The fire worm, p.11
The Fire Worm, page 11
No longer was he looking along a black rocky tunnel, but rather down a fleshy, phosphorescent tube — at the end of which the three men postured tiny as flies. For a while then Harry saw double. Something floppy was advancing toward him, humming that sickening song, rolling over and over on too many rubbery arms or legs. Something white as tripe. A fat coiled-up worm, with other worms clinging to it. The thing wasn’t coming along the passage. No, it wasn’t! It was sliding and tumbling slowly through the solid rock alongside. A worm that could pass through stone!
The creature was distant no longer. It was upon Harry — and he shrieked out. The thing was clutching his hand in a suckery, slobbery grip. It was pulling him. It was drawing his forearm inside the solid stone, transforming his flesh and bone to something ghostly.
The thing also sucked at his terrified thoughts, lapping them as a cat laps milk. It sucked his existence inside the stone along with it, inward, downward.
Cold, the cold! The locking cold!
Yet fires were a-burning. Fires in the heart of the world! In the lava entrails; in the interior oceans of molten rock. Fires which made gold flow like blood through veins! Phoenix fires, of power. Fires of foreverlasting. Oh no, not the fires of Hell — but fires which transmuted the stuff of coal into bright immortal diamond. Vital fires of the primal planet, before it scummed over with soil and fields, with trees and houses.
Creatures, incarnate forces, thrived in the boiling heart of Earth in extremest heat. Oh no, not devils, though people might think them devils. Born in the Venusian heat of early Earth, as the world cooled and as metals and mountains and meadows hardened, as clammy marshlands formed a skin, they had descended into the furnace depths.
These creatures could be called up from the stiff, molten depths — to writhe in cold exile seeking a means to return to the original fire; back from the cold, the locking cold. Fierce passions, wild desire, mad greed, fiery spurting blood, the burning of the brain which is insanity: needles of nightmare could pierce the cool skin of the world and let the exiled elementals return to the depths.
The chilly tentacles released Harry. His fire wasn’t hot enough yet. It let go; yet part of the creature still touched him, and would continue to touch him, to stroke and stoke his fire, if only that could be made to burn mad bright.
If a fish is hooked up from its own cold depths, does it not fight to return? Particularly if the fish could sense the fisherman’s feelings, and play these on a line …
A fish can flop for hours struggling for its breath while razor-air saws its gills; lying limp then thrashing again. A creature of elemental mercurial fire can exist out of its element for fossil centuries …
Harry writhed in bed, sweating the sheets. Memory and dream throttled one another.
“ … You gain the wager, Sir William. I would not wish to win. What is in here unseen, should never be seen. The Indian tribes are aware of such … such ravaging forces from beneath nature. This is not a cage I would enter.”
“The gold … ” Elwes’ voice shook. Maybe his long shanks were knocking together, but he repeated, “What about the gold inside?”
Van Amburgh snorted. “Gold? Yes, I sense a kind of gold, and more. You have your gold, Sir William: one hundred sovereigns in payment for this encounter tonight. And should you try to earn extra by consulting the gentlemen of the press I shall return — and tame you with my whip! For the sake of every living soul, this business ends in silence. Understood?”
“I know you! You’re Captain Bell’s boy from Front Street. Why, you snooper, you’ve been spying on us! Get up!”
“The boy looks dazed out of his wits,” murmured Van Amburgh’s companion.
“That he does,” agreed the beast-charmer. “I think he may have experienced something which we only felt brush by us. You all right, lad?”
Harry gibbered, vomited.
“That’ll teach you to mind other people’s business,” said Shanky high-mindedly. “What was your idea? Why, I ask myself? Ah! I begin to perceive. Master Bell … Mrs. Halliday’s slut of a niece … and a matter in which I concern myself in the public interest — regarding that friend of agitators, Miss Martineau, for whom we’re supposed to feel such generous sympathy! The thread leads back, does it not? Does it not indeed?”
Van Amburgh said sharply, “I know nothing of these circumstances. However, Sir William, despite your graceful airs you appear to be a deplorable person. Do you not see that this boy is badly shaken? His spirit has been mauled. Hand me your lantern, Brendan. Support the lad. Let us leave this vile place quickly, before worse … ”
In his dream Harry was trapped in the rock. Jane’s voice called out to him desperately, pleadingly. Drunken soldiers laughed at her.
“Look at that mad tart wailin’ after hor sweetheart.”
“Can none of you heroes help me?”
“She needs a soldier, doon on the sands.”
“Question is, does a soldier need hor?”
“Harr-eeee! Harr-eeee!”
“What’s the hot hurry, lass?”
Slowly, as if through suffocating mud, Harry was pulled by her voice through the mass of the Castle rock upward toward air and life … and fire bubbled in his mouth.
The man called Brendan poured brandy down Harry’s throat so that he jerked upright in the packed snug of the Gib, coughing and spluttering.
“I’m … I’m aal reet.”
Distorted red faces of soldiers leered and swam amid clouds of dizzying tobacco smoke. He shouldn’t be here. What would his Mam and Dad think?
“Let me be!”
“There’s gratitude for you.” Elwes fixed Harry with a malevolent eye that promised for the future. Something had twisted up inside Shanky, thought Harry. The man’s carefree reprobate heart had been stained. Yet the baronet swiftly recovered his bright good manners and amiability.
“Speaking of gratitude, my good partner in adventure, hmm?”
“We’ll settle our affairs at that other inn,” growled Van Amburgh.
“In privacy, I trust?” Elwes’ glance at Harry was all benevolence now.
“Aa can walk hyem on me own.” Harry struggled up. “Thanks, Mista Van Amburgh.”
“So you know me, lad?”
“Aa saw yor show. Aa’ll not say nothin’. Aa must gan hyem.”
A red-hot worm forged through the bowels of the world, and through his own bowels. A white-hot worm swam in fire, its element. Harry found that he was holding his penis: a hot swollen worm had joined itself to him. He tried to pull this off. The image of Jane appeared in his mind, hectic with embarrassed desire.
“Escort her to my cave,” whispered the worm. “Lie her down. Pull up her dirty skirt and her petticoats. Who’ll notice any extra stains?”
The worm shivered. It was cold as ice, but it felt hot enough to Harry. The worm needed to plunge itself into the inner heat of Jane, her blood heat. He writhed, loathing himself, sick in the head. He couldn’t. Mustn’t. Wouldn’t.
He passed out.
He had led Jane into the cave and his worm was mesmerizing her. Her mouth was agape, her eyes watered rheumily. Then he was turning her over on to her front, because of course he mustn’t give her a baby. So instead he parted her tripe-white buttocks wide and thrust up from behind into the tight heat where no baby could be made; thrust until he burst.
He woke soaked and sticky, thinking in despair, “She is not that person at all! I am not that person!”
However, his worm kept on touching him; the worm that corrupts.
Chapter Fourteen
On Saturday morning Jack wanted me to go to the Central Post Office down by St. Nick’s Cathedral to check out his mail. High time that Mandarin made an offer for the latest addition to the Cannon canon,Gorgon Gaze . This had been sent off a good six weeks earlier, a fortnight before Tony ever came into my life.
On the street I noticed a good few more veils being worn by women, some of whom looked like beekeepers. This wasn’t just another symptom of the new puritan modesty being enforced by the scourge, which might eventually transform our towns into Islamic ones. There was a growing dread of being bitten by any midges or mosquitoes which might be breeding in puddles on derelict land. Liked a nip of blood, didn’t they? So they might,might conceivably, transmit AIDS to a few people in a million.
So might fleas. Since the new strain of AIDS had got into part of the animal population, the number of domestic pets was declining. Moggies were being put down by scared owners. People were shooting at cats with air guns, crippling them. It was the Middle Ages again; the witch fever, with cats as victims. Dogs were fumigated, kept indoors, only walked with muzzles. Houses of former pet owners, were fumigated to kill fleas, since hungry fleas could bite people, couldn’t they, and sup their blood? Memories of the Black Death. Irrational nonsense — but it gripped people.
At the post office I collected half a dozen letters and a fat Jiffy bag from Mandarin, which presumably contained copies of some French or German edition.
Usually I wouldn’t let Jack open his mail until the evening. In this case I made an exception, since I’d spotted Mandarin’s postal franking, first class, on one of the letters. So I walked along past the Lit and Phil library to the Station Hotel in Neville Street to see whether the lounge bar was open yet. It was, and had no other customers. I took a small bottle of Brown Ale off to a padded corner.
Yes indeed, the letter was from Sally Butterworth. Mandarin were willing to offer £5,000. But first …
Sally wanted some changes; and she hated Jack’s title.
“Gorgon Gazesounds like a blend ofGormenghast andGorgonzola ,” she wrote. “And it’s confusing — not everyone knows what a gorgon is. Couldn’t you simply call itThe Gaze , to be in key with your other books? That would look much neater on the cover.”
Readers would know what a gorgon was all right, when they’d read the book! A woman whose look could petrify, who could turn a man (or another woman) to stone — psychically, and physically too in part or in whole. In the AIDS context the symbolism of the gorgon was obvious enough to me; however, I felt that Jack had handled the treatment subtly. There were some wonderfully disturbing scenes, but none in which a penis simply turned to stone.
Sally was also unhappy about the main character’s “casual promiscuity”, as she put it.
She — the gorgon character — could hardly be otherwise, could she?
Well, these days sex had almost entirely vanished from advertisements on billboards, on TV, in magazines. (And Page Three was gone forever.) You couldn’t sell vodka or perfume or fast cars any longer by suggesting that these products would increase your chance of scoring sexually — not when that way lay (perhaps!) an incurable disease. The accent now was on health and efficiency, on family, on personal and spiritual fulfillment. Driving a fast car was a private, Zen-like high; sipping vodka was a way of imbibing the soul of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Plus, there were some very odd and creative attempts to evolve a new iconography of polymorphous-perverse fetishism. Romantic relationships with inanimate objects, you know? I could foresee sex-robots being developed quite soon for flexible, pneumatic gratification, if technology was up to it. These soft robotswould not necessarily resemble the human form too closely, provided that certain curves and openings and protrusions were coded in satisfyingly.
The Gazewas Jack’s problem. Likewise the other letters. I finished my ale and set off up Grainger Street. I detoured through the covered market, crowded with shoppers, because Jack enjoyed the sight and smell of blood and sawdust, and all the display of black and white puddings, knuckles of beef, tripes, faggots, hearts, livers, brains, half sheep’s heads. These gave him ideas and images; nourished him.
On impulse, I decided to cut through Fenwick’s. A few minutes later I found myself in the book area, where I stopped to check the titles in the horror section. Naturally Jack kept his works locked up in an oak cabinet in our study back home, so it was amusing to see those same books nakedly on open shelves. Why not rearrange some, with more covers facing outward? I stooped to do so.
“Hullo, Dr. Cunningham!”
It was Tony Smith.
Of course. The music department was just along from the books. He could have seen me coming.
“Do you read horror books, Doctor?”
“Um … not really. No.”
“Why are you looking at them, then?”
“A cover caught my eye.” I had my hand onThe Goblin by Jack Cannon. An evil red flaming imp grinned and bared its teeth. Tony took the book from me.
“Could be psychologically interesting,” I joked. “Maybe it’s a book about compulsive eating.” (Oh no it wasn’t.)
“Oh yeah?” My joke fell flat. “Jack Cannon, eh?” he read. “Wonder who he is, when he’s at home? Makes a bundle out of it, I bet! You going to buy this?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“What a high-pressure salesman you are.”
“Maybe you don’tneed a copy.”
What the hell did that mean? How could he possibly suspect … ?
You being such a good writer yourself already,” he added.
I realized that in my zipper bag were several letters and one whopping package all addressed to Jack Cannon. Was the bag zipped up properly?
(“Don’tlook at it, you idiot!”)
I visualized the bag spilling its contents over the carpet of the store, the Jiffy bag bursting open, exposing half a dozen identical copies of a German horror with Jack’s name on it … Oh, so we get published in foreign countries so that nobody will know the truth in England?
“The way you wrote up about Gavin and the cave, Doctor — what did you think I meant?”
I glanced in the direction of the music department, where the jolly soundtrack ofOklahoma was playing. Two female assistants were on duty, by my count. The blonde one was serving a fat man. The brunette was arranging a cassette display. Which of the two was Carol Smith? Or was neither of them Tony’s wife, to whom he could no longer satisfactorily make love?
(“Fuck, John. Fuck.”)
I returned my attention toThe Goblin, as if I had never seen such a book before; as if Tony was recommending it to me.
(“Tell him that you’re here to sneak a look at him and Carol interacting. It’s plausible. That’s why you were hiding behind the shelves.”)
“Why hullo, Doctor!”
It was Brenda Jarvis, with a canvas shopping bag.
(“Bloody Piccadilly Circus today.”)
Brenda wore her straight black hair to shoulder length, framing a somewhat ruddy face which I suppose indicated high blood pressure, not that she was under any particular stress that I knew of, either at home where she lived with her parents, or in Jesmond Road.
(“Maybe she’s frustrated, John. Pent-up.”)
Mother didn’t exactlypester Brenda. It was Brenda who ran upstairs at regular intervals. She had quite a trim figure. Brown boots disappeared under a long, dark-green tartan skirt. A tweed jacket cinched a tight pea-green pullover which moulded firm, moderately prominent breasts. She favoured a bright-red lipstick, but with her skin colour that wasn’t too blatant. Not that much skin was showing; only her face. I noticed that she was wearing thin tan gloves.
“Buying a book, are you, Doctor?” She peered at the cover. “I wouldn’t fancy meeting him on a dark night!”
(No I am not buying a book!)
“This is my receptionist, Miss Jarvis,” I told Tony.
“I know. I’ve been in her office, remember? Fancy you both bumping into each other in Fenwick’s.” Tony sounded suspicious.
(“That’s because Brenda’s here to give a woman’s assessment of Carol.”)
I beamed at Brenda. “Indeed, an unexpected pleasure. Maybe you’d like a quick drink?” Anything to disentangle the situation.
Brenda beamed back. “That’s very kind. I’d love one.” She continued beaming, her face like a blush.
“We’ll be running along,” I said to Tony. “See you at the usual time next week, mmm?”
“Any reason why not?” Tony still heldThe Goblin. “Do you thinkI ought to read this?”
“God, no.”
(“Thanks a heap, squire.”)
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Well, because … ” Because I daren’t let you! In case you recognize some mannerism of mine. Turns of phrase, attitudes, quirks of thought.
“Because,” I murmured to him, “a horror novel — whatever’s in it, and I’m sure I wouldn’t know — could conceivably colour what you tell me next about you-know-what.”
“Do you think so?”
“Suppose one of your past lives was located in the Wild West, I certainly wouldn’t advise reading something by J. T. Edson just at the moment! You mustn’t read any horror novels. Right? Ah, we must see about that drink.”
In my confusion, I took Brenda by the arm.
So there we were in another lounge bar, myself with my second Brown Ale of the morning, Brenda happy with a Martini and lemonade; and with my company too.
“Do you mind if I call you John, while we’re being sociable?”
“Not at all.”
We talked about my mother. More to the point, Brenda talked about my mother.
“She’ll be delighted to hear about us meeting and having a drink. She’s a bit worried about you, you know? Not enjoying life enough, not getting out, she says. For a drink, or a meal, or a dance.”
“I don’t dance.”
“Do you like Chinese food?” she asked.
“No. Indian.”
“Oh, I like Indian too. I hear there’s a fabulous new restaurant in Newgate Street. The Star of Bengal. Could I invite you out for a meal, John? As a birthday treat! It’s your birthday in a fortnight.”
Thank you, Mother.
“At my age, birthdays are best ignored.”
“Nonsense, John. You aren’t old. You’re a man in his prime.”
Oh gorgon you, I thought to myself.
