy Swede, red-eyed, came down to complain of the smell, and insisted that the skins be turfed over the side. I was too sick to resist. Each drawer of my wooden cabinet was filled with corruption and shame: all lost, all for nothing.

  But still I had the bones, and the egg in its wool-packed box. If I pulled aside the wool and laid my finger on the shell, I fancied I could feel some movement, a flip or shift in the sac of fluid within. Could it be alive? One storm-rocked night it escaped its nest and rolled elliptically across the deck. I scrambled after it, trapping it with my body.

  At times I thought: this will be the making of me. It will be a sensation.

  At other times I thought: it is my ruination.

  Île-de-France

  I have abandoned the bones. All I have left is the bluish egg, heavy as a cannonball. It was cool when we found it, but here in the orangery I can feel it has gained warmth, like a quickening thing. Palms pressed to its curve, I close my eyes; the last thing I see in the gloom is the egg’s pale glow, like seashells, like bone, like quartz. I try to remember the shape of the painted creature on the rock, those many months ago. The red flanks, the calves and thighs, the long muzzle. The sheen of the wet rock behind it. A wonder.

  Outside, shouts and the sound of breaking glass.The windows of the chateau. I think of the famous white cabinet, rocking on its ball-and-claws. The mob is coming closer, Vive la Révolution, and now the egg trembles against me as if in answer to that roar. Flames on my eyelids, an orange campfire light.

  Breaking glass again, and closer, and all around. A wrench inside the shell. A black blast, a roar of heat: shards of glass strike me and as I topple back I feel the great egg crack in my arms, and something blood-hot and wet and writhing clambers from my grasp. As the walls of the orangery shatter around me, the newborn opens its wings.

  When I wake I am on my back, staring up at the dark sky. The dome is broken. The chateau burns, and orange-lit smoke obscures the stars. It is too late for fear.

  High above, the great forms hangs with wings outspread. Lizard-jawed, fish-scaled, coal-feathered, impossible. It pulls back its neck and screams. I cry out: something wordless, for it has no names that I can say.

  It hears.

  Looping its serpentine body, it turns and drops towards me. A hot rush of wind, and for a moment I see its giant eye.

  It is a human eye, and every other kind besides. It is like no living thing, and yet contains all living things. It is animal and mineral and angel, and every being yet to be invented, all creatures of the coming age.

  It rises up again, on wings of smoke and fire.

  Footprint

  Archie Black

  Despite the continued (and, frankly, baffling) popularity of Cathedral of Death, the 1977 Hammer Horror gorefest which is a staple of sleepovers and midnight cinema showings, few people are aware that the film was itself based on a true story. Well, a “true” story — the largely—forgotten nineteenth century antiquarian Simon Laverman’s reproduction of what he claimed was the diary of one J. L. Frontis, an engineer involved in the reconstruction of London following the Great Fire of 1666 — specifically, rebuilding St Paul’s Cathedral. Frontis, if the diary is to be believed, was deeply involved in the development of Christopher Wren’s masterpiece.

  The facts are these: a cathedral dedicated to St Paul the Apostle has stood at the top of ancient London’s highest point, Ludgate Hill, since the early seventh century. The first St Paul’s was destroyed by fire in 962; the second (by the same means) in 1087. Work on the cathedral that would precede Wren’s building, generally referred to as Old St Paul’s, began in that same year. Like so many of the great building projects during this period of history, took decades; following yet another disruption by fire in 1136, the cathedral was not consecrated until 1240. The Great Fire, which raged for close to four days in late 1666, consumed upwards of 90% of the homes within London’s ancient Roman walls, as well as eighty-seven churches… and Old St Paul’s.

  A few more details bear noting: the first St Paul’s was constructed over the ruins of at least one and probably several pre-Norman religious buildings including, at least, the Roman cathedral of London and a Roman temple to Dis Pater (who may have originally been a Celtic god). The footprint — that is, the plan of the building as laid across the ground — does not exactly match the footprints of Old St Paul’s or the earlier buildings, which were aligned upon an exact east/west axis. Rather, the footprint of Wren’s St Paul’s is rotated by a few degrees to the south-east. Wren claimed that this slight alteration aligned the cathedral so that it faced the sunrise of the Easter Sunday of 1670, the year that construction began.

  One of the most famous stories about St Paul’s cathedral concerns a stone Christopher Wren found, a fragment of an ancient monument bearing a single Latin word: resurgam, “I will rise again.” Wren used it to mark the central point in the new cathedral, to give his engineers a precise spot from which to measure.

  Wren’s St Paul’s has never caught fire.

  Simon Laverman (1814 — 1878) published the Diary in 1852, and it experienced a brief period of vogue until the Great Gold Robbery of 1855 overtook the public consciousness. Edited versions began appearing about ten years later, first in volumes devoted to the Great Fire and later in collections of ghost stories, for which the Victorians had a passion. You’re probably already familiar with Diary, though you may not remember it — Diary, presented as entirely fictional, has been a staple of middle-grade textbooks in some form or another for at least fifty years and, as we know, Hammer’s Cathedral of Death is based very, (very) loosely upon it.

  It is very likely, however, that you have never read the piece in its entirety. I loved the story as a kid and (of course) I’m a huge fan of the film. When, while on holiday in Yorkshire at the end of 2012, I found an old copy of Diary in a collection of ghost stories, my curiosity was piqued. Who was J. L. Frontis, who was S. Laverman, and when was the story actually written – if it even was a story? The harder I worked to discover the truth about the story, the more questions I raised. It took me more than a year to track down a first edition from 1852; even the hallowed British Library has no copy that hails from earlier than 1863.

  I am no historian, so it is not my place to speculate about the authenticity of Laverman’s work. Certainly his introduction, also reproduced below, suggests a man with an ideological axe to grind. Not to mention the style in which the
diary is written, which is, even to my untrained eye, significantly more nineteenth century than seventeenth. Laverman’s disgust with the seventeenth century’s intellectual preoccupation with reason and order, at what he considered the expense of the human soul, is obvious and, not to put to fine a point upon it, pretty suspicious. Also suspicious: his claims to have destroyed the original diary itself because, among other reasons, its author was the kind of guy who wrote down his dirty thoughts about the ladies. Laverman, he claims on his own behalf, was forced to destroy the diary to ensure that no sensitive soul might ever learn the corrupting truth that men think about sex a lot.

  What is important for our purposes is that the original 1852 publication is being reproduced here, complete and unedited, for the first time in close to two centuries. Despite Laverman’s insistence that Frontis’ seventeenth century spelling and punctuation be retained, which I personally consider part of his effort to establish the authenticity of a subpar forgery rather than a considered academic decision, I have taken the liberty of modernising the text for the sake of today’s reading public, who may not have the patience for Frontis’, shall we say, “experimental” writing style. (Fifteen different spellings of “appearance” being, perhaps, a bit much for the casual reader.) Again, it goes without saying that the authenticity of Laverman’s document and claims are questionable; Laverman is not the first antiquarian who claimed to have discovered a valuable historical document and then destroyed it in a bid to preserve its integrity. But the story itself, as well as the story surrounding the story, remains a compelling one, and so I am proud to present The Diary of J. L. Frontis, unedited and unaltered, for the first time since its publication in 1852.

  Archie Black

  London

  2014

  First I must set the stage. Surely I may pass over the history of the Great Fire of London, the details of which are known to every child — of the bakery fire that began early on September 2nd, 1666, on Pudding Lane and, four days later, extinguished itself against Pie Corner; the fire which destroyed 70,000 houses and laid waste to the greatest city in the world. Perhaps less well known today are the glut of extraordinary city plans that were presented to Charles II in the wake of the destruction, many suggesting the rebuilding of the metropol according to the clockwork imaginings of that century’s finest minds — everyone from Sir Christopher Wren to John Evlyn to James Hooke, and multitudinous others, all of whom wished to see the cramped twists and turns of the medieval city widened and straightened and regularised, as the minds of that century wished to widen and straighten and regularise all human endeavour, with no thought to the variegations and variety of the human spirit, much less its ingenuity. With no regard for the pneuma of London’s ancient history did they plan the wholesale destruction of the human traces of the city’s past: the winding lanes; the tumble of buildings, each individual in its noble architecture, its indomitable spirit.

  The sainted Wren had been contracted to save Old St Paul’s, which was following the conflagration a ruinous pile, its proud spire the victim of a lightning strike a century before; its exquisite nave become little better than a covered market, where children threw stones at jackdaws with little regard for the sacred space within which they gamed; the churchyard buildings torn down for scrap, or inhabited by dissident preachers and booksellers. Inigo Jones oversaw an attempted restoration beginning in 1620, but the political upheavals of the 1640s brought an end to the project and the great cathedral fell once again into disrepair. Following the Restoration, Wren was brought in to complete the work of his predecessor, he decried man’s monument to God as “wanting in accuracy” and advocated its wholesale destruction. When, quite rightly, the outcry of the inhabitants of England and the rest of the world became to great to bear, Wren capitulated and agreed to restore the cathedral according to Jones’ model.

  We certainly cannot lay the blame for the Great Fire of London at Sir Christopher Wren’s feet! Nevertheless, it goes entirely without saying that he benefited mightily from London’s tragedy, no more so than in being given permission to carry through his plans to rebuild St Paul’s. Upon discovering that the damage was too extensive for even the great Wren to repair, the plan to restore Old St Paul’s was abandoned and the new cathedral was built upon the footprint of the cathedral before it, and likewise the cathedral before that, and the temples that preceded even that to a numinous prehistory shrouded from us by the mists of time, all erected along the same axis of east to west, and all exactly upon the footprint of the house of God that preceded it. So was Wren’s St Paul’s wrought, from the crypt to the lantern, wholly anew, but with one slight, and puzzling, alteration; the plan of the new cathedral was placed not along the true line that runs from east to west, as all previous structures had been, but instead rotated several degrees along the axis of north and south.

  Although the change has been commonly attributed to Wren’s desire to prove his mathematical and astronomical genius by predicting the exact point at which the sun would rise on a given day in a given year, yet another attempt by the process-minded men of the Age of Reason to exert dominion over the mysteries of Creation, this Diary evidences that the change was the suggestion of one J. L. Frontis, a minor surveyor on the project, whose work in excavating the remains of the crypt of Old St Paul’s, as diligently recorded in his Diary, formed the basis of his recommendation to destroy the old structure and begin anew, and almost certainly contributed to his mental deterioration.

  My discovery of this Diary stands as testament to the enduring spirit of those same mysteries of Creation hitherto referenced; for here we have, at long last, an alternate and truthfully more satisfying — albeit unsettling — explanation to account for this irregular act by Sir Christopher Wren, the seventeenth century’s most regular mind.

  Little is known of J. L. Frontis, the engineer whose excerpted diary this essay introduces. Of his birth and childhood we have no information; the name James Lighthorpe Frontis appears on the rolls no earlier than 1663. Where there can be no doubt is that one James Frontis was involved in Wren’s cathedral project, following the Great Fire of London, for years; his information remains complete in the surviving records and accords to the text below.

  Less certain, however, is his fate; James Frontis’ name vanishes from the primary sources in 1674. No explanation is ever produced,by the official sources, but that fact is not necessarily significant in and of itself; a hundred possibilities suggest themselves. Frontis may have met with an accident, may have been required of necessity to quit his position to care for his ailing wife, or may simply have left the project altogether; such behaviour was not uncommon in this period of upheaval.

  What is certain is that one Jas Frontyce was admitted to Bethlehem hospital in 1675. Better known now as Bedlam, Bethlehem was one of the most famous lunatic asylums in all of history. The first reference to “Frontyce, the Mystic of Bedlam” appears in print in 1677, in the correspondence of Lady Fitzwinter; by 1683 “The Mystic” was well established in the Bedlam and appears in the hospital’s catalogue, which advertised to interested viewers during this barbaric period that “he may be visited on Tuesdays between 9 and noon, to expound upon the pagan gods of the old city and their multitudinous airs and eccentricities to the delight of all ages”.

  I discovered this curious little document in one of the grimmer bookstores off Fleet Street; a slender volume bound in decaying paperboard, I am ashamed to say the Diary was being advertised for its prurient content, although the purveyor, being familiar with my antiquarian interests, particularly relating to the Great Fire, heeded its value as an historical document and recommended it to me. I blush to recall the more lubricious entries that made up so much of the Diary’s content; so many compositions of such a crude and off-putting nature did it contain that I was forced to destroy it after replicating what few entries held any historical value, for fear that the unexpurgated whole might fall into the hands of those delicate creatures for whom such admissions must, b
y nature, be abhorrent. Despite the wholly incalculable value of retaining such a document for the historical record — in the author’s own hand, the ink still strong, marks of his quill impressed deeply into the aged paper — for posterity, I could not in good conscience allow the Diary to survive whole and true. Better that it haunt only my dreams, than risk its infection to spread to even one other.

  There can be no doubt that James Lighthorpe Frontis was mad; this Diary stands testament to his descent into lunacy. Whether that James Lighthorpe Frontis was the same Jas Frontyce as was admitted to Bethlehem and became known as “Frontyce the Mystic” will almost surely never be positively ascertained. All I can do is recommend this curious document to your interest, and recommend that you draw your own conclusions upon the evidence as presented.

  S. Laverman

  London

  1852

  2 June 1667

  Following a long day amongst the ruins I required air; even now we turn up ashes from the fire in dark pockets, and beneath the great heat-cracked stones; we step into the darkness and suddenly black clouds arise to choke us. So many of these did we find today, despite how many times we have sent the boys down to sweep the ruins, I cannot number them in my memory.