You open your mouth like a money-box. You’ll swallow what I give you.
The whores round the horse trough, washing their thighs, tongue waggling lies. Exhausted, worn down, swamped in sadness, they cluster together: a mass of bruised flesh, putrid insides, black lungs and rotting bones. The vast sky above them swirls and simmers, savage green – the soupy concoction of a sorcerer. I click my fingers. MAKE THEM MOVE.
Horse shit stuck between their swollen toes. They stick fingers in their mouths, count their remaining teeth. A backside pinched by a grubby face drunk. They are the foul little specimens. I glide past. I AM THE SHARK.
I AM THE SHARK
I am being observed by a man with porridge stains on his waistcoat. I have seen him before. He comes out in the darkness. Yellow fingernails, leech fat fingers. Killer of women; girls go missing all the time; slip off the edges of the world. Fall into holes.
I stare into him, make him evaporate. MELT ON THE SPOT.
I leave him behind, move past the butchers, where bloody sausages hang in sloppy ribbons from a hook in the window. The butcher examines me as I pass: one big hairy hand clutching a glittering wet intestinal loop.
Meandering through the maze of side alleys, I make my way towards the museum. The sludge-brown streets are bobbing with excrement, bubbling foul odours: the stench of tanneries, pie shops and soap-boilers. I gaze into the cobwebbed window of a Hocus-pocus den: see a human skull painted blue, and tiny fairy-size candles sizzling in the darkness. Inside, hovering over a dirty crystal ball, a decrepit looking gent peers goggle-eyed into the future. He wears a tattered robe of indigo with embroidered stars, now falling off. What future does he see? What other-worlds can he glimpse?
I AM FROM THE OTHERWORLDS, FORTUNE TELLER.
I AM FROM THE UNDERNEATH.
ONLY AN INCH AWAY.
I move through the narrow streets, passing rows of shops: smell pickles, dead dog, green cheeses and hot cider. I could gobble up the lot.
I am blistering black, blacker than midnight, blacker than space.
I AM THE SHARK
The museum gates loom open, the jaws of a beast carved in marble. The sky is full of spirals of milky clouds, whipped up white. I turn them green. Sour the palette.
I am an executioner today, I imagine a thousand skulls lie under my feet.
POWER
Loops of energy spin round me, demonic atoms colliding and exploding.
Do you want to know what power is?
I pick out a small gentleman in the crowd carrying a heavy pile of books. He staggers under their weight, wobbles on his feet. I have chosen him.
He explodes; pieces of his body splatter a school party. A small child holds up a severed arm with delight. His teacher, drenched in intestinal juices, screams, “PUT THAT DOWN THIS INSTANT, PERCY!”
Percy looks disappointed. That’s education for you.
I tip my hat at him.
Percy waves back and then turns his attention away, looking for the head.
I am in a world of skulls. The pieces of you.
I take off my coat. Reveal my waistcoat, which is quite extraordinary: embroidered with exquisite lizards and butterflies in a dazzle of aqua and cornflower blues. I am getting hot. I feel the boil in my blood.
Young women drift past: they smell of buttercups, bluebells and raspberry jelly. Not really my thing at all. I like my women to taste like fireworks. Melt in my hands. Under my weight.
And here comes the spindly curator Uriah Cushing, hunched very low, his words a muttering wetness. “Prime Minister, it is an honour to see you again.”
I nod, acknowledge his feeble existence.
“And may I say,” he blithers on, “your last donation to the museum was considerable.”
He’s a nervous little creature, hook nosed, fearful of predators. Smells of something cabbagy. Everything has to be labelled and positioned carefully within white spaces in his world. The wondrous and magical are stuffed into glass jars and corked, sealed within a vacuum. Never to be released.
I follow him up the great stone steps into the mouth of the museum: my eyes wandering to the heights of the vast ceiling where, hanging from wires within the gloomy depths, the complete skeleton of a great dinosaur is ominously suspended above us. I listen for the creak of chains. I listen for the breaking.
We move into dark indigo space.
“I have an interest in viewing the bottled mermaids,” I say to Uriah, who leads me up the flight of steps to the upper level of the museum.
Within a glass cabinet sits a monstrous stuffed frog, observing quietly.
Within the velvety black shadows of a corner of the exhibition, a pickled giant octopus floats in a jar of formaldehyde, a weird creature of surveillance.
I imagine the curator stuffed and preserved within a cabinet. The thought amuses me.
Uriah points to the cabinet, “Here are the beauties.”
BEAUTY BEAUTY
I HAVE SEEN SUPERNOVAS
YOUR BEAUTY IS A PIECE OF SHRIVELLED SKIN IN A JAR.