Weirdtongue (24)
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Continued from: HERE.
aka The Glistenberry Romance
Following attendance at the festival’s main stage, Gregory Mummerset and Suzie Mildeyes later yearned for the more gentle melody of lullabies rather than the thumping thumbprints of sound pressed into the soft-imagined carapaces of their once new-born heads. They returned to their tent along with raging migraines: potential op-art dreameries if sleep should help to dull the pains alongside its more customary provision of creative gliding through the fripperies of unreality.
They had enjoyed the ‘circus’ stage-show but the delayed diminishment of competing sounds – rehearsed as well as unrehearsed – from all corners of the benighted site did little to encourage the curative qualities of sleep. The tent was cross-skewed itself as if hordes had skirted it during the collateral damage caused by some ill-reported war here among the valleys beneath the long-tongued Tor. The ground’s mildewy discomfort gave sleep further excuse to keep poking from its shell, antennae quivering in search of further delay.
The couple looked pitifully into each other’s eyes; leaning forward from time to time while lightly kissing away the tears. They were out of depth. Gregory even feared he might need to return to the hospital. Mildeyes and melody-boxes. Somersaults and summersets. The cavortings of a clown. A group called Friques in a side-tent. Safety-net spiders spinning big tops for pops. Marionettes hanging half-dead between the tangling spools of sleep’s slow withdrawal and the crazy-paved merging of two migraines. The incredible Mister Kite. A dark shadow swooping in…
*
Blasphemy Fitzworth was aboard the fair-sailed Glittenburier as it entered a new harbour of choice without visible steam or sound. Captain Bintiff had long since left this particular texture of truth upon the original craft of Feemy’s destiny with a crew chosen from several of the other voyages that had since intervened yet remained strangely unreported by any of our correspondents in the field. Where Bintiff had gone, nobody in these parts even pretended to know. Feemy’s new Captain if he had a long tongue certainly hid it with a short one. As hidden as his name. A nemophile with emptiness for a face.
Despite the beauty of the fantastical turrets (each a hill-topping Tor in its own right) built upon each new brow of dream, there was a wholesale war afoot here, too, and here and here - with many wild machinations of politick and bent magick. Feemy tried to retain his innocent task of selling meaty parts of himself to the natives – but natives who prided themselves as more civilised than Feemy felt they had no need of such meagre off-cuttings of grease and gristle. They had edible luxuries (rich in protein) hidden within their own humps, but failed to be able to reach round to mine them. Yet, simply knowing luxuries were there (just behind them) made the natives feel confident enough to near starve rather than buy provender from the likes of Feemy.
These natives were native of nowhere. Nemophobes in the main, however, they vigorously sought a name for the land that Feemy had now reached as well as names for themselves ... names for the land where they (these as yet nameless ones) purportedly lived amid the mass of hill-topping Tors and nightly-lit circuses and festivals galore in each valley cleft. If any reader has a name for this land and its natives before we visit its veils and piques again, please let it be known. If, indeed, any reader wishes actually to enter as a real character into the throes of the story towards bolstering, even curing, these various vexed textures of destiny or truth known as Weirdtongue, please also make yourself known to the narrative hospital.
CONTINUED: HERE.
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