Almost Insentient, Almost Divine Read online

  ALMOST INSENTIENT, ALMOST DIVINE

  D. P. WATT

  Also by D.P. Watt

  Pieces for Puppets and Other Cadavers

  An Emporium of Automata

  The Phantasmagorical Imperative and other Fabrications

  Conflagration

  For Samuel Raphael Watt

  A child gave me a key and said, this is the key to the snow.

  Everything we experience is an answer.

  Jürgen von der Wense, A Shelter for Bells,

  trans. Kirston Lightowler and Herbert Pfostl

  Almost Insentient, Almost Divine, by D.P. Watt

  All stories copyright © 2016 by D.P. Watt

  Cover art copyright © 2016 by Tran Nguyen

  Cover design copyright © 2016 by Vince Haig

  Interior design, typesetting, and layout copyright © 2016 by Courtney Kelly

  Proof-reader: Carolyn Macdonell-Kelly

  Publication History

  “Mors Janua Vitae,” “The Pornographer’s Calendar,” and “Lotska” are original to this collection

  “With Gravity, Grace,” “In Comes I,” and “The Mechanised Eccentric,” The Transfiguration of Mr Punch, Egaeus Press, 2013

  “A Delicate Craft,” Aickman’s Heirs, edited by Simon Strantzas, Undertow Publications, 2015

  “Shallabalah,” Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter #26, 2014

  “Myself/Thyself,” Terror Tales of the Highlands, edited by Paul Finch, Gray Friars Press, 2015

  “Mr Egare,” Sorcery and Sanctity, Hieroglyphic Press, 2013

  “A Hive of Pain,” Transactions of the Flesh, Zex Press, 2013

  “Honey Moon,” A Soliloquy for Pan, Egaeus Press, 2015

  “At the Sign of the Burning Leaf,” Booklore, edited by Alcebiades Diniz and Jonas Ploeger, Zagava, 2016

  “The Man We All Imagined I Might Have Been,” Dreams of Ourselves, Zex Press, 2014

  The Usher, Dunham’s Manor Press chapbook, 2015

  “Archontes Ascendant,” The Gift of the Kos’Mos, edited by Damian Murphy and Geticus Polus, Ex Occidente Press, 2016

  First Edition

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Undertow Publications

  Pickering, ON Canada

  [email protected] / http://www.undertowbooks.com

  CONTENTS

  The Terrible Foolish Wisdom of the Puppet: A Preface, by Timothy J. Jarvis

  SOMEWHERE

  With Gravity, Grace

  A Delicate Craft

  Shallabalah

  Myself/Thyself

  Mr Egare

  A Hive of Pain

  ELSEWHERE

  Mors Janua Vitae

  Honey Moon

  At the Sign of the Burning Leaf

  In Comes I

  The Man We All Imagined I Might Have Been

  NOWHERE

  The Mechanised Eccentric

  The Pornographer’s Calendar

  The Usher

  Archontes Ascendant

  Lotska

  About the Author

  The Terrible Foolish Wisdom of the Puppet: A Preface

  by Timothy J. Jarvis

  “Does that mean,” I said in some bewilderment, “that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?”

  “Of course,” he said, “but that’s the final chapter in the history of the world.”

  Heinrich von Kleist, “The Puppet Theatre”

  New-fallen snow lay like a shroud over the picked carcass of Highland Park, Michigan. In an apartment, in a derelict tenement house, on a block of empty lots, rubble and ash, Thomas Ligotti, pale, eyes watery behind the thick lenses of his thin-rimmed spectacles, stood looking down at a cast-iron strongbox and a cardboard box on the floor. A miserable apartment, dingy, bare, with plaster walls blistered and flaking and the hue of old bone, floorboards warped. It was almost as cold inside as without; the window panes were rime etched, and Ligotti’s breath ghosted. But the cold didn’t seem to bother him, though he wore only a black t-shirt, thin sports jacket, and cotton slacks. Hunkering down beside the strongbox, he took a key from his pocket and unlocked the padlock securing the box’s hasp. His hands were like spiders, fingers long, spindly. Lifting the lid of the box, he took something out, something wrapped in a grey woollen blanket.

  Holding this thing tight, he raised it to his mouth, muttered to it. “November seventeenth, two thousand and seven. Nearly thirty years since I found you. Or rather, you found me. How time flies.”

  He then looked up, gazed wistfully at a large patch of damp on the wall before him. Some time passed, then he sighed, began whispering to the thing once more. “But it’s time now for us to part. You need a new puppeteer.” He laughed, hoarse, then coughed, spluttered. “I’m going to mail you to England. To the bowels of England. You’ll like that, won’t you? Closer to home.”

  Part unwrapping the object, Ligotti solemnly put his lips to what looked a rudimentary carven head. Then swaddled it again and placed it in the cardboard box, nestling it in the foam packing material with which the box was filled, before closing and sealing, with packing tape, the lid.

  *

  The cherry trees were in full blossom, bright white, pink, the sweet, cloying scent drifting in the streets, when, in the spring of 1970, Angela Carter came across a weird fetish while browsing the shelves of a junk shop in the Kōenji district of Tokyo. She was enthralled by it, bought it, kept it a few months. Finally, though, the bad dreams, the sleepless nights, wore her out. She tried to sell it, then to throw it away, but it kept finding its way back to her. Finally, she hit on the plan of sending it somewhere far from her, somewhere unlikely. She chose, at random, the Ford motor factory in Dearborn, and posted it one day in late autumn.

  *

  It was a harsh winter, the European winter of 1941 to ’42. Perhaps the din of war woke, from slumbers beneath northern glaciers, a tribe of ice giants, who irked, smote the continent.

  It was a season of blizzards, of frozen seas, a bitter season.

  In London, there was skating on the Serpentine, and snow mantled the rubble of the bombed-out districts to the east of the city. In Paris, the Seine was so cold that when a dancer from les Folies Bobino pushed a soldier of the Waffen-SS, who, drunk, had followed her out of the club and was pestering her, and he stumbled into the grey river, his heart gave out on the instant and he slipped under with barely a splash. In Prussia, one of Hitler’s dogs, turned out of the bunker at the Wolf’s Lair for gobbling up a pork knuckle left out in the kitchen by a cook preparing a meal for some guests who didn’t follow the Führer’s strict dietary regimen, froze rigid, was not found till the next morning. There was much remorse over the incident.

  In the Drohobycz Ghetto, Bruno Schulz stole several hanks of tobacco from the residence of his Gestapo protector, Landau. He shared them with family, friends, and acquaintances. Lacking papers to roll with, they resorted to using squares ripped from the draft of Schulz’s partially completed novel, The Messiah. By spring, the entire manuscript had been torn up and smoked. And the backstreets of the ghetto in Warsaw were peopled with bizarre chimeras, whole families frozen, huddled together.

  In Leningrad, the besieged ate bread baked from dough that was mostly sawdust, mothers smothered, butchered, and cooked in stews their youngest children so that their older offspring might not starve, and Daniil Kharms, disgraced author of books for children, provocateur, and scribbler of riotous tales and erotic poems in secret notebooks, wasted away in the psychiatric ward of the city prison, till one day, gaunt and frail, he slipped
on some filth on the floor of his cell, fell, hit his head on the iron frame of his cot, and died, observing, with his last breath, “It’s a mean filthy little world.” And, not far away, to the south and west of the city, the folk of a small farming community on the shores of Lake Peipus were taught of, by a village elder, the ancestral tradition of the Winter Sleep, and hibernated the cold months away, wrapped in furs, sustained only by mouthful of hard bread, washed down with water, once each day.

  Even in Marseille, a city known for its mild winters, there were sharp frosts. And when the Mistral blew it was like a slap to the face and a knife in the lungs.

  André Breton and a number of other prominent surrealists, having fled German-occupied France, holed up in a villa on the outskirts of the city, awaiting passage to the United States. They were fraught times. The corrupt government of Marshall Petain was hostile to the group, their radicalism, their irreverence, and they were harried when they went out. And the harsh weather was further incitement not to spend too long abroad.

  The motley band whiled away the time by coming up with a new pack of playing cards, along surrealist principles. Hieroglyphs on the court cards symbolized persons of import to the movement, from writers to literary characters, from thinkers to revolutionaries. The Joker was the only figure not original; they used Alfred Jarry’s sketch of his grotesque anti-hero, Père Ubu.

  But there had been an earlier design for this card, by Max Ernst. It depicted an effigy of gnarled wood, a travesty of the human form, with a squat torso, twisted limbs, a head with rough carved, yet hideous features. It dangled by wires from a crossbar in the grip of a black claw. Ernst called it, “La marionnette fou”, said it symbolized, “the terrible foolish wisdom of the puppet.” He told the others his design had been inspired by a pagan fetish he’d found in a junk shop in Montmartre, bought, and hung on the wall in his studio.

  Tristan Tzara, who was also in Marseille that winter, on seeing Ernst’s “La marionnette fou” advised him to burn it. When Ernst asked why he should, Tzara retorted, “Have you seen that thing, that idol?” Ernst said he had, told Tzara it had watched over him while he painted some years, but that he’d had to leave it behind when he fled Paris. Tzara slammed his hand down on the table. “Don’t you know what you’re fooling with? You might unleash forces best tethered.”

  Ernst remarked that this was precisely the point of the Marseille deck, but Tzara shook his head. “There are liberating energies. But there are energies that are death, pure and simple.”

  Ernst sneered.

  “Just ask Duchamp why he gave up art for chess,” Tzara went on. “He’ll tell you.”

  “I know why,” Ernst came back. “I’ve known Marcel for years. It’s because chess is pure, can’t be bought or sold.”

  Tzara shook his head. “That’s not it, that’s not it at all. Ask him why he really gave up art for chess.”

  “Whatever, I don’t see what that has to do with my burning the card.”

  Tzara took his leave, saying only, as he went out, “Well, it’s on your head.”

  Over dinner that evening, Ernst, laughing, told the others about his row with Tzara. “He’s an old woman before his time.” But that night something happened, which Ernst would tell no one about, and, next morning, when the household came down for breakfast, they found him sitting at the sturdy oak table in the kitchen, wan, shivering, his robe wrapped around him, a burnt match in his right hand, and “La marionnette fou” ash on a plate before him.

  It wasn’t for a while, not till July 1944, that Ernst got round to putting Tzara’s question to Duchamp. They were at a party, hosted by a minor art patron named Emmanuel Golding, in an apartment in a Greenwich Village brownstone. The night was close, and many of the revellers were crowded onto the fire-escape balcony outside the apartment, where it was cooler. Ernst and Duchamp were out there, leaning on the railing, looking out over the turmoil of night-time Manhattan. They’d both been in New York for over two years at that point, had met on many occasions, but good times and drink had helped Ernst forget what had happened that night in Marseille. And, besides, the unearthed horrors of the Nazis had blotted other horrors from his mind.

  But that evening, he was jostled by the throng out on the balcony and, turning, saw they were clearing a space for two young women who danced clasping tailors’ dummies. This set Ernst’s heart scrabbling in his chest, and he turned to Duchamp.

  “Why did you really give up art for chess?”

  “You know very well,” came the response. “Art has been caught up in the chariot wheels of hateful Mammon.”

  Ernst nodded. Then told Duchamp about “La marionnette fou”, of the things he’d seen, that the card had shown him.

  Duchamp drained his glass of wine at a gulp, his hand shaking.

  “Something similar happened to me after I finished my Large Glass. Those mannequins, the bachelors, they haunted me. Of course, I couldn’t destroy it. I couldn’t.”

  Ernst sipped at his Old Fashioned. “Why not?”

  “Are you joking? All those years, that fine work?”

  “But if you were scared?”

  “Actually,” Duchamp said, “I think the Glass now keeps me safe somehow. And I got rid of that thing.”

  Ernst nodded.

  “How did you come by it?” Duchamp asked.

  “Found it in a brocanteur near la Place de Montmartre.”

  “Well then, je regrette, because that’s the place I left it.”

  Ernst pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “When and where did you come across it?”

  “In nineteen twelve, in Munich. Paul Klee gave it to me. We met only briefly. He was carrying that thing around. Said it repulsed him, but that he didn’t want to let it out of his sight. I was entranced by it, so he gave it to me.”

  “Where had it come from before that?”

  “Klee said he’d been given it by Alfred Kubin who claimed to have found it in a box among some effects of E.T.A. Hoffman’s. Someone had apparently been taking photographs of it, as Kubin also found some prints and glass plates in the box. These he finally destroyed, but he couldn’t destroy the thing itself, though he tried to. “It will not burn,” he said. As to where Hoffman might have got hold of the thing, I’ve no idea.” Duchamp stopped, shook his head. “Poor Paul.”

  Ernst raised his glass. “To Paul.”

  Duchamp raised his. “Santé.”

  They swigged at their drinks.

  Then Duchamp went on. “You know,” he mused, “he really hated it, Klee did. But still he carried it around all the time, like he couldn’t let it out of his sight. For six years. He was obsessed. Those puppets he made for his son? I think they were an exorcism.”

  “You know, I never felt that repugnance. But when Leonora saw it, she said it was the vilest thing she’d ever seen, spat on it.”

  “A perceptive woman.”

  Ernst nodded.

  Just then, someone inside the apartment put on a record of jug band music. It drifted out onto the balcony. Duchamp smiled at the bright burr of the homemade banjo, but when the deep whoop and boom of the jug came in, he shuddered.

  “So like the calls of those frogs,” he said low.

  Ernst leaned in, frowned. “Frogs?”

  Duchamp peered at him. Then, with shaking hands, took out his silver cigar case which held two fine Cuban cigars. After offering one to Ernst, who smiled and took it, he took the other himself. Ernst then lit the cigars with a match from a hotel book struck one-handed, a flashy gesture to hide his disquiet.

  Duchamp took a long pull, the ember glowing, then exhaled a plume of smoke.

  “Those frogs,” he said, a tremor in his voice, “that belch and holler each night on the banks of the open sewer they call a river.”

  “The Seine?” Ernst asked.

  Looking at him askance, Duchamp said, “The river in that Sodom where they swig, from flasks in rush baskets, a black wine made from the grapes that grow on the sla
g heaps of the Callors mines.”

  “Cahors?”

  Duchamp turned to Ernst with a grin. But there was no mirth in it.

  “So you didn’t go through?” he asked.

  “Through? There was no through. Just that twisted thing and its vile insinuations and imprecations. Its dancing.”

  “Ah, well,” Duchamp said. “You had a nightmare, but you woke from it. Me? I’m not so sure.”

  “There was a through?”

  “You had a lucky escape.” Duchamp looked up, tapped ash off his cigar out into the stink and heat and hubbub rising from the street below. “I made my Large Glass, ma mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, to be broken, to be impotent, yet it had this terrible energy. I couldn’t understand it. It was only later I realized I shouldn’t have taken inspiration from that thing.”

  Inside, the record came to an end, and someone began strumming a guitar, soft sad chords.

  Ernst smiled. “Peggy will be in raptures. She loves this folk music.”

  “Do you not?”

  “I like folk music. I just prefer the concertina to the guitar.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  Duchamp chuckled. Then frowned. “One day, one of the bachelors came to me, told me I could free myself, if only I relinquished my art, made the Large Glass a final statement.”

  Ernst nodded.

  “That’s why I gave up art for chess,” Duchamp said. “Though I’m considering taking it up again now. Enough time has passed. Though in secret. Something not to be shown to the public. Perhaps a memory of what I found on the other side.” He sighed. “It wasn’t all rotten, you know. There are fragments of beauty there, amid the squalor. Like ambergris in whale vomit.”

  Duchamp shook his head. “What did you do with the thing? I hope you got rid of it?”