The Visitor (19)
(I thought 2006 readers of this novel might like to know that, included in the 1974 typescript, there is a mighty big map with a multitude of details that can be folded out (drawn in real ink by PFJ) depicting the lands surrounding events in ‘The Visitor’— e.g. Neb, The Onyx Field, Nambitur, The Forest of Abominations, Bluemanland, The Onyx Gulf, The Sea Of Neb, Pseudo-Neb, England, Kra, The Ana-Anna Desert, Lancaster, Heman Peninsula, and lots of towns and rivers etc. etc – the seas blotched in red by DFL).
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(iii)
The Story of Iceman the Swift of the Sky
The scene is a city, a large, sprawling megalopolis in England. The time is long, long away and Victoria sat on a birdish throne, surveying her scurrying citizen Engs.
The dark corners (chimney-corners, kyphotic angulations, forked nooks, furcated crossways, hook-nosed cusps, V-shaped crutches, akimbo zigzags) of the city were haunted, haunted with stooping figures on ghostish paths, with unhewn statues in search of shape and with unlicked beasts in quest of lolling tongues.
I, as Iceman, flew across that frosty sky and the citizens cracked in frore dismay. I entered the alouetted mansion beside the slivering river and swept in white array along the nightworn corridors. I came to the silent door and, for a while, listened at the lotto keyhole for the breathing I knew would be there and grimly crept, insect-like, through the keyhole. Once inside, I hovered over the bed in which the two women slept, their bodies enlocked together. Their heavy breathing threw white smoke into the air, but their limbs were squashed and intensely warm and their well-formed breasts hung between the V-shaped interstices of the bed.
I knew their names, of course, and I know them now – Rosemary and Ample … and the child born from their transsexual embraces would become a mutation, a hideous thalidomide of the dark world – all head and no body, waddling over from cot to grave.
“Fence it in! Fence it in!” the motley infants roared.
The Cuckoo looked askance and beckoned to Iceman to continue his enthralling story.
Riffling his wings and folding their webs beneath his titted crest, he spoke anew:
I, as Iceman, tucked myself into their interlaced arms and peered down into the dark chimney-corners of their bed to see if this evil act had been completed. But, of course, the cold awoke them from their slumber and the sudden movement resulting from their start, itself completed the act I was there to prevent. I glimpsed a wad of pure white spirt from crutch to crutch, so white it lit up the furcated crossways of the sheet-bunching bed. The two women sighed each other’s name lovingly and twisted me into their foul cuddle.
I uncovered my two fangs from the wrinkles of my beak and their razor tips pierced their tender breasts. But they felt no pain – their dying love was a pain greater and more pleasurable than that I concocted.
At this moment, Edalpo (who left Lorg Dagg to go to this gathering (he knew he must gain entry to the Plains of Ka and Harchwee and Lorg must be kept safe while he accomplished this feat, so he left him busy listening to a series of stupid and irrelevant stories from the mouth of some individual claiming to be the art Master (the latter is telling the tales but, little does he know, the real art Master is telling of him telling the stories))) fidgeted, for he was very bored. He could not wait until it was his turn.
Anyway, continued Iceman, please do not shudder. I escaped from their naughty clutches. I flew from the night-shrouded mansion and took the macroscopic path (from microminiature to mammoth sky-swift) from the granular Land of Eng to the Onyx Field (which is all land and all scapes) where you see me now. That is my story.
“But what of the mutation? Was it born? Was it fenced in for its livelong days? Tell us, pray tell us,” brayed the milling toddlers.
Horror of Horrors! The end of my tale must be told. As I flew from their sexual bed, the impregnated egg between their legs accidentally (sticky as it was) got stuck to my thigh feathers and, as I passed from microsubstance to what I am now, it became embedded in my womb! And before all our tales are told, it will out, head and all.
The Cuckoo waved a disbelieving hand and crooked his claw to the next teller of the tale.
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COMMENTS (III)
By Peter Jeffery
It is as if DFL has surrounded himself with the additional layers of identity as protective garb against the Core… ‘Comments II’ by PF Jeffery really needs no comments from me … You seem to have made a pretty fair job of editing what must be a pretty unwieldy bulk of comment. I especially liked the inclusion of a bit of comment on my previous comments … The white sea is very reminiscent of the description of the core (itself cuckoo-spit, perhaps, or bubbling semen) & the rutted land, perhaps, echoes Orlando’s rutted skull. A tangent from ‘The Visitor’ is ‘badlands’, possibly a reference to John Metcalfe’s story of that name & an even further tangent (to use a mixed metaphor) is a possible link between ‘alabaster seas’ & ‘alabaster genitals’ of Zeroist fame … Genitals to semen & semen to the surging white of the core: the core to the Onyx Field Sea & the sea to the alabaster of the genitals, a very neat train of thought, wouldn’t you say?…
(written 1974)
to be continued...
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