Dear Henry,
See? I’m practicing proper cursive script. Do you like it? It’s not as good as yours yet. But I’m good at picking up fussy, flourish things like this. Tiny stitches and loops on letters… Carmen’s always been the one who handles the blunt force things in our lives, and I put the finishing touches on. But I’m not so good at describing things in words.
You say it’s so important that we ‘say it all clear’ and tell our story loudly while we still can because you never know when it will all be snatched away from you. But I’m not really sure how to do that. I wish you could teach me how to write. I will try and describe what happened leading up to us finding our next lead, but I don’t promise it will be high art.
Carmen and I were in the kitchen getting ready for work and she was dressed in her nurse’s uniform. “He found this little prayer card of Saint Jude and he’s stuck it to an old jar with a tea light in it. I think he’s praying to it,” she told me as if it was pitiful.
I shrugged. “Well, he’s a nineteenth-century Catholic in trouble, what do you want from him?”
“Do you know who St Jude is?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“He’s the patron saint of lost causes...”
I pressed my lips together sadly and we both acknowledged the poignancy. “Do you think we should tell him about great-grandad Cecil’s collection yet?”
“Might be a good idea to do it soon, give him something to focus on, going through all that old stuff. You know, like busy work? That’s usually good for grief.”
“Don’t you think we should talk to someone else about him? He needs more than busy work. He needs a future of some kind… I mean, by no fault of our own, or his, we have an illegal immigrant from another time with no ID... What are we going to do with him long term? How is he going to contribute to society? He tells me that his own major saleable skill was being able to play music, but he can’t do that anymore. I asked him to write down his major remaining skills and he listed ‘sending the evil eye’ and ‘laudanum tolerance’…”
“Well he was only recently a teenager I suppose… I know he says that maturity levels are way down since then, but his skillset sounds on point… What are you thinking we should do? Like going to the authorities or something?” Carmen crossed her arms. “Because fuck that, I’m sorry, but I know people who can get him fake ID done up…”
“I think we need to find someone to help us. Not the authorities, but not necessarily criminals either… I mean, someone that knows about… well… the supernatural.” I was waiting for her to mock me because if she did I was going to remind her that you came back from the bloody dead so all the cards are on the table now.
“A priest? Are you thinking the Catholic angle?”
I shook my head. “No I’m thinking of something a little more outside the box than that.”
That’s what led me out there looking for witches, occultists, mediums, spiritualists, whatever turns up when you go looking for the psychic riff raff of the city. I will say right from the start that whatever Carmen says it was more than coincidence that an Allport descendent happened to be standing in the rivulet tunnel taking photographs after her hospital shift when you came along. And just as that was no coincidence neither was it that I then went to that particular card reader…
I think I know what we have to do next now, Henry. I’ve found people who are specialists in the uncanny. That’s what I do, I think. Carmen saves people, I discover people. Her super hero name has to be Saving Carmen and I’m Discovering Madeline. See what I did there? You will approve of the double meanings I’m sure, if not the mangled grammar!
Dearest Madeline,
I am a poet, not a schoolteacher, I’m not here to correct your grammar or hatchet out the joy from language as pedants do. Twist it to any shape that pleases you, yet touch it still, work it in your fingers, soften it to other shapes you haven’t tried before. You don’t have to be good at it, but write it anyway. Our mind is partially bound with words, it pays to make them supple. My kind are the outlaws of language, we capture and torture English until it gives up its hidden secrets to us. We put grammar on the rack and to the thumbscrew, stretching and rending them, while we ask again and again for them to confess to us where the devil sucked upon their witch-teats.
It vexes me when people say they are afraid to write. The whole of society seems to exist to clamp down on the main artery of creativity, anyone who creates does so in the teeth of all, risking mockery and infamy. Anybody with any sense is afraid to write, especially if it means bearing their jugular vein to the unkind masses. If you say you want to write but you won’t because you fear you will be derided, know that you will indeed be derided, by at least someone, somewhere, out there. But do you intend to let that bitter mediocrity own you? Or do you love language enough to do it anyway?
You are right about Saving Carmen and Discovering Madeline, I like what you did there. ‘Maddie’ is quite lovely and I appreciate all she’s done for me, more than I can express, yet I am very much looking forward to discovering Madeline.
It might interest you, (just as an aside and because I’d rather talk about just about anything than the matter at hand) to know I have a girl living inside of me, who has a different name to myself, just as you do. At least, she has the embryo of a name. She is something made of light. She lives inside the jaws of the wolf in my belly. I am the man, who swallowed the wolf, who devoured the girl… It isn’t around just anyone that she comes out, you have to hold open the jaws of the wolf like the lady with her hands in the mouth of the lion in Strength from the tarot deck.
My interior girl of light came out around you Madeleine when you let me brush your hair. I’ve always enjoyed it when ladies allow me little privileges, which would not be extended to normal men. That’s not how I’m meant to refer to myself anymore, is it? There are all these beastly new categorizations for attraction I need to work out. I never thought about it like that, this gay, straight or bisexual business, all I know for sure is that you aren’t the first lady to allow me the relaxed intimacy of a girl friend.
That which is man in me indeed takes much less interest in the sexual features of women’s bodies, but the beast inside, and the girl… They have their own agendas. Usually it was only in Arthur’s presence that I could allow partial freedom to those other parts. To the sharp bird of prey beak that lives in my mind, ready to rend the visceral of an idea and to the hungry, feral she-wolf in my gut, and the girl hiding inside the beast skin, also. But despite struggling to fit my understanding to the three-pronged division of sexuality your era presents me with, I’m coming to feel safer here… Which really wouldn’t be terribly hard under the circumstances of the now absent death penalty that hung over our every move.
With the subsiding of fear I find myself able to think with lucidity again. When your mind is doused with the chemical wash of fighting or fleeing you are never really thinking rationally. It is only now that I can realistically assess the level of danger I was putting him in. It is only now that I discover what Arthur left behind him here in Hobart, like a resounding echo of his life ringing out still, that I can feel the true magnitude of my mistake. Fear swallowed me utterly, just as despair threatens me at times now. It was his job to protect me, and yet I could not bear the risk he would have taken for me.
Now I can relax I see that I had no right to take that decision from his hands, it was his life to risk, his death to choose. What is love though, but that kicking out from the very centre of yourself against the death that has chosen your beloved? It was Arthur’s job to hold the cloak around me, to conceal me, to partially reveal me, but to neither report what he had seen nor record it. The work we did was secret, and he knew better than most how to Keep Silent. Such is the sacrifice akin to death, which is asked of the men who ward the edges of our House’s precinct.
For this reason I doubt I will find anything about myself in his papers…
Arthur would have destroyed any evidence from before my death, not because he was ashamed about he and I, in truth there was nothing, at the physical level, that we were guilty of. He would have done it still because it was his job to be an invisible man, a man made of many faces and no face, composed of nothing but shadows and ocean mist.
Sometimes I see echoes of his particular talents in yourself and your sister. Forgive me if my words come off sounding paternalistic, which might seem strange when you are physically older than I. If it sounds so it is because I am a contemporary of your forebear, and out of my love for your forefather I feel a strange stewardship or guardian role over you two. You are the product of my love, even if you could never have been the product of our love.
At the physical level it has been you two who have shielded me from this new world, and I who can protect you from the other more arcane terrors that lurk below our feet and inside the walls of this city. I feel that in some way the luck force of his family line is therefore still with me, heralded by your arrival, still draped around me like his loving sponsorship. His spiritual patronage endures over the whole city having its roots in his collection.
As to how to tell it all clear… we must tell and tell until our very skin becomes see-through that is what it means to get clear with yourself. If we are to empty out all the falsehood that’s been shoved down our throats we must go to the extreme ends with confession. I took my clothes off in the night and opened the window, standing naked beneath the moon and told the sky I was who I was, unchanged, unashamed. Before mankind I will put my clothes back on, I will put my human skin back on, and walk around taken for normal, but I have given back their voices. My voice is alone now in a stark sort of purity.
One simply screams in some form and tries to do it tunefully, that is all art is, that is all writing is, an eruption of what is unbearable otherwise, made beautiful so as to be tolerable to others…. One finds one’s self in a place, and one writes from there. One sits very still and listens to the story demons creeping up, barely breathing with anticipation. I felt them skulking around up from the rivulet about when the rain began to ease off. When I feel that breeze stir in a certain way I grab a pen and brace myself.
I over heard you and Maddie from the kitchen talking about how the dam had dropped in Les Revenants just before the zombies came back. I may have rolled my eyes at you, but I was intrigued. You noted that the dam was back in fine form again now in Hobart, after all this rain that ‘Henry has brought with him’.
Movies, songs, and the electronic world that interacts with your stream of consciousness so regularly are looked to as oracles of sorts, just as the sky and bush were looked to for omens once. You don’t notice that you do it, or count it as a belief system, but you believe these electronic stories and story fragments you are immersed in have some bearing on your reality. You believe these stories interact with each other and with reality in some way, just as my mother believed the folk stories she grew up with enough to claim I was a changeling.
When I heard you two talking it led me to consider what a man of Arthur’s talents would have done with such things at his disposal. Right when I was thinking it, the electricity went down and we were plunged into the reassertion of primordial night.
“Arthur?” I murmured into the now dark air of your flat. Perhaps it is the same species of mytho-logic you used to link your viewing of a French television series to a drop in Hobart’s dam water, and onward to my own synchronistic appearance? It is story logic to be sure, but what isn’t, when you break it all down? I knew what it meant in my marrow. It meant Arthur killed the lights, like our century split the night, and it means he can still hear me.
Stimulus Question: Henry, could you please describe Cecil Allport, whom you called Arthur, and your relationship with him? I’m particularly interested to hear more about the reason you believe he would be capable of turning off our electricity? This might help give you something to do while I’m at work other than turning all of our jars into saint candles and hiding magical pee samples. –love, Carmen.
There are some things in life so far outside the ordinary we can only express them in mythic terms. For this reason I will as yet give you no: ‘we met at the age of ten at my father’s house’ or ‘as we grew I would read poetry to him as we lay on our backs in the long, late-summer grass.’ Even those facts seem too pedestrian, and to do it justice in another form would require a novel-length endeavor.
Let me tell you, instead of describing our relationship, about the story of a child named Sorrow, whom my Welsh Grandmother spoke of in hushed tones. Pryderi, son of Rhiannon, stolen away on the night of his birth reappeared in the home of a horse breeder whose mare had been in foal, but the foal had been snatched away. Pryderi had reappeared, replacing the vanished colt foal, which had been taken from the stable by a monstrous hand of a creature of a troll being of the Otherwise. The loss of Pryderi caused Rhiannon much sorrow and care as she was punished for his murder, and for this the child was named for sadness.
Pryderi and his equine double, are part of an ongoing story about divine twins of light and darkness. One who sees the sun through the sky and the other on its perilous nightside journey through the Underworld, one passing it to the other… Snow White and Rose Red, a feminine version of this ageless story with no beginning and no end, that is always going around and around like the sun seems to walk across the heavens and down into the salty arms of the sea.
I knew a man once who claimed to have danced with the Vodou Queen of New Orleans, he used to say Arthur and I were the Marassa… Because even as far afield as Africa the story was still going around and around about twin beings that herald the beginning of things.
Just as I was taken, and the unlucky Pryderi, Mabon ap Modron was also stolen from his mother’s side by otherworldly beings. Mabon grows to young manhood languishing in a strange land, little different to Sleeping Beauty in his isolation and the feats that must be passed to obtain him, except that he, like the caged bird, and myself, sings in his captivity.
‘What is to be got of me will be got through fighting’ –Mabon warns the intrepid heroes who would attempt the task. Oh I know all the words to the paean of Mabon… I know that old refrain like the Irishman in me knows the bittersweet tune of heartsick, and the scent of dawn after whiskey and tears.
It is King Arthur and his war band who rescued Mabon, by entering the deathly domain of water on the back of the Salmon of Wisdom. I think that was one of the reasons I thought of calling Cecil ‘Arthur’, in the beginning. Though it was not the reason at the forefront of my mind I see now the form of the salmon of wisdom rising beneath me, monsterous, titanic, lifting me from the water that threatens to engulf me, with a strength greater than any human hands. I realize suddenly that it was not Arthur, or my angel who lifted me from the ocean and brought me here, but the specter of some rising immortality, its nature only partially knowable. It was who I am still becoming that lifted me.
That idea of Arthur, the raven-turning once and future graal king, lurked deeper in, within the wet, subterranean chambers of the heart where Mabon sings his lament inside me, waiting for his fated appointment with the sacral king. In a way that name, his secret name, is still only the echo of an idea gestating in the dark. But once unleashed into many minds, ideas can be powerful.
When I fell into trance his were the hands that steadied me and the hands that held the fob watch that mesmerized me, also. When he and I touched hands in the séance, sparks could be felt as though were designed by nature to create a battery. When I went out into the world his arm was there through mine, mutely telling the world I was his friend, and therefore not to be bothered by anyone, or else… His voice the one that spoke for me when I was uncertain... When I trembled under the weight of my calling and my gift, his was the coat around my shoulders and the excuses for why we had to leave early. When The Ignorant came to persecute me it was his fists that drew my enemy’s blood and his quick tongue that left them stammering for a stillborn comeback.
It was me who showed him how to break the fourth wall on reality, so that he saw for the first time how what we call life is but a stage play, and who the audience is and the people who leverage our puppet strings. It was me that pressed close the heat of the cunning fire in my own brow over his until his forebrain grew incandescent with the glow of our connection. I taught him how to see and hear what is called dead, but has merely moved its location to the interior spaces of life. It was I, since we were little more than boys, who held him when he was sorrowful, cooked for him when he hungered, tended him where he hurt, read to him and broadened and deepened his apprehension of the beautiful, and again and again decided to place our friendship above all petty irritations in life. Thus something of the divine nature touched upon us, lightly, perfectly, shyly...
And it was good.
That is all I know how to say of it for now. As to how he could have turned out our electricity, well… Your great great grandfather was a two-faced man, a crossroad’s walker, a taker and wearer of the faces of others and the skins of beasts, the kind of man a grave can’t hold down for long. He had a wolf inside him like I do, but there was a fecund and fearsome darkness that lodges close to his heart, a breathless outer space, close to the Void sensation.
I feel his influence here still and I know his collection of curiosities, which his son Henry bequeathed (as he wished it) to the people of Hobart, will prove this to be true when I can bear to go look at them.
My avenging angel who watches over me told me once that I would need to come to terms with the sex in me to progress with my Art, because it is not enough to say that sexuality is part of magic. Magic, instead, is a sexuality, something which exists within the erotic nature of a person. If magic is up inside you it’s as unstoppable as if you are a boy who likes other boys, and it is felt and wanted with the same kind of intensity. I believe and know he is right.
Yet for me I feel that if magic is an aspect of human sexuality then sexuality, for me at least, is a type of art. Some people have a gift for it, like music or dance. There is no discontinuity between my music and how it felt to love Arthur. There is no real line between the compulsion toward poetry and the intricate and mindful expression of love, which I desired to compose upon his flesh with mine.
Make no mistake about it, to me that was what our relationship was, if you want to know, art… A thing of deep enduring beauty and a joy forever, a still unravished bride of quietness, a foster child of Silence and slow Time. Like the figures in Keats’ Grecian urn, we are suspending in mid-motion always, a lost refrain, or cause, a few unplayed notes lingering in the air, a reaching out hand ungrasped, a caress never quite landing.
Maybe.