Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  The beast’s eyes appeared glossy. Its mouth hung open slightly, a pink tongue lolling, panting. The head jerked forward again and came to rest.

  ‘Jesus and Mary!’ cried Kirstie. Jon was gaping out of the window, as blanched as Lucy for once. Lucy stared; she was the cool one.

  We must be the victims of some sick rural ritual. We were experiencing some initiation jape, to blood us as new residents. Day afore the hunt, you traps a fox and you chops his head off … A sly oaf must be hiding behind our chestnut tree, pushing the head with a stick. No, he’d be skulking beyond the hedge with a length of invisible fishing line paid out as puppet string.

  ‘Some bugger’s pulling that along!’ Jon had reached the same conclusion.

  How could the head look so alive? Answer: it was stuffed. How did it stay upright? Luck, sheer luck.

  ‘Ha ha, Pete! Good joke. Who’s pulling? Your gardener?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me, I assure you!’

  ‘In that case, come on.’ Jon darted, and I followed him: into the kitchen, out the door, up the brick steps on to the lawn.

  Nobody was crouching behind the tree. No sniggers emerged from our hedge; our boundaries were silent. No string or nylon was attached to the head. The thing simply sat there on the frosted grass. It was undeniably alive. Numb, stunned, bewildered at the body it had lost, but alive.

  ‘Sweet shit,’ Jon muttered.

  How could a head live without a body? It did. How could a head travel without a body? By flexing the neck muscles, by thrusting with that bone-stump? It had travelled. Here it was, looking at us.

  I reached down my hand.

  ‘Don’t!’ called Lucy from the head of the steps. ‘It might bite.’

  ‘Bite?’ Jon cackled – a brief eruption of hysteria.

  Lucy strode up to us, fascinated, with Kirstie in tow. I suppose Lucy had seen enough nasties before opting out from the labs, but the real horror here wasn’t blood and guts and rags of flesh. It was the sheer absence of those, the unspeakable absence of body itself from a creature which was manifestly still living.

  Calmly Lucy said, ‘Did you know that a head can survive for a while after being guillotined? In nineteen-oh-something one French doctor knelt in front of a freshly chopped-off head and shouted the man’s name. The eyes opened and stared back. That particular head had fallen upright on the neck stump, staunching the haemorrhage.’

  ‘Jesus wept, spare us,’ said Kirstie.

  ‘It soon died. Thirty years earlier, another doctor pumped blood from a living dog into a criminal’s head three hours after decapitation. The lips stammered silently, the eyelids opened, the face awakened, said the doctor.’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ exploded Jon. ‘Three hours? He was either lying or hallucinating.’

  She looked down. ‘Soviet doctors kept a dog’s head alive detached from its body, didn’t they?’

  ‘Not lying on a fucking lawn, Lucy!’

  She made to poke it with her toe. As her shoe slid through the grass I swear the base of the neck bunched up. The pointy head shifted a few inches, dragging its white stub. The fox blinked. It tried to lick its lips.

  Kirstie shook with shivers. ‘It wants sanctuary, poor thing! It’s parched after running from the hunt.’ Before we could discuss procedure she had swooped and picked the head up from behind by both ears. Holding it firmly away from her she hurried indoors.

  When the rest of us regained the parlour Kirstie had already placed the fox’s head on the pine table upon a copy of the Cork Examiner, she advertised in all the main Irish newspapers. Rushing to the kitchen, she returned with a saucer of water.

  The fox’s muzzle touched the offered liquid but it didn’t lap. How could it drink, how could it eat? Food or water would spill out of its neck. The head made no move at all now. Like clockwork running down, I thought. Desperation to escape had propelled it as far as our garden – how? – and no further locomotion was possible … It didn’t seem to be dying. The head continued to survive, eyes bright as ever.

  ‘’Tis a miracle,’ said my wife. ‘A terrible awful miracle.’

  Lucy stooped to scrutinize the wound and the jut of spine. ‘Do you have a magnifying glass?’

  Kirstie obliged, and Lucy spent minutes inspecting closely.

  Finally she said, ‘It seems organic. An advanced civilization might build an organic machine that would function as a living creature, but which you could take apart. The parts might still function in isolation. Maybe we could build something like that ourselves in a few hundred years time. We’re going to learn a lot about organic mini-microcomputers, machines the size of single cells. Stuff that could mimic cells but not be real cells. They could be programmed to build a body … an immortal body.’

  ‘What are you driving at?’ asked Jon.

  ‘Maybe we could build a human machine and plug somebody’s head into it when their natural body failed. We’d start with animal experiments, wouldn’t we? Rat and chimp and dog. Or fox.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that the hunt caught a manufactured fox? Some sort of biologically-built fox that escaped from an experiment somewhere near?’

  ‘It couldn’t happen for a century or two.’ The keenest regret, and desire, sounded in Lucy’s voice. ‘This head must be false too. I’d love to examine slices under an electron microscope.’

  ‘No!’ cried Kirstie. ‘The poor suffering thing – that would be vivisection. If it struggled so hard to survive, the least we can do is –’ She didn’t know what.

  ‘Wouldn’t this be the ideal tool for spying?’ resumed Lucy. ‘False wildlife, false birds. Pull off the head after a mission and download it through the spine into some organic computer. Humans couldn’t produce this yet. Either it fell through some time-hole from the future, or else it’s from out there, the stars. And if there’s one such, why not others? Why not false people too, acting just like us, watching us, then going somewhere afterwards -having their heads pulled off and emptied?’

  I suppose it was inevitable that I should call to mind Kirstie’s scrupulousness in never letting me see her in the nude, her dislike of sports (which might involve brief garments), all her stratagems; the evidence accumulated. Unlike foxes people don’t boast inbuilt fur coats to hide the joins. Why had the creature headed here of all places?

  Why was Kirstie so defensive of it? Try as I might to thrust suspicion out of my head, stubbornly it lurked.

  ‘Let’s go to Lower Dassett as planned,’ I suggested. ‘Lunch at the Green Man, eh? Leave this other business on the table.’

  To my relief the others all agreed. The same impetus as earlier persisted. My convergence upon Lucy, hers upon me, Jon’s upon Kirstie, and Kirstie’s … she virtually simpered at Jon. Would sleeping with him safeguard her fox from future harm at Lucy’s hands? Almost, the fox seemed a mascot of our intentions.

  No titled hooker was in evidence at Lower Dassett, though she was still the talk of the inn, and the Green Man’s restaurant fulfilled all other expectations. In public we didn’t discuss the fox. Afterwards, well fed on poached salmon and pleasantly tipsy, I drove us up through Dassett Country Park. What seemed a modest ascent through woodland opened unexpectedly upon the local equivalent of mountains. Bare sheep-grazed slopes plunged steeply into a broad plain of far fields, copses, distant towns. A stubby stone monument was inset with a circular brass map of the five counties surrounding. Replenishing our lungs in the fresh, sharp air, Jon and I strode along a ridge admiring the view, glowing with a contentment which the enigma back home seemed powerless to dash -on the contrary, with a heightened sense of expectation. Marvellous how one could adapt to, no, capitalize upon the extraordinary. Meanwhile Lucy and Kirstie pored over the map, pointing out tiny landmarks.

  ‘Poker tonight after dinner?’ I asked Jon.

  ‘You bet.’ We enjoyed poker. Bridge was for wimps.

  ‘Afterwards we’ll all play a more serious game? If you’re game for it?’

  ‘Hmm. I think so. I de
finitely do. At last.’

  ‘Kirstie likes to play that game in the dark – then to be surprised, illuminated!’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘Don’t say I tipped you off. It would seem we’d been swapping locker room tales.’

  ‘Quite. Let’s get back to our ladies. So what’ll we do about that fox?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you?’

  ‘I’ve been racking my brains. Sell the story to the papers? Our fox mightn’t perform. This could end up in the hen’s-egg-hatches-frog category; the silly season in midwinter. Maybe Lucy could – ?’

  ‘Take it away and slice it up? Destroy it, and find no proof?’

  ‘I suppose there’s no sense in alerting authorities. If there are any authorities on phoney animals, what bothers me is the subject could be top secret. If an alien earth-watch is going on, and governments suspect, they could be ruthless. We’d be muzzled, watched, maybe even –’

  ‘Snuffed, to silence us?’

  ‘There’s that risk, Pete. Let’s leave decisions till later, till we’ve played our games.’

  Later: pheasant, and more wine. We had dined around the fox’s head which was still perched on the newspaper. The fox made no attempt to snatch mouthfuls of roast bird from our plates, though it continued to appear alive, a mute motionless guest at our board even when Lucy interrogated it, calling into its face like that French doctor addressing the victim of the guillotine. ‘Who are you, Charley Fox? Where do you come from? Are you recording, even now that you’re unplugged?’

  Lucy became quite drunk, drunk with a desire to know, to be fulfilled by Charles James. That desire would soon shift its focus. All four of us were members of a tiny secret tribal cult undergoing an initiation featuring wine, a feast, and soon the fever of gambling accompanied by images of kings and queens, and presently sexual rites to bind us all together. An hour later Lucy had the bank, while I had lost all of my original fifty pound stake money. Nothing was left to bet except myself.

  ‘If I lose this time, Lucy, you win me. How about that?’

  ‘Yes!’ she agreed, excited. ‘If that’s okay with you, Kirstie?’

  ‘Sure, you know it is. We’ve been leading up to this.’

  ‘Jon?’

  He nodded.

  When Lucy won, she leapt up, ignoring coins and notes, and gripped my wrist.

  ‘Be off with you then upstairs,’ said Kirstie, ‘the both of you. All night long till the morning.’

  Jon also stood expectantly.

  ‘Ah, Jon, I’d like for us to stay down here by the fireside. The sofa pulls out into a bed.’ Kirstie was in charge of fires – her hair had affinity with flames -however tonight she had let the wood die down to ash and embers. As I was leaving with Lucy, Kirstie called, ‘Peter, turn out the lights.’ Which I did.

  In the darkness of the parlour only small patches glowed hot like eyes of wild beasts surprised by a torch beam, watching from the ingle.

  ‘I like it this way,’ I heard as I closed the door.

  Leading Lucy upstairs, I opened the second bedroom, almost as large as our own. It was very warm from the storage heater. I switched on a bedside lamp then killed the light on the stairs, and shut the door. Already Lucy had shaken off her white jacket and was unbuttoning her blouse.

  Unexpectedly I found myself embarrassed at being naked in Lucy’s unclothed presence. I tended to avert my gaze from the complete spectacle, by pressing close to her. Thus the nakedness that I saw was partial, discreet camera angles on her bare flesh: shoulders, neck, a breast, the top of a knee, a flash of thigh. I couldn’t bring myself to pull back and feast my eyes. When Lucy rolled me over in turn to mount me I quickly drew her body down upon myself rather than let her rear upright exultantly. I think she interpreted my hugs as an attempt at even closer, more ecstatic intimacy.

  Meanwhile an alarm clock, a time bomb, was ticking away in my brain. Fifteen minutes, twenty, how long?

  A squeal from downstairs! That wasn’t any orgasmic outcry. Too magnified by far, too full of pain and affront. Another, longer shriek.

  ‘Something’s wrong.’ I pulled loose, seized a sheet to wrap myself.

  ‘You can’t just go bursting in on them! Jon isn’t rough.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the fox – I’ll check. You wait here.’

  ‘While you peep through the keyhole? I’m peeping too.’ Lucy snatched up a blanket as cloak.

  ‘He isn’t rough,’ she whispered insistently as I padded downstairs ahead of her.

  A line of light showed under the parlour door. I heard a sound of weeping, and mumblings from Jon, so I pushed the door open.

  A naked man, remarkably hairy around the base of his spine like some huge monkey. A nude woman: plump breasts, freckles, swelling thighs, red bush of pubic hair. Rubens territory I had mapped so often with my fingers, hitherto unseen. Kirstie’s hands were splayed defensively not over crotch or bosom but …

  Monkey swung round and snarled. ‘You bastard, Peter!’

  From Kirstie’s tummy to her left tit sprawled a vivid red birthmark resembling the map of some unknown island once owned by the British and coloured accordingly.

  How could I explain that I’d merely wanted to test whether my wife, my comrade, my bedmate of the last eight years, was a phoney person, an alien life-machine planted in the world to watch us? The idea seemed suddenly insane. Despite the fox, despite. And so now the fox too seemed insane.

  Jon and Lucy mounted in silence to the room where we’d made love, and where I’d failed to see her as revealingly as I’d suddenly seen Kirstie. I went upstairs to our bedroom alone, and eventually slept. Kirstie stayed on the sofa by the dead fire.

  In the morning, how stilted we were. What minimal conversation at breakfast: no one mentioned the night before. We ate burnt sausages and eggs with broken yolks and avoided looking at each other much, until Jon said, ‘I think we’d best be going.’

  Lucy stared longingly for many moments at the fox which Kirstie had transferred to the sideboard, still on the Cork Examiner.

  ‘You made sure I couldn’t have it, didn’t you, Peter?’ she accused me. ‘Seems very small and unimportant now. Yes, let’s go.’

  When the Porsche had driven off, I said, ‘I was drunk last night.’

  Kirstie nodded. ‘I don’t believe in divorce, but you shan’t touch me again, Peter. You’d best find a girlfriend who won’t put your health at risk. I shan’t object when you’re “delayed” at the office. We won’t sell the cottage, either. We’ll come out here on lots of weekends to be lonely together, with Charles James. He must be very lonely. He’s lost his body. You’ve lost mine.’

  Penance, I thought. A million Hail bloody Marys and no forgiveness. The unforgivable sin is betrayal. Maybe she would soften in time.

  During the next week Kirstie bought a varnished wooden shield from a sports trophy shop, and a Black and Decker drill together with some drill-bits, one of them huge. When we arrived at the cottage on Saturday she told me to mount the shield above the ingle then drill a fat hole through the middle, drill the hole six inches deep into the stone wall behind.

  When I’d done so, she lifted the fox’s head and slid its spine into the hole. Held in place thus, neck flush with the plaque, the fox head imitated any other such hunting trophy decorating a pub wall. Except that it was still fresh, still spuriously alive, although utterly unresponsive. By now it reacted to no stimuli at all, a little like Kirstie herself. So it hung there in our parlour, an absurd living idol, a dumb dazed undying God of falsity.

  Time passes but does it heal us? Last weekend when I entered the parlour, for the first time in months I thought I saw a flicker of movement from the fox, a twitch of an ear, an eyeblink. I began to hope: that it might one day revive, that one day it would eject itself from our wall and try to rejoin, somehow, its lost body. And go away. Then she would have forgiven me.

  I even patted the fox encouragingly on the forehead. On impulse I gripped its ears and tugged gently. I wou
ld slide it in and out just to give it the idea of resuming a more active existence.

  The head wouldn’t budge. It was fixed firm. In panic I pulled, but in vain. I realized then that the spine had taken root in the fabric of the building. I imagined tendrils growing out from that spine, threads of clever little cells converting stone and mortar into nerves and organs, spreading along the inside of the wall into other walls, insinuating themselves through the timbers like the fungus threads of dry rot until the head had gained a mutant body of another kind so that we would eat within it, crap within it, sleep within it, though not make love within it.

  How I feared the head’s revival now. How I dreaded to take an axe to it, causing the cottage to shriek, as Kirstie had shrieked that night.

  Samathiel’s Summons

  The day after the third woman student in three months was found murdered, Trish told her roommate, Helen, ‘I’m going to summon a demon to protect me.’

  Trish began rolling another joint on the open pages of The Grand Grimoire of Magick, a glossy paperback. Her shelf bore at least twenty similar books, tucked in amidst the modern poetry texts, and a Tibetan mandala poster was tacked above her bed. (Was Magick with a “k” perhaps more magical than plain Magic?)

  Helen regarded her with exasperation. Trish was a fey pre-Raphaelite redhead with blanched skin, wearing an impractically long Indonesian batik dress and toe-grip leather sandals guaranteed to prevent her from running or kicking or otherwise defending herself. Helen, on the other hand, had her own black hair cut short so that nobody could grab hold of it. She dressed in jeans and boots and a slippery plastic jacket.

  ‘You promised you wouldn’t smoke more than one,’ said Helen angrily. (And even that first one had been heady stuff). ‘You’re already stoned. Murder’s nothing to joke about.’

  ‘But I’m not joking. I’m scared out of my wits.’ Blithely, Trish lit up.