The Grimscribe's Puppets (6 page)

~*~

Now Praesident Schreber set out the most pointed criticism of this model in his
Memoirs
. All right, he says, so these are hallucinations I’m having. What does this mean, apart from the fact that certain phenomena appear only to me? What else can be said about them? That they aren’t real? But they are real; I saw them. I saw God, the rays. The only reason to dismiss my visions as unreal would be if we were to insist, without any better evidence, that everyone must be able to see everything. Meaning that, if everyone went blind, light would cease to exist. Now who’s being “subjective”?

No, the pertinent question is not whether or not these are hallucinations, but why I should hallucinate these particular things, and not some others? In other words, while you may convince me what I see is “all in my mind,” you cannot so easily, if at all, demonstrate that what I see in my mind wasn’t
put there from outside
, just like anything I might have seen with my eyes. I saw it with my language, my thinking.

Even if the imperious summons to sacrifice is entirely in my mind, the question is, who put it there? Not me, bub, not me!

~*~

A: “The stories cropped up one after another. Once I knew what I was looking for I could tell which ones they were. Which stories were ... those kind of stories.”

B: By the sign.

A: “Right! By the sign in each story. There was the one about all those dead cats they found. One about birds. They made circles out of their own feathers, even pulled out their own bones from their own bodies to form the circles. There were all sorts of unexplained shootings. There was a fourth-grade teacher who was gang raped and taken captive by her whole class, girls and boys. They tied her up and hid her in the school basement somehow. Slipped out on the substitute, or came by at night to see her.”

B: Little devils.

A: “The point is, no one could account for the impulse. It came from outside. It came from outside.”

~*~

Why ten? Why the sun? No answer.

And yet, eleven won’t do. This is part of the affirmation of ten.

A cloud, a mountain, they cannot be above the sun – nothing can. Same thing.

So you see, the dogmatism is right there. At the moment the idea appears it appears with a built-in “must.” The facultative understanding of inspiration, as a mode of mental operations, has a tendency, largely as a consequence of thoughtless modelings like that one I have been describing to you, to make us forget that inspiration is always associated with a sudden alteration, from inaction to action. When inspiration strikes, habitual action, which is almost inaction, even a kind of inaction, is abandoned, and lassitude drops away. Energetic activity is an aspect of inspiration. This energy is directed toward making the virtual thing or condition actual.

Well, not to go on and on, although I will of course happily answer any questions, I contend that the supernatural does appear to us. If you want to see the supernatural, however, you will be wasting your time to wait for it to find you, or appear to you in its own terms. It does not do this. Instead, you must begin to speak, call to it, and form images. The fact that you want to already shows it is working in you. Why else would you want it?

We cannot exclude claims of the supernatural simply because they appear to be self-serving or what is known as “projecting” or “anthropomorphizing” and so on, even if these things arouse our doubts. After all, we may ourselves be “anthropomorphized” by something else, something which is not itself “anthropomorphic.”

As I say, my hypothesis is that the supernatural resembles us only coincidentally, and could be construed in a completely alien way if we offered it completely bizarre tropes to occupy.

We must not be restrained from boldly, if not exactly recklessly, mapping out the invisible world, designating zones and naming names, by the accusation that we’re simply “making things up.” While this is what we do, it is not so flat. Our maps and names are not authoritative nor are they meant to be, they are only occasions for the supernatural to address us. And we must pin it down. We must. We must provide these means, just as we must put fuel on the fire. We must. The fuel is not the fire, but there is no fire without fuel.

~*~

“There aren’t any secrets like that, not any more. All the old grimoires can be ordered online. Or downloaded. For nothing. In PDFs. Your every movement is watched, and every place on earth is under satellite. There’s no secret spot for magic to hide in.”

“Not all of the books are available. Not everything you do is seen.”

“There are no secrets. The more widely available those books become, the more easily you can call up images and even movies of the rites, the threadbare, shoddy impostures that they always were become the more and the more obvious. Once, those books were rare prizes, in a time when all copies were made by hand, when books were scarce and expensive. If you got your hands on one, you
made
it work. You point at the mysterious words, and your unlettered man believes they say whatever you tell him they say. Merely writing something down was magical. Now, those secrets are all dispelled.”

“Not all secrets can be dispelled. Some secrets remain even when they’ve been explained. And only the ones who’ve paid the price can really receive a secret.”

“The price is nothing.”

“You don’t buy it, no. But you pay a price, to prove that you are worthy.”

“There is nothing to be worthy of.”

“Worthy to receive the secret as a secret. The right one will receive the secret, and understand it, without its ceasing to be a secret, even to him. He’ll have the proof.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out glass ampule.

“Not a soul, or a life, or anything like that. A mystery. A very productive kind of thing.”

The man looks at him, and at the object he holds out. He takes this proffered thing and drops it efficiently into his vest pocket. All the sorrowful resignation, the weary puffiness, melting from his face, leaving a lean, hard, stern-eyed countenance. The transaction has happened.

Standing, the man goes within and shuts his door.

~*~

I didn’t recognize the emblem in time.

It turned out to be a mirror.

Of course! In the mirror ... yes oh god the windows are splitting in two oh god oh god any moment now—the door is gleaming at me from another world, the door catapults away from me everything that is light—and then there is a rolling kneading, like being underwater or rolled out with a rolling pin churning droning rolling pressure weighing down, being squeezed out like a toothpaste tube—yes I know who the sacrifice is—I know who the next sacrifice is going to be—

~*~

A: “But you do look familiar. I feel like we’ve met before.”

B: I get that from a lot of people.

A: I do know you. Don’t I?

B: “Go ahead. Take a close look.”

A: ...

B: “Now. What do I look like?”

A: ... You ... you look like ...

A: ...

A: [suddenly terrified]
You look like ...!

By Kaaron Warren

Behold the human moth. Drawn to the light, antennae out and ears alert, she can’t stay inside on a night like this.

The human moth emerged covered in thin, downy hair. She has a photograph of herself newborn; she seems to shine in the bright lights of the hospital. Her mother’s arms, white, skinny, not hairy at all, encircle her. The human moth always loved the bright lights. Lying in her cot and later, on her bed, blinking at the light, screaming if it was turned off. She didn’t like it low, didn’t like it dimmed. She liked it so bright it would make your eyes water if they were weak.

Her mother was the same; obsessed with the light. Her father wore his hat over his eyes, tilting his head back if he wanted to see. He never left the house. “Whoodhireyou,” her mother called him.

They took in foster children, for your own good, she was told, because Mummy’s a mess down there and there won’t be any more like you, and did he say thank god for that? The human moth’s hearing was very acute.

One by one they moved in, edging her out of her big, bright bedroom. Making noise and mess, taking up space. Making fun of her because of her rounded stomach. Maybe there was a ball of hair in there. She sucked her hair all rat’s tailed and wet.

Maybe there was a twin in there. Teeth and mutated bone and tissue. She always wanted a real sister.

Maybe it was because she ate fabric. Strands of wool, pieces of material.

They made fun of the way she ate, little nibbling bites like a moth.

By the time she was eight, there were a dozen children living in her house. Her mother spent her days shouting and the children, all ages, cooked and ate and shat and messed, they went to school when the human moth did not. The more children moved in, the smaller the human moth’s cocoon grew, and the darker it got, the further from the light. She moved into the basement,
your own special place
, and they kept all the old clothes down there, the bags of mothball-smelling charity clothes, donated for all those dear children. She burrowed in, made her cocoon. She took every candle in the house, every match, and pretended not to hear when they were called for.

The other children teased her about her hairiness but it wasn’t until she set up her cocoon in the basement and covered the wall with pictures of moths that they called her that.

She pretended to hate it so they wouldn’t stop.

Outside the basement window a large lilac bush blocked the sun. She loved the smell and she grew used to the taste on those nights when she was hungry.

Her mother didn’t like the lilac but she didn’t take the bush away. Her mother said, “It’ll turn your flaps purple, just watch, make a mess of you down there if you’re not careful.”

The human moth never went to school. Her parents kept her safe at home where only her foster brothers and sisters could laugh at her.

Her parents weren’t cruel but they weren’t kind. They taught her nothing about cooking or thinking, they only taught her about eating and about the light. They taught her about survival and that some have to die so that others can live. They made her sing the babies to sleep, read to the other children till her throat was raw. Some nights she wished she could sew her mouth shut, like a normal moth so that she wouldn’t have to sing anymore. Her voice was weak and she didn’t always remember the words, would sit with eyes blind, mind blank, while the children screamed with delight at her stupidity.

“You be nice to the poor little souls, they’ve had a hard life,” her mother said. As if the human moth was the luckiest girl on earth.

In her cocoon, she watched the moths around the streetlight. They were free, but they were obsessed, and they flew together, they made no sound, they were simple in their needs and wants. They didn’t eat; they had no mouths. They knew when they would die and how, and the pain of starvation would be sad for them because it was the end, but it was also inevitable. She thought there would be a certain comfort in that.

When she could capture them, she liked the feel of moths across her palm. Liked the fine powder dust they left behind, far finer than talc. She wished she could find powder as fine.

The human moth watched the babies being powdered, the glaze-eyed concentration on her mother’s face. Her mother ate talc powder by the spoonful, and she fed it to the human moth too, but never the others. When the human moth complained of her painful lungs and stomach, her mother fed her more. “It’ll fill you up,” her mother said, “and it won’t make you fat. Fatter. It won’t make you any more roly poly than you are now,” and she poked the human moth’s stomach to make the children laugh. “Nothing like the sound of a child’s laugh,” she said, glaring at the human moth for not joining in.

The human moth imagined the powder working its way through her skin, making her insides smell like lilac as well.

Her mother loved talcum powder. The human moth knew when her parents needed privacy. Her father appeared carrying a bottle of baby powder. He would shake it like a castanet, come on baby, and her mother would follow him and shut the door after her.

Her mother’s skin was scaly and scratchy and she came out in the morning looking like a ghost. Head to toe, runnelled talcum powder. Naked. “Don’t stand there with your mouth flapping open,” her mother said.

Her mother had no self-control. Her father always said that when they found her folded around a wine bottle. The human moth was the one to clean it up. He wouldn’t.

As the children began to leave, to grow up and move out, her parents made their plans. They would put her in a place, a home, they would lock her up and they would go away, because, her mother said, they had not lived a life at all, but instead they had sacrificed for their little girl so that she would want for nothing.

She wanted for everything.

Out of respect for her parents, after she smothered them she stretched them out like moths collected. Down in the basement her father had nails and hammers, he was a handyman but he never helped her.

It was exciting to her, seeing them like that. She was too terrified to speak to the police when they eventually knocked at the door, but it was clear, it was obvious to all, that an animal had done this, a hardened criminal, and that the human moth should be given all the privacy to grieve that she needed.

It was lonely without them, but it was nice not to have to open her mouth.

She lived alone in the big house until the failure of the lights. She had medical texts to read, and the Field Guide to Moths. She had cut out most of the moth pictures already but she liked to memorise the names.

She tried not to eat because moths don’t. But she got so hungry. She had no willpower. So she pretended to be a silkworm, eating enough to last the transformation. Most moths live off the fat stored in their bodies. She couldn’t live off fat, or off textiles.

She ate tinned food, ate it cold. Beetroot, tuna, pineapple. Baked beans, spaghetti, mini franks. Her mother was terrified the food would run out with all those children, then the children left and the parents died and all the tins were left. If a meal was slightly tainted from waiting for so long to be eaten, she ate it stirred through with lilac. She bought the bush inside and kept it by the window, where it flourished.