by Rhys Hughes
Dr Mock smote his forehead with his fist, but I thought I discerned his eyes glittering with pride when he blinked them in the recovery from concussion. I was on the right track, no doubt about that, but there was a long way to go before this sport was finished, or even acknowledged as a game by the umpire, who bellowed:
“No, no, Mr Delves! Any inconsistencies in my fable are due to the incompetence or haste of its author. There aren’t meant to be solutions to Horace’s demise. I don’t know what ‘really’ happened to him, nor do I care, and neither should you. It was just a fairytale. It worked for your colleagues, but plainly you are more awkward.”
I waited for him to soften his tone. He added with a sigh: “Maybe that’s not such an undesirable trait. A priest has a responsible rôle in modern society. He’s the final defender against the general notion that all knowledge, whatever its moral basis, is worthwhile. We are eager to oppose this trend, to preserve some of the veils on the body of nature that others wish to rip away. We hope to leave her with not too many, not too few, but just enough to lend dignified movement to her laws, a balance crucial to our position between animal and angel.”
I clicked my heels and saluted him. “I appreciate your inclination to speak in riddles. It’s for the best. I intend to prove myself worthy of joining your secret society in the minimum time. Tonight I shall work on a formula for Horace’s extinction.”
“Please don’t, Mr Delves!”
I touched his arm. “Don’t fret. I won’t become a languid Elagabalus of the tombs, or a languid anything of anywhere, for that matter. I once taught arithmetic to vampires. That’s the shocking experience I wish to purge from my soul, as the suicide of his shipmate was to Horace, but little bats who flap around the classroom with exposed fangs, instead of simply throwing paper darts, annihilate any last vestiges of languidness in the crucible of the evasive scurry!”
“Lord! I have a lunatic for a student!”
“Who is it? Do you want me to keep watch on him? Is he also nameless? Or is it young Willis?”
Dr Mock pointed a clumsy finger. “Out!”
I went, feeling very pleased with myself. Joining a secret society, especially one designed to combat evil, was an ambition I wasn’t aware I had until the possibility arose, which on further reflection is entirely appropriate. And Dr Mock had already set me the first practical trial of my induction: to find the secret library on my own. He obviously trusted me more than his ancestor trusted Horace. What a compliment! But first I had to examine the hidden recesses of his anecdote.
Returning to my room, I threw myself down on the bed and considered the gravity of what I had learned.
It was weighty enough to crush a timid intellect into a sphere with a radius less than that of a grape!
Madness would ferment words into whines!
This proves I can do the syntactical jokes better than Dr Mock, but my sleeping capabilities were probably inferior to his, for I tossed all my dreams away that same night, as if I sailed along on blankets churned by inner typhoons of unwelcome memories, not my own. Horse latitudes for nightmares! They sank. Full fathomless five. Actually there were about a dozen, but that spoils the poetry.
Namelessness was the key to the bloody lock on the wormy door which led to the slimy dungeon of total horror. I knew that for certain. Up in the mountains the vermin of darkness had words to represent their shapes and identities. The little vampires were terrible but graspable, because they could be called something personal. They had appellations—Milly, Miles, Ross, Ferdy, Warren, Anna, Darren, Choggles, Barnum, Egg, Nathan, John, Rachel, Caspar—so it was always possible to form an idea in the mind of what pursued you. An impression clothed in a word. Ah look, it’s Simon at the window! Catch this clove of garlic, Rita! Pardon me while I soak my cane in holy water, Thomas!
But with nameless horrors this isn’t an option. You are constrained by inevitable silence to stand and blubber while evil seizes its chance. No point even trying to talk your way out of an assault by indescribable ineffables! You can’t reason or plead with them on an intimate level. No opportunity to evolve a useful victim-aggressor relationship, to play on shared experience as suffering individuals in a contingent universe. The doom given to you by them will always have the formality of the unknown. At least with natural disasters, insensate murderers, such as tornadoes, you can shout out a family cognomen, “whirlwind!” or “spindizzy!”, as it sucks you to the other side of death, sneeringly, in the hope of shaming its physics. Not that it will, but it’s worth the attempt. With nameless killers, nothing is worth anything.
Consider the synonyms of the word nameless. All are as disturbing as themselves. What are they? I won’t say, because most are still unidentified, unspecified, anonymous, unlabelled, undesignated, untagged, unspeakable, unutterable, inexpressible, unmentionable, indescribable and simply not right to talk about. Were they free to be listed, I’d advise you to look the other way.
If Horace Gripp had been called “any old student,” his experiments would have been even more frightening. It occurred to me that the condition of namelessness might be rendered less harmful, if not exactly safe, by forcing its avatars to accept individual labels. A simple expedient! But the label would have to be exactly appropriate, or else it would be redundant, and there’s nothing so against itself and useless as a nickname which hasn’t caught on.
Dawn came. I went down to matins. I ate my breakfast of gruel. The morning passed slowly. I sat in class and discovered why the omniscience of God doesn’t invalidate free-will. Just because he knows what’s going to happen doesn’t imply we haven’t chosen it.
After the lecture I stayed behind, and this was also my own choice, but Dr Mock regarded it as the workings of a malicious fate, for he was frowning at the whole cosmos as he waited for me to depart, and when I didn’t he snapped: “What is it now?”
“Pardon me, sir, but I may have solved the puzzle of Horace Gripp’s death. Would you care to listen to my theory?”
“Don’t be idiotic, Mr Delves!”
Which obviously meant I was foolish to imagine he didn’t. So I inhaled deeply and began: “Horace invoked the phantom of his shipmate, Billy Broom, as intended, but summoned up a stowaway with him. I’ll explain that succinctly. We often hear talk about the ‘spirit of war’. What does it mean? What if it isn’t a metaphor for ideological aggression? What if there truly is a ghost of combat, a sort of manitou of massacre? Let’s assume for now there is. Well, normally it would be far too large, and thus dilute, to interact noticeably with its material subjects. For example, a spirit of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) would stretch across dozens of states in space, and decades in time, and that’s such a wide stretch that its particles, presumably formed from etheric atoms finer than those of brute matter, would be shared among too many men in too many locations at too many times to affect individual psychologies. Rather like snorting a single molecule of cyanide.”
Dr Mock fanned his face with a sheaf of lecture notes. I took this as an invitation to proceed. I said:
“But in the case of the Zanzibar War of 1896, the conflict was so brief that its spirit didn’t have a chance to thin itself out. It more or less remained in a single congealed chunk. Probably it rolled around in the wind. Maybe the artillery blasts from the gunboats knocked it over the sea. Anyway, Billy Broom inhaled it whole. It went inside him and stuck in his subconscious. But as the political repercussions from the war expanded after the ceasefire, it started to grow inside him. He had no option but to make more room. Snorting gunpowder and igniting it was just his way of expanding his mind.”
“What has this got to do with Horace Gripp’s death?”
“It was the answer to the suicide that he wanted. But it cost him his own life. For in the passing of the years between his career as a sailor and his diligent work as a theology student, those repercussions, though minor and mostly unrecognised, had grown larger. Read the political history of Zanzibar if you don’t believe me. When he
created a vessel for Billy’s spirit by joining together suitable bits of corpses, he did it so well that he summoned up the entire package: Billy’s ghost and the spirit of the war, which had its roots in the other’s soul. The corpse vessel didn’t have gaping nostrils as an emergency pressure valve and so the battle phantom was compressed inside it at enormous pressure. It was probably the size of the room now, but was expected to be at home inside an average human cadaver. Naturally, or supernaturally rather, it blew the body apart, killing the dead Billy and the living Horace in one dramatic and sulphurous blast.”
After a pause, I asked: “How did I do? Am I right?”
“Mr Delves, I don’t think the man who wrote the fable had that solution in mind. He didn’t want to invent a clever tale. He just hoped to scare students for their own good. An artful story wasn’t necessary. Something crude and effective would do.”
“Yes, but knowing exactly what happened makes it less intimidating, less creepy, less horrific, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so. All the same, please go away!”
“I’ll find the hidden library before the week is over, I promise. You’ll be delighted you chose me as your favourite disciple, sir! I won’t let you down.”
He addressed me with a mystic word: “Cretin!”
Obviously if names were the deadly enemies of horror, the more the better! I skipped along the corridor. I reached and lurked in my rooms. I heard young Willis giggling through the wall, doubtless at something profane, displaying all this contempt for learning. I opened the encyclopaedia I had brought with me from my teaching job. I muttered respectfully to myself as I turned the yellowing pages:
“What exactly is an Elagabalus?”
The answer chilled my bones around their marrow, which is contrary to most expectations of fear, but not because of any direct revelation of monstrous depravities. It’s not a thing as such, an Elagabalus, but the name of a Roman Emperor who ruled from 218 to 222. He was descended from a clan of priests of the ancient Syrian sun-god and imposed worship of this deity on his subjects when he gained the throne. Replacing Jove with Baal didn’t endear him to his Senate, but it was his indolence which proved to be his undoing at the hands and spears of the Praetorian Guard. The Roman world had long been used to bloodthirsty autocrats, but effete listless ones were a totally new disadvantage.
Elagabalus was torpid and apathetic. When he wasn’t resting on a couch of feathers he was sleeping on a bed of petals. He yawned with exhaustion at the act of sniffing the most refined perfumes. On the few occasions he travelled anywhere it was in a chariot pulled by teams of naked youths. He was so light and vapid the yoke of this vehicle could be harnessed to rings in their pierced nipples without risking undue distortion. When he volunteered himself for castration, because he was too lazy to remain a man, he slumbered through the operation without requiring the customary anaesthetic services of a vat of wine. He ordered the surgeon to drink it instead. Asked if he ever intended living, he replied: “My slaves will do that for me.”
He was the very personification of languidness.
But this data presented me with a problem of logic, an enigma of language. Dr Mock had described Horace as a ‘languid Elagabalus’. But if the word Elagabalus is synonymous with the word languid, then there’s no need to use them in conjunction! It’s tautological and adds nothing to the meaning. Dr Mock might just have said ‘an Elagabalus of the tombs’. That extra ‘languid’ is redundant.
I couldn’t accept that an intelligent man like Dr Mock, a tutor of metaphysics and advanced crusader against diabolism, hadn’t realised this, and therefore I was compelled to conclude that this tautology wasn’t an example of clumsy grammar but had a genuine, though abstruse, significance. What was it? It seemed a mystery beyond my capabilities of analysis. But the answer is harrowingly simple.
Although inserting the word ‘languid’ before ‘Elagabalus’ doesn’t directly augment the substance of either, it does imply there might be such a thing as a ‘non-languid Elagabalus’. Consider that! It’s the same as saying a ‘non-languid languid’. It’s a self-contradiction! Dr Mock must have been hinting that self-contradictory things can exist! What a philosophically awful prospect!
If he felt it necessary to include that superfluous ‘languid’, which he had, then it was clear he believed in the viability of logical impossibilities, that they actually have conceptual form, because a ‘non-languid Elagabalus’ is as impossible and unimaginable as a ‘dark light’ or ‘circular triangle’ or ‘married bachelor’. It’s not impossible in the sense of purple unicorns or edible planets, which have no place in the real universe but can be pictured in the mind. No, it’s more impossible than that. It can’t even be conceived.
Try to visualise it and you’ll understand what I mean. It cancels itself out before it even becomes an idea. And yet Dr Mock was claiming that this logical impossibility was an actual phenomenon! I shuddered at the consequences which might follow from entertaining this possibility. A corporeal logical impossibility would have to remain nameless. It was all coming together at last! By granting these anomalies names, whether they liked it or not, we could convert them from logical impossibilities into empirical ones. Returning to my earlier analogy, the process was akin to transforming a circular triangle into a blue unicorn, or a married bachelor into an edible planet.
This explained why Dr Mock kept insisting that Horace Gripp was a fictional character rather than an historical personage. As a fictional character defined by his unlikely adventures he was merely an empirical impossibility. This suggested he had once been something much worse: a logical impossibility! So granting him the name Horace Gripp had cured him of his inconceivability! This was the only feasible explanation for what I had learned from my tutor’s special lecture. And it would be my rôle once I graduated as a priest to continue this tradition, changing impossibilities from a state of greater to lesser evil by the process of naming them! Not that they would thank me for this. They wouldn’t even notice. Tacent, satis laudant!
I felt extremely confident I was now ready to join Dr Mock’s secret society, and I waited in my room for some indication that I had passed the test, but on further reflection the practical side of my assignment still needed to be completed before membership could be won. I went in search of the library.
It took three successive nights of creeping around college to find it. And it turned up in the most prosaic place imaginable. Inside the stationery cupboard at the rear of the Dean’s office! Breaking a pane of glass in one of his windows, slipping the latch and climbing through, I rummaged unsuccessfully through his desk before noticing the seemingly innocent door in the far wall. It was unlocked. I opened it and encountered a sight of such bilious bibliolatry that I nearly fainted. Thousands of nameless books stacked in neat rows on shelves! Much worse was the fact that all were blank inside. Exactly the sort of abominable grimoires that had destroyed Horace all those decades ago!
I had brought a pen along with me. I now set to work defusing these manuals of malevolence. I gave them titles and authors. I invented historical magicians and wrote these names on the covers and spines. I also filled a few with random but harmless words. In the end, as dawn crept up behind me, I was forced to resort to merely scribbling like an infant on as many pages as possible. But I didn’t leave a single volume untouched. I was quite pleased with some of my fictional authors and bogus titles. Here are my favourites: Bishop Wormwood’s False Book of Truths, Papus Levi’s Arcane Enabler, the Compleat Wrangler of Izaac Spoilchild, Advanced Pickface Techniques by Bungay Peele, Gramarye Moses and her Senile Cuddle, Florence Near’s Inner Belly of Isis, Celine Dion Misfortune’s Pan Alchemy, Hermes Trigamous and his Slapped Cheek Trilogy, and the powerful but slipshod Aching Soul of Solomon the Cobbler. My own view is that these suppositional tomes and sorcerers deserve to be confused in the minds of modern scholars with the genuine articles.
I escaped back to my room without being caught and slept in the blissful know
ledge that I had contributed to reducing the total amount of horror in the world. I decided to treat myself for my good work. Instead of rising to attend lectures, I remained in bed. Dimly I heard commotion in the corridors. People were shouting. Then there was a knock on my door. Very urgent, as if it belonged to a fist whose owner wasn’t going to be deterred by silence.
Wearing a wry smile, I crossed the room and admitted my visitor. It was Dr Mock. Plainly he had come to extend an official invitation to join his secret society. Before he opened his mouth, I nodded and winked. “I accept your offer!”
He shook his head and sat on my bed with a sigh. He said: “Somebody has been damaging stationery.”
I beamed in reply. “We’ve got those ghastly logical impossibilities on the run! We’re a great team!”
“The Dean is furious, Mr Delves. A whole cupboardful of new ledgers has been vandalised. We’ve had to suspend the recording of the college accounts until replacements are secured. I can’t defend you on this one. But before I turn you in, tell me why you scrawled gibberish all over them?”
“Fighting namelessness, sir!”
“Yes, yes, a lunatic. I guessed it all along. Don’t you realise my reputation will be sullied when the Dean discovers that I gave private lectures to the culprit?”
I knew he was serious. “In that case, don’t say it was me. Blame let’s see, young Willis instead.”
“But it was your handwriting, you dolt!”
“Can’t you use metaphysics to convince him otherwise?”
“Why should I? Young Willis is a conscientious student. He spends his time enjoying alcohol and women. He’s normal. So why should he be expelled for your crime?”
“Reasons of blackmail. If you tell the Dean the fault is mine, I’ll inform him about your misdemeanours. I’m not referring to the picture of the naked nun in a wimple which your ancestor tore out of Horace’s book and passed down the generations to you, but the hereditary crime whose evidence was destroyed in the grate of the secret library in the nonexistent tower!”
