"Do what you like I"m walking."
His footsteps receded: the dark encased him.
After a minute, Judd followed.
The night was cloudless and bitter. They walked on, their collars up against the chill, their feet swollen in their shoes. Above them the whole sky had become a parade of stars. A triumph of spilled light, from which the eye could make as many patterns as it had patience for. After a while, they slung their tired arms around each other, for comfort and warmth.
About eleven o"clock, they saw the glow of a window in the distance.
The woman at the door of the stone cottage didn"t smile, but she understood their condition, and let them in. There seemed to be no purpose in trying to explain to either the woman or her crippled husband what they had seen. The cottage had no telephone, and there was no sign of a vehicle, so even had they found some way to express themselves, nothing could be done.
With mimes and face-pullings they explained that they were hungry and exhausted. They tried further to explain that they were lost, cursing themselves for leaving their phrasebook in the VW. She didn"t seem to understand very much of what they said, but sat them down beside a blazing fire and put a pan of food on the stove to heat.
They ate thick unsalted pea soup and eggs, and occasionally smiled their thanks at the woman. Her husband sat beside the fire, making no attempt to talk, or even to look at the visitors.
The food was good. It buoyed their spirits.
They would sleep until morning and then begin the long trek back. By dawn the bodies in the field would be being quantified, identified, parcelled up and dispatched to their families. The air would be full of rea.s.suring noises, cancelling out the moans that still rang in their ears. There would be helicopters, lorry loads of men organizing the clearing-up operations. All the rites and paraphernalia of a civilized disaster.
And in a while, it would be palatable. It would become part of their history: a tragedy, of course, but one they could explain, cla.s.sify and learn to live with. All would be well, yes, all would be well. Come morning.
The sleep of sheer fatigue came on them suddenly. They lay where they had fallen, still sitting at the table, their heads on their crossed arms. A litter of empty bowls and bread crusts surrounded them.
They knew nothing. Dreamt nothing. Felt nothing.
Then the thunder began. In the earth, in the deep earth, a rhythmical tread, as of a t.i.tan, that came, by degrees, closer and closer.
The woman woke her husband. She blew out the lamp and went to the door. The night sky was luminous with stars: the hills black on every side.
The thunder still sounded: a full half-minute between every boom, but louder now. And louder with every new step.
They stood at the door together, husband and wife, and listened to the night-hills echo back and forth with the sound. There was no lightning to accompany the thunder.
Just the boom Boom Boom It made the ground shake: it threw dust down from the door-lintel, and rattled the window-latches.
Boom Boom They didn"t know what approached, but whatever shape it took, and whatever it intended, there seemed no sense in running from it. Where they stood, in the pitiful shelter of their cottage, was as safe as any nook of the forest. How could they choose, out of a hundred thousand trees, which would be standing when the thunder had pa.s.sed? Better to wait: and watch.
The wife"s eyes were not good, and she doubted what she saw when the blackness of the hill changed shape and reared up to block the stars. But her husband had seen it too: the unimaginably huge head, vaster in the deceiving darkness, looming up and up, dwarfing the hills themselves with ambition.
He fell to his knees, babbling a prayer, his arthritic legs twisted beneath him.
His wife screamed: no words she knew could keep this monster at bay no prayer, no plea, had power over it.
In the cottage, Mick woke and his outstretched arm, twitching with a sudden cramp, wiped the plate and the lamp off the table.
They smashed. Judd woke.
The screaming outside had stopped. The woman had disappeared from the doorway into the forest. Any tree, any tree at all, was better than this sight. Her husband still let a string of prayers dribble from his slack mouth, as the great leg of the giant rose to take another step Boom The cottage shook. Plates danced and smashed off the dresser. A clay pipe rolled from the mantelpiece and shattered in the ashes of the hearth.
The lovers knew the noise that sounded in their substance: that earth-thunder.
Mick reached for Judd, and took him by the shoulder.
"You see," he said, his teeth blue-grey in the darkness of the cottage. "See? See?"
There was a kind of hysteria bubbling behind his words. He ran to the door, stumbling over a chair in the dark. Cursing and bruised he staggered out into the night Boom The thunder was deafening. This time it broke all the windows in the cottage. In the bedroom one of the roof-joists cracked and flung debris downstairs.
Judd joined his lover at the door. The old man was now face down on the ground, his sick and swollen fingers curled, his begging lips pressed to the damp soil.
Mick was looking up, towards the sky. Judd followed his gaze.
There was a place that showed no stars. It was a darkness in the shape of a man, a vast, broad human frame, a colossus that soared up to meet heaven. It was not quite a perfect giant. Its outline was not tidy; it seethed and swarmed.
He seemed broader too, this giant, than any real man. His legs were abnormally thick and stumpy, and his arms were not long. The hands, as they clenched and unclenched, seemed oddly jointed and over-delicate for its torso.
Then it raised one huge, flat foot and placed it on the earth, taking a stride towards them. Boom The step brought the roof collapsing in on the cottage. Everything that the car-thief had said was true. Popolac was a city and a giant; and it had gone into the hills...
Now their eyes were becoming accustomed to the night light. They could see in ever more horrible detail the way this monster was constructed. It was a masterpiece of human engineering: a man made entirely of men. Or rather, a s.e.xless giant, made of men and women and children. All the citizens of Popolac writhed and strained in the body of this flesh-knitted giant, their muscles stretched to breaking point, their bones close to snapping.
They could see how the architects of Popolac had subtly altered the proportions of the human body; how the thing had been made squatter to lower its center of gravity; how its legs had been made elephantine to bear the weight of the torso; how the head was sunk low on to the wide shoulders, so that the problems of a weak neck had been minimized.
Despite these malformations, it was horribly lifelike. The bodies that were bound together to make its surface were naked but for their harnesses, so that its surface glistened in the starlight, like one vast human torso. Even the muscles were well copied, though simplified. They could see the way the roped bodies pushed and pulled against each other in solid cords of flesh and bone. They could see the intertwined people that made up the body: the backs like turtles packed together to offer the sweep of the pectorals; the lashed and knotted acrobats at the joints of the arms and the legs alike; rolling and unwinding to articulate the city.
But surely the most amazing sight of all was the face.
Cheeks of bodies; cavernous eye-sockets in which heads stared, five bound together for each eyeball; a broad, flat nose and a mouth that opened and closed, as the muscles of the jaw bunched and hollowed rhythmically. And from that mouth, lined with teeth of bald children, the voice of the giant, now only a weak copy of its former powers, spoke a single note of idiot music.
Popolac walked and Popolac sang.
Was there ever a sight in Europe the equal of it? They watched, Mick and Judd, as it took another step towards them.
The old man had wet his pants. Blubbering and begging, he dragged himself away from the ruined cottage into the surrounding trees, dragging his dead legs after him.
The Englishmen remained where they stood, watching the spectacle as it approached. Neither dread nor horror touched them now, just an awe that rooted them to the spot. They knew this was a sight they could never hope to see again; this was the apex after this there was only common experience. Better to stay then, though every step brought death nearer, better to stay and see the sight while it was still there to be seen. And if it killed them, this monster, then at least they would have glimpsed a miracle, known this terrible majesty for a brief moment. It seemed a fair exchange.
Popolac was within two steps of the cottage. They could see the complexities of its structure quite clearly. The faces of the citizens were becoming detailed: white, sweat-wet, and content in their weariness. Some hung dead from their harnesses, their legs swinging back and forth like the hanged. Others, children particularly, had ceased to obey their training, and had relaxed their positions, so that the form of the body was degenerating, beginning to seethe with the boils of rebellious cells.
Yet it still walked, each step an incalculable effort of coordination and strength.
Boom The step that trod the cottage came sooner than they thought.
Mick saw the leg raised; saw the faces of the people in the shin and ankle and foot they were as big as he was now all huge men chosen to take the full weight of this great creation. Many were dead. The bottom of the foot, he could see, was a jigsaw of crushed and b.l.o.o.d.y bodies, pressed to death under the weight of their fellow citizens.
The foot descended with a roar.
In a matter of seconds the cottage was reduced to splinters and dust.
Popolac blotted the sky utterly. It was, for a moment, the whole world, heaven and earth, its presence filled the senses to overflowing. At this proximity one look could not encompa.s.s it, the eye had to range backwards and forwards over its ma.s.s to take it all in, and even then the mind refused to accept the whole truth.
A whirling fragment of stone, flung off from the cottage as it collapsed, struck Judd full in the face. In his head he heard the killing stroke like a ball hitting a wall: a play-yard death. No pain: no remorse. Out like a light, a tiny, insignificant light; his death-cry lost in the pandemonium, his body hidden in the smoke and darkness. Mick neither saw nor heard Judd die.
He was too busy staring at the foot as it settled for a moment in the ruins of the cottage, while the other leg mustered the will to move.
Mick took his chance. Howling like a banshee, he ran towards the leg, longing to embrace the monster. He stumbled in the wreckage, and stood again, bloodied, to reach for the foot before it was lifted and he was left behind. There was a clamor of agonized breath as the message came to the foot that it must move; Mick saw the muscles of the shin bunch and marry as the leg began to lift. He made one last lunge at the limb as it began to leave the ground, s.n.a.t.c.hing a harness or a rope, or human hair, or flesh itself anything to catch this pa.s.sing miracle and be part of it. Better to go with it wherever it was going, serve it in its purpose, whatever that might be; better to die with it than live without it.
He caught the foot, and found a safe purchase on its ankle. Screaming his sheer ecstasy at his success he felt the great leg raised, and glanced down through the swirling dust to the spot where he had stood, already receding as the limb climbed.
The earth was gone from beneath him. He was a hitchhiker with a G.o.d: the mere life he had left was nothing to him now, or ever. He would live with this thing, yes, he would live with it seeing it and seeing it and eating it with his eyes until he died of sheer gluttony.
He screamed and howled and swung on the ropes, drinking up his triumph. Below, far below, he glimpsed Judd"s body, curled up pale on the dark ground, irretrievable. Love and life and sanity were gone, gone like the memory of his name, or his s.e.x, or his ambition.
It all meant nothing. Nothing at all.
Boom Boom Popolac walked, the noise of its steps receding to the east. People walked, the hum of its voice lost in the night.
After a day, birds came, foxes came, flies, b.u.t.terflies, wasps came. Judd moved, Judd shifted, Judd gave birth. In his belly maggots warmed themselves, in a vixen"s den the good flesh of his thigh was fought over. After that, it was quick. The bones yellowing, the bones crumbling: soon, an empty s.p.a.ce which he had once filled with breath and opinions.
Darkness, light, darkness, light. He interrupted neither with his name.
Tainaron: Mail From Another City.
Leena Krohn.
Translated into English by Hilda Hawkins.
Leena Krohn (1947) is one of the most respected Finnish writers of her generation. In her large body of work for adults and children, Krohn deals with issues related to the boundary between reality and illusion, artificial intelligence, and issues of morality and conscience. Her short novel Tainaron: Mail From Another City, reprinted herein, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005. Tainaron shares some affinities with the work of Kafka, while being utterly original. Each section of the novel illuminates the next, with the weird element serving both as strange adventure and parallel to the real world. It is one of the most important works of post-World War II dark fantasy.
The Meadow and the Honey Pattern.
The First Letter.
How could I forget the spring when we walked in the University"s botanical gardens; for there is such a park here in Tainaron, too, large and carefully tended. If you saw it you would be astonished, for it contains many plants that no one at home knows; even a species that flowers underground.
But most of all I like the meadow attached to the gardens, where only wild flowers grow: corn-flower, cotton thistle, toadflax, spiked speedwell. But you would be wrong if you supposed them to be ordinary flowers of the field. No, they are some kind of hybrid, supernaturally large. Many of the knapweeds are as tall as a man, and their corollas are as broad as a human face; but I have also seen flowers into which one can step as if into a sunny bower.
It gives me pleasure to imagine that I might one day take you there, beneath the thistles. Their lovely corymbs are veiled by a downy web, which floats high above like the crowns of trees on a beach promenade.
You would enjoy a visit to the meadow, for in Tainaron it is summer and one can look at the flowers face to face. They are as open as the day itself and the hieroglyphs of the honey-patterns are precise and clear. We gaze at them, but they gaze only at the sun, which they resemble. It is so difficult to believe, in the warmth of the day"s heart just as difficult as before the face of children that the colour and light of which they are made are matter, and that some time, soon, this very night, their dazzle will be extinguished and will no longer be visible.
Much happens in the meadow; it is a stage for fervent activity and a theatre of war. But everything serves just one purpose: immortality. The insects who are pursuing their own interests there do not know that they are at the same time fulfilling the flowers" hidden desires, any more than the flowers understand that to the insects, whom they consider their slaves, they are life and livelihood. Thus the selfishness of each individual works, in the meadow, for the happiness of all.
But it is not only the ordinary hover-flies and sawflies that come to the meadow of the botanical gardens to amuse themselves: the idle cityfolk spend their free moments here, whiling away their time in a way that is undeniably strange to us.
"Admiral! Admiral!" I heard Longhorn shout delightedly one Sunday, when once again we were wandering along the paths that criss-cross the meadow.
I looked around me past the flower-stalks some of them were as strong as the trunks of young birch trees but I could not see whom Longhorn had been talking to until he pointed to the corolla of an orchid-like flower. On its brilliantly red, slightly mottled lips there sat or rather, skipped about on the spot someone who seemed very anxious and very happy.
This Tainaronian waved all his legs at Longhorn, and began to whine earnestly: "This way, ladies and gentlemen, please don"t be shy!"
I must admit that his behaviour bewildered me, for he went on with his unsteady dance, bouncing from one petal to another and from time to time rubbing his backside against it. All of a sudden he dropped limply flat on his face and seemed to chew enthusiastically on the fine, downy fluff that straggled around the base of the lip. Well, we were in a public place, and I turned my face away from such debauchery.
But Longhorn peeped at my face and began to smile; and that only made me more angry.
"What a puritan!" he said. "You disapprove of lonely people"s most innocent and cheapest weekend amus.e.m.e.nts? They make love to the flowers and the flowers make them drunk; they go from flower to flower and at the same time pollinate them; is that not beneficial to the entire meadow, the entire city?"
At that very moment Longhorn"s friend leaned over toward us from the broad, generously curving lip of the orchid, which swayed and rocked violently beneath him. Now I could see that he was stained from head to foot with sticky pollen, and when I looked upward, shading my eyes from the sun, a sweet droplet trickled from his long, fumbling proboscis and on to my lips. I licked it away; it was not unpleasant, but at the same time I remembered some lines I had read long ago.
Appeased, I would have liked to have recited them at once to Longhorn, but his friend was now speaking incessantly.
"My dear friends," the Admiral stammered, "I wager you have never seen nectaries like these, aaaah, follow me, quickly, I know the way..."
And with that he disappeared into the depths of the huge corolla, so that I could make out only one of his hind legs, wriggling deep in the quivering cavity.
"No," I said finally, "I will not go in there."
"Well then," said Longhorn amicably, "let us continue on our way. Perhaps I may introduce you some other time. Let us continue now, and see whether the meadowsweet has flowered."
As we wandered beneath the flowers, I knew their desire and their thirst, knew that what was visible of them, all their finery, was merely a stepping-stone for their seed. And I could not stop myself from teasing Longhorn by reciting the lines that the foolish Admiral had just recalled to my mind: For what are anthers worth or petals Or halo-rings? Mockeries, shadows Of the heart of the flower, the central flame!
He seemed absent-minded as he listened, and finally he interrupted me.
"Can"t you hear?"
Quite right, I thought I could distinguish a desperate howling that came from the south, from the other side of the field. This was what Longhorn had been listening for, throughout my recitation.
We had turned in the right direction, for we did not have far to go before we heard an anxious voice panting, "I"m here, here!", and we saw, once more, a flower as big as a room, this time a glowing ultra-marine, where a little mannikin was struggling, apparently stuck in its funnel-like stigma.
"Well, well," said Longhorn, glumly, "this is just what I expected. This is a vincetoxic.u.m, a fly-trap."
And he directed his words to the ensnared creature: "You are not the first to have met this fate."
And Longhorn climbed nimbly into the sparkling blue corolla, leaning on the axils of the stem. Without delay and briskly he grasped the victim beneath the arms. Hup! and at the same moment there was a hissing sound like silk tearing, the corolla sagged downward, and both the helper and the flower"s prisoner rolled on to the lawn.
But before I could reach them under the broken herb, both had risen to their feet and were brushing pollen off themselves, so that the air was dusty with a glittering haze.
"But you are limping," said Longhorn sternly to the shy creature he had saved.
"Just a little accident," said the luckless one, glancing at the ravaged plant as if a sudden attack could still be expected. "There was some kind of trap in there...."
"Never trust a flower," Longhorn advised. "Next time, think where you put your head."
I do not believe that the flower"s victim intended ever to return to the meadow. He was already limping off under equally treacherous plants, and had forgotten to say thank you. Longhorn linked arms with me, and I was grateful, for I felt I needed support, as if it had been me who had suffered in the prison of the vincetoxic.u.m.