“‘Reports are coming in that a thousand children have been captured close to Ingatestone in Essex.’
He switched off the TV in disgust. The latest war had made children wonder whether their species could actually be preserved.”
I closed the book for a moment, leaving a finger in my place. I glanced at the title again—MISCREANT IN MOONSTREAM—in many ways a beautiful phrase but one pregnant with foreboding. It was a fantasy story—well, at first, I thought it was. But, when it started dealing with close on a thousand names of children who had been slaughtered by just one Town Council alone—I knew this could not be entertainment, whatever the meaning of that word. Since when were lists something you could read for pleasure?
Come to think of it, it was a strange book, as a physical thing. The cover seemed to be made from wrinkled black skin. The title itself was artfully picked out in gold tooling, the spine could be depended upon to crack each time it was opened and shut and there were weathered metal clasps. I tried to recall the whereabouts of the secondhand bookshop where I had obtained it. Having haunted such places for most of my life, I felt like a ghost through whose fingers the book would soon slip to the floor. Or it would fall, not as a result of a false grip in my fingers, but because of its own lack of substance.
Yes, it had been that darkly lit street, back of High Holborn—the one that always laid out its penny dreadfuls on planks, the worst of them all ranked outside beneath smeared panes. Not that the owner was any better at window dressing. It looked more like a backstreet sex shop than one intended to house such classics as George Eliot, James Tiptree, Jr., Fiona MacLeod, Radclyffe Hall, Branwell Brontë, Oscar Wilde, Petal Jeffery, &c. Indeed, when the runes were read, civilized fornication had as much seediness as the backstreet variety. Having known neither, I was not the one best suited to judge.
The man behind the stacked counter was smaller even than myself. He wore a long beard and a short pinafore dress, each, no doubt, to disguise a different aspect of his true persona. His piping voice offered assistance in interpreting the labels on the various plank shelves.
“I’m after historical stories with a good straightforward plot.” My voice, too, echoed the high pitches of the room. It had evidently been a public drinking-place in its heyday, one of those large affairs with a honky-tonk in every corner for random sing-songs. You could even see woodworm holes around a perfect circle on one of the walls…“I’ve got cleverly plotted historical stories in here than you’d ever dream of, young man.” I didn’t relish his tone—nor his grammar, for that matter. I scowled, or I attempted to scowl—whether he saw it as a scowl, I am probably not master enough of my own narrative to tell. He showed me behind some heavy-duty shelving bearing the biggest books I had ever seen. They must have been very tall people back in History, especially in Ancient Egypt. It was too dark to read the titles. However, he pointed to a finger-torch which, if I stood on the stepladder, I could reach. It felt very precarious teetering up that ladder. If I didn’t believe in sanity, I could have suspected him of having murderous designs on his customers by enticing them into unnecessary accidents. He was right, though. Once I got stuck into browsing, I discovered a veritable treasure trove of historical literature, by the likes of E. F. Benson, C. S. Lewis, A. Blackwood & Machen, R.Aickman, L. Dunsany, T. Ligotti, M.P. Shiel, D.F. Lewis, H. P. Lovecraft, C. A. Smith, E. A. Poe.
The list was endless, except it couldn’t’ve been. There were also small volumes with grey and yellow photographs bearing the names of writers who had not yet earned the fame of those undeserving of it. Let me see, there were Sarah Poe (no relation), Samuel Rigger, Padgett Weggs, Blasphemy Fitzworth, Abraham Bintiff, Clovis Camber, Archibald Z________ (no relation), Felix Holt, C. M. Eddy, Sr., the Wild Man of Hurtna Pore, Fred Tyrrel, Stripling Welham, Nial Hopper, Ervin Tourner, the Weirdmonger, Rachel Mildeyes &c, &c. And there was, of course, MISCREANT IN MOONSTREAM, tucked away in the third rank, where no literary greed had previously been sufficient to send the page-turners grubbing and pawing. It was by an anonymous writer, if it was by a writer at all. With the flickering torch, I scanned random paragraphs.
The tome cost an arm and a leg, or it should have done judging by the glint in the shopkeeper’s eye as I toted it to his front counter. He seemed to be pissing, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He would only accept a cheque, so I put my ready cash back where it came from and scrawled some outlandish number in the amount space, finishing with a crazy flourish that people often do when first inventing their own signature. He took it without demur. I was convinced he was glad to be shot of MISCREANT IN MOONSTREAM. But why then stash it away in the most inaccessible slot imaginable, beyond the reach of even the painstakingest bookworm? I clip-clopped along the wet pavements of the moon-strewn city, reading as I went.
There was once a war that spread haphazardly across the frontier of twilight, between the fields we knew and the lands held to be subject to the sound of elfin horns. The light, extruding from the dawn sky like strands of melted butter, suddenly re-hardened with thud of tank on tank. He peered over the makeshift edge of the trench he had dug the night before in a marshy area, and saw that the bore-holes of two tanks’ gunbarrels were so dissimilar that one had slipped upon the other, like a telescope, only to explode outwards in a particularly nasty fashion, plying him with jagged curds of steel. From along the nearby waterway which began somewhere further back than the fields we knew and extended even beyond the elfin gloaming, he could make out the distant chugging of one of those Narrow Boats that the allies utilised on canals as transporters of army provender. Eventually, it rounded the bend, emerging from the shimmering curtain of sunrise and moored clumsily quite near his entrenchment—into which he had by now withdrawn his head to gouge out the splinters. He heard voices laughing, as if a joke had been cracked amongst the crew. He laughed, too, uncertain of his own sense of humour amidst a war. Sporadic gunfire still stitched the air from another quarter of the fields we knew and, out of the prevailing silences, an intermittent screeching of the death terrors served to remind him that there could be no joke worthy of even the slightest titter. Then, the return fire, like the Earth ripping off its waistcoat, button by button. Having reteethed to the gums, he lifted a loud “halloo!” from the bottom of his trench, half to put a halt to the unseemly light-headedness of those who should know better and half to release the bad air in his lungs. The “halloo!” returned from their direction with redoubled force. Could he have set up, unintentionally, some communication system that was intrinsic to a wider, more complex pattern of passwords, resistance movements, codes, semaphores, undercover war-work and smugglers’ tips-of-the-wink? It was with some abruptness that he realised he was not exactly alone in his trench. He had indeed dug it for himself, but someone else had crept in on tiptoes . . . or someone else was already there, a four-limbed earth snake of slithery black. “Who are you?” The voice sounded hoarse with shouting. “I am a very old man.” His voice was as high-pitched as a child’s. “What are you doing here?” “What are you doing here?” “Sheltering from the war.” “Which war?” “Is there more than one?” The implication was incredulity that even one war was feasible. He saw tears weltering in his eye-holes and felt some stinging in his own without his mind being particularly doleful. He pushed his head into the soft loam of his trench, as if that would make him forget about him. He decided tentatively to peer out of the trench and test the score. This he did and saw the Narrow Boat with the name “Abraham Bintiff II” painted along its side. A series of faces watched him, a line of decapitated heads along the bulwarks staring deeply into his eyes from only a few yards away. Suddenly, with a great roar of childlike laughter, they got up on the feet growing directly from their necks and waddled to the bank where, without preamble or possible motive, they began eating each other with the utmost relish. The fastest eaters naturally lasted the longest and the right gobblers, scolded by their better-mannered compatriots, filled their cheeks with massy balloons of face-fodder—only to sick it all out again into the grume of the inky cut. Without bellies, sicking-up was the only sure result and, before long, tatterdemalion skull- bones with half-digested cheek-flaps fought for each other’s succulent neck muscles. He knew he witnessed a vision stemmed from war. If madness is born, then madness will die. The heads soon became serried clottings of living gristle and, tail in mouth, their Worm Ouroboros wound across the deck and interlaced with the poles and boat-hooks which, on better days, helped the passage of the boat through the locks and winding-holes of those fields we once knew. It was at that point he became the first self-confessed human being to spot, if fleetingly, the inscrutable faces of our elfin neighbours from just across the other side of twilight. A whole day had passed, evidently. As a child, he had learnt that, beyond the fields backing on to the back of the last row of terraced houses, there lived others that could only be told about in song. And, that day of all days, there was no possible way that such a song could be mustered by his aging, dried-out lips. It was all gone from him, with the war. And, gradually, ineluctably, the rest of his body crept away from his head, disgusted by the foulness that brooded inside the skull. And the head of D. F. Lewis rolled into the moonstream with a glittering splash.
“The bookworm closed the book with a final splintering of its backbone. He could now go to bed; he had been insufficiently awake to tell how tired he was. The plot had held him fast for literally hours since arriving home. He uncoiled his nether-turban of a nappy, ensuring piecemeal that his day’s doings were all present and correct. He scratched at the new stubble on his chin. He, too, was about to sprout a false beard upon what no longer felt to be his own face. As he collapsed into the confines of his cot, he managed to plug a dummy into his mouth to stopper the screams.”