I've got another bit of madness for you! For some reason, I've been in kind of a swordfish mood lately… (Is this what being trapped in an artistic rut* feels like?)
*On the plus side, my swordfish-themed-cover-art-skills seem to be improving.
Anyways, this one's definitely a rough draft, so if there's anything that feels like it ought to be cut, just say so!
Without further ado...
At 3:37 PM, Thursday, 37 years ago, the stuffed swordfish over the mantle piece began to weep. The tears were black, slightly viscous, and described by those present as smelling strongly of sandalwood and turpentine.
When the tears had not abated by 4:42, but had instead begun to pool on the hearth in what threatened to be a permanently-staining manner, Madame Z_____________ sent for the priest (the local gendarmerie and Madame Z_____________'s lawyer having already been summoned but failing to arrive in a timely manner.)
The priest was, unfortunately, in a neighboring village, performing an emergency baptism for a sick infant, but Madame Z_____________'s courier was able to locate the churchwarden, who was only removing a dead squirrel from the chapel's attic, and compel him to come in the priest's stead.
At 5:26, the warden arrived with a book of common prayer, flask of holy water, and a faint but lingering scent of dead squirrel, which he had been unable to remove in the small amount of time he was given to prepare.
The gendarme and Madame Z_____________'s lawyer had already arrived at the site, though neither had been willing to touch the fish, which had by this point begun to admit a slight but undeniable phosphorescence.
The warden looked at those assembled and, seeing no way out that would not sully the church in the eyes of state, citizens, and intelligentsia, asked for a stepladder. This having been provided, he approached the fish.
"Perhaps there is some animal magnetism strong enough to be retained even after death and stimulated now by the warmth of the fire," suggested a vacationing clerk from S.
Regulars were quick to counter that the fish had been hanging over the fire since Madame Z_____________'s father, and surely if such a reaction could be sparked by simple heat, it would have done so long ago. The clerk made to defend his claim, but at that moment silent gripped the entire assembly, for the warden had planted his ladder and now approached the fish.
It was at this point that the voice first spoke.
The warden froze with one hand outstretched.
There was much debate, afterwards, as to where the voice originated, some saying the floorboards, others the attic, or even the motionless, tear stained lips of the fish. The clerk remained adamant throughout his later treatment that the words were spoken by the warden himself using a secretly developed aptitude for ventriloquism (which had recently gained popularity in Oslo).
What all present could agree upon was the content of the message: as the hesitant warden reached out his hand to take hold of the fish's tail, a strong, deep voice cried out the words: "Here! Dig here!"
At this, the startled warden, already pressed beyond his usual limits, fell from the stepladder. The impact of this fall rattled the mantelpiece, and, despite the sturdy wires holding it to the decades-old masonry nail from which it hung, the weeping, lambent swordfish shook loose from its place and plunged to the floor, landing, point first, only 11 centimeters from the warden's head. The beast's weapon sunk a full 18 centimeters into the solid flagstone as if it had been sand. Its phosphorescence ceased immediately. The tears which continued to emerge from the stuffed and lifeless eyes at odd intervals ran down the sword and vanished through the hole that it had bored in the flagstone.
Rising to his somewhat unsteady legs, the warden requested a shovel and a prybar. They were pressed, some moments later, into his hand by the barkeeper, who had decided to act despite Madame Z_____________'s complete silence. He would later be docked two day's wages.
Armed for the task, the warden began to trace the boundaries of the stricken flagstone, pausing occasionally to run a hand across the rosary around his neck. It was a large stone, over a meter across. The mortar around it was only packed dirt, as had been common in the area some centuries before. This having been eliminated, the warden worked the prybar's thin beak into the gap and began, with sputtering effort, to shift the stone. The whole time, the swordfish continued its weeping, albeit at a slower pace.
The great stone proved to be no more than a span in depth. Its top, which had been dished and darkened by the tread of several centuries lifted (under the gasping efforts of the warden and several wordless volunteers, including the post man, a butcher’s boy, and a local procurer of pleasant company operating under the nom de guerre Rusty Renaud) to reveal a lily white underbelly, glistening with a nacreous luster reminiscent, according to several onlookers, of oyster shell. The tip of the fish's sword had pierced this surface also, and pointed, still slick with tears, into the blackness below.
When the stone had been shifted enough to permit passage, the warden requested a light, and was rewarded with a dairy farmer's lantern.
Many crowded forward to view the newly illuminated opening, which appeared to be a vertical shaft of slightly smaller dimensions than the stone which had covered it and fell to a depth a little less than a man's height. Each of the shaft’s sides glistened with the same mother-of-pearl, as if the whole chamber had been enameled. The smell of sandalwood and turpentine, joined now by a medley of lillies and laurel, grew to such strength that several windows were opened for the sake of Madame Z_____________ and other ladies of delicate composition. At the bottom of the cavity lay a sheet of light colored fabric, conforming to the shape of some unknown object over which it was stretched. In the center of this covering, glistened a dark mark where the black tears of the swordfish had fallen in the pattern of a slanted X.
Despite the brightly burning lantern in his hand and the hushed expectancy that pressed around him from every corner of the room, the warden merely crouched on the shaft's edge and gave no indication of wishing to push farther.
"I believe it is a body," said Renaud.
A kind of silent impulse shivered through the crowd. The gendarme began to shoulder his way to the edge of the pit. Sensing that his jurisdiction was imperiled by the approaching agent of the state, the warden steeled whatever nerves he had stored up in reserve and dropped into the dark below.
The room went stiller, and even the advancing gendarme moved with slowing steps and halted breath.
There was, from the unseen recess, the sound of a stifled cry.
The warden's shaking hands came into view, holding a bundle of dust-caked cloth. On the third attempt, his choking voice called for a tray. Several minutes passed before the barkeeper fought his way to the kitchen and back, carrying a silver serving tray (and earning himself another two day's docked wages when Madame Z_____________ came fully to herself). The tray was exchanged for the bundled cloth, which could now, by the light of the fire, be seen to shimmer with the same nacreous deposits as the flagstone's belly and the walls of the hidden recess, as if dozens of pearls have been sewn into its weave.
The aroma, which had before been overwhelming, now seemed (according to those nearest to the cavity) to replace the air entirely. The barkeep stood, still holding the cloth for which he had exchanged the tray, and making with his free hand a slow and shaking cross. Several of those nearest followed suit. Those in the back had begun, without objection from Madame Z_____________ (which was a major miracle in itself) to climb onto the furniture to achieve a better view of the proceedings. One enterprising individual, trapped by the front door due to the press of the crowd, began to charge admission from those outside seeking entry. (Ever have cool minds prevailed in the face of the unknown.)
All at once, the entire assembly, from the genuflecting peasants at the front to the haggling merchants at the back (where a row had been threatening to ignite over the calculation of change for the last entry transaction) fell silent. In the pit's mouth, there glimmered the glint of silver.
Slowly, and with great care to maintain a level bearing, the warden's hands rose into view. Between them was the tray.
"Take it," he hissed.
His assembled volunteers merely stood and stared. After a long moment, Renaud pushed his way to the front, seized the tray, and – with a flare which several in attendance agreed had always marked his work – set it on a nearby table.
The entire room, which had up to that point been seemingly filled to saturation, condensed its human contents into the 20 paces around the silver tray.
On it lay a human skull, surrounded by ribs and finger bones and all the other parts which comprise the total body of a man. They were all of them a radiant pearl.
Only two items remained untouched by the curious nacre which had coated all else in the shaft: one was a wooden box, the width of a large man's forearm, found to contain (when its age-black lid had been lifted) an assortment of pigments and artist's brushes. The other was a small, unfinished portrait, only a hand span across and executed in a Gothic style, depicting a young girl in blue, holding in one hand a flowering branch.
The skull exhibited what several men of military bearing called a saber cut, stretching almost from ghostly ear to ghostly ear. The edges of the cut glittered with pearl like the rest. Those nearest, despite scarves and kerchiefs pressed over nose and mouth, began to grow faint from the scent of lily and laurel.
When doctor's salts had returned Madame Z_____________ to the full possession of her faculties, and room had been forced for her beside the table by two of her grimmer footman, she stood (breath guarded by a silk square dashed with absinthe) and observed the unusual thing which had been unearthed beneath her floor.
"Take it outside before we choke," she said.
It was a great struggle, due to the crowd, for her footman to bear the tray even a few meters, but the gendarme was soon induced to lend the weight of state to the proceedings, and eventually (after several citizens had been given their own blows to the head by which to remember the occasion), the procession reached the door, and through it, the courtyard, taking with them the overpowering aroma.
A doctor was summoned for those whose sensory faculties had suffered in the face of such stimulus, and a tincture of cocaine and laudanum was administered to several whose nerves required steadying. A servant began to open a window, but Madame Z_____________ forbade it, lest the overwhelming scent reenter the building.
Official inquiry found the skull to measure ____________ centimeters in circumference, with a weight of ___________ kilograms, the unusual heft of the item attributed to the pearlescent mineral deposits which had completely coated each bone. Fully assembled, the skeleton stood at __________ centimeters.
While members of the peasantry took the paraphernalia discovered with the remains to mean that the deceased had been in life a painter, experts found the skull to exhibit the proportions associated with criminality and brutishness. Most likely, the corpse was that of a common robber fleeing with stolen goods during the Revolutionary instability of the previous century.
Several, led by the visiting clerk, accused the warden of malfeasance in the whole ordeal, suggesting that skeletal remains could have easily been procured from the local churchyard that the warden tended and planted on Madame Z_____________'s property during recent renovations (the remains having first been enameled using an electrical plating technique that the clerk had witnessed used at the studio of Mssr. K_____________, a local sculptor specializing in copper-finished statuary for gardens.)
Before his departure for a restorative health holiday in Munich, the clerk's accusation gained enough momentum that a criminal investigation was undertaken against the warden, though it was eventually abandoned in the face of (sometimes violent) peasant protest.
The remains themselves were taken into the custody of the Marquis, where they presumably perished with the rest of his collected oddities during the most recent unpleasantness.
The swordfish which instigated the entire event had a much more mysterious fate: it was discovered – the very evening of the disturbance – to have vanished entirely from Madame Z_____________'s premises. Several saw this is undeniable proof of hoax, the swordfish surely containing mechanisms responsible for its strange behavior which the perpetrator could not allow to be discovered. One particularly fervent cartwright vehemently argued the opposite: its earthly mission accomplished, the sainted icththyan had returned to that realm from which it came, a place that he termed "the magnetic origin," and described in greater detail across a long-running series of pamphlets, illustrated by his own hand. At his death, he was found to have sired no less than 26 children with members of his small but impressionable following, and the modest estate that he had amassed through his writings (and hands-on magnetic therapies) vanished as instantly as the fish on which it was founded. One of his many sons now leads the movement, though he has enjoyed only a fraction of his father's success (having sired only a modest three children at the time of this writing, two of them with his lawfully wedded wife.)
While it is difficult to imagine one of those present successfully secreting a 159 centimeter swordfish on his or her person, the establishment was heavily crowded and filled with great excitement which distracts even the most observant of minds.
This author shall refrain from judgment. Decades have now passed, and the matter is unlikely to be settled in any satisfactory manner. Indeed, the public has far more pressing matters to hold its fear and interest than the strange occurrence of a Thursday afternoon 37 years ago. Yet, it is hard for those who were present on that day of strangeness (a company shrinking with each day, for time is ever hungry) to not feel a certain mental gravitation to its mysteries. Perhaps, they are drawn by the magnetic origin of the Cartwright's pamphlets. Or, perhaps, it is merely the natural magnetism of youthful memories to aging minds that have seen much change in disaster since that time.
This author has been no exception.
It is a shamefully easy thing to witness the shocking as a youth – to feel the grip of fear and fascination – and then lose them in the sea of all life's follies and pursuits. To the youth, every passion is wild and unknown. It is only in age that we learn to recognize the mundane. Felt with all the novelty of first encounter, these things – the ambitions of unremarkable career, the thrills of an empty love affair, the joyless compulsions of sport and chance – these things known hollow to older eyes dazzle the youth's and usurp the wonderment to due true marvels.
A thousand novelties have come and gone, a thousand innovations and a thousand horrors. This author has chronicled them all. None compares to the strangeness of that Thursday.
Herein lies recorded all that this author witnessed while standing on the sofa at the establishment of Madame Z_____________, and subsequently read in pamphlets and papers across the decades since.
The narrative does not end here.
Driven by memory and the kind of voiceless grief that comes to one who has glimpsed two paths and chosen what he realizes too late to be the lesser, the author of this account recently ventured a return journey to the site of that great hoax or marvel 37 years ago.
One dreams that the past is simply a foreign land – one that it would be possible to revisit if only the right visas could be procured. Madame Z_____________'s establishment proved otherwise. The building still stands (on revolutionarily renamed roads) but its dimensions have been dramatically altered, and the ornamentation of the stone exterior which had been a trademark of the place entirely stripped away, leaving just a husk of pockmarked masonry. It is now used for the storage of cured meats.
Madame Z_____________, according to the few knowledgeable locals of sufficient age to remember such things, relocated to S_____________ only a few short years after the incident, hoping that the sea air would revitalize her fraying nerves. Written correspondence with officials of that city revealed that she died 18 years ago of advanced palsy.
The warden had no borders to hide him from the coming wrath, and so bore the full brunt of the future. He was taken in the second wave of arrests. After 13 years in a reeducation facility in R__________ , he returned and reassumed his role as groundskeeper at the church, which had since been converted into a library and dance hall. He executed these duties to the satisfaction of his superiors for another 13 years until his death, which came only a little over a decade ago, when he fell from a ladder while attempting to remove a dead squirrel from the library-dance-hall's attic (not, we hope, the same with which he had struggled decades before). He was very quietly in the new commoners’ mass grave, the old churchyard cemetery he once tended (and from which certain skeptics claimed he procured the skeleton) having been converted into a lovers' garden long before.
Inquiries after Rusty Renaud proved fruitless, though his trade has grown to be one of the area's strongest industries.
There is very little else that can be said about the one-time establishment of Madame Z_____________ and its environs. Youthful eyes see a youthful world. This author no longer has the apparatus for hope and wonder.
_
I (if the reader will forgive being so informally addressed) had originally intended to end my account with the previous statement, but a certain event on the return trip has lodged within my brain and seized for itself the place of true ending, though I cannot fully understand it.
We (for this old man can no longer travel without company) had disembarked at the first stop to stretch aching legs and take some solace in the sun. Our location was a country village of half the size of the one that we had just quit and less than a day's journey from it by traditional means of travel. It bore all the signs of the rural decline with which we have grown so accustomed over the last decades: fallen fences, fallow fields, a few anemic goats grazing on unmarked graves. The bullets of the revolution still marked the walls of the nearest houses. It was in all aspects sad and unremarkable. Yet, I could not help but walk down those dusty, half abandoned streets: there was a compelling force that I do not feel in the alleys of my own city. Despite the complaining of my joints, I moved on with a quickening pace, though I knew not where or why I moved.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the impulse was gone, and I found myself alone and winded, with aching limbs and that peculiar irritation that comes with being lost in a small place.
Cursing my impetuousness, I limped to lean against a nearby structure and wait for my companions to find me. I was already hearing their chides in my mind when my hand touched the stone of the wall.
All at once, I stopped. Through the ages, the sensation of youth rushed into my fingertips. The stone on which my hand rested was from Madame Z_____________'s.
The structure was small, hardly more than a dacha, and the stonework was a haphazard collection of scavenged blocks: here a piece of red granite from Madame Z_____________'s façade, there a glinting flash of half-shaped marble that may have once been a member of her garden statuary; the entire enterprise had been constructed piecemeal with pirated masonry.
I continued around the structure, my hand tracing a dozen half forgotten memories: the garden chase, the blackened chimney pipe that I once climbed to win a foolish bet, the porch where Selena held her secret little court.
On the far side, facing away from the street, stood an open door. The impetuity of youth took hold of me once more, and, without even pausing to consider whose property it might be, I stooped beneath the low, low arch and stepped inside.
It was a chapel, in the style of the secret churches of the revolutionary years, built low and thick to hide the voices of the cantors. There was no chanting now, though a few faithful candles flickered in the corners, dancing shadows across the crudely painted country saints that covered every wall. They were daubed directly on the brick in a dozen cheap and clashing pigments with a highly interpretive sense of scale and anatomy: a colossal Francis towered above a Bernadette that rose barely to his knee beside a kneeling David, who lifted in a posture of anguished supplication two arms of disconcertingly disparate proportions.
Despite these unwitting lapses into the grotesque, there was an unifying gravity to every image, all through that saintly menagerie, there ran an almost electric current, drawing the viewer's eye up and forward, to the chapel's magnetic center: a large portrait of a young girl dressed in blue, holding a blossoming branch. At the foot of the image, resting on a trio of nails stabbed straight into the eclectic masonry, lay the withered, beak-like weapon of a swordfish. Its sides were stained with something not unlike tar.
I could still smell, over the scent of beeswax and old incense, the lingering aroma of sandalwood and turpentine.
A peasant woman genuflected in a corner. I would have thought her old when I was young, but she could have been no more than a baby when the cause of her devotion all took place. Her prayers were whispered, but I thought I could make out, by the repetition of the word, what I took to be a name. I opened my mouth to ask a question but could not form it.
Then, I heard the voices of my companions calling out with urgency and irritation, and whatever I had thought was gone. Both time and transportation wait for no man.
Outside, the sky was bright and gray.
The woman turned as we departed. Over her still-lovely face was a birthmark in the shape of a tilted X, or perhaps, as I am sure she thought it, a cross.
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