THE SPLATTERSPLOOCH
David Britton and Mike Butterworth
Gather ye rosebuds while ye May,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smells to-day Tomorrow will be dying.
Herrick, ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’
If, like the sirens, roses lured otherwise sensible men to their ruin, then the Brandywine Bridge spanning the flowing Thames, separating the Gumstool Charnel House in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire, from the Holocaustically successful Crematorium Goose – a converted classic 17th Century brick-and-flint furnace – and lying succulent in the river valley, drew oddballs to its consistent warm presence like bears to honey.
Even in the depth of the severest winter the bridge glowed with sombre red warmth. Roses, and the intricate feathery red-and-white Semper Augustus tulip, bloomed all year on trellises nailed into its heated brick. But for all the happy waft-and-welt of rose trellises and steady hum of the guzzy-buzzy honeybees, a deep sense of unease stalked the region.
Black as treacle, the reed-lined waters flow slowly here, incongruous shoots of red blood winding snugly in their centre. How far the Thames had travelled to reach this seminal point, who could say? Lord Horror told Squab he had once sailed it the length of Kenya, as it mixed with the Tana and Uaso Nyiro rivers, through Uganda to the Mountains of the Moon and into the Congo. She supposed this was an accomplishment of sorts. Compared to zoning-out in front of a TV it was, but not in relation to reading a book.
There is a humour – a light, conspiring mockery that punctuates the melancholy drama – freshly imported in the shape of our young heroine, La Squab, the prettiest coquette in the bizness in her black lace Chloé scarf, Jackie O silk blouse and full-length Gucci mink coat to keep the early morning chill at bay.
With her Jimmy Choo kitten heels on firm sod, she viewed the hot bricks and arched a manicured eyebrow. An uncommonly strange voice broke her thoughts.
“Thinking of going over the bridge, Little Sparrow?” Taking off her scarf and stuffing it in her pocket, she looked at the voice’s owner. There was no doubt that it was a hundred per cent human, but the only other person she had ever heard talking in so affected a mechanical tone was Stephen Hawkins.
A dissolute, youngish man, clearly a piss-head but with an intelligent burning look in his eyes, was surveying her from the driving seat of a ramshackle Oochee-Papa-Poontang fornication wagon.
“Might be,” she returned.
As it happened she did intend crossing the bridge.
She had decided, on a whim, to visit her friends Fudge and Speck in Pixie Village. But she had not travelled this way before: coming from the west was a new experience, and perhaps an adventure too.
The man opened the wagon door so she could have a clear sight of him. He was small, of slender build. A straggly shock of dark hair tumbled to his shoulders. What looked like a blunderbuss was nonchalantly slung across his back. He was dressed in gypsy finery, all red, silver and black. A pair of black Donna Karan trousers with royal red side-stripes rested elegantly on silver leather Sigerson Morrison zipped ankle boots. On his fingers he wore large gold rings set with jade.
“Then a word of advice from one who’s been there,” the voice crackled, as if pulled and fed through a faulty microphone of poor quality. If rust could talk, this was what it would sound like, she thought. But though it grated on her she sensed an underpinning comic nature. She would not have been surprised to hear it utter the Dalek’s cry: ‘Ex-termin-ate’.
“Upon my mirth,” she stifled a laugh and shook her mop of blonde curls.
“If you want safe passage over those unholy bricks, go on all fours.”
“As if.” She was affronted. “Never in my life have I made an entrance without dignity. Even when my blade dipped inconsolably in the Hereafter to give a taste of fact to a molecule, I pirouetted with grace and refinement. What would Uncle Horace say if word ever reached him that I had walked over a bridge like a dog...? Never!”
“Not like a dog, like a crab. A crustacean once went across the bridge, and when the creature that guards it, the Splattersplooch, reached out a tentacle, the crab raised a pincer and gave it a nasty nip. Since then the Splattersplooch has avoided anything travelling sideways on all fours. But suit yourself.”
A beast-grunt passion chorus issuing from the wagon’s confines accompanied his words. He kicked the panel behind him with the heel of his shoe, and shouted in French what seemed like a long blasphemy of the Girty Puddings.
Squab noted he had the look, with his beflowered face, of a strange kind of clown. His eccentric way of speaking, without inflexion or nuance, with an equal accentuation on all the syllables, even on the mutes, was relentless.
“Well, don’t say I didn’t put my two-pennyworth in,” he said to her in English.
She scrutinised the cabin. Empty bottles were scattered on the floor – ‘Ether’, she read on one of them.
Stuffed owls dangled from bits of string about his head.
“You’re just humbuggin’ me,” she said dismissively, walking a few feet into the neighbourhood of a flowering apple tree that was fairly vibrating with bumblebees. “I don’t believe there’s a Splatter beast under that bridge.” She now recognised the little Frenchman, but didn’t let on, pretending to study the bridge.
Beneath its cascading roses ran a supply of electricity in steel conduits half-sunk in the masonry. Not, she thought, that this accounted for the almost obscene heat pouring from every brick in the Brandywine Bridge. Of a creature, there was no sign.
“You’ll soon see your error.” The pataphysician tapped his nose. “Hold on now, what’s this coming our sweet way?” He leant eagerly across the passenger seat, pressing his forehead to the side window.
Up a dark mulchy path through the trees, footing it like a mad thing, a one-eyed, one-legged human curiosity was coming as confidently as any biped.
Striking the side of his head with his right hand, an action that caused his single eye to roll backwards, the one-leg swept past them, churning the black earth under his foot as he went. He mounted the bridge in a single bound, and reached its centre a split second later. Obviously he had arrived at his destination, for he now simply stood there, determinedly swaying: a golden thing. White, wind-tattered clouds raced overhead.
“Doesn’t look like he could knock the skin off a rice pudding,” was Squab’s considered opinion. “He’s a rum turd, and no mistake.”
On the monopede’s molten bronze skin a caterpillar patina of honey-coloured body hair was moving with the manic valse tzigane of the committed suicide jockey. Hair, like green lace, swished from his head. There was no face that Squab could see, just a wide, empty circular mouth fitfully opening and closing as he panted from the exertion of his journey. Slowly he spread out his arms and issued a brief hoot, almost a pleading bray.
At his arrival, the bridge glowed redder, cinders of ash and spurts of hot gas erupting from its brickwork. Was the monopede importuning to be scalded to death by steam?
The solitary, fuzzy wasp-eye in the middle of his head glowed orange. Moving his arms gently, in a suddenly mournful tone he sang out:
“Whose heart is made of brine and stone, Who makes its nest from sailors’ bone, Whose feared by men and fish alike, Who feasts on farmer, priest and pike...?” The occupant of the Poontang wagon soon rejoined with his own evocation: “‘So, ‘Below the thunders of the upper deep…’”, he shot a warning glance at Squab, “‘Far beneath in the abysmal sea, his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep.
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee about his shadowy sides: above him swell huge sponges of millennial growth and height; and far away into the sickly light, from many a wondrous grot and secret cell unnumbered and enormous polypi winnow with giant fins the slumbering green…’” He spun his head again at his small acquaintance (who he hoped was listening agog) and finished coldly, “‘…There has he lain for ages and will lie battering upon hu
ge sea worms in his sleep, until the latter fire shall heat the deep; then once by men and angels to be seen, in roaring he shall rise and on the surface die…’
“And so,” he commented casually, leaning tawny arms on the steering wheel of his vehicle, “the natural world is only surprising for what’s left out – it’s a skin-deep world – but for that very reason it’s not a mysterious place.” With typical disingenuousness the eyes of the Frenchman were now fixed not on the fairy victim but on the rippling waters.
He expelled warm breath, and sat up straight. He was growing hot, and removed his waistcoat, leaving the sleeve of his shirt flapping loose. “For in the real world you have to rely on imagination to swing your partner strong around the Poison Tree.”
The noise of foaming water rose from the point in the river where he had been looking. The birds had stopped singing, and except for the one-eye’s mournful voice an unwholesome peace fell on the land.
“Whose ears are deaf to mermaids’ sighs, Who only smiles at children’s cries, Who picks its teeth on coral shells, Who sleeps content in sunken bells...?”
A large head slowly emerged from the foamy wash.
At first, Squab thought it looked like a massive, wrinkled brain – it might be rubbery – with two predatory eyes peering cold at the unfortunate thing on the bridge. A perverse DNA ancestry seemed to be written in those malevolent orbs – squid, octopus, crab, shark, or some unknown ossivorous denizen of the ocean’s oily depths.
Noticing the big beast rising, the monopede chanced a final narquois couplet in its direction:
“Where sea begins and nightmare ends, Beware the Splattersplooch, my friends.” He commenced jumping up and down on the spot, arms pressed tight to his side, straining to project himself into the sky.
“Here it comes,” said Monsieur Jarry to La Squab, teasing a Strand between his lips. “Pay attention now, look and learn why the wary call it Bad Man’s Bridge.” He struck a vesta on the metal dashboard.
The striking match brought a small, lanky form – a type of ape, Squab was sure – rising from the floor of the passenger seat where it had been sleeping. It was Bosse-de-Nage, Jarry’s companion – a dog-faced baboon. Giving a single snort: “Ha-ha,” it jumped leerily onto the vacant seat.
The Splattersplooch was now clearly visible, a mutated cephalopod sporting clusters of suckered tentacles that wriggled about its head like worms caught in a threshing machine. It heaved a single massive tentacle into the air and waved it ominously. Squab saw a long trunk-like snout unfold, revealing a mouth with two solid rows of black laniary projections. At the same moment her ears were assailed by the most terrible antisonant piping scream:
“Who did me wrong today or yesterday?”
Did she imagine she could discern its real voice amidst the maelstrom?
It had an echo in the black night of Lord Horror’s rambunctious soul. The bumble of his stride. The clichéd angst of his obsessions – that pedigree affliction that marked him out as a man separate – seeped from his presence. Here and there he came walking from Festung Breslau, goose legs buckling, vials of horse blood for human transplants in his deep pockets, abroad in Fairyland, that country of sly crosset tablum and rocking stones, cears and tumuli.
A dead man cannot carry another.
We are born to perish. At the end, there is nothing.
Endlosösung.
“Spiel that special sorcerous spell,” encouraged Jarry of the creature.
Then came a rolling ‘BOOM’...the great Splattersplooch giving out with sumptuous sonorous waterfalls of sound.
“Christ, what’s that...” the little Ubu cocked his ear in jest, “...could we have just heard reflections of the prelapsarian English soul?”
Slithering its immense tentacle across the sky the river denizen cooed for just a moment, then it brought it towards the pencil-thin figure still cavorting on the bridge.
“With a good pair of opera glasses on a clear day,” said Squab, nonchalantly, “you could see Hackney Marshes...if it wasn’t for the houses in between.” She was now leaning on a run of redbrick bridge wall.
The tentacle folded gently around the jumping man’s body, enveloping him in a long, wide cape. Along its fleshy jag rudimentary fissures cracked open and sprayed a secret stink, a lethal cocktail of poisons and powerful enzymes, over the hapless figure. The liquid commenced its work destroying the flesh. Appetisingly, the tentacle withdrew.
Soon, the one-leg’s arm started to melt.
“Phew,” Squab chuckled apologetically to herself, “wouldn’t you know it, the best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your arm.”
The tentacle crushed down on the monopede again, lifting away a whole bunch of its flesh and swept the mush into its mouth. The Splattersplooch sucked up the one-eyed’s runny bone and flesh as if it were Granny’s soup.
Squab squinted amusedly at Jarry. “I would also like to speak as find,” she nodded towards the happening. “True friends are like diamonds, precious and rare. False ones are like autumn leaves, found everywhere.”
After a decent line of coke, she was fond of such everyday homilies.
The shrimp Jarry placed a relaxed arm around Bosse-de-Nage (who commented: “Ha-ha.”), while maintaining a keen eye on the oceanid.
A change was coming over it. Orifices were appearing on the top of its trunk, and a kind of auto-caesarean wound spread across the round of its snout. From trunk and snout clusters of mulky capsules appeared.
The Starry Wisdom Page 18
