The Last Feast of
Harlequin by Thomas Ligotti
1
My interest in the town of Mirocaw was first aroused when I heard
that an annual festival was held there which promised to include, to some
extent, the participation of clowns among its other elements of pageantry. A
former colleague of mine, who is now attached to the anthropology department of
a distant university, had read one of my recent articles (“The Clown Figure in
American Media,” Journal of Popular Culture), and wrote to me that he vaguely
remembered reading or being told of a town somewhere in the state that held a
kind of “Fool’s Feast” every year, thinking that this might be pertinent to my
peculiar line of study. It was, of course, more pertinent than he had reason to
think, both to my academic aims in this area and to my personal pursuits.
Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in
various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the
significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. Every year for
the past twenty years I have attended the pre-Lenten festivals that are held in
various places throughout the southern United States. Every year I learned
something more concerning the esoterics of celebration. In these studies I was
an eager participant—along with playing my part as an anthropologist, I also
took a place behind the clownish mask myself. And I cherished this role as I
did nothing else in my life. To me the title of Clown has always carried
connotations of a noble sort. I was an adroit jester, strangely enough, and had
always taken pride in the skills I worked so diligently to develop.
I wrote to the State Department of Recreation, indicating what
information I desired and exposing an enthusiastic urgency which came naturally
to me on this topic. Many weeks later I received a tan envelope imprinted with
a government logo. Inside was a pamphlet that catalogued all of the various
seasonal festivities of which the state was officially aware, and I noted in
passing that there were as many in late autumn and winter as in the warmer seasons.
A letter inserted within the pamphlet explained to me that, according to their
voluminous records, no festivals held in the town of Mirocaw had been
officially registered. Their files, nonetheless, could be placed at my disposal
if I should wish to research this or similar matters in connection with some
definite project. At the time this offer was made I was already laboring under
so many professional and personal burdens that, with a weary hand, I simply
deposited the envelope and its contents in a drawer, never to be consulted
again.
Some months later, however, I made an impulsive digression from my
responsibilities and, rather haphazardly, took up the Mirocaw project. This
happened as I was driving north one afternoon in late summer with the intention
of examining some journals in the holdings of a library at another university.
Once out of the city limits the scenery changed to sunny fields
and farms, diverting my thoughts from the signs that I passed along the
highway.
Nevertheless, the subconscious scholar in me must have been
regarding these with studious care. The name of a town loomed into my vision.
Instantly the scholar retrieved certain records from some deep mental drawer,
and I was faced with making a few hasty calculations as to whether there was
enough time and motivation for an investigative side trip. But the exit sign
was even hastier in making its appearance, and I soon found myself leaving the
highway, recalling the roadsign’s promise that the town was no more than seven
miles east.
These seven miles included several confusing turns, the forced
taking of a temporarily alternate route, and a destination not even visible
until a steep rise had been fully ascended. On the descent another helpful sign
informed me that I was within the city limits of Mirocaw. Some scattered houses
on the outskirts of the town were the first structures I encountered. Beyond
them the numerical highway became Townshend Street, the main avenue of Mirocaw.
The town impressed me as being much larger once I was within its
limits than it had appeared from the prominence just outside. I saw that the
general hilliness of the surrounding countryside was also an internal feature
of Mirocaw. Here, though, the effect was different. The parts of the town did
not look as if they adhered very well to one another. This condition might be
blamed on the irregular topography
of the town. Behind some of the old stores in the business
district, steeply roofed houses had been erected on a sudden incline, their
peaks appearing at an extraordinary elevation above the lower buildings. And
because the foundations of these houses could not be glimpsed, they conveyed
the illusion of being either precariously suspended in air, threatening to
topple down, or else constructed with an unnatural loftiness in relation to
their width and mass.
This situation also created a weird distortion of perspective. The
two levels of structures overlapped each other without giving a sense of depth,
so that the houses, because of their higher elevation and nearness to the
foreground buildings, did not appear diminished in size as background objects
should.
Consequently, a look of flatness, as in a photograph, predominated
in this area.
Indeed, Mirocaw could be compared to an album of old snapshots,
particularly ones in which the camera had been upset in the process of
photography, causing the pictures to develop on an angle: a cone-roofed turret,
like a pointed hat jauntily askew, peeked over the houses on a neighboring
street; a billboard displaying a group of grinning vegetables tipped its
contents slightly westward; cars parked along steep curbs seemed to be flying
skyward in the glare-distorted windows of a five-and-ten; people leaned
lethargically as they trod up and down sidewalks; and on that sunny day the
clock tower, which at first I mistook for a church steeple, cast a long shadow
that seemed to extend an impossible distance and wander into unlikely places in
its progress across the town. I should say that perhaps the disharmonies of
Mirocaw are more acutely affecting my imagination in retrospect than they were
on that first day, when I was primarily concerned with locating the city hall
or some other center of information.
I pulled around a corner and parked. Sliding over to the other
side of the seat, I rolled down the window and called to a passerby: “Excuse
me, sir,” I said. The man, who was shabbily dressed and very old, paused for a
moment without approaching the car. Though he had apparently responded to my
call, his vacant expression did not betray the least awareness of my presence,
and for a moment I thought it just a coincidence that he halted on the sidewalk
at the same time I addressed him. His eyes were focused somewhere beyond me
with a weary and imbecilic gaze. After a few moments he continued on his way
and I said nothing to call him back, even though at the last second his face
began to appear dimly familiar. Someone else finally came
along who was able to
direct me to the Mirocaw City Hall and Community Center.
The city hall turned out to be the building with the clock tower.
Inside I stood at a counter behind which some people were working at desks and
walking up and down a back hallway. On one wall was a poster for the state
lottery: a jack-in-the-box with both hands grasping green bills. After a few
moments, a tall, middle-aged woman came over to the counter.
“Can I help you?” she asked in a neutral, bureaucratic voice.
I explained that I had heard about the festival—saying nothing
about being a nosy academic—and asked if she could provide me with further
information or direct me to someone who could.
“Do you mean the one held in the winter?” she asked.
“How many of them are there?”
“Just that one.”
“I suppose, then, that that’s the one I mean.” I smiled as if
sharing a joke with her.
Without another word, she walked off into the back hallway. While
she was absent I exchanged glances with several of the people behind the
counter who periodically looked up from their work.
“There you are,” she said when she returned, handing me a piece of
paper that looked like the product of a cheap copy machine. Please Come to the
Fun, it said in large letters. Parades, it went on, Street Masquerade, Bands,
The Winter Raffle, and The Coronation of the Winter Queen. The page continued
with the mention of a number of miscellaneous festivities. I read the words
again. There was something about that imploring little “please” at the top of
the announcement that made the whole affair seem like a charity function.
“When is it held? It doesn’t say when the festival takes place.”
“Most people already know that.” She abruptly snatched the page
from my hands and wrote something at the bottom. When she gave it back to me, I
saw “Dec.
19-21” written
in blue-green ink. I was immediately struck by an odd sense of scheduling on
the part of the festival committee. There was, of course, solid anthropological
and historical precedent for holding festivities around the winter solstice, but
the timing of this particular event did not seem entirely practical.
“If you don’t mind my asking, don’t these days somewhat conflict
with the regular holiday season? I mean, most people have enough going on at
that time.”
“It’s just tradition,” she said, as if invoking some venerable
ancestry behind her words.
“That’s very interesting,” I said as much to myself as to her.
“Is there anything else?” she asked.
“Yes. Could you tell me if this festival has anything to do with
clowns? I see there’s something about a masquerade.”
“Yes, of course there are some people in … costumes. I’ve never
been in that position myself… that is, yes, there are clowns of a sort.”
At that point my interest was definitely aroused, but I was not
sure how much further I wanted to pursue it. I thanked the woman for her help
and asked the best means of access to the highway, not anxious to retrace the
labyrinthine route by which I had entered the town. I walked back to my car
with a whole flurry of half-formed questions, and as many vague and conflicting
answers, cluttering my mind.
The directions the woman gave me necessitated passing through the
south end of Mirocaw. There were not many people moving about in this section
of town. Those that I did see, shuffling lethargically down a block of battered
storefronts, exhibited the same sort of forlorn expression and manner as the
old man from whom I had asked directions earlier. I must have been traversing a
central artery of this area, for on either side stretched street after street
of poorly tended yards and houses bowed with age and indifference. When I came
to a stop at a streetcorner, one of the citizens of this slum passed in front
of my car.
This lean, morose, and epicene person turned my way and sneered
outrageously with a taut little mouth, yet seemed to be looking at no one in
particular.
After progressing a few streets farther, I came to a road that led
back to the highway. I felt detectably more comfortable as soon as I found
myself traveling once again through the expanses of sun-drenched farmlands.
I reached the library with more than enough time for my research,
and so I decided to make a scholarly detour to see what material I could find
that might illuminate the winter festival held in Mirocaw. The library, one of
the oldest in the state, included in its holdings the entire run of the Mirocaw
Courier. I thought this would be an excellent place to start. I soon found,
however, that there was no handy way to research information from this
newspaper, and I did not want to engage in a blind search for articles
concerning a specific subject.
I next turned to the more organized resources of the newspapers
for the larger cities located in the same county, which incidentally shares its
name with Mirocaw. I uncovered very little about the town, and almost nothing
concerning its festival, except in one general article on annual events in the
area that erroneously attributed to Mirocaw a “large Middle-Eastern community”
which every spring hosted a kind of ethnic jamboree. From what I had already
observed, and from what I subsequently learned, the citizens of Mirocaw were
solidly midwestern American, the probable descendants in a direct line from
some enterprising pack of New Englanders of the last century. There was one
brief item devoted to a Mirocavian event, but this merely turned out to be an
obituary notice for an old woman who had quietly taken her life around
Christmastime.
Thus, I returned home that day all but empty-handed on the subject
of Mirocaw.
However, it was not long afterward that I received another letter
from the former colleague of mine who had first led me to seek out Mirocaw and
its festival. As it happened, he rediscovered the article that caused him to
stir my interest in a local “Fool’s Feast.” This article had its sole
appearance in an obscure festschrift of anthropology studies published in
Amsterdam twenty years ago. Most of these papers were in Dutch, a few in
German, and only one was in English: “The Last Feast of Harlequin: Preliminary
Notes on a Local Festival.”
It was exciting, of course, finally to be able to read this study,
but even more exciting was the name of its author: Dr. Raymond Thoss.
2
Before proceeding any further, I should mention something about
Thoss, and inevitably about myself. Over two decades ago, at my alma mater in
Cambridge, Mass., Thoss was a professor of mine. Long before playing a role in
the events I am about to describe, he was already one of the most important
figures in my life. A striking personality, he inevitably influenced everyone
who came in contact with him. I remember his lectures on social anthropology,
how he turned that dim room into a brilliant and profound circus of learning.
He moved in an uncannily brisk manner. When he swept his arm around to indicate
some common term on the blackboard behind him, one felt he was presenting
nothing less than an item of fantastic
qualities and secret value. When he replaced his hand in the
pocket of his old jacket this fleeting magic was once again stored away in its
well-worn pouch, to be retrieved at the sorcerer’s discretion. We sensed he was
teaching us more than we could possibly learn, and that he himself was in possession
of greater and deeper knowledge than he could possibly impart. On one occasion
I summoned up the audacity to offer an interpretation—which was somewhat
opposed to his own—regarding the tribal clowns of the Hopi Indians. I implied
that personal experience as an amateur clown and special devotion to this study
provided me with an insight possibly more valuable than his own. It was then he
disclosed, casually and very obiter dicta, that he had actually acted in the
role of one of these masked tribal fools and had celebrated with them the dance
of the kachinas. In revealing these facts, however, he somehow managed not to
add to the humiliation I had already inflicted upon myself. And for this I was
grateful to him. Thoss’s activities were such that he sometimes became the
object of gossip or romanticized speculation. He was a fieldworker par
excellence, and his ability to insinuate himself into exotic cultures and
situations, thereby gaining insights where other anthropologists merely
collected data, was renowned. At various times in his career there had been
rumors of his having “gone native” a la the Frank Hamilton Cushing legend.
There were hints, which were not always irresponsible or cheaply glamorized,
that he was involved in projects of a freakish sort, many of which focused on
New England. It is a fact that he spent six months posing as a mental patient
at an institution in western Massachusetts, gathering information on the
“culture” of the psychically disturbed. When his book Winter Solstice: The Longest
Night of a Society was published, the general opinion was that it was
disappointingly subjective and impressionistic, and that, aside from a few
moving but “poetically obscure”
observations,
there was nothing at all to give it value. Those who defended Thoss claimed he
was a kind of super-anthropologist: while much of his work emphasized his own
mind and feelings, his experience had in fact penetrated to a rich core of hard
data which he had yet to disclose in objective discourse. As a student of Thoss,
I tended to support this latter estimation of him. For a variety of tenable and
untenable reasons, I believed Thoss capable of unearthing hitherto inaccessible
strata of human existence. So it was gratifying at first that this article
entitled “The Last
Feast
of Harlequin” seemed to uphold the Thoss mystique, and in an area I
personally found captivating.
Much of the content of the article I did not immediately
comprehend, given its author’s characteristic and often strategic obscurities.
On first reading, the most interesting aspect of this brief study—the “notes”
encompassed only twenty pages—was the general mood of the piece. Thoss’s
eccentricities were definitely present in these pages, but only as a struggling
inner force which was definitely contained—incarcerated, I might say—by the
somber rhythmic movements of his prose and by some gloomy references he
occasionally called upon. Two references in particular shared a common theme.
One was a quotation from Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm,” which Thoss employed as a
rather sensational epigraph. The point of the epigraph, however, was nowhere
echoed in the text of the article save in another passing reference. Thoss
brought up the well-known genesis of the modern Christmas celebration, which of
course descends from the Roman Saturnalia. Then, making it clear he had not yet
observed the Mirocaw festival and had only gathered its nature from various
informants, he established that it too contained many, even more overt,
elements of the Saturnalia. Next he made what seemed to me a trivial and purely
linguistic observation, one that had less to do with his main course of
argument than it did with the equally peripheral Poe epigraph. He briefly
mentioned that an early sect of the Syrian Gnostics called themselves “Saturnians”
and believed, among other religious heresies, that mankind was created by
angels who were in turn created by the Supreme Unknown. The angels, however,
did not possess the power to make their creation an erect being and for a time
he crawled upon the earth like a worm. Eventually, the Creator remedied this
grotesque state of affairs.
At the time I supposed that the symbolic correspondences of
mankind’s origins and ultimate condition being associated with worms, combined
with a year-end festival recognizing the winter death of the earth, was the
gist of this Thossian “insight,” a poetic but scientifically valueless
observation.
Other observations he made on the Mirocaw festival were also
strictly etic; in other words, they were based on secondhand sources, hearsay
testimony. Even at that juncture, however, I felt Thoss knew more than he
disclosed; and, as I later discovered, he had indeed included information on
certain aspects of Mirocaw suggesting he
25
was
already in possession of several keys which for the moment he was keeping
securely in his own pocket. By then I myself possessed a most revealing morsel
of knowledge. A note to the “Harlequin” article apprised the reader that the
piece was only a fragment in rude form of a more wide-ranging work in
preparation. This work was never seen by the world. My former professor had not
published anything since his withdrawal from academic circulation some twenty
years ago. Now I suspected where he had gone.
For the man I had stopped on the streets of Mirocaw and from whom
I tried to obtain directions, the man with the disconcertingly lethargic gaze,
had very much resembled a superannuated version of Dr. Raymond Thoss.
3
And now I have a confession to make. Despite my reasons for being
enthusiastic about Mirocaw and its mysteries, especially its relationship to
both Thoss and my own deepest concerns as a scholar—I contemplated the days
ahead of me with no more than a feeling of frigid numbness and often with a
sense of profound depression. Yet I had no reason to be surprised at this
emotional state, which had little relevance to the outward events in my life
but was determined by inward conditions that worked according to their own,
quite enigmatic, seasons and cycles. For many years, at least since my
university days, I have suffered from this dark malady, this recurrent
despondency in which I would become buried when it came time for the earth to
grow cold and bare and the skies heavy with shadows. Nevertheless, I pursued my
plans, though somewhat mechanically, to visit Mirocaw during its festival days,
for I superstitiously hoped that this activity might diminish the weight of my
seasonal despair. In Mirocaw would be parades and parties and the opportunity
to play the clown once again.
For weeks in advance I practiced my art, even perfecting a new
feat of juggling magic, which was my special forte in foolery. I had my
costumes cleaned, purchased fresh makeup, and was ready. I received permission
from the university to cancel some of my classes prior to the holiday,
explaining the nature of my project and the necessity of arriving in the town a
few days before the festival began, in order to
do some preliminary
research, establish informants, and so on. Actually, my plan was to postpone
any formal inquiry until after the festival and to involve myself beforehand as
much as possible in its activities. I would, of course, keep a journal during
this time.
There was one resource I did want to consult, however.
Specifically, I returned to that out-state library to examine those issues of
the Mirocaw Courier dating from December two decades ago. One story in
particular confirmed a point Thoss made in the “Harlequin” article, though the
event it chronicled must have taken place after Thoss had written his study.
The Courier story appeared two weeks after the festival had ended
for that year and was concerned with the disappearance of a woman named
Elizabeth Beadle, the wife of Samuel Beadle, a hotel owner in Mirocaw. The
county authorities speculated that this was another instance of the “holiday
suicides” which seemed to occur with inordinate seasonal regularity in the
Mirocaw region. Thoss documented this phenomenon in his “Harlequin” article,
though I suspect that today these deaths would be neatly categorized under the
heading “seasonal affective disorder”. In any case, the authorities searched a
half-frozen lake near the outskirts of Mirocaw where they had found many
successful suicides in years past. This year, however, no body was discovered.
Alongside the article was a picture of Elizabeth Beadle. Even in the grainy
microfilm reproduction one could detect a certain vibrancy and vitality in Mrs.
Beadle’s face. That an hypothesis of “holiday suicide” should be so readily
posited to explain her disappearance seemed strange and in some way unjust.
Thoss, in his brief article, wrote that every year there occurred
changes of a moral or spiritual cast which seemed to affect Mirocaw along with
the usual winter metamorphosis. He was not precise about its origin or nature
but stated, in typically mystifying fashion, that the effect of this
“subseason” on the town was conspicuously negative. In addition to the number
of suicides actually accomplished during this time, there was also a rise in
treatment of “hypochondriacal” conditions, which was how the medical men of
twenty years past characterized these cases in discussions with Thoss. This
state of affairs would gradually worsen and finally reach a climax during the
days scheduled for the Mirocaw festival. Thoss speculated that given the
secretive nature of small towns, the situation was probably even more intensely
pronounced than casual investigation could reveal.
The connection between the festival and this insidious subseasonal
climate in Mirocaw was a point on which Thoss did not come to any rigid
conclusions. He did write, nevertheless, that these two “climatic aspects” had
had a parallel existence in the town’s history as far back as available records
could document.
A late nineteenth-century history of Mirocaw County speaks of the
town by its original name of New Colstead, and castigates the townspeople for
holding a “ribald and soulless feast” to the exclusion of normal Christmas
observances.
(Thoss comments that the historian had mistakenly fused two
distinct aspects of the season, their actual relationship being essentially
antagonistic.) The “Harlequin” article did not trace the festival to its
earliest appearance (this may not have been possible), though Thoss emphasized
the New England origins of Mirocaw’s founders. The festival, therefore, was one
imported from this region and could reasonably be extended at least a century;
that is, if it had not been brought over from the Old World, in which case its
roots would become indefinite until further research could be done. Surely
Thoss’s allusion to the Syrian Gnostics suggested the latter possibility could
not entirely be ruled out.
But it seemed to be the festival’s link to New England that
nourished Thoss’s speculations. He wrote of this patch of geography as if it
were an acceptable place to end the search. For him, the very words “New
England” seemed to be stripped of all traditional connotations and had come to
imply nothing less than a gateway to all lands, both known and suspected, and
even to ages beyond the civilized history of the region. Having been educated
partly in New England, I could somewhat understand this sentimental
exaggeration, for indeed there are places that seem archaic beyond
chronological measure, appearing to transcend relative standards of time and
achieving a kind of absolute antiquity which cannot be logically fathomed. But
how this vague suggestion related to a small town in the Midwest I could not
imagine. Thoss himself observed that the residents of Mirocaw did not betray
any mysteriously primitive consciousness. On the contrary, they appeared
superficially unaware of mysteriously primitive consciousness. On the contrary,
they appeared superficially unaware of the genesis of their winter merrymaking.
That such a tradition had endured through the years, however, even eclipsing
the conventional Christmas holiday, revealed a profound awareness of the
festival’s meaning and function.
I cannot deny that what I had learned about the Mirocaw festival
did inspire a trite sense of fate, especially given the involvement of such an
important figure from my past as Thoss. It was the first time in my academic
career that I knew myself to be better suited than anyone else to discern the
true meaning of scattered data, even if I could only attribute this special
authority to chance circumstances. Nevertheless, as I sat in that library on a
morning in mid December I doubted for a moment the wisdom of setting out for
Mirocaw rather than returning home, where the more familiar rite de passage of
winter depression awaited me. My original scheme was to avoid the cyclical
blues the season held for me, but it seemed this was also a part of the history
of Mirocaw, only on a much larger scale. My emotional instability, however, was
exactly what qualified me most for the particular fieldwork ahead, though I did
not take pride or consolation in the fact. And to retreat would have been to
deny myself an opportunity that might never offer itself again. In retrospect,
there seems to have been no fortuitous resolution to the decision I had to
make.
As it happened, I went ahead to the town.
4
Just past noon, on December 18, I started driving toward Mirocaw.
A blur of dull, earthen-colored scenery extended in every direction. The
snowfalls of late autumn had been sparse, and only a few white patches appeared
in the harvested fields along the highway. The clouds were gray and abundant.
Passing by a stretch of forest, I noticed the black, ragged clumps of abandoned
nests clinging to the twisted mesh of bare branches. I thought I saw black
birds skittering over the road ahead, but they were only dead leaves and they
flew into the air as I drove by.
I approached Mirocaw from the south, entering the town from the
direction I had left it on my visit the previous summer. This took me once
again through that part of town which seemed to exist on the wrong side of some
great invisible barrier dividing the desirable sections of Mirocaw from the
undesirable. As lurid as this district had appeared to me under the summer sun,
in the thin light of that winter afternoon it degenerated into a pale phantom
of itself. The frail stores and starved-looking houses suggested a borderline
region between the material and nonmaterial worlds, with one sardonically
wearing the mask of the other. I saw a few gaunt pedestrians who turned as I
passed by, though seemingly not because I passed by, making my way up to the
main street of Mirocaw.
Driving up the steep rise of Townshend Street, I found the sights
there comparatively welcoming. The rolling avenues of the town were in
readiness for the festival. Streetlights had their poles raveled with
evergreen, the fresh boughs proudly conspicuous in a barren season. On the
doors of many of the businesses on Townshend were holly wreaths, equally green
but observably plastic. However, although there was nothing unusual in this
traditional greenery of the season, it soon became apparent to me that Mirocaw
had quite abandoned itself to this particular symbol of Yuletide. It was
garishly in evidence everywhere. The windows of stores and houses were framed
in green lights, green streamers hung down from storefront awnings, and the
beacons of the Red Rooster Bar were peacock green floodlights. I supposed the
residents of Mirocaw desired these decorations, but the effect was one of
excess. An eerie emerald haze permeated the town, and faces looked slightly reptilian.
At the time I assumed that the prodigious evergreen, holly
wreaths, and colored lights (if only of a single color) demonstrated an
emphasis on the vegetable symbols of the Nordic Yuletide, which would
inevitably be muddled into the winter festival of any northern country just as
they had been adopted for the Christmas season. In his “Harlequin” article
Thoss wrote of the pagan aspect of Mirocaw’s festival, likening it to the
ritual of a fertility cult, with probable connections to chthonic divinities at
some time in the past. But Thoss had mistaken, as I had, what was only part of
the festival’s significance for the whole.
***
The hotel at which I had made reservations was located on
Townshend. It was an old building of brown brick, with an arched doorway and a
pathetic coping intended to convey an impression of neoclassicism. I found a
parking space in front and left my suitcases in the car.
When I first entered the hotel lobby it was empty. I thought
perhaps the Mirocaw festival would have attracted enough visitors to at least
bolster the business of its only hotel, but it seemed I was mistaken. Tapping a
little bell, I leaned on the desk and turned to look at a small, traditionally
decorated Christmas tree on a table near the entranceway. It was complete with
shiny, egg-fragile bulbs; miniature candy canes; flat, laughing Santas with
arms wide; a star on top nodding awkwardly against the delicate shoulder of an
upper branch; and colored lights that bloomed out of flower-shaped sockets. For
some reason this seemed to me a sorry little piece.
“May I help you?” said a young woman arriving from a room adjacent
to the lobby.
I must have been staring rather intently at her, for she looked
away and seemed quite uneasy. I could hardly imagine what to say to her or how
to explain what I was thinking. In person she immediately radiated a chilling
brilliance of manner and expression. But if this woman had not committed
suicide twenty years before, as the newspaper article had suggested, neither
had she aged in that time.
“Sarah,” called a masculine voice from the invisible heights of a
stairway. A tall, middle-aged man came down the steps. “I thought you were in
your room,”
said the
man, whom I took to be Samuel Beadle. Sarah, not Elizabeth, Beadle glanced
sideways in my direction to indicate to her father that she was conducting the
business of the hotel. Beadle apologized to me, and then excused the two of
them for a moment while they went off to one side to continue their exchange.
I smiled and pretended everything was normal, while trying to
remain within earshot of their conversation. They spoke in tones that suggested
their conflict was a familiar one: Beadle’s overprotective concern with his
daughter’s whereabouts and Sarah’s frustrated undemanding of certain
restrictions placed upon her. The conversation ended, and Sarah ascended the
stairs, turning for a moment to give me a facial pantomime of apology for the
unprofessional scene that had just taken place.
“Now, sir, what can I do for you?” Beadle asked, almost demanded.
“Yes, I have a reservation. Actually, I’m a day early, if that
doesn’t present a problem.” I gave the hotel the benefit of the doubt that its
business might have been secretly flourishing.
“No problem at all, sir,” he said, presenting me with the
registration form, and then a brass-colored key dangling from a plastic disc
bearing the number.
“Luggage?”
“Yes, it’s in my car.”
“I’ll give you a hand with that.”
31
While
Beadle was settling me in my fourth-floor room it seemed an opportune moment to
broach the subject of the festival, the holiday suicides, and perhaps,
depending upon his reaction, the fate of his wife. I needed a respondent who
had lived in the town for a good many years and who could enlighten me about
the attitude of Mirocavians toward their season of sea-green lights.
“This is just fine,” I said about the clean but somber room. “Nice
view. I can see the bright green lights of Mirocaw just fine from up here. Is
the town usually all decked out like this? For the festival, I mean.”
“Yes, sir, for the festival,” he replied mechanically.
“I imagine you’ll probably be getting quite a few of us
out-of-towners in the next couple days.”
“Could be. Is there anything else?”
“Yes, there is. I wonder if you could tell me something about the
festivities.”
“Such as …”
“Well, you know, the clowns and so forth.”
“Only clowns here are the ones that’re … well, picked out, I
suppose you would say.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Excuse me, sir. I’m very busy right now. Is there anything
else?”
I could think of nothing at the moment to perpetuate our
conversation. Beadle wished me a good stay and left.
I unpacked my suitcases. In
addition to regular clothing I had also brought along some of the items from my
clown’s wardrobe. Beadle’s comment that the clowns of Mirocaw were “picked
out” left me wondering exactly what purpose these street masqueraders served in
the festival. The clown figure has had so many meanings in different times and
cultures. The jolly, well-loved joker familiar to most people is actually but
one aspect of this protean creature. Madmen, hunchbacks, amputees, and other
abnormals were once considered natural clowns; they were elected to fulfil a
comic role which could allow others to see them as ludicrous rather than as
terrible reminders of the forces of disorder in the world. But sometimes a
cheerless jester was required to draw attention to this same disorder, as in
the case of King Lear’s morbid and honest fool, who of course was eventually
hanged, and so much for his clownish wisdom. Clowns have often had ambiguous
and sometimes contradictory roles to play. Thus, I knew enough not to brashly
jump into costume and cry out, “Here I am again!”
That first day in Mirocaw I did not stray far from the hotel. I
read and rested for a few hours and then ate at a nearby diner. Through the
window beside my table I watched the winter night turn the soft green glow of
the town into a harsh and almost totally new color as it contrasted with the
darkness. The streets of Mirocaw seemed to me unusually busy for a small town
at evening. Yet it was not the kind of activity one normally sees before an
approaching Christmas holiday. This was not a crowd of bustling shoppers loaded
with bright bags of presents. Their arms were empty, their hands shoved deep in
their pockets against the cold, which nevertheless had not driven them to the
solitude of their presumably warm houses. I watched them enter and exit store
after store without buying; many merchants remained open late, and even the
places that were closed had left their neons illuminated. The faces that passed
the window of the diner were possibly just stiffened by the cold, I thought;
frozen into deep frowns and nothing else. In the same window I saw the
reflection of my own face.
It was not the face of an adept clown; it was slack and flabby and
at that moment seemed the face of someone less than alive. Outside was the town
of Mirocaw, its streets dipping and rising with a lunatic severity, its
citizens packing the sidewalks, its heart bathed in green: as promising a field
of professional and personal challenge as I had ever encountered—and I was
bored to the point of dread. I hurried back to my hotel room.
“Mirocaw has another coldness within its cold,” I wrote in my
journal that night. “Another set of buildings and streets that exists behind
the visible town’s facade like a world of disgraceful back alleys.” I went on
like this for about a page, across which I finally engraved a big “X”. Then I
went to bed.
***
In the morning I left my car at the hotel and walked toward the
main business district a few blocks away. Mingling with the good people of
Mirocaw seemed like the proper thing to do at that point in my scientific
sojourn. But as I began laboriously walking up Townshend (the sidewalks were
cramped with wandering pedestrians), aglimpse of someone suddenly replaced my
haphazard plan with a more specific and immediate one. Through the crowd and
about fifteen paces ahead was my goal.
“Dr. Thoss,” I called.
His head almost seemed to turn and look back in response to my
shout, but I could not be certain. I pushed past several warmly wrapped bodies
and green-scarved necks, only to find that the object of my pursuit appeared to
be maintaining the same distance from me, though I did not know if this was
being done deliberately or not. At the next corner, the dark-coated Thoss
abruptly turned right onto a steep street which led downward directly toward
the dilapidated south end of Mirocaw. When I reached the corner I looked down
the sidewalk and could see him very clearly from above. I also saw how he
managed to stay so far ahead of me in a mob that had impeded my own progress.
For some reason the people on the sidewalk made room so that he could move past
them easily, without the usual jostling of bodies. It was not a dramatic
physical avoidance, though it seemed nonetheless intentional. Fighting the
tight fabric of the throng, I continued to follow Thoss, losing and regaining
sight of him.
By the
time I reached the bottom of the sloping street the crowd had thinned out
considerably, and after walking a block or so farther I found myself
practically a lone pedestrian pacing behind a distant figure that I hoped was
still Thoss.
He was now walking quite swiftly and in a way that seemed to
acknowledge my pursuit of him, though really it felt as if he were leading me
as much as I was chasing him. I called his name a few more times at a volume he
could not have failed to hear, assuming that deafness was not one of the
changes to have come over him; he was, after all, not a young man, nor even a
middle-aged one any longer.
Thoss suddenly crossed in the middle of the street. He walked a
few more steps and entered a signless brick building between a liquor store and
a repair shop of some kind. In the “Harlequin” article Thoss had mentioned that
the people living in this section of Mirocaw maintained their own businesses,
and that these were patronized almost exclusively by residents of the area. I
could well believe this statement when I looked at these little sheds of
commerce, for they had the same badly weathered appearance as their clientele.
The formidable shoddiness of these buildings notwithstanding, I followed Thoss
into the plain brick shell of what had been, or possibly still was, a diner.
Inside it was unusually dark. Even before my eyes made the
adjustment I sensed that this was not a thriving restaurant cozily cluttered
with chairs and tables—as was the establishment where I had eaten the night
before—but a place with only a few disarranged furnishings, and very cold. It
seemed colder, in fact, than the winter streets outside.
“Dr. Thoss?” I called toward a lone table near the center of the
long room.
Perhaps four or five were sitting around the table, with some
others blending into the dimness behind them. Scattered across the top of the
table were some books and loose papers. Seated there was an old man indicating
something in the pages before him, but it was not Thoss. Beside him were two
youths whose wholesome features distinguished them from the grim weariness of
the others. I approached the table and they all looked up at me. None of them
showed a glimmer of emotion except the two boys, who exchanged worried and
guilt-ridden glances with each other, as if they had just been discovered in
some shameful act. They both suddenly burst from the table and ran into the
dark background, where a light appeared briefly as they exited by a back door.
“I’m sorry,” I said diffidently. “I thought I saw someone I knew
come in here.”
They said
nothing. Out of a back room others began to emerge, no doubt interested in the
source of the commotion. In a few moments the room was crowded with these
tramp-like figures, all of them gazing emptily in the dimness. I was not at
this point frightened of them; at least I was not afraid they would do me any
physical harm. Actually, I felt as if it was quite within my power to pummel
them easily into submission, their mousy faces almost inviting a succession of
firm blows. But there were so many of them.
They slid slowly toward me in a worm-like mass. Their eyes seemed
empty and unfocused, and I wondered a moment if they were even aware of my
presence.
Nevertheless, I was the center upon which their lethargic
shuffling converged, their shoes scuffing softly along the bare floor. I began
to deliver a number of hasty inanities as they continued to press toward me,
their weak and unexpectedly odorless bodies nudging against mine. (I understood
now why the people along the sidewalks seemed to instinctively avoid Thoss.)
Unseen legs became entangled with my own; I staggered and then regained my
balance. This sudden movement aroused me from a kind of mesmeric daze into
which I must have fallen without being aware of it. I had intended to leave
that dreary place long before events had
reached such a juncture, but for some reason I could not
focus my intentions strongly enough to cause myself to act. My mind had been
drifting farther away as these slavish things approached. In a sudden surge of
panic I pushed through their soft ranks and was outside.
The open air revived me to my former alertness, and I immediately
started pacing swiftly up the hill. I was no longer sure that I had not simply
imagined what had seemed, and at the same time did not seem, like a perilous
moment. Had their movements been directed toward a harmful assault, or were
they trying merely to intimidate me? As I reached the green-glazed main street
of Mirocaw I really could not determine what had just happened.
The sidewalks were still jammed with a multitude of pedestrians,
who now seemed more lively than they had been only a short time before. There
was a kind of vitality that could only be attributed to the imminent
festivities. A group of young men had begun celebrating prematurely and strode
noisily across the street at midpoint, obviously intoxicated. From the laughter
and joking among the still sober citizens I gathered that, mardi-gras style,
public drunkenness was within the traditions of this winter festival. I looked
for anything to indicate the beginnings of the Street Masquerade, but saw
nothing: no brightly garbed harlequins or snow-white pierrots. Were the
ceremonies even now in preparation for the coronation of the Winter Queen? “The
Winter Queen,” I wrote in my journal. “Figure of fertility invested with
symbolic powers of revival and prosperity. Elected in the manner of a high
school prom queen. Check for possible consort figure in the form of a
representative from the underworld.”
In the pre-darkness hours of December 19 I sat in my hotel room
and wrote and thought and organized. I did not feel too badly, all things
considered. The holiday excitement which was steadily rising in the streets
below my window was definitely infecting me. I forced myself to take a short
nap in anticipation of a long night. When I awoke, Mirocaw’s annual feast had
begun.
5
Practically bounding from my bed to the sounds of bustling and
carousing outside, I went to the window and looked out over the town. It seemed
all the lights of Mirocaw were shining, save in that section down the hill
which became part of the black void of winter. And now the town’s greenish
tinge was even more pronounced, spreading everywhere like a great green rainbow
that had melted from the sky and endured, phosphorescent, into the night. In
the streets was the brightness of an artificial spring. The byways of Mirocaw
vibrated with activity: on a nearby corner a brass band blared; marauding cars
blew their horns and were sometimes mounted by laughing pedestrians; a man
emerged from the Red Rooster Bar, threw up his arms, and crowed. I looked
closely at the individual celebrants, searching for the vestments of clowns.
Soon, delightedly, I saw them. The costume was red and white, with matching
cap, and the face painted a noble alabaster. It almost seemed to be a clownish
incarnation of that white-bearded and black-booted Christmas fool.
This particular fool, however, was not receiving the affection and
respect usually accorded to a Santa Claus. My poor fellow-clown was in the middle
of a circle of revelers who were pushing him back and forth from one to the
other. The object of this abuse seemed to accept it somewhat willingly, but
this little game nevertheless appeared to have humiliation as its purpose.
“Only clowns here are the ones that’re picked out,” echoed Beadle’s voice in my
memory. “Picked on” seemed closer to the truth.
Packing myself in some heavy clothes, I went out into the green
gleaming streets. Not far from the hotel I was stumbled into by a character
with a wide blue and red grin and bright baggy clothes. Actually he had been
shoved in my direction by some young men outside a drugstore. He lost his
footing on the slick sidewalk and tumbled down into a bank of snow along the
street. “See the freak,” said an obese and drunken fellow.
“See the freak fall.”
My first response was anger, and then fear as I saw two others
flanking the fat drunk. They walked toward me and I tensed myself for a
confrontation.
“This is a disgrace,” one said, the neck of a wine bottle held
loosely in his left hand.
But it was not to me they were speaking; it was to the clown. His
three persecutors helped him up with a sudden jerk and then splashed wine in
his face. They ignored me altogether.
“Let him loose,” the fat one said. “Crawl away, freak. Oh, he
flies!”
The clown trotted off, becoming lost in the throng.
“Wait a minute,” I said to the rowdy trio, who had started
lumbering away. I quickly decided that it would probably be futile to ask them
to explain what I had just witnessed, especially amid the noise and confusion
of the festivities. In my best jovial fashion I proposed we all go someplace
where I could buy them each a drink. They had no objection and in a short while
we were all squeezed around a table in the Red Rooster.
Soon after we were served, I told them that I was from out of town
and asked if they could explain some things… I did not understand about their
festival.
“I don’t think there’s anything to understand,” the fat one said.
“It’s just what you see.”
I asked him about the people dressed as clowns.
“Them? They’re the freaks. It’s their turn this year. Everyone
takes their turn. Next year it might be mine. Or yours,” he said, pointing at
one of his friends across the table. “And when we find out which one you are—”
“You’re not smart enough,” said the defiant potential freak.
This was an important point: the fact that individuals who played
the clowns remained, or at least attempted to remain, anonymous. This
arrangement would help remove inhibitions a resident of Mirocaw might have
about abusing his own neighbor or even a family relation. From what I later
observed, the extent of this abuse did not go beyond a kind of playful
roughhousing. And even so, it was only the occasional group of rowdies who
actually took advantage of this aspect of the festival, the majority of the
citizens very much content to stay on the sidelines.
As far as being able to illuminate the meaning of this custom, my
three young friends were quite useless. To them it was just amusement, as I
imagine it was to the majority of Mirocavians. This was understandable. I
suppose the average person would not be able to explain exactly how the
profoundly familiar Christmas holiday came to be celebrated in its present
form.
I left the bar alone and not unaffected by the drinks I had consumed
there. Outside, the general merrymaking continued. Loud music emanated from
several quarters. Mirocaw had fully transformed itself from a sedate small town
to an enclave of Saturnalia within the dark immensity of a winter night. But
Saturn is also the planetary symbol of melancholy and sterility, a clash of
opposites contained within that single word. And as I wandered half-drunkenly
down the street, I discovered that there was a conflict within the winter
festival itself. This discovery indeed appeared to be that secret key which
Thoss withheld in his study of the town. Oddly enough, it was through my
unfamiliarity with the outward nature of the festival that I came to know its
true nature.
I was mingling with the crowd on the street, warmly enjoying the
confusion around me, when I saw a strangely designed creature lingering on the
corner up ahead. It was one of the Mirocaw clowns. Its clothes were shabby and
nondescript, almost in the style of a tramp-type clown, but not humorously
exaggerated enough. The face, though, made up for the lackluster costume. I had
never seen such a strange conception for a clown’s countenance. The figure
stood beneath a dim streetlight, and when it turned its head my way I felt a
sense of recognition. The thin, smooth, and pale head; the wide eyes; the
oval-shaped features resembling nothing so much as the skull-faced, screaming
creature in that famous painting (memory fails me). This clownish imitation
rivaled the original in summoning an effect of stricken horror and despair. It
had an inhuman likeness more proper to something under the earth than upon it.
From the first moment I saw this creature, I thought of those
inhabitants of the ghetto down the hill. There was the same nauseating
passivity and languor in its bearing. Perhaps if I had not been drinking
earlier I would not have been bold enough to take the action I did. I decided
to join in one of the upstanding traditions of the winter festival, for it
annoyed me to see this morbid impostor of a clown standing up. When I reached
the corner I laughingly pushed myself into the creature—“Whoops!”—who stumbled
backward and ended up on the sidewalk. I laughed again and looked around for
approval from my fellow merrymakers in the vicinity. No one, however, seemed to
appreciate or even acknowledge what I had done. They did not laugh with me or
point with amusement, but only passed by, perhaps walking a little faster until
they were some distance from this streetcorner incident. I realized instantly I
had violated some tacit rule of behavior, though I had thought my action well
within the common practice. The idea occurred to me that I might even be
apprehended and prosecuted for what in any other circumstances was certainly a
criminal act. I turned around to help the clown back to his feet, hoping to
somehow redeem my offense, but the creature was gone. Solemnly I walked away
from the scene of my inadvertent crime and sought other streets away from its
witnesses.
Along the various back avenues of Mirocaw I wandered, pausing
exhaustedly at one point to sit at the counter of a small sandwich shop that
was packed with customers. I ordered a cup of coffee to revive my inebriated
system. Warming my hands around the cup and sipping slowly from it, I watched
the people outside as they passed the front window. It was well after midnight
but the thick flow of passersby gave no indication that anyone was going home
early. A carnival of profiles filed past the window and I was content simply to
sit back and observe, until finally one of these faces made me start. It was
that frightful little clown I had roughed up earlier. But although its face was
familiar in its ghastly aspect, there was something different about it. And I
wondered that there should be two hideous freaks.
Quickly paying the man at the counter, I dashed out to get a
second glimpse of the clown, who was now nowhere to be seen. I wondered how it
could have made its way so easily out of sight, unless the dense crowd along
the sidewalk had instinctively allowed this creature to pass unhindered through
its massive ranks, as it did for Thoss. In the process of searching for this
particular freak, I discovered that interspersed among the celebrating populace
of Mirocaw, which included the sanctioned festival clowns, there was not one or
two, but a considerable number of these pale, wraithlike creatures. And they
all drifted along the streets unmolested by even the rowdiest of revelers. I
now understood one of the taboos of the festival. These other clowns were not
to be disturbed and should even be avoided, much as were the residents of the
slum at the edge of town. Nevertheless, I felt instinctively that the two
groups of clowns were somehow identified with each other, even if the ghetto
clowns were not welcome at Mirocaw’s winter festival. Indeed, they might
legitimately be regarded as part of the community and celebrating the season in
their own way. To all appearances, this group of melancholy mummers constituted
nothing less than an entirely independent festival—a festival within a festival.
Returning to my room, I entered my suppositions into the journal I
was keeping for this venture. The following are excerpts:
There is a superstitiousness displayed by the residents of Mirocaw
with regard to these people from the slum section, particularly as they lately
appear in those dreadful faces signifying their own festival. What is the
relationship between these simultaneous celebrations? Did one precede the
other? If so, which? My opinion at this point—and I claim no conclusiveness for
it—is that Mirocaw’s winter festival is the later manifestation, that it
appeared after the festival of those depressingly pallid clowns, in order to
cover it up or mitigate its effect. The holiday suicides come to mind, and the
“subclimate” Thoss wrote about, as well as the disappearance of Elizabeth
Beadle twenty years ago, and my encounter this very day with the pariah clan
existing outside yet within the community. Of my own experience with this
emotionally deleterious subseason I would rather not speak at this time. Still
not able to say whether or not my usual winter melancholy is the cause. On the
general subject of mental health, I must consider Thoss’s book about his stay
in a psychiatric hospital (in western Massachusetts, almost sure of that. Check
on this book and Mirocaw’s New England roots). The winter solstice is tomorrow,
albeit sometime past midnight. It is, of course, the day of the year on which
night hours surpass daylight hours by the greatest margin. Note what this has
to do with the suicides and a rise in psychic disorder. Recalling Thoss’s list
of documented suicides in his article, there seemed to be a recurrence of
specific family names, as there very likely might be for any kind of data
collected in a small town. Among these names was a Beadle or two. Perhaps,
then, there is a hereditary basis for the suicides which has nothing to do with
Thoss’s mystical subclimate, which is a colorful idea to be sure and one that
seems fitting for this town of various outward and inward aspects, but is not a
conception that can be substantiated.
One thing that seems certain, however, is the division of Mirocaw
into two very distinct types of citizenry, resulting in two festivals and the
appearance of similar clowns—a term now used in an extremely loose sense. But
there is a connection, and I believe I have some idea of what it is. I said
before that the normal residents of the town regard those from the ghetto, and
especially their clown figures, with superstition. Yet it’s more than that:
there is fear, perhaps hatred—the particular kind of hatred resulting from some
powerful and irrational memory. What threatens Mirocaw I think I can very well
understand. I recall the incident earlier today in that vacant diner. “Vacant”
is the appropriate word here. The congregation of that half-lit room formed
less a presence than an absence, even considering the oppressive number of
them. Those eyes that did not or could not focus on anything, the pining
lassitude of their faces, the lazy march of their feet. I was spiritually
drained when I ran out of there. I then understood why these people and their
activities are avoided.
I cannot question the wisdom of those ancestral Mirocavians who
began the tradition of the winter festival and gave the town a pretext for
celebration and social intercourse at a time when the consequences of brooding
isolation are most severe, those longest and darkest days of the solstice. A
mood of Christmas joviality obviously would not be sufficient to counter the
menace of this season. But even so, there are still the suicides of individuals
who are somehow cut off, I imagine, from the vitalizing activities of the
festival.
It is the nature of this insidious subseason that seems to
determine the outward forms of Mirocaw’s winter festival: the optimistic
greenery in a period of gray dormancy; the fertile promise of the Winter Queen;
and, most interesting to my mind, the clowns—the bright clowns of Mirocaw who
are treated so badly. They appear to serve as surrogate figures for those
dark-eyed mummers of the slums. Since the latter are feared for some power or
influence they possess, they may still be symbolically confronted and conquered
through their counterparts, who are elected for precisely this function. If I
am right about this, I wonder to what extent there is a conscious awareness
among the town’s populace of this indirect show of aggression. Those three
young men I spoke with tonight did not seem to possess much insight beyond
seeing that there was a certain amount of robust fun in the festival’s
tradition. For that matter, how much awareness is there on the other side of
these two antagonistic festivals? Too horrible to think of such a thing, but I
must wonder if, for all their apparent aimlessness, those inhabitants of the
ghetto are not the only ones who know what they are about. No denying that
behind those inhumanly limp expressions there seems to be a kind of obnoxious
intelligence.
As I wobbled from street to street tonight, watching those
oval-mouthed clowns, I could not help feeling that all the merrymaking in
Mirocaw was somehow allowed only by their sufferance. This I hope is no more
than a fanciful Thossian intuition, the sort of idea that is curious and
thought-provoking without ever seeming to gain the benefit of confirmation. I
know my mind is not entirely lucid, but I feel that it may be possible to
penetrate Mirocaw’s many complexities and illuminate the hidden side of the
festival season. In particular I must look for the significance of the other
festival. Is it also some kind of fertility celebration? From what I have seen,
the tenor of this “celebrating” sub-group is one of anti-fertility, if
anything. How have they managed to keep from dying out completely over the
years? How do they maintain their numbers?
But I was too tired to formulate any more of my sodden
speculations. Falling onto my bed, I soon became lost in dreams of streets and
faces.
6
I was, of course, slightly hung over when I woke up late the next
morning. The festival was still going strong, and blaring music outside roused
me from a nightmare. It was a parade. A number of floats proceeded down
Townshend, a familiar color predominating. There were theme floats of pilgrims
and Indians, cowboys and Indians, and clowns of an orthodox type. In the middle
of it all was the Winter Queen herself, freezing atop an icy throne. She waved
in all directions. I even imagined she waved up at my dark window. In the first
few groggy moments of wakefulness I had no sympathy with my excitation of the
previous night. But I discovered that my former enthusiasm had merely lain
dormant, and soon returned with an even greater intensity. Never before had my
mind and senses been so active during this usually inert time of year. At home
I would have been playing lugubrious old records and looking out the window
quite a bit. I was terribly grateful in a completely abstract way for my
commitment to a meaningful mania. And I was eager to get to work after I had
had some breakfast at the coffee shop.
When I got back to my room I discovered the door was unlocked. And
there was something written on the dresser mirror. The writing was red and
greasy, as if done with a clown’s make-up pencil—my own, I realized. I read the
legend, or rather I should say riddle, several times: “What buries itself
before it is dead?” I looked at it for quite a while, very shaken at how
vulnerable my holiday fortifications were. Was this supposed to be a warning of
some kind? A threat to the effect that if I persisted in a certain course I
would end up prematurely interred? I would have to be careful, I told myself.
My resolution was to let nothing deter me from the inspired strategy I had
conceived for myself. I wiped the mirror clean, for it was now needed for other
purposes.
I spent the rest of the day devising a very special costume and
the appropriate face to go with it. I easily shabbied up my overcoat with a
torn pocket or two and a complete set of stains. Combined with blue jeans and a
pair of rather scuffed-up shoes, I had a passable costume for a derelict. The
face, however, was more difficult, for I had to experiment from memory.
Conjuring a mental image of the shrieking pierrot in that painting (The Scream,
I now recall), helped me quite a bit. At nightfall I exited the hotel by the
back stairway.
It was strange to walk down the crowded street in this gruesome
disguise. Though I thought I would feel conspicuous, the actual experience was
very close, I imagined, to one of complete invisibility. No one looked at me as
I strolled by, or as they strolled by, or as we strolled by each other. I was a
phantom—perhaps the ghost of festivals past, or those yet to come.
I had no clear idea where my disguise would take me that night,
only vague expectations of gaining the confidence of my fellow specters and
possibly in some way coming to know their secrets. For a while I would simply
wander around in that lackadaisical manner I had learned from them, following
their lead in any way they might indicate. And for the most part this meant
doing almost nothing and doing it silently. If I passed one of my kind on the
sidewalk there was no speaking, no exchange of knowing looks, no recognition at
all that I was aware of. We were there on the streets of Mirocaw to create a
presence and nothing more. At least this is how I came to feel about it. As I
drifted along with my bodiless invisibility, I felt myself more and more
becoming an empty, floating shape, seeing without being seen and walking
without the interference of those grosser creatures who shared my world. It was
not an experience completely without interest and even enjoyment. The clown’s
shibboleth of “Here we are again” took on a new meaning for me as I felt myself
a novitiate of a more rarefied order of harlequinry. And very soon the
opportunity to make further progress along this path presented itself.
Going the opposite direction, down the street, a pickup truck
slowly passed, gently parting a sea of zigging and zagging celebrants. The
cargo in the back of this truck was curious, for it was made up entirely of my
fellow sectarians. At the end of the block the truck stopped and another of
them boarded it over the back gate. One block down I saw still another get on.
Then the truck made a U-turn at an intersection and headed in my direction.
I stood at the curb as I had seen the others do. I was not sure
the truck would pick me up, thinking that somehow they knew I was an impostor.
The truck did, however, slow down, almost coming to a stop when it reached me.
The others were crowded on the floor of the truck bed. Most of them were just
staring at nothing with the usual indifference I had come to expect from their
kind. But a few actually glanced at me with some anticipation. For a second I
hesitated, not sure I wanted to pursue this ruse any further. At the last
moment, though, some impulse sent me climbing up the back of the truck and
squeezing myself in among the others.
There were only a few more to pick up before the truck headed for
the outskirts of Mirocaw and beyond. At first I tried to maintain a clear
orientation with respect to the town. But as we took turn after turn through
the darkness of narrow country roads, I found myself unable to preserve any
sense of direction. The majority of the others in the back of the truck exhibited
no apparent awareness of their fellow passengers. Guardedly, I looked from face
to ghostly face. A few of them spoke in short whispered phrases to others close
by. I could not make out what they were saying but the tone of their voices was
one of innocent normalcy, as if they were not of the hardened slum-herd of
Mirocaw. Perhaps, I thought, these were thrill-seekers who had disguised
themselves as I had done, or, more likely, initiates of some kind. Possibly
they had received prior instructions at such meetings as I had stumbled onto
the day before. It was also likely that among this crew were those very boys I
had frightened into a precipitate exit from that old diner.
The truck was now speeding along a fairly open stretch of country,
heading toward those higher hills that surrounded the now distant town of
Mirocaw. The icy wind whipped around us, and I could not keep myself from
trembling with cold. This definitely betrayed me as one of the newcomers among
the group, for the two bodies that pressed against mine were rigidly still and
even seemed to be radiating a frigidity of their own. I glanced ahead at the
darkness into which we were rapidly progressing.
We had left all open country behind us now, and the road was
enclosed by thick woods. The mass of bodies in the truck leaned into one
another as we began traveling up a steep incline. Above us, at the top of the
hill, were lights shining somewhere within the woods. When the road leveled
off, the truck made an abrupt turn, steering into what looked like a great
ditch. There was an unpaved path, however, upon which the truck proceeded
toward the glowing in the near distance.
This glowing became brighter and sharper as we approached it,
flickering upon the trees and revealing stark detail where there had formerly
been only smooth darkness. As the truck pulled into a clearing and came to a
stop, I saw a loose assembly of figures, many of which held lanterns that
beamed with a dazzling and frosty light. I stood up in the back of the truck to
unboard as the others were doing. Glancing around from that height I saw
approximately thirty more of those cadaverous clowns milling about. One of my
fellow passengers spied me lingering in the truck and in a strangely
high-pitched whisper told me to hurry, explaining something about the “apex of
darkness.” I thought again about this solstice night; it was technically the
longest period of darkness of the year, even if not by a very significant
margin from many other winter nights. Its true significance, though, was related
to considerations having little to do with either statistics or the calendar.
I went over to the place where the others were forming into a
tighter crowd, which betrayed a sense of expectancy in the subtle gestures and
expressions of its individual members. Glances were now exchanged, the hand of
one lightly touched the shoulder of another, and a pair of circled eyes gazed
over to where two figures were setting their lanterns on the ground about six
feet apart. The illumination of these lanterns revealed an opening in the
earth. Eventually the awareness of everyone was focused on this roundish pit,
and as if by prearranged signal we all began huddling around it. The only
sounds were those of the wind and our own movements as we crushed frozen leaves
and sticks underfoot.
Finally, when we had all surrounded this gaping hole, the first
one jumped in, leaving our sight for a moment but then reappearing to take hold
of a lantern which another handed him from above. The miniature abyss filled
with light, and I could see it was no more than six feet deep. One of its walls
opened into the mouth of a tunnel. The figure holding the lantern stooped a
little and disappeared into the passage.
Each of us, in turn, dropped into the darkness of this pit, and
every fifth one took a lantern. I kept to the back of the group, for whatever
subterranean activities were going to take place, I was sure I wanted to be on
their periphery. When only about ten of us remained on the ground above, I
maneuvered to let four of them precede me so that I might receive a lantern.
This was exactly how it worked out, for after I had leaped to the bottom of the
hole a light was ritually handed down to me. Turning about-face, I quickly
entered the passageway. At that point I shook so with cold that I was neither
curious nor afraid, grateful for the shelter.
I entered a long, gently sloping tunnel, just high enough for me
to stand upright. It was considerably warmer down there than outside in the
cold darkness of the woods. After a few moments I had sufficiently thawed out
so that my concerns shifted from those of physical comfort to a sudden and
justified preoccupation with my survival. As I walked I held my lantern close
to the sides of the tunnel. They were relatively smooth as if the passage had
not been made by manual digging but had been burrowed by something which left
behind a clue to its dimensions in the tunnel’s size and shape. This delirious
idea came to me when I recalled the message that had been left on my hotel room
mirror: “What buries itself before it is dead?”
I had to hurry along to keep up with those uncanny spelunkers who
preceded me. The lanterns ahead bobbed with every step of their bearers, the
lumbering procession seeming less and less real the farther we marched into
that snug little tunnel. At some point I noticed the line ahead of me growing
shorter. The processioners were emptying out into a cavernous chamber where I,
too, soon arrived. This area was about thirty feet in height, its other
dimensions approximating those of a large ballroom. Gazing into the distance
above made me uncomfortably aware of how far we had descended into the earth.
Unlike the smooth sides of the tunnel, the walls of this cavern looked jagged
and irregular, as though they had been gnawed at. The earth had been removed, I
assumed, either through the tunnel from which we had emerged, or else by way of
one of the many other black openings that I saw around the edges of the
chamber, for possibly they too led back to the surface.
But the structure of this chamber occupied my mind a great deal
less than did its occupants. There to meet us on the floor of the great cavern
was what must have been the entire slum population of Mirocaw, and more, all
with the same eerily wide-eyed and oval-mouthed faces. They formed a circle
around an altar-like object which had some kind of dark, leathery covering
draped over it. Upon the altar, another covering of the same material concealed
a lumpy form beneath. And behind this form, looking down upon the altar, was
the only figure whose face was not greased with makeup.
He wore a long snowy robe that was the same color as the wispy
hair berimming his head. His arms were calmly at his sides. He made no
movement. The man I once believed would penetrate great secrets stood before us
with the same professorial bearing that had impressed me so many years ago, yet
now I felt nothing but dread at the thought of what revelations lay pocketed
within the abysmal folds of his magisterial attire. Had I really come here to
challenge such a formidable figure? The name by which I knew him seemed itself
insufficient to designate one of his stature. Rather I should name him by his
other incarnations: god of all wisdom, scribe of all sacred books, father of
all magicians, thrice great and more—rather I should call him Thoth.
He raised his cupped hands to his congregation and the ceremony
was underway.
It was all very simple. The entire assembly, which had remained
speechless until this moment, broke into the most horrendous high-pitched
singing that can be imagined. It was a choir of sorrow, lament, and
mortification. The cavern rang with the dissonant, whining chorus. My voice,
too, was added to the congregation’s, trying to blend with their maimed music.
But my singing could not imitate theirs, having a huskiness at odds with the
keening ululation of that company. To keep from exposing myself as an intruder
I continued to mouth their words without sound. These words were a revelation
of the moody malignancy which until then I had no more than sensed whenever in
the presence of these figures. They were singing to the “unborn in paradise,”
to the “pure unlived lives.” They sang a dirge for existence, for all its vital
forms and seasons. Their ideal was a melancholy half-existence consecrated to all
the many shapes of death and dissolution. A sea of thin, bloodless faces
trembled and screamed their antipathy to being itself. And the robed, guiding
figure at the heart of all this—elevated over the course of twenty years to the
status of high priest—was the man from whom I had taken so many of my own
life’s principles. It would be useless to describe what I felt at that moment
and a waste of the time I need to describe the events which followed.
The singing abruptly stopped and the towering white-haired figure
began to speak. He was welcoming those of the new generation—twenty winters had
passed since the “Pure Ones” had expanded their ranks. The word “pure” in this
setting was a violence to what sense and composure I still retained, for
nothing could have been more foul than what was to come. Thoss—and I employ
this defunct identity only as a convenience—closed his sermon and drew closer
to the dark-skinned altar. Then, with all the flourish of his former life, he
drew back the topmost covering. Beneath it was a limp-limbed effigy, a
collapsed puppet sprawled upon the slab. I was standing toward the rear of the
congregation and attempted to keep as close to the exit passage as I could.
Thus, I did not see everything as clearly as I might have.
Thoss looked down upon the crooked, doll-like form and then out at
the gathering. I even imagined that he made knowing eye-contact with myself. He
spread his arms and a stream of continuous and unintelligible words flowed from
his moaning mouth. The congregation began to stir, not greatly but perceptibly.
Until that moment there was a limit to what I believed was the evil of these
people. They were, after all, only that. They were merely morbid souls with beliefs
that were eccentric to the healthy social order around them. If there was
anything I had learned in all my years as an anthropologist it was that the
world is infinitely rich in phenomena that society as we know it (whoever “we”
might be) would regard as strange, even to the point where the concept of
strangeness itself had little meaning for me. But with the scene I then
witnessed, my conscience vaulted into a realm from which it will never return.
For now was the transformation scene, the culmination of every
harlequinade.
It began slowly. There was increasing movement among those on the
far side of the chamber from where I stood. Someone had fallen to the floor and
the others in the area backed away. The voice at the altar continued its
chanting. I tried to gain a better view but there were too many of them around
me. Through the mass of obstructing bodies I caught only glimpses of what was
taking place.
The one who had swooned to the floor of the chamber seemed to be
losing all former shape and proportion. I thought it was a clown’s trick. They
were clowns, were they not? I myself could make four white balls transform into
four black balls as I juggled them. And this was not my most astonishing feat
of clownish magic. And is there not always a sleight-of-hand inherent in all
ceremonies, often dependent on the transported delusions of the celebrants?
This was a good show, I thought, and giggled to myself. The transformation
scene of Harlequin throwing off his fool’s facade. O God, Harlequin, do not
move like that! Harlequin, where are your arms? And your legs have melted
together and begun squirming upon the floor. What horrible, mouthing umbilicus
is that where your face should be? What is it that buries itself before it is
dead? The almighty serpent of wisdom—the Conqueror Worm.
It now started happening all around the chamber. Individual
members of the congregation would gaze emptily—caught for a moment in a frozen
trance—and then collapse to the floor to begin the sickening metamorphosis.
This happened with ever-increasing frequency the louder and more frantically
Thoss chanted his insane prayer or curse. Then there began a writhing movement
toward the altar, and Thoss welcomed the things as they curled their way to the
altar-top. I knew now what lax figure lay upon it.
This was Kora and Persephone, the daughter of Ceres and the
Winter Queen: the child abducted into the underworld of death. Except this
child had no supernatural mother to save her, no living mother at all. For the
sacrifice I witnessed was an echo of one that had occurred twenty years before,
the carnival feast of the preceding generation—O carne vale! Now both mother
and daughter had become victims of this subterranean sabbat. I finally realized
this truth when the figure stirred upon the altar, lifted its head of icy
beauty, and screamed at the sight of mute mouths closing around her.
I ran from the chamber into the tunnel. (There was nothing else
that could be done, I have obsessively told myself.) Some of the others who had
not yet changed began to pursue me. They would have caught up to me, I have no
doubt, for I fell only a few yards into the passage. And for a moment I
imagined that I too was about to undergo a transformation. Anything seemed
possible now. When I heard the approaching footsteps of my pursuers I was sure
there was nothing left for me but the worst finale a human being can suffer—the
death known to those whom the gods have first made mad. Perhaps I would even be
forced to take a place on the altar among the gory remnants of the Winter
Queen. But the footsteps behind me ceased and retreated. They had received an
order in the voice of their high priest. I too heard the order, though I wish I
had not, for until then I had imagined that Thoss did not remember who I was.
It was that voice which taught me otherwise.
For the moment I was free to leave. I struggled to my feet and,
having broken my lantern in the fall, retraced my way back through cloacal
blackness. Everything seemed to happen very quickly once I emerged from the
tunnel and climbed up from the pit. I wiped the reeking greasepaint from my
face as I ran through the woods and back to the road. A passing car stopped,
though I gave it no other choice except to run me down.
“Thank you for stopping.”
“What the hell are you doing out here?” the driver asked.
I caught my breath. “It was a joke. The festival. Friends thought
it would be funny. Please drive on.”
My ride let me off about a mile out of town, and from there I
could find my way. It was the same route I traveled when I first visited
Mirocaw the summer before. I stood for a while at the summit of that high hill
just outside the city limits, looking down upon the busy little hamlet. The
intensity of the festival had not abated. I walked toward the welcoming glow of
green and slipped through the festivities unnoticed.
When I reached the hotel I was glad to see that no one was about.
Given that I was so obviously a wreck, I feared meeting anyone who might ask
what had happened to me. The hotel desk was unattended, so I was spared having
to speak with Beadle. Indeed, there was an atmosphere of abandonment throughout
the place that I found ominous yet did not pause to contemplate.
I trod up the stairs to my room. Locking the door behind me, I
then collapsed upon the bed and was soon enshrouded by a merciful blackness.
7
When I awoke the next morning I saw from my window that the town
and surrounding countryside had been visited during the night by a heavy
snowfall, one which was entirely unpredicted. A few leftover flakes were still
lighting on the now deserted streets of Mirocaw, and buried beneath the drifts
below were the last vestiges of revelry and celebration. The festival was over.
Everyone had retired to their homes.
And this was exactly my own intention. Any action on my part
concerning what I had seen the night before would have to wait until I was away
from the town. I am still not sure it will do the slightest good to speak up
like this. Any accusations I have made with respect to the slum populace of
Mirocaw are eminently subject to dismissal, perhaps as a hoax or a festival
hallucination. And thereafter this document will take its place alongside the
works of Raymond Thoss.
With packed suitcases in both hands I walked up to the front desk
to check out. The man behind the desk was not Samuel Beadle, and he had to
fumble around to find my bill.
“Here we are. Everything all right?”
“Fine,” I answered in a dead voice. “Is Mr. Beadle around?”
“No, I’m afraid he’s not back yet. Been out all night looking for
his daughter. She’s a very popular girl, being the Winter Queen and all that
nonsense. Probably find she was at a party somewhere.”
A little noise came out of my throat.
I threw my suitcases in the back seat of my car and got behind the
wheel. On that morning nothing I could recall seemed real to me. The snow was
falling and I watched it through my windshield, slow and silent and entrancing.
I started up my car, routinely glancing in my rear view mirror. What I saw
there is now vividly framed in my mind, as it was framed in the back window of
my car when I turned to verify its reality.
In the middle of the street behind me, standing ankle-deep in
snow, were Thoss and another figure. When I looked closely at the other I
recognized him as one of the boys whom I surprised in that diner. But he had
now taken on a listless resemblance to his new family. Both he and Thoss stared
at me, making no attempt to forestall my departure. Thoss knew that this was
unnecessary.
I had to carry the image of those two dark figures in my mind as I
drove back home. And only now has the full gravity of my experience descended
upon me. So far I have claimed illness in order to avoid my teaching schedule.
To face the normal flow of life as I had formerly known it would be impossible.
I am now very much under the influence of a season and a climate far colder and
more barren than all the winters in human memory. And mentally retracing past
events does not seem to have helped. If anything, I now feel myself sinking
deeper into a velvety white abyss.
At certain times I could almost dissolve entirely into this inner
realm of purity and emptiness, the paradise of the unborn. I remember how I was
momentarily overtaken by a feeling I had never known when in disguise I drifted
through the streets of Mirocaw, untouched by the drunken, noisy forms around
me: untouchable. It was the feeling that I had been liberated from the weight
of life. But I recoil at this seductive nostalgia, for it mocks my existence as
mere foolery, a bright clown’s mask behind which I have sought to hide my
darkness. I realize what is happening and what I do not want to be true, though
Thoss proclaimed it was. I recall his command to those others as I lay
helplessly prone in the tunnel. They could have apprehended me, but Thoss, my
old master, called them back. His voice echoed throughout that cavern, and it
now reverberates within the psychic chambers of my memory.
“He is one of us,” it said. “He has always been one of us.”
It is this voice which now fills my dreams and my days and my long
winter nights. I have seen you, Dr. Thoss, through the snow outside my window.
Soon I will celebrate, alone, that last feast which will kill your words, only
to prove how well I have learned their truth.
-End-