Connecting with the air the eggs opened, and octopus-like young wriggled feverishly about the creature’s head. Sinking greedy infant teeth into its fleshy bits, they began eating.
“I’ve seen this before,” Jarry said casually. “After it has not eaten for some weeks, when it feeds, the Splattersplooch ovulates and births offspring. Its options are many. Rather than starve to death our alien can also decide what parts of its body are not necessary to survival, so the young can feast on the tenderest bits and ensure the lineage – or it simply eats itself to exist, until new food becomes available.”
“Hah, yes Monsieur,” hummed Squab, delicately eyeing the surrounding food-for-caterpillars – stinging nettles, holly, ivy, buckthorn, cuckooflower and other such non-mellifluous things. “Love many, trust few, and always paddle your own canoe. That’s the way it should be.”
“Nothing wrong with the right grub, makes bones grow straight,” Jarry advised decisively. He leant back, his bandolier of Heckler and Koch automatics and grenades catching the sparkling sun, and further speculated, “At optimum times of the year, the Splattersplooch’s reproductive organs are redundant and are pre-absorbed back into its body, which can shrink to a size that just about sustains itself.” He stretched his neck to get a clearer view.
“Though today it looks in need of something more substantial than an apéritif.”
Reduced by the furious attack of its young, but still large by any normal standards (and dwarfed by the giant Sequoias and the King and Queen oak trees), the Splattersplooch stretched up a whole fluther of sticky orm-like limbs in the air and commenced a lazy rumba-waltz.
“Now that reminds me of Uncle Horace dancing The Moby Dick,” said Squab excitedly. Her shoulders rose up in giddy, girlish anticipation. “He was so deviant, so Frank Randle. Money still can’t buy funny.”
“Hell girl, you’d be even more amused if you could have seen Lord Horror crawling over a mound of corpses in his prime.” Jarry took his arm off the ape’s shoulder.
Reaching beneath his seat, he rummaged about. “Eel-slithering peacock-proud from the gnarled old womb of the Big Belly Oak, flashing teeth fit to die for, touched by negrillo magick, wielding his hooked nose as a dagger, dispatching everywhichway miscreants of the Left-Hand-Path. Of course, who departed depended on which moral Geiger counter he was using that day; left, right or liberal, man, woman or beast. He was Ahab’s inner turmoil made corporeal.”
“Yeah,” said Squab dryly, “I’ve seen him walking the crook down Bad Blood Alley.”
“I know you have,” the Frenchman chuckled. “But it’s always worth reporting facts on Horror first-hand.” Boss-de-Nage slapped its spongy arse on the seat. It would soon be turning somersaults.
“Horror’s still not backward in coming forward,” Squab said quietly, a certain wistfulness in her voice. She sighed. “I’ve seen armies of ‘grovet-teams’ bend the knee to him…”
“…and halitotic circus dwarves stand at salute,” Jarry finished. “Be that as it may, he could be sharp on his heels when it suited. On a good day, he’d step from the metaphorical womb, where no marauding felon could dig him out, secure as a tick on a cow’s back, and vanish with a Trickery spell in seconds.”
“I love the way I listen to you,” she told him.
“It must be my Gallic charm,” he answered modestly.
The bridge was now visibly palpitating and glowing with an eerie vital blow of radiance. Human voices were rising from its interior. She did a double take. Could she hear the creepy wails of lickspittles and Untermenschen?
The sounds prompted a series of view halloos from the ripsaw throat, bell-true and powerful, of its Thames companion, the Splattersplooch. The twin obscenities blended in voice like the chaos and trickery of Mischief Night, when drunken miscreants boil dogs and stuff crematorium chimneys with cabbages, and the legendary Unnamed gaze blindly with eyes like polished windows – birthed in the heat from the hammer strokes of Creation – into the heart of man.
“Yep. Casting a spell …” Squab gave a tip-top triumphant little pout. “There’s more of that enjoyable ‘Medicated Magic’ that Horror promised would never cease to thrill my bones. As always, Death’s emissary was not wrong.”
Her small lips quivered with satisfaction. “Isn’t that river beast in cracking form…” She held her girlish arms excitedly around her chest. “Doesn’t it raise your juice and kindly boil your hambone?”
Flubberating stuffs still leaked from the threatening form of the Splattersplooch. It swivelled evil eyes towards them, and fell silent.
“Sure,” Jarry forced a pantomime grin, still searching beneath his seat. “Hobbes, in Leviathan, gave Sovereign Power the form of a giant sea-creature to emphasise its inalienability.” He gathered up a rubber snout-restrainer. Fiddling with its mechanism for a few moments he quickly strapped it about Bosse-de-Nage’s head. The baboon yelped once. Jarry looked determined. “I’ve come to believe this present manifestation of the Splattersplooch is a deliberate ploy intended to hide its real origins. From the stories I’ve heard, it used to clearly resemble one of Francis Bacon’s biomorphs – a single-necked random amorphous mass of body with pig-like dugs...” Bosse-de-Nage’s hands briefly landed on Jarry’s head, but the Frenchman was faster, and punched his companion to the wagon floor. He put a single Sigerson Morrison boot on its head. “Now,” he continued, “in a gastronomo-ethical universe God would be forever reproaching and chiding the Splattersplooch in its watery haunts, where it fishes for the flirty mermaids with the Maker’s everlasting cold hand on its flesh.”
“T’ch!” snorted Squab, amusedly eyeing the bridge.
“There’s one thing for sure, that unfortunate one-leg won’t be sent home with a boner and a heart monitor.” Of the monopede, only a single wet running shoe remained, still stuck to the Brandywine Bridge. It fizzed softly.
“Och, piece o’shite,” Squab disdainfully wiped off a chappati-like lump of the one-leg’s flesh that had landed on her shoulder. “Yes, yes, old fashioned dancin’ has remained popular at ceilidhs north of the border, and I can now see what the natives do around here for entertainment.” She gave a theatrical hurrup with her rump. “Christmas was a hoot,” she quipped. “Reminds me of cunthooks.” She jerked her head towards the monopede’s remains. “‘Leaving the left foot free’ is an established part of their celebrations, along with the Yuletide furniture and mince pies and a rousing chorus of ‘Silent Night’.”
The noise of crashing undergrowth interrupted her. A naked woman’s headless corpse broke cover from the woods. The body came in a wriggling crawl, jiggling over the ground, before proudly rising up on dainty feet, waving white, sensuous arms, and hoochy-cooing. Squab recognised a display of tarantism, the ‘dancing mania’, in its movement of limbs. The corpse blew airily like the wind, then collapsed, and lay quite dead.
“Go for it, girl,” Squab encouraged.
Sometimes Squab has a child-like voice, which retains the questioning inflection of a pre-school weeny. At first you are too gripped by her worldly, enveloping gaze to notice it.
Because her eyes suggest they’ve seen it all, the innocence of her voice temporarily passes you by.
Perhaps some of her many rôle models are the Russian nihilists of the 1860s, men such as Chernishebsky and Zaichnevsky.
“Stump down hard on that mess,” she shouted.
I could scarcely persuade myself that murder had been actually done to the one-leg, and a human life cruelly cut short just a moment before my vision.
Why, the relic of his shoe was still smoking, evidence of his once corporeal presence; now absent.
If I left the scene at this point, would not my absence itself be an evidence to everyone of my alarm, and therefore of my fatal knowledge?
When I viewed closer, the Splattersplooch loomed before Squab like a blot of something blacker than Negro and brisker than Marmite.
But presently I was my own master again, and looked to Squab different from l
ife’s comeliness.
A resolve came over her.
She removed her mink coat and threw it carelessly on the ground. Presently, on all fours, she moved her legs and arms in a fast scuttle, chiming: “If Horror hears of this indignity, I’m sunk.” With percolating limbs she approached the incline of the bridge, and proceeded up its length. This close, she could taste roasting meat – a curious almond-and-garlic flavour – rolling from somewhere beneath its structure, yet could not put a name to the beast from which it cooked.
“There you go!” She halted, dead in the centre of the bridge. Still on hands and knees she looked behind her.
“Walk a mile in my Jimmy Choo’s,” she addressed Jarry, “and tell me you can’t smell blood!”
“Not I,” called back the pataphysician. “My father called me Alfred, not Harold the Ever-Ready or Usher the Bloodletter.”
From the back of the Oochee-Papa-Poontang wagon the primate fornicating chatter of Bos-de-Nage’s relatives blasted out like trumpets at the gates of Brazen Dis.
Inside the cabin Jarry tried to dampen the ardour, but too late. Aroused, the baboon, with an unexpected (swelling) female flourish, swung its lower body left and right, its rear end, a peacock fantail of red flesh, now so large and grotesque that sitting down was not an option.
“Ha-ha,” whispered Bottom-face succinctly through its restrainer: and it did not lose itself in further considerations.
Squab chuckled. Even if its arse was dipped in diamonds, she decided, its utterances were worthless.
Despite the heat pouring off the brickwork, she shivered. “That’s right. I’m a Pee-Wee sonic person,” she said to the bridge. She pressed a finger to her ear. “I hear, feel, thrill to the quiver of air – Sam Phillips understood the dynamics of sound, yes sir, capturing that rocking spin like a holy imp imprisoned in the bottle.”
She heard a subliminal noise, coming, perhaps unlikely, from the Brandywine’s beating heart. “There you are, I’m sure there’s a smidgen of bat in me.” Her satisfied words came soft and greasy as noble sperm. “I’m a sonic detective now. Stand by, here we go…”
The Splattersplooch was still motionless, waiting in the water, its eyes visible above the bridge wall, its young feeding, snuffling like little black pigs of death.
Hands and kitten-heels soundly planted on the brick surface, Squab looked directly into the huge orbs. One of them blinked balefully at her, its lid leathery and tanned as a fiend’s back. The eye closed slowly and then rose up again, wiping a film of grease from its iris. Was that a fish she could see, swimming around in the eye?
Another illusion, she decided.
Beneath her, as if a gag were working loose, the bridge seemed on the verge of delivering a statement.
Spoken in words of smouldering brick and cement it would not, she was sure, by nature and effect, when uttered, be pleasant to hear.
She could smell melting tar, and wrinkled her nose.
Her face, in which the angularity of childhood was still visible, with her blue, slightly oblique eyes, was expectant and knowing. She bunched her limbs tight and compact, making herself small as she could.
“My truth and My mercy shall be with him; and in My name shall his horn be exalted…” The chill voice of the Brandywine Bridge spoke clearly for the first time, cutting indelicately through her thoughts.
Fine sparks that blue-pokered in the air accompanied these swinish words from the red brick.
“If only I had blue skin and a necklace of skulls,” she was emphatic, “I could probably carry this off.” The bridge shivered seductively, and from deep in its bowels sitars and shehnai struck up an exotic raga. Now Squab, who believed in positive action and self-determination, was a young girl. Unable to resist an excuse to dance, like the monopede before her had done, she shot to her feet and began moving to the sound, flirting delicate wrists in snake-like undulations about her.
Keeping as perfect time as any western child could, she swayed hither and tither, and turned a quite preposterous pirouette.
“Veritas mea et misericordia mea cumipso: et nominee meo exaltabitur cornu ejus.”
This declaration (pumped in a cloud of steam from within the bridge) accompanied the merry harmony, and Squab knew enough of the classical tongue to recognise the gist gavotte of it.
Abruptly remembering herself – and the Splattersplooch! – she looked down into the Thames. The liquorice waters clinging to the oceanid had turned blue. A strip of thick blood was running from under the bridge, circling it in a surreal fairy pool. It noticed upright Squab.
Seeking her littleness, a swishing tentacle, heavy with myriad babies teething on its skin, snaked out towards her through the cloudy vapours. In its maternal state it was all it could manage. Easily, she dodged to one side.
The bridge became more hortatory (again, the Horror effect). “Fetch the hooks,” it called, “a martyr’s flesh will make a sweeter breakfast than a common Thames herring.”
“Go for it.” Squab suddenly jumped into the air, hands circled over her head.
There’s a move of satisfaction for a line well delivered.
“Get on this.” Up and up and up.
“Let’s get some gone.” Almost levitating.
“Here’s me doing The Saul Bellow.”
Squab imitated the Pissdous Ratous, reeling like a drunken Frozen Charlotte, rolling goggly eyes.
“Eat me.”
Damp globules of flesh were squeezing from between the brickwork beneath her. Coconsciously, she hopped like a frog to one side. In a few moments more a human mouth emerged from the suppurating bridge wall. A bitter sigh escaped its Ashkenazi lips.
She reverted to crab formation, warily studying the mouth’s teeth. Mouth and teeth reminded her of vagina dentata.
“Well, squeeze me till I pop.”
She had the intuition that this was an infant’s mouth, visible on its features the kind of relief from painful tension received when infant teeth erupt through the mucosa of the gum condition (fancifully known amongst the medical profession as ‘fantasies of explosive cannibalistic penetration’).
From enjoying Francis Bacon’s triptychs Squab had no trouble identifying phalluses equipped with mouths – mouths as funfair sites for sex and violence.
What could be more biomorph than the vision of the Splattersplooch, malevolence personified, bopping in the mist? Were its spermy phallus-shaped fishy limbs destined to plunge into the growing wet orifice on the Brandywine Bridge?
Metamorphosing rapidly into an adult’s, the mouth munched, opening and closing before her; sweet tongue of mint, teeth of cheese, lips of carmine sponge, breath of Zyclon B.
She waited expectantly.
The mouth, that gash of profound impulses, a font of rising anxiety, spoke: “Into my heart an air that kills. From yon far country blows. What are those blue remembered hills…”
Another long sigh. A big blue bubble rolled off the tongue, and floated into the sky. The mouth blew furnace breath directly onto her. “I would give…” a long silence “…my soul for a chance of dying crushed under your feet.” The sounds of church bells, cowbells, blows on bricks, the pant of George Dyer’s vulgar hips in motion, dully ricocheted. I’d succumb to your passion of vehement cruelty… Deeply I desire to die by you if that could be; and more deeply I desire you to destroy me…scourge me into swooning, and absorb my blood with kisses…caress and lacerate my loveliness…alleviate and heighten my pains. I want to feel your lips upon my throat (if I had one), and want you to wound me with your teeth…inflict careful torture on my gums…bite through my sweet and shuddering brick.”
The bridge gave a funny boom-chicka-boom.
“Why,” laughed Squab, “I think you’ve mistaken me for a lover…”
The mouth stretched into a swastika-swelling grin.
The brickwork of the Brandywine Bridge softened, and yet more steam boiled from fissures in its masonry; inside, Squab sensed, humans greased and ignited.
“…
a lover,” she continued pointedly, “with more passion than I possess. Maybe if I were a few years older, I’d be up for your leery games.” Still on hands and knees, she arched her back, and made ready to scramble-sprint off the bridge to the other side. “I’d hasten your demise in a tick.”
“Oh, blessed heart, I should like you to tread me to death. Darling, I wish you would kill me this day; it will be so jolly to feel you killing me. Not like it? Shouldn’t I! You just hurt me and see.”
Clear liquid noises accompanied these sentiments.
She could hear screams, hoots, sobs and whistles, coming from within.
“When perverse rebellious love
Masters the feminine heart,
Then destroyed is the union
Of mated lives for beast or man.”
The bridge began to swing easy, rhyme-to-death blood trickling from its cornices. The flesh, pressing like crematoria goo from the heated brickwork beneath her hands and feet, sizzled. It stuck to her dried fingers with a particularly abhorrent tenacity. She felt the megrims and the vapours of fleshy biff-drops; the infection of Mengele’s thalidomide and Bacon’s algolagnia.
“From bone to brick, I’m made for love and death
For that is my world and nothing else.
That is – what can I do – my nature.
I can only fuck and nothing else.
Women and beasts cluster round me like moths round a flame
And if they burn, I’m not to blame.”
Enlivening clicks of teeth in motion rumble, soft hisses that sounded like kisses fly; then the mischievous roars of bellows and, over all, bucolic and immense, grievous laments of anguish rising from the inhabitants within the Brandywine.
“Suckers.” Squab’s back arched further, and she indignantly tightened her muscles. “So, you want me to be a cunt like everybody else?”
She didn’t wait for a reply but put the full energy of youth into a spider-crawling dash. She left the bridge briskly, running upright and straight-backed.(“Let’s creep away from the fray for the party’s over now…” Noel Coward knew a thing or two about life, and the appropriate time to be away on his toes, don’t you think?) Squab came to a halt. She continued running on the spot, panting. “What-O,” she mopped her brow. “Thanks to the speed of my gollies and your fortuitous advice…” She waved an amicable hand to the pataphysician across the river “…I’ve got away scot-free. Now that smells like teen spirit to me!”
The Starry Wisdom Page 19
