Fango Fantasma had one companion: his strongman Yahoo Clay. If Fantasma was cursed with anxiety, Yahoo Clay was damned with rage. He hated a universe that had denied him the capacity to love; for Clay the world was nothing more than the scraphouse of a butchery, a shithouse built upon a graveyard. He said little else than: “Mere buggery.”
Pictured in caricature, Yahoo Clay wears an incongruous quantity of hair in the manner of an English judge. According to a chronicler of the time, Clay’s acute vanity—which caused him to walk about in clothes queerly fashionable and far too tight—made him appear ludicrous, if, nevertheless, it was evident at a glance that Yahoo Clay was also dangerous.
That Fantasma had hired him was Clay’s vindication. Fantasma—in constant fear of assassination, an insomniac who believed in ghosts—felt safer with Clay’s bulk beside him. And because women feared him, Clay slept alone, and like a dog, slept on the floor before his master’s door.*
Strangely, Phosphor also slept alone. At a vulnerable age Fogginius had told him an unfortunate story about a maiden whose vulva had been transformed by the machinations of a jealous witch into the jaws of a snapping turtle. From that moment dark places without exits such as ovens and graveyards simultaneously repelled and attracted him. The metaphoric vehicle for his first collection of verse, The Uncertain Suitor, is Zeno’s paradox. (The poems are so poor I have not included them here.)
Phosphor fell for creatures whose skeletons were as slight as his own—such as Professor Tandanza’s daughter, who, to tell the truth, he had seen only once and from a distance; she was sitting on a horse. Because she dreamed of being swept up and away by a centaur (her father was a classicist) and not an impoverished fantast, she ignored Phosphor’s epistolary advances, although he made much of the fact that the sound of hooves upon the sod had struck him dumb. He went mad with desire, hallucinating that love had infected him with an incandescent marrow. He sent the girl a poem so peculiar her father instructed the maids not to allow him past the front door under any circumstances:
… yet I would suck your flesh like milk
else doomed to madness hang
my heart of clay consumed by moss.
The women who were intrigued by Phosphor’s deformities were megaliths whose ossified husbands reeked of decrepitude, and whose sons had beetled off. These women relished Phosphor’s diminutive size—the next best thing to youth—and longed to dandle him on their meaty knees. Sitting on a bench in the botanical gardens, Phosphor would be imagining a virgin so friable one harsh word would suffice to reduce her to powdered sugar, when a creature redolent of moth and rust, and famished for something to brood over, would appear as from a stale crust, and invading the place where he was actively dreaming, press a thigh like a side of butchered beef against his own, letting drop a handkerchief embroidered with an engorged blossom.
It was uncanny how they rooted him out—matrons so amply upholstered that Phosphor fantasized he was about to be crushed beneath an outsize hassock. At moments such as these, Phosphor felt like a gnat in the maw of a frog, like a stone in the gizzard of a hen, like a fly drowning in flan, like a dead rabbit nailed to the side of a barn.