grotesquerie

“Life is flesh on bone convulsing above the ground.”

— E. Elias Merhige, Begotten

Just how the Headsman trapped divinity within His axe blade is a riddle I am not destined to solve. But I have borne witness to the Cut-Lord’s miracles. They evidence the power of both the blade and the hand that wields it. This is sufficient to keep me in servitude to Him.

Once I shared a stout daub house with my Mother and Father. There was stew in my bowl daily and mown hay to bed down on nightly. If such an arrangement constitutes happiness, then for a brief time I was happy. But then Father abandoned us, forcing Mother and I to till the land and re-wattle our drooping roof and lay shivering in our cistern, hiding from the bands of highwaymen that stalked the trails near our land.

Mother seldom showed emotion, but I was not afraid to cry or curse my Father; which I did often at first, more rarely as the seasons passed.

It was on the very night when the Moon first pulled blood out of my body to stain my nightdress and thighs that the Headsman darkened our door.

The moment Mother spotted His monumental frame plodding toward our house she began to plead. Mother’s fear of death ran deep. I see now that she could never have let go, could never have properly received the Headsman’s lesson.

So instead she struck a bargain with Him: her life would be spared and in exchange I would become His charge, His Trust. With horrifying ease, He wrenched me from Mother’s ankles where I clung, screaming. He whisked me off and chained me to His wagon. I have been at His side in the many Moons since that night.

We emerge like the spawn of the forest that encloses this village. As if aware of our destination, the mares draw our carriage to the clearing. Once they reach the execution platform, they halt. I tie the reins to my footrest and leap down from the driver’s bench. Our carriage is a slight but ominous thing, canopied in midnight-blue leather and fastened with thick iron bolts. The whole contraption appears to my eye as a grand foreboding book, one that holds fast to its secrets. I move to the back and unlatch the iron grate.

The Headsman climbs out from the wagon. He is looming and lanky. His arms, while thin, are sure.

He is already hooded when He lumbers into view. His hood is dun, and the eyes that stare through its only openings are citrine and intensely focused.

We have been travelling for what feels to be a ceaseless summer, an interminable span of swelter and insects and sweating peasants. Of late it feels that we are wayfaring to the very edge of the world. We have nearly reached the sea.

Our rituals rarely deviate, so the fact that we have not yet collected a coffin for today’s victim troubles me. When I inquire about this the Headsman tells me:

…in due course…

My duty is to tend to the block and I see to this as soon as the Headsman passes me. The block is stored within the wagon. We employ it for each beheading. Its surface has been smoothed by the blood that voids out of His victims. This human grease softens the woodgrain. The block now has the silken texture of a woman’s thigh.

The Headsman stores His implement in an oblong box of stone that is lidded with a nameless tombstone.

Once the Headsman has inspected the scaffold for today’s task He returns to the carriage and uncaps the oblong box. The gravestone lid groans as He pushes it from its mount. Trapped air flows upward. It is heady with apple and pine, poppy and sage. On the eve of the first execution where I served as the Headsman’s Trust I watched Him prepare entanglements of these and other flora with great care. He’d sowed the dank bottom of the trough with them, making a fragrant bed upon which His unwieldy axe reposes. I do not ask the Headsman about this practice, though I believe that the indwelling spirits of these plants bless the weapon. Never have I witnessed the Headsman burnish it nor lean it to the whetstone, yet the blade has lost none of its lustre or its edge.

A drum begins to beat.

The ceremony is commencing.

I could list the minutiae of these proceedings—the vengeful accusations of thievery or wortcunning, the mock trials, the prayers for the condemned—but a greater picture can be painted without such trivialities.

The drum lures the villagers from their hovels and huts. They congregate before the platform as the guards drag out the latest woman to be convicted. She squints, for the sun undoubtedly pains her after such a long span in a windowless cell. She does not utter a sound, not even as she is guided up the scaffold steps and her head is pressed against the block.

The drummer goes still, and the mob falls silent in anticipation of the Headsman’s song.

The Headsman assumes His stance, adjusts His grip on the handle of His weapon. It is customary for the Headsman’s Trust to avert their gaze out of respect for the condemned, but something, some impelling force, inspires me to lock eyes with the woman on the block. I know the blade will fall at any moment, so I wring every detail I can from the sight of the woman’s wide, lunatic eyes. Her lips are peeled back over her misshapen teeth. She trembles, though not from fear. Her body quakes with silent, mirthful laughter.

Then comes the Headsman’s song: the crisp flit of the axe swinging downwards, the briefest of squawks from the victim before her neck is parted, the muffled thump of the wetted iron edge sinking into the block. The crowd gasps.

Along with its song, decapitation has its scent, one that chokes the air like a swollen cloud. It stinks of copper and mud and yeast.

The head lops forward, like some sluggish creature. It wobbles down into the basket. Wordlessly the Headsman reaches down and grips it by its mane. Like Perseus, He holds this morbid trophy aloft. The drained face has already assumed a ghostly shade of white. Gore dangles from the halved neck like ruby pendants.

Occasionally the heads manage to retain a wisp of their original awareness. The eyes will shift and blink in frantic confusion, the tongue may wriggle as it gropes for speech. However, this does not happen today.

The Headsman drops the spoil back into the basket, pushes it to the edge of the scaffold with His boot.

Like crows, the villagers swoop in to grasp at the carrion. There is arguing and shoving as they slink back into the village in a messy procession. The dripping basket is held above them. Different villages put these ruined heads to different uses. Some give them a burial in alignment with their native faith, others preserve them in brine where they are said to become a divination tool.

What they do with the head is of no concern to me or the Headsman. Our mission is markedly different from this.

A boy named Matthias worms his way to the headless corpse. He holds up a stone bowl to the raining neck.

Not far from this village, at the hem of the forest’s shade, there stretches a broad heath. There the heathgrass sprouts as tall as men, and even on the stillest days these blades sway under strange winds from elsewhere. Upon this heath is a cluster of standing stones. How long they have stood no one knows. The winds that bully the heathgrass also erode these stones. Occasionally large pieces are lopped off. These pieces are often fashioned into bowls, as today’s villagers have done.

Matthias has followed us dutifully throughout this scorching season, skillfully gathering the precious blood and then feeding it as offerings to the gods of certain hidden places that the Headsman regards as sacred. Matthias wanders off, his bowl brimming. The blood will be meticulously borne to the heath and poured upon the standing stones, food for the power that pulses inside them.

Matthias was born to serve the standing stones. He has shared with me the methods his parents employed to groom him for this role. As to why I was recognized to the role of Headsman’s Trust I do not know. Perhaps the Headsman perceived some shift in my soul, a quickening that has transformed me alchemically into something purer than I was before. I do not sense it myself. But just before the season turned the Headsman informed me that I was no longer to collect the blood offerings, I was to tend to the block.

Today I am to be shown yet another step in this sprawling ritual.

The Headsman lifts the carcass from the block and sets it upon the platform. It is like a morbid enactment of the bridegroom laying his love upon the marriage bed.

We disrobe her.

“We should wash her,” I say. My request is met with a rigid denial.

Instead the Headsman hands me a crude map that reveals a path to the hovel of the casket-maker. I am to collect the custom coffin for the recently fallen. He attempts to bolster me for what I will witness at the casket-maker’s hovel. He orders me to make haste.

The midday heat swells the veins in my hands, causes my breathing to become laboured. I yearn for the shade of a glen but my path snakes through open country.

The casket-maker dwells and works in a pithouse far from any village, far from any burial ground.

The sight of her homestead steals my breath. I am impelled to lower my tired frame, to cross my legs and sit in contemplation of this mound-like structure. Being a pithouse, the dwelling is a bored-out hole in the earth that is roofed with a rigid entanglement of bones. Fibula and femur, scapula and tarsal; they all nest into one another as if Nature Herself had forged this skeleton, the remains of some fabulous arachnid that had skittered across the plains with the mammoths. The bones are the colour of old wheat. They nestle so tightly together that no view of the pithouse’s interior is possible.

After a respectable amount of time has passed, I rise and approach. An odd sound creeps into my ears.

Crickets.

To hear one or two of them chirping in the daylight is not uncommon, but what I hear is not the thin creaking of a few stray bugs, it is an orchestra. Their serrated song gives the afternoon a nocturnal pulse, a rhythm ill-suited for raw light and heat. It is instead the cool, murky rhythm of twilit mires, of waning embers, of the charm hung above the bed before slumbering, of secrecy, of dim potential.

Their song passes over me, through me, and I imagine that my heart is altering its beat to match this pulsation. I move closer to the pithouse, the womb that houses the crickets. My face is practically pressed against the spiky mesh of bones. I can see precious little through the weave, but I can hear the chirping fully now and I can smell the heady stench of mud and milt. It is sickening and arousing at once.

There then comes a sonorous creaking which joins the cricket orchestra like the faint rumble of distant thunder. The creaking pulses low, then high, low, then high. Its pace is measured and patient. I press my eye to one of the few slits in the bone shelter.

Within the pithouse, something shifts. I can almost discern the shapeless form. It reposes in the centre of the shallow hole. Needles of sunlight manage to pierce the darkness through the tiniest of apertures, pressing in like unwanted seawater through a ship’s hull. These bright threads form a luminous crosshatch. As my eyes grow accustomed to this, I am better able to spy the figure in the hut.

I can only presume it is a woman, for the figure is dressed in a luxurious gown, one that suggests nobility. The hair is piled hectically upon the pale head. I cannot discern the face. If woman she is, if human she is, she is seated in a frame chair, one that rocks slowly back and forth, creating that measured creaking. The chair is composed of pale wood. Or is it bone?

Instinct presses me backwards. I scuttle back from the hut. The crickets continue to chirp.

Leaning against a warped, canker-laden tree is the coffin. It is a wicker casket. The thin branches that form its woven body are the grey of morning fog.

Suddenly remembering my task as if newly woken from a dream, I scramble to my feet and creep over to collect the casket. I am glad to be ignorant of whatever arrangement the Headsman has with the casket-maker. I simply take up the coffin and flee.

My load is mercifully light, but its shape makes carting it a chore. I lug it on my back and can feel the knots of its branches pressing into my flesh. I do not offer the pithouse a backward glance. Soon the only cricket-song I hear is the one that stains my memory.

The light is already fading to a late-afternoon shimmer by the time I return to the scaffold, where I find the Headsman waiting in what appears to be the same standing position as when I departed. I plunk the coffin down and begin to breathlessly explain what I have seen.

Unconcerned, the Headsman simply goes about His task. He removes the wicker lid and from the inside of the coffin He produces a length of fabric. I aid him in unfolding this. The long sheet feels coarse against my palms. It is a shroud, dyed midnight blue.

We begin to wrap the headless body. The shroud is a sullied thing, woven with many kinds of thread and soaked in the waters of the Moon. Or so the Headsman tells me. When this task is complete, I help the Headsman lift the swaddled body and deposit it inside the coffin.

Once we replace the lid, the Headsman orders me to step away and turn my back. This I do, all the while trying simultaneously to both hear and not hear the words He mutters over the casket. I wonder what gestures the Headsman makes, what substances He might use to anoint His victim.

Eventually He announces that it is time.

We take up the casket. I am at the foot of the box, following my leader as He marches steadfast through the forest and across the great heath whose stones seem to study us as we pass and whose billowing grasses urge us to hush…

The Headsman does not utter a sound and I dare not break our shared trance by asking any of the thousand questions that swim in my brain, foremost of which is where our destination will be.

We move west, further and further. Even the sparsest of villages are now behind us. Eventually we three are crossing a terrain that no hermit or even beast would occupy. We are nearing the sea. In all my years, it is a sight I have never seen and the prospect of it fills me with exhilaration, with dread. Rocky cliffs jut up all around us, like the grasping fingers of a great hand. They strike me as being the parents of the heathstones, which now seem tiny and frail by comparison. Between the rocky spikes of the cliff I catch my first faint glimpse of the sea.

“May we stop?” I ask.

When the Headsman does not reply, I ask Him again, and yet again. I want so very much to race to the cliffs’ edge and take in that boundless green expanse, to hear its roaring surf, feel its cold spray against my skin.

Our path suddenly juts in a sharp incline. I feel the cadaver shift in its box, placing all the weight on my end. My exhausted arms wobble as I struggle to keep our cargo aloft.

When I spot the mouth of the great cave that yawns at the end of our path, I somehow intuit that it is our destination. After a few more paces the Headsman proves my hunch correct.

Once the casket is set down upon the stony ground, I am only able to take a few steps nearer to the sea before my body betrays its exhaustion. I collapse against a boulder. My arms and thighs burn with pain. In the distance the Moon paints a gleaming stripe across the roiling sea. I am only dimly aware of my hand as it grazes the surface of the stone that braces me. Have the howling winds of this plateau smoothed it? It feels like taut silk beneath my fingertips.

Faintly I hear the steps of the Headsman. He holds His hand out to me.

…I have placed her inside the cave…

I take the small bundle that the Headsman is offering. My fingers can barely unknot the fabric. Within are shelled nuts, a wedge of bread, fruits.

…eat…

I devour it all greedily, gratefully.

The Headsman never eats.

…tonight you rest here…

I nod gratefully, for the very thought of having to venture back to the village overwhelms me. My exhaustion is excruciating.

The Headsman never slumbers.

My stomach filled, I recline on the luxurious stone and close my eyes. The surf lulls me. I feel like an infant in the arms of its Mother, Her rolling tide rocking me back and forth, back and forth…like the woman seated in the pithouse.

Though our surroundings are arid, a garden of stone, in the distance I hear an orchestra of crickets.

I do not dream.

The warmth of the sun upon my face draws me back to the land of the living. I sit up, groan.

The Headsman is nowhere to be seen. I stand and call for Him, softly at first, then at a volume to rival the pounding surf below. I climb and survey the area from many vantage points but see no trace. Am I being tested?

I return to our outcropping and I wait. I have courage enough to start homeward, but before I do, I must inspect the final place where the Headsman might be waiting.

With reluctant steps, I enter the cave. Once more I call for my master and the echo of my voice spurs violent sounds of movement. Startled, I stagger backwards. The firmly textured wall of the cave halts me. I feel the foul water that moistens the cave saturating my clothing. I squint to see but can discern little of my surroundings beyond mere black.

Something shifts in the darkness. Instinct causes me to look in the sound’s direction.

I see.

I do not want to see.

She is sitting up in her casket. Her stiffening body is luminous within this grim cave. The shroud we had used to wrap her remains like a gift for the afterlife is now twisted and rent. One large section is draped over the lip of the wicker coffin like flung bedclothes. The woman herself—or what had once been a woman—is like a startled dreamer who has bolted up in her bed. Her hands molest the air around her and her headless trunk twitches as if trying to see.

A strange logy feeling comes over me. As my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, I truly scrutinize the thing in the box. I study the halved neck; lumps of muscle, knots of bone, all held in place by the gluey clotted blood.

The whole image becomes a primordial volcano, spitting up waves of blood-lava and fledgling landscapes of tendon and of bone.

It is as if a new world is flooding out all around me. I see it with the eyes of my heart. It is a potent land whose laws are the bristling nerve, the pulsing red caverns and the stiff digits of bone.

Who will be the god of this grim, corporal world? What deity would dare send down creeds in the lawless wilderness of quivering skin and flowing blood?

She leaps!

Her escape from the casket is sloppy and awkward. Her hands swat the wicker box while her feet wobble over the cave’s rutted floor. The thing staggers about in a series of blind, brutal rings. She is as a panicked moth trapped in a bell jar. Though she has no face, the headless thing turns to face me. Worse, I know that in some way she sees me. The dark blotches upon her breasts come to resemble eyes. Horror seizes me utterly. I collapse upon the jagged stones, yet I cannot look away.

I watch her climb the cavern walls, nimbly, like some ugly salamander. She skitters to the very summit of the cave. She contorts her body and presses her open neck against one of the stalactites. For one indescribable instant, this creature dons the entire cave as her crown. The tapered rock penetrates her throat and suddenly I can hear the cave’s long-buried song. It comes to screeching life through the woman’s flesh. Her pores open like the mouths of some heinous choir.

The chthonic music screams at me.

I stagger up and charge down the daylit passage.

I would flee the area entirely, but I discover a trio waiting for me on the plateau: the Headsman stands with Matthias by His side. The boy is holding the block before him, not to boast of his appointment as the Headsman’s new Trust, but to show me that he understands his duty, that he reveres it.

Standing behind them is the woman from the pithouse. Her face is worse than words can convey. I turn away from her, but not from revulsion. Her visage is a sun at full glare. I am awed. I am awakened.

The headless cadaver comes bounding out of the cave. She flails about like a manic puppet.

Gracefully, placidly, the woman from the pithouse advances. She swipes her claw-like nails at the cadaver, wielding these natural weapons with swiftness and skill. With a single slice, she ends the corpse’s mad enactment. The thing falls, goes still.

I feel I should speak yet I can find no words. The only sound is the pounding surf and the incessant wind that creates dust-devils all around us.

The headless cadaver begins to twitch, but only for an instant. Something is struggling to free itself from that lifeless husk. It finds the yoni forged by the woman’s razor-like claws. It erupts from the flesh.

A shrike.

Despite the gore that greases the bird’s plumage, I can sense the pristine shading of its feathers. It seems to carry celestial light in its down. The bird’s eyes are the silver of burnished nails. The bird takes flight.

I see. I want so very deeply to see more. But what observes this richly shaded world is not my eyes, but my throat, my fingers, the soles of my feet. I am a vent for visionary power.

The bird begins to sing. And I hear the music of the spheres. I somehow comprehend the wisdom of the song. It speaks of a knowledge deeper than the mind, a frenzied light that lies within the flesh and beyond it.

The song stirs my soul while it lulls my flesh. I am only dimly aware of dropping to my knees, of resting my head upon the smooth block that the Headsman’s new Trust has set before me.

I watch my predecessor and I believe she feels no pain.

She is now a bird, floating, soaring, singing.

She is riding sublimated light, along with the bird that was the woman from the cave.

They are the light.

My name was once Matthias, but now I am simply the Headsman’s Trust.

I turn my gaze once more earthward and I see the pair of headless bodies. Their bones awaiting repurposing. Soon I will carry them to the pithouse shelter of the horrible Woman who has already slipped away from the Headsman and myself.

She is vile.

She is a Saint.

She and the Headsman have freed these two souls from the tyranny of their heads.

Their thoughts have now become a shrieking music, a deathly birdsong that now makes these decapitated corpses flail.

These mangled forms frighten me. They are rising and moving all around me. I shut my eyes and I shiver.

Everywhere I hear the screaming shrikes. Everywhere is the unbearable sound of dead flesh dancing, dancing…