The Grimscribe's Puppets (7 page)

She kept the lights burning all the time. Every light in every room. This for a very long time because she was terrified that she would not find the switch in the dark. There was no one to tell her to turn the lights off.

Then…failure. Her power went and there was no light. She had candles and torches, but she knew they wouldn’t last long. The candles would burn down and the torches run out of power.

So she had to leave. Find a light place to live.

The first house, the light hummed musically, but there were too many comings and goings. She never knew who would be in the bathroom, or who would bang on the door for her to get the fuck out. She needed time for her powdering. A moth dies without a powdering.

Talc made her cough and sneeze. She loved the lilac-scented smell of it so much, sometimes she closed the bathroom door and puffed the talc out until it filled the air. She breathed in, mouth open, tasting the sweet powder.

Talc brought her mother back so real, that and the underlying smell of sweat. It was always warm in her childhood house.

She had to leave that place; there were too many people and they wanted to talk to her. She kept her lips pursed closed and when someone asked her a question she smiled as if she were an imbecile.

She thought they watched her throat, purple from the lilac. She’d live off lilac if she could. She loved it in her honey and her tea, she had her lipstick sent from America, lilac flavoured and shiny and thick on her lips, she wore it at home and out but she couldn’t stop herself from licking it off. She sucked on lilac lozenges from England and she cooked lilac into her porridge. She stirred lilac-flavoured sugar into her tea and she ate it by the spoonful if no one was watching.

She liked to stroke her throat because it was covered in a silky, downy hair and it felt nice on her fingers. There was hair on her large, soft stomach and she liked to stroke that, too.

The human moth was spared the embarrassment of people asking her if she was pregnant because people didn’t often see her. If she fluttered between a man and his light he’d look up and swat at her. By then she would have snipped off a corner of his shirt and have it tucked under her tongue.

She found a small apartment, up high, quiet. Some days she watched the moths outside and thought she could join them so easily.

The human moth couldn’t fly but she had flapping wings of flesh under her arms. She went walking at night, especially when the moon was waning and the lights of the houses shine so brightly the glow hurt her eyes.

The lights outside were so beautiful and varied all she could do was follow them.

She liked curtain-open people. These ones she could watch. Although curtain-closed people she could creep up and listen and she could mark the house for next time, write in chalk they couldn’t see or rub up against the letterbox or spit, or piss.

It was warm outside her apartment. The human moth sweated a lot and the talcum powder she wore caked onto her like the makeup of little old ladies. She learnt not to shake the talc on when she was soaking wet out of the bath because it clumped and was not powdery at all. Instead, she body buttered herself and then stood in the shower, tipped the shaker up.

She enjoyed the warm open air, and walked for an hour, or two, keeping her eyes on the streetlights, her hands out to catch the moths. They led her to the park, where a drunk man slumped under a light on a park bench with his elbows on his thighs. His face resting on the palms of his hands.

She was attracted to his sweat just like a clothes moth, although they don’t like the light. They’ll hide under rugs and the caterpillars love to chew on dirty clothes.

His wallet bulged out of the back pocket of his dirty pants. He’d fallen over, mud along one side of his clothing, blood oozing out of one ear.

He had a yellow wristband and this he waved at her as she sat down. He didn’t seem to mind how she looked.

“All you can drink! What do they expect is going to happen, all you can drink? Those bitches, they’re all over the big bosses, forget about the rest of us,” he said. His voice was clear and too loud. Apart from the two of them and the moths the park was empty. He looked sideways at the human moth, assessing her. Would she do? Clearly he’d been turned down by the women he worked with but the human moth thought he was lovely.

She shifted closer to him and he didn’t move away. She was glad she powdered herself; the smell of lilac rose off her and she hoped he liked it.

He said, “So, what’s your name? What’s a….woman like you doing here alone?”

She opened her mouth. She wanted to say, “My name is Lobesia. Do you want to go and have a drink with me?” She always thought of a different moth name.

But she was so unused to talking, a small cough came out. She looked at his mouth, wet, open, and she wished she could cover it up, keep it quiet.

She fluttered closer to him. He shook his head at her, a look of disgust across his face, and he stood. She smiled, lifted her arms. Kicked his feet out from under him, sat across his chest and pressed her arms across his face. Fat and fleshy, damp, she covered his mouth. She remembered a story she read, many times, called The Cocoon, about a young butterfly collector. The smell of the butterflies. And then he was smothered by them and she wondered what it would be like to die that way.

She took his wallet and his briefcase, too, because you never knew what there would be.

She wanted to powder him, stake him. But there were voices. Shouts. She was seen, noted, followed.

Back to her small, high apartment. The streetlight shone right up in and the bed rested beneath the glow of it.

A lilac bush grew in a pot on the window sill, and it seemed to exude its scent to welcome her.

She took a lilac petal, then another, filled her mouth with it. She didn’t have much time; she knew this with the sense her parents gave her, the flight response. Her parents didn’t see the human moth coming, though. They thought her well-trained, obedient, like all the other children. They were surprised.

She ate every petal off her lilac bush. She didn’t think they’d let her take it; she didn’t think they’d let her take anything. Or do anything. They’d make her talk and they’d think her crazy with every word she spoke.

She sat comfortably in her chair, a mirror set up in front of her. She wanted to get it right. She’d planned this for a long time; known that one day she would have to protect herself this way, transform herself so that she was a moth, she really was a human moth.

Opening her mouth wide, she squeezed superglue onto her bottom teeth, then shut her jaw. She was careful not too put too much, not wanting her tongue to be glued.

It tasted of pure chemical.

She squeezed glue onto her lips, then pressed them together gently.

She felt exhilarated.

The light shone brightly through her window

The human moth, no mouth, covered with powder, went out one last time, to stare into the windows, to follow the light.

Behold the human moth, who will not eat again.

Should a moth feel so hungry?

By Joel Lane

It wasn’t the blackouts that frightened Max Parry so much as the recurrent feeling that they proved the rest of his life to be unreal. They’d been happening since his late teens, usually when he was tired or hungry. It was due to a temporary overdose of the medication that had kept him alive since that dreadful summer of thirst and weariness at the end of his school years. Ever since, he’d suspected that he was a ghost, and the blackouts seemed to confirm it.

Every time it happened, he felt he was on the edge of a timeless and profound vision. The world slipped away from him, and a few details of it took on some obscure significance that held time prisoner. As he struggled to break open the mystery, his sight blurred and his hands began to shake. Sometimes he went into a violent seizure, or stood unable to move, or passed out. When he woke up, a desperate hunger took hold of him, and only sugar-rich food could restore him to any sense of himself. In the fight to recover, the hint of a vision was lost.

Occasionally the blackouts had the fragile perfection of a dance he had never learned but somehow got right first time. One day, coming home from work, Max had lost the plot while opening his front door. The key didn’t work, probably because he was turning it backwards. But he felt sure there was some lesson to be learnt. He checked the door number and even the name of the road. There was no doubt: it was Max’s house. So he must be someone else.

More often, he was left only with a sense of never having been. Which was quite hard to deal with if he was at work, or in bed with a lover. It was only bearable if he was on his own, able to see his life around him like a shattered bulb. To feel the teeth of the night worrying softly at his throat. Then he could smile and tell himself:
Worst episode ever
. In company, the only thing that mattered was getting back to normal—even though the blackout’s silent joke had normality as its punch line.

An unstable phase in his early forties caused Max to experience several bad spells in the office. His manager was unimpressed. “This is a professional environment,” she told him. “You can’t expect support from your colleagues. They’re here to work, not nurse a sick person.” But he only needed to be handed some of his own biscuits, Max said, and the problem would go away. His manager shook her head firmly. “That’s for you to sort out, on your own.” He didn’t mention to her that the blackouts made far more sense to him than the company’s brand meetings.

If he could only stitch together these damaged episodes, find their common language, he’d have the gateway to another world. But it didn’t help to bring them on deliberately. They had to happen in their own time. The medication he was on had, in the past, been used for shock treatment in mental hospitals and as a form of torture in the interrogation of suspects. It didn’t reveal its secrets to order.

He met Colin at a patient group meeting in Birmingham’s business district, where hotels and conference facilities were filling the spaces left by defunct factories. The meeting room was far too large for the group. The discussion revolved around new monitoring technology, the balancing of figures; it reminded him of brand meetings at work. Max had nothing to contribute. He’d lost the will to measure his condition. The whisper of darkness inside him was too persuasive. And the people talking about the healing powers of data didn’t look any happier than he felt. Behind their tense smiles was the corrosive fear of losing control.

Afterwards, drinking coffee and checking that he remembered the way home, Max heard an argument behind him. A man was saying, “But it’s understanding we need, not numbers. In order to make sense of the data you need to look at the individual.” A woman replied: “But the condition isn’t part of the individual. What’s there to understand? If your house is on fire you don’t try to
understand
the fire, you try to put it out.” Max turned and saw a young man in navy blue denim talking with a middle-aged doctor whose badge had the logo of a private health company.

Later, as people were drifting away, Max saw him standing alone. Their sightlines crossed and he smiled, displaying small perfect teeth. “I heard what you were saying earlier,” Max said. “About understanding the person. I’d like to know what you mean. Are you a doctor?”

The stranger shook his head. “No. I work with patients. I’m interested in creative expression.” He passed Max a tiny black card on which the letters were reversed out in blue:
Colin Harpa, Outsider Arts
. A phone number, an e-mail and a web address were printed over a ghostly image of a human face composed of vapor or ectoplasm. “Have you ever felt the most important part of you was unknown to the people around you? Like a secret even from yourself?”

Max nodded slowly. Was it possible this therapist, or whatever he was, understood the meaning of the blackouts? Colin’s pale hand touched his own. “Have a look at the website. Maybe we can help each other.”

He walked back to the city centre in a fine rain that swirled around the yellow streetlamps. The city’s true name was written in the unstable patterns of light above the rotting stone. As he tried to decipher it, memories of the old city wrote themselves over the night again and again. He came to in a taxi that he was only just able to direct to his home address. Later, he realized the driver had charged him twice: at pickup and at drop-off. His rage kept him awake half the night.

During a mild but overcast winter that felt like an endless hangover, Max and Colin met a number of times in a Jewellery Quarter pub near the old Vyse Street cemetery. It had live music, usually acoustic blues, and an impressive range of spirits. Max wasn’t sure if they had a friendship or a business relationship. The two shook hands, smiled and chatted cozily enough, but Colin always brought something to sell him and he never said no. At the back of his mind were other men, dates from his past, and though he sensed no rapport at that level the script of memory was hard to tear up.

One of the things he bought from Colin was a small, carefully wrapped pane of blue glass which Max used to repair a window in his bedroom. He’d passed out on his bed one evening and woken up to find the window cracked; he had no idea whether he’d done it or how. At night, the new pane was almost ordinary glass, only slightly tinted. But in daylight, it showed him a garden at night, its bare trees and ruined buildings silhouetted against the city’s light pollution. It could be his garden as it had looked in the past, or would look in the future. Birds flew past in descending arcs, too fast to be seen clearly. They weren’t visible through any other pane in his bedroom.

Another night, Colin sold him a box of CDs with no text except three-digit numbers, and cover images rather like the view through the blue glass. They held some kind of abstract music, jagged and repetitive, with sharp fragments of sound emerging from dull swirls—like a shattered aircraft falling out of the clouds, Max thought. The music—if it was that, rather than a recording of some industrial process—threatened to reveal something that, no matter how hard he listened, never came through. It was like going into, or coming out of, one of his bad spells. But it didn’t bring them on, and if anything it made him more stable.