bits come away? like its moulting
scratches pops dropped frames
this is old/1920s? silent film
older?
I remember what looked like sheaves of grain waving back and forth, or the shadows of very tall grass, sharp under a pitiless sun that must surely have been an effect, since battery-powered electrical lamps were not available during the period in which Mrs. Whitcomb made her films but a painted backdrop could be made to look flatly three-dimensional, as if going away into the distance the theatrical suggestion of a field, with people onstage in front of it, wearing archaic, fairy tale peasant-type clothes—smocks and leggings, jerkins, hoods that hid their faces, mediaeval, like a Dance of Death.
And then there was a woman, stepping out from behind them, either around the backdrop’s edge or through a cunningly hidden slit cut into it. She was brighter than everything else yet far harder to see in any true detail, covered as she was in a whitish veil that draped from her head to her feet and dazzled, sewn perhaps with glassine sequins, or tiny shards of mirror. She leaned down to whisper in one figure’s ear, dwarfing him—was he played by a child? A child with a false beard, recoiling from her with his hands up?
Cued, her own hand came out from behind her back, and I could see she held a sword, angling it to reflect till it had almost turned white: curved and sharp like a sabre, like the blade of a scythe. So bright it hurt the eyes.
At which point, the screen went black.
“Typically uninterested in any film except his own, Wrob Barney gives pride of place to Untitled 13,” my Deep Down Undertown article begins, “a waking dream of troubling things, done flammably, in light and poison.” Then again, though, I really wasn’t one to talk: there were ten other movies on that program, and I barely remembered any of them—Alec Christian got on my case about that, later on. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the way Barney’s piece made me feel, itchy in a good way, like the grit before the pearl. I needed to know where that came from.
I got home around one in the morning. Clark had probably been asleep since eight-thirty or nine, and Simon had dozed off in bed with the lights still on, a roleplaying game module balanced haphazardly on his chest. I could hear the two of them sawing counterpoint from either end of the apartment, a wracking, swollen-tonsils duet that wasn’t doing much for my burgeoning migraine. The older I get, the more I find that any sort of barometric pressure shift goes straight to my sinus cavities, ruthlessly crossbreeding what sometimes feels like a near-constant case of PMS with the general side-effects of crap vision versus watching movies all day (and night) to create organic lens-flares. I knew I’d need a potentially dangerous amount of Melatonin, muscle-relaxants, and recreational web surfing before I could safely count on being able to dodge a full-blown bout of insomnia.
So I started the usual late-night round of chores—load of laundry, load of dishes—and set my laptop up on the “dining room” table, an unwieldy glass-topped ironwork monstrosity Simon’s parents had bought us in anticipation of parties we’d never throw and meals we’d never make, not once it became clear that sitting still for social situations was something Clark seemed unlikely to ever do for more than ten minutes at a time. I transcribed my notes, moved stuff around, dashed off two thousand words’ worth of description and analysis, then signed onto our WiFi, readying the article to post.
Throughout the process, I kept on thinking about the film, replaying it in snatches till it overlaid the mundane details of my life. It was seriously driving me nuts, because the masks, the costumes, the hint of a story . . . it all reminded me of something, and I just couldn’t remember what. Not a movie, I knew that much; I thought maybe a photo, or a picture, so I hit PUBLISH, then pulled out my reference books and started going through them: stuff on fairy tales, stuff on mythology, on the occult, woodcuts, engravings, chiaroscuro, collage—Ernst, Magritte, Khnopff, Bosch, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo. Movie stills. Comic books. Surrealists and Decadents of all descriptions.
Slowly but surely, as my perception narrowed, the presentiment of pain I’d been wrestling with became pain itself, dim but distinct: my eye sockets lit up, muscles on the back of my skull humping and crawling. I got sick, sleepy. Eventually, I had to force myself to sit down and stay quiet for a while, lids lowered, taking deep, slow breaths. Press my thumbs against my nasal bridge and watch the patterns form, hypnagogically recursive—red spiralling away into black, thicker and thicker, making it impossible to tell which was which.
Olfactory hallucinations came next, tinnitus garnished. To my left, I smelled hay and smoke and mould, a whole burning barn of fragrances; to my right was wet earth, cold green shoots, frozen decay. A forest, deep and dark, after the late autumn rains.
Quiet, then. A long, grey pause, empty of almost everything.
When I opened my eyes once more it was almost four in the morning, but the pain was gone. Better yet, I finally knew what I was looking for.
I still have the text in question today, bookmarked between pages 112 and 113, where the section titled “Dreams & Nightmares” begins—a battered trade paperback with fraying laminate corners, the cover a murky reproduction of Emily Carr’s 1931 painting Among the Firs, called Finding Your Voice: Creative Writing Prompts and Projects, Grades Three to Eight (edited by Luanne Kellerman, copyright 1979 from Seedling Press, Toronto). It’s a compilation of fifth-grade English class prompts that struck enough of my fancy to make me “forget” to bring it back at the end of the yea
r, all based on poems and essays, myths and fairy tales; mostly Canadian Content, too, because that must’ve been the most affordable option. It usually is.
Nothing to show what I wanted it for, at least not on the outside. But we all know the spine of a book tends to crack where you’ve read it most, even if it was so long ago it now seems unfamiliar, from the inside-out.
So when I opened it, this is what I found.
LADY MIDDAY
A Fairy tale of the Wends
Collected and Translated by Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb
First printed in The Snake-Queen’s Daughter: Wendish Legends & Folklore
Once, a young boy was ploughing a field to ready it for planting, during the noon hour. How hot it was, and how he wished he could be elsewhere! His whole hatband was soaked with sweat. But his father was dead and his mother took in sewing to pay their way, and there was no one else to help him with his labours.
Soon enough, when the sun was at its still point above him, there came by Lady Midday, so tall and fine with her long white hair and her blazing eyes, and a terrible great pair of scissors in one hand, with blades so sharp and polished they threw back the sun’s rays like lightning.
“It is a hard day for ploughing,” she said to the boy, “and you without even a cup of water. Do you not wish for rest and comfort?”
But the boy’s mother had warned him of Lady Midday. So he kept his eyes to his task, bowing low in deference at the same time, and replied: “No, milady, for this field must be ploughed and planted, so that my mother and I may have crops to sustain us this winter. I need nothing, though I thank you for your kindness.”
At this, Lady Midday’s eyes flashed like a sword heated red-hot, thrust deep into the very heart of the fire, and she bent herself double to put her face right up next to the boy’s so that her hair fell around them like a veil. Whereupon the heat of her was so great the boy thought either he would smother, or that his cheek would crisp like bacon.
“Oh,” she said, so sweetly, “but you are a good boy, to do your mother’s bidding thusly! Do you not wish to stop and drink a bit, if only to refresh yourself once more for the work you have yet before you? See, I have brought water in a cup, cool and deep. You may have it all, if you will only turn to look my way.”