In the evenings, in the summer twilight, with a southwest breeze blowing, all the town’s streets fill with the cloying, unendurable smell of cadavers.
Everywhere windows are slammed shut, the few lone pedestrians withdraw into the crowded, hermetically shut pubs. Everyone knows it’s the fumes from a factory on the outskirts that produces some sort of ingredients for detergents, where masses of cadavers, animal cadavers, are rendered and work begins at nightfall.
But none of the drinkers in the pubs know when the smell in the streets will lift, in their barrooms, too, the windows and doors are slammed shut, curtains are drawn, you settle in as though resolved to drink till the early daybreak, you shun the streets as though dreading an epidemic, you sit and drink in the awareness of a smell outside the doors, a smell casting, as a blue gas, a dull phosphor glow through the night, you think you hear it gnawing at the houses’ outer skins, you think you hear desiccation spreading inward through the wood of the doorframes, you must drown this awareness within you. You must drink until all memory of that repulsive gas yields to a drunken, reeling flood of thoughts that revolve around the barroom’s increasingly inscrutable goings-on. Yellow and green are the hues of all things capable of warding off the pestilence. At the counter of yellow wood, fogged by dampness, about to vanish behind swaths of stale breath and tobacco smoke, beer’s being poured in an endless series of glasses that race off to the tables, the tablecloths are swept to the floor, and on the wet wood the glasses slide faster into the splayed hands, lots and lots of yellow foam-crowned glasses that soon seem to merge, so that all at once you see them as a single wave of cool-bitter, white-yellow beer foam surging toward you, but still so shallow that it fails to reach your round, open mouth; it reaches waist-high, and from every opening, every sucking, protruding orifice, every hose-end, the unconsumed dregs flow back, trickling away in quick loops on the floorboards; the voices in the room have the raucous force of a storm, resounding in the breasts of the people around you, though their gaping mouths seem to release no sound. Meanwhile, the thirst grows more pressing, more unstillable, as—taking material form, mutely announcing its yearning—it drips and runs from all the bodies; the open mouths’ cavities are tinged green, are sponges, displaying in panic the threat of desiccation; even as the heads’ clarities yield to a frothing, spurting, streaming confusion, even as the eyes turn to fungi, the yellow shape of the bar counter looms like a rock in the fog, and the second wave rolls in from there, breaking at neck level, wetting your hair for the first time, but still you haven’t gotten your share; you stand up, nearly toppling onto your outstretched arms, you try to drag your disintegrating body to the front, to the yellow light of the bar, for your thirst is uncontrollable, gigantic, infernal, but the third wave hurls you back, you go under; as through a soft, flexible channel with all the floodgates unlocked, the liquid floods you without cease, falling over backward, you feel your thirst turn grotesque and ridiculous; when your limbs begin to drift away you feel the green and idiotic thirst of a creature that dwells in liquid, a thirst that persists independent of all satiation. The mouths of the people around you have stretched to foaming flews, swollen to shaggy trunks, lengthened to amphibious bills, all the bodies are a glistening green, covered with silver scales, all the limbs are strong and supple, equipped with splayed webs, dangling fins, fishtails, rhythmically vibrating gills, they’re all diving, swimming, gliding creatures, releasing streams of bubbles and touching each other with gaping snouts; it’s awful to see their obscene pleasure as they roll over on their backs at the level of the dim lamps and, inert for a time, a mere snuffling their only sign of life, press white-yellow glistening belly against belly. You watch with horror, speechless and already remote from humanity, hung with dripping heavy pelts, gurgling as you struggle for breath, surrounded by the grunting of Tritons and the tittering of Nereids, assaulted by the lust of great foam-sucking cockles, ogled, with crabby, stinging cnidarian tentacles already twitching around your loins and thighs, instinctively almost at home in a world of damp and fogs, almost submerged in the true monsters’ deeps, yet still senselessly thirsty; but at last, long past curfew, the full horror dawning on you, you jump up, reeling, and fling up your arms to scream, to create, through your screams, room for the human breast, but already you feel your arm seized; you’re grabbed and drawn into a sleepy, swaying circle and included in a stately chant intoned as ebb and flow, pouring from mouth to mouth like sluggish currents of heavier water.
If, at this hour—the air fresh again, the southwester having long since chased the smell of rot from town—a traveler hastening through streets swept empty should glimpse light in the window of a pub, and knock repeatedly for admittance, urgently but in vain, puzzled at first, then shouting out an angry curse: A plague upon this town… his ear, inclined in alarm toward the pane, would be answered by a ponderous song taking form from a din, seeming explanation as well as threat, but always so indistinct that both are intuited rather than grasped:
We know full well, we know full well
then and now in the fires of hell
they burned the bones, they burned the pelts.
If you’re wise you’ll sell the cow
sell the dog and sell the sow
sell the goat to Ponikau
the cash will quench the thirst of hell.
Horror shooting through every limb, the traveler forgets his thirst. Native to an ever-fragrant region, from an era following the Flood in which all creatures have been assigned to their proper species, and land and sea divided, he takes this for a town in the sway of wild beasts, beasts interbreeding in the ritual light of mingled yellow-blue sacrificial fires to produce the most horrid monsters, ah, he’d count himself lucky to spend the rest of the night in the fields, to flee before the club-brandishing cattle drivers burst out through all the doors; he sees the silent houses lurking in the first morning light; he’d prefer the stench of a stable on the fields’ edge.