These Our Monsters Page 5

  On the parched lawn, the children turned onto their bellies and watched their father pace the long perimeter path. The Sandwalk. He was on the third lap of his five. His ‘constitutional’. Twice a day. Sometimes they’d sneak up and steal one of the stones he deposited with every lap – to throw him off his tally. He was always deep in thought, pondering the vast, empty wastes of Patagonia or the savages of Tierra del Fuego, all of which he’d seen before any of them were born.

  Now as they watched, he bent down – to study an ant at work or perhaps a slug not at work. The earthworms had burrowed deep in the earth because it was too hot. When he straightened, he raised his walking-stick high in a salute, and they waved back.

  All the while, Annie listened. Above her father, in the canopies of the lime trees, the fairies droned, like one great, mournful harmonium. She suspected they knew about his butterfly net in the cupboard under the stairs. They knew something. The longer he lingered by the lime trees, the louder the noise of their wings. Izzzz, izzzzz, izzzz.

  When Annie was born on the 2nd of March, 1841, her father, Charles, had weighed and measured her, as he would each of his ‘animalcules’ in turn. It was a difficult birth, and as a babe-inarms, she was frail and a worry.

  Her first smile arrived, Charles recorded, on her forty-sixth day, and others followed effortlessly and often thereafter. Her first word was ‘goat’, and Charles rejoiced. Emma still fretted, however. Their firstborn, Willy, had been declared as an infant a ‘prodigy of beauty & intellect’ by his father, and Emma herself had fallen in love for the second time in her life. But when Annie was nine months old, Emma confided to her diary, ‘She is very ugly, poor body, with a broken out ear just like mine.’ Later that year, she wrote to her aunt, ‘My little Annie has taken to walking and talking for the last fortnight. She is thirteen months old and very healthy, fat and round, but no beauty.’

  Charles delighted in cuddling and kissing her. She wrinkled up her nose when she smiled or didn’t understand. She would appear with blades of grass torn from the lawn for him. When she reached fourteen months, he marvelled that she took hold of pens and pencils ‘in the proper way’. When she was two and three-quarters, Emma put little combs in her hair, and Charles declared it made her look quite a beauty. Soon, she’d arrive in his study, grinning and proffering a pinch of snuff from the jar in the hall from which, she knew in her own childish way, he was meant to abstain. Never, he announced to Emma, had there been a more affectionate child.

  Now, aged nine, Annie was sometimes allowed to help Mrs Davies with grown-up things. One afternoon, as she collected the teacup and orange peels from her father’s study, she stopped short at his armchair and frowned. His scraps of Theory were multiplying. She could see them hiding around his study, like clues to a terrible treasure hunt. They were words that would worry her mother and send her father to his bed again.

  One poked out from behind a cushion. She read it – ‘Species not immutable, though like murder to confess it.’ – and she snatched it up.

  Another fluttered on the floor below the window: ‘Animals are our fellow brethren. Man is not demeaned when compared – on contrary, animals have cause to object!’

  She herself found their donkey and Bran, their terrier, every bit as nice as Etty and George, but she knew it wouldn’t do for her father to write that down in a book, even if he agreed, which he did. The vicar at St Mary’s would get very cross.

  On the drum-table, under a jar of barnacles, she found the worst yet: ‘Old Testament God, vengeful tyrant. Not First Cause.’

  Her mother would certainly cry at that.

  She took the scraps, smoothed them flat, and ran upstairs, leaping as always over The Bottomless Hole. Then she shut them in her writing-box, turned the key and closed the key in her locket.

  At the open window, fairies hovered, watched and buzzed. Izzzz, izzzz, izzz.

  Her father told all his children that questions were very good things, and that it was better to know nothing than to know everything. Annie wrinkled her nose. She wanted to know why. That was her question. Because she wanted to know everything.

  She stood in his study, waiting for his answer. He took a seat on his microscope-stool, meeting her at eye-level. He said that he, for example, knew how life was but not what life was. That was the great mystery. His own vexing question. ‘What is the Is of Life, Annie? No one knows!’

  She shrugged, impatient. She had another question, she said. She wanted to know if Mary Eleanor, her baby sister who had died at three weeks, was with the angels in Heaven. Her father cleared his throat to speak, but, at that moment, her mother passed in the hall outside the study, and her father stopped.

  Why, she demanded, would he talk about fairies perfectly sensibly, but never about angels? He tried to tickle her but she stamped her foot in a rare display of grievance. Then her mother called her and the other children into the drawing room and proceeded to play The Galloping Tune very loudly. Annie sat straight-backed on the chaise-longue and would not join in.

  That evening, her father found her in the nursery under the quilt. Later, in his notebook, he would ask himself: ‘Children & hiding & hiding games: vestige of savage instinct?’

  He drew her onto his lap. ‘Are you crying, Kitty Kumplings?’ He had called her that since she was a baby.

  ‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘It’s only water coming from my eyes.’

  She buried her hands in his shirt and chest hair. He growled on cue for her like a bear, if quietly because Etty and George were already asleep.

  Her mother joined them and read softly from The Nursery Rhymes of England, adding a rhyme from her own girlhood, ‘There Was an Old Woman as I’ve Heard Tell’, which was Annie’s favourite. The vicar, her mother said with a wicked smile, did not approve of nursery rhymes. He thought them ‘immoral’. But vicars, she said, did not know everything, and neither, for that matter, did mamas or papas. She did know, however, that Mary Eleanor was safe with God. There were truths one knew in one’s head, and truths one knew in one’s heart.

  Her father said her mother was eternally wise, and they kissed Annie goodnight. Then they went down the stairs for their nightly game of backgammon.

  What things did mothers and fathers not know? Annie found her father’s list on his Pembroke table.

  ‘Why do men have nipples?’

  ‘What can be the origin of movement from tickling?’

  ‘What is emotion?’

  ‘Why does joy and other emotion make grown-up people cry?’

  ‘What passes in a man’s mind when he says he loves a person?’

  She knew the answer to the last one. What passed in her mind was the tickle of her father’s whiskers as he kissed her goodnight, and her mother’s smooth hand on her forehead when she was unwell.

  What passed in her mind was sitting on her father’s lap on his microscope-stool, and clinging to him as he punted them through the drawing room with his walking-stick. What passed in her mind was Mama not caring that the wheels scored the carpet.

  She remembered, too, her father’s laugh as he slid on his bottom down the sliding-board that fitted over the stairs. He’d had old Alfred make and polish a sheet of wood, with hooks to fit it to the top stair and the bottom. Even Mama and Miss Thorley took turns on the slide; their crinolines made them go very fast. But only Annie could do what the family called ‘Eight Stairs Standing’. She glided all the way in her stockinged feet from top to bottom. She felt like a shooting star.

  More than anything, what passed in her mind was the Secret she kept for her father: that he did not believe in angels or the Bible. Perhaps not in Heaven either. The vicar once said a person must believe in Heaven to be admitted to Heaven, and Annie had seen her mother look mournfully over the row of their Darwinian heads to the unhappy shape of their father, who looked poorly and clutched his stomach.

  The doctor said her father’s illness was ‘dyspepsia’. Her mother told the doctor she was confounded by the range of his sym
ptoms. Parslow scrubbed and showered her father daily for his water-therapy, but he was often ill and brought up his food.

  Annie knew his Secret was the First Cause of his poorliness; that it made his heart flutter, his head ache and his legs give way. It made him rush to the privy, bent double, and take to his bed for weeks at a time. It made him tremble and weep in Parslow’s arms, unable to stop, even when she and Etty stood, wide-eyed, at his bedroom door.

  The long hot spell of midsummer broke at last. Thunder and lightning split the sky over Down House. The storm arrived on the day Charles felt well enough to leave his bed and lock himself away in his study to write once more. The air cleared.

  It was the day that Annie stepped into The Bottomless Hole.

  Etty and George had been running behind her up the stairs when their sister collapsed in a heap at the top, outside the nursery. They froze where they stood and Annie began to cry strangely. Etty shouted for Brodie, who arrived in a rush of black silk, and scooped Annie up. Brodie muttered that she hadn’t been herself all day. ‘Who has she been, Brodie?’ asked George, but their nurse had already disappeared, with Annie limp in her arms.

  It was the summer Annie began to weaken and fail.

  Down, down, down, she went.

  She weakened, rallied and weakened again.

  Charles and Emma lived for months in a place of dread from which they would never fully return, a place more remote than the wastes of Patagonia.

  Annie died on the 23rd of April, 1851.

  Charles’ words would swim back at him nightmarishly from his notebook: ‘There is a ceaseless and incalculable waste of pollen, eggs and immature beings.’

  Cause of death: ‘bilious fever’.

  In Great Pucklands, the hunchbacked fairies stitched and cut, stitched – and cut.

  She was buried with her locket at her breast and her barnacle shell tucked in her fingers.

  Down House fell into a profound silence.

  On a high shelf in the nursery, her writing-box sat, locked and forgotten, under a film of dust.

  But beneath its hinged lid, the darkness metabolised. Over the days, nights, weeks and months, the crimson of the paper lining deepened like an expectant womb.

  The stitches on the spine of her book began to strain and pull.

  The ink on its pages grew wet again to no one’s touch.

  Her curled capitals flexed, rearing up.

  Then her beloved Equation broke free of its line and transmuted on the page before no one’s eyes. ‘Larva – Pupa – Slug – Winged Insect – Winged Fairy – Hominin – Human.’ It flickered to life, in a bright kinetic reel, a candescent chain of life, while outside the nursery window, fairies swarmed.

  They flew at the panes, their wings beating the glass.

  Izzz, they sang, is, is, is.

  Goibert

  of the

  Moon

  Paul Kingsnorth

  THE CHILD’S NOSE was pressed up against the glass display case, his dirty little fingers smearing whatever muck he had last eaten all over it. The condensation from his breath obscured what was on the other side. It made little difference to him, as he was clearly unable to concentrate on anything that wasn’t featured on the screen of a phone.

  ‘Do you like the bunny?’ asked the boy’s mother, cradling another, smaller, brat in her arms. It wriggled like a worm on a hook as she spoke. ‘Isn’t it cute?’ she added, hopefully.

  The child stared through the steamed glass at the stuffed hare for perhaps five seconds, and then wandered over to the fox and the badger, which are even scrawnier and less shapely after a century in a museum case. The mother smiled at me wanly as she followed him. It’s a bloody hare! I felt like saying to her. It’s a hare, not a ‘bunny’. Can’t you see the difference? Set your snivelling little child an example! I did not say this. I only nodded. I have found as I have grown older, much to my delight, that it is possible to get through most days without having to say anything to anyone at all.

  After the child had left, I produced my handkerchief and carefully cleaned the glass. European Hare, read the Victorian hand-lettered label. Lepus europaeus. I looked into her glass eyes. Her black-tipped ears were balding, as if she had mange.

  Old side-looker, I whispered to her, through the glass. Stag of the stubble. Old Turpin. They have never treated you as you should be treated. No respect. There is no respect left in this world. Left on show here as if you were just another beast of the fields. As if you were mortal. But I will find you. I am still looking.

  I try not to talk to the hare when there are others present.

  The museum is not far from my home. I come here perhaps once or twice a week. The staff are used to this eccentric old man wandering through their exhibits. I do not care how they see me. The hare knows me perhaps better than any human. I come because I feel, sometimes, as if looking into the eyes of the hare – false though they are – may furnish me with answers to questions which my research in more conventional areas has so far failed to reveal. I realise this is superstition. This is why I do it. Since I was a child I have gravitated towards anything dismissed by the educated as whimsy, stupidity, foolishness. Anything primitive or superstitious, any pre-modern notion which cannot be double-blind tested. The more educated a person is, the less they can really see. When the educated look at hares, if they ever do, they do not see the dance under the moon. They do not see the transformation. They do not see what She is and can become. The power and the danger, the polar dance on the green downs in summer.

  No. They see a bunny.

  But the dance continues, I am sure of it. Up there somewhere, in the old, high places. Before I die, I will bear witness.

  fire rises in the circle

  fire rising up the stones

  the stones dance as if they are alive

  they are alive

  above the circle, the moon’s eye watches

  the order of things shall be as ever

  and the people stand circled within the ring

  and the coals are the colour of the blood moon

  and all speak now the words of summoning

  the hare is brought forth

  The hare’s association with the moon is of particular interest to me. The hare that dances on the plain here appears when the moon is full. This is what the tales say, in what scant documentary evidence remains. It was often the case that hares seen when the moon was full were considered to be bad luck. In many parts of the country, in fact, hares were bad luck at any time. In the West Country, no fisherman would put to sea if he came across a hare on the way from his home to his boat. Once at sea, any mention of the hare was strictly forbidden. Take a hare aboard your vessel and drowning is certain.

  The moon hare is not a purely British phenomenon, which interests me greatly. The association is global. Silimukha, the Indian hare-king, is connected with the moon. In China, a hare sacrificed itself to the Buddha by throwing itself onto a fire. The Buddha, in recognition of its offering, commanded that the hare’s image should henceforth adorn the disc of the moon. The moon is a hare in many lands, and the hare becomes the moon in many others. Moon-hare tales lurk in the mythologies of Morocco, South Africa, France, Russia, various American Indian nations. There is a strange image of what appears to be a hare goddess in an old Saxon text. The Celtic goddess Ceridwen is linked also with hares. The Egyptian moon god Un-nefer, an early manifestation of Osiris, king of the dead, became a hare at the correct time of the month. And what of the hares painted high up in the Paleolithic caves in the Dordogne? What of the hares on the shaman’s drumskins in Lapland?

  The hare lives in the places between. She is never merely animal. All have known this.

  All except us.

  The hare and the moon: across the world, they saw the connection. Back when the outer world was alive, when Man was not the measure of all things. Back when we could see beyond the ends of our noses. Before the lights came on and the asphalt went down. They all saw something.
Here, when the moon was full, many times over the centuries, they saw the hare dancing on the plain, near the henge. The circling hare that came with a message. What did it have to say?

  silence is the sky

  silence in the moon’s eye

  still the stones dance

  and now the people hum

  and the hare is brought to the fire

  and the herbs are brought to the fire

  and the oil is brought to the fire

  and the hare annointed

  it does not struggle

  its ears lay flat upon its skull

  in my arms now it is still

  my arms now I raise to the fire

  the hare does not move

  in its eyes the flames dancing

  Become, I say

  Become!

  The old church at Imber is only accessible now on a few days each year. A strange place, is Imber; strange and sad. A high, lonely village up on the plain, it was requisitioned by the War Office in 1943 and the villagers expelled. They were never allowed to return, even when they descended en masse and demanded their homes back. Their homes are long gone, the thatched cottages, the inn, the manor, all replaced by concrete block houses where soldiers can practise kidnapping, killing, raiding, whatever it is they do and wherever they do it. But the church still stands, and once a year the public is allowed to visit. It has been stripped of its fittings – the pews are gone, the altar, the font. But the ghosts are still here.

  It is in the parish records of St Giles’ at Imber that the hare first appears. The date is 1318. John Godwin, a shepherd on the plain, was on his rounds. Where he was precisely is not known; or was not known, before my work began. It was somewhere between the village and the henge, which is perhaps ten miles distant. It was the evening of the full moon, and the shepherd was resting on the downs. In my mind’s eye I see the plain in the times before industry. The hills of yellow grass and green, rolling to a far horizon. The skies clear, the only sounds the birds, the sheep, the wind. Sometimes I curse my mind’s eye for what it shows me. All of the unreachable things.