The Chthuliad:

   The Summoner: Beginnings.


                                                “…sea moves as mercury
                                    To break its perfect skin to dare to dive within

                           Sometimes, sometimes I see much more than is good for me”

                                                                          - Paris Train, Beth Orton.


Paris is a palimpsest of cultures and concepts, a document written in stone and glass, brick and slate, mud and water; always water.

If you believe the rumours: she is the ultimate city of romance; if you believe your eyes: she is a graffiti daubed labyrinth, where signs and symbols of power rest side by side with tawdry names and vulgar ideas scratched into palace windows; while outside it is often ankle deep with litter, shuffled through by creatures as shadowy and sinister as Ahab’s dawn crawling crewmen, muttering and skulking beneath a drizzle filtered neon haze.

It was as a brooding, melancholy young man of twenty, leaving her museums and bars behind me for the first time that I realised I already loved the city and would return. As I often have.

You see this is where my real life began. My other life, a shadowy facsimile of which I still wrap around me like a coat, was left on a Paris backstreet, a reflection of a smiling youth trapped in a puddle of clear rainwater, reaching for a small shiny object.

…


I don’t recall what had brought me to the small back street, but it is likely that it was the vague idea of a shabby bookshop or a shabbier bar.

Reappearing from beneath the stone archway I stepped out onto a heavy-stone paved street and noticed that the light rain had stopped altogether. The thin film of rain seemed to leave the surface of the road and the edges of its stone and wooden architecture edged with silver as they reflected the now emerging sun.

The road was wide, curving away to the left to eventually be obscured by clustered buildings. Opposite, the street was lined with trees like an avenue, but instead of houses the far side of the pavement broke away into a wide space of waste ground.

The near side of the street was filled to the old fashioned central gutter with the wares of the six or seven antique stores that occupied the buildings there. Beautiful inlaid cabinets and writing desks stood side by side with huge gilt-edged mirrors and curious recovered architectural stonework in the form of rampant griffons and crouching lions, all sat under dripping awnings ready to be exposed to the pale sunlight. One shop-front was nearly obfuscated altogether behind an enormous set of ecclesiastical stained-glass windows, the nearest of which depicted an angular Jacob wrestling a unconcerned blank-eyed angel in a kaleidoscopic setting of red and gold.

The buildings themselves boasted a series of well kept and artfully made wooden window-frames, beautiful metal ironwork in the form of woven vines looped in and out creating dummy balconies along the level of the first floor, while above, tall, elegantly proportioned, painted-shuttered windows looked out over the Paris backstreets; it was as if an Atget photograph, somehow brought to life, had been flooded with wan colour.

It was as that very thought entered my head that I looked down to my feet.

It shone like gold, beneath the surface of the shimmering puddle, but it wasn’t gold.

It was brass, simple brass. An engineer’s metal, the Hebrews tell us that it was first conceived of and wrought by Tuval Kayin, brother to Naamah and descendant of Cain.

It weighs like sin and tastes like blood.

As I think of it I can almost feel the weight of it on its leather strap increase.  Twice since then I have lost the amulet, but I have always found it again, once in broad daylight in a busy street. Nobody even turned their head to watch me pick it up.

And I now know what it wants.

I’ve felt the pull of it when travelling by ferry, or by plane; or when I stood on the bridge by Notre Dame; or on the quayside of Hamburg’s freeport on the Elbe; or on the ice strewn beach at Timendorfer on the Baltic Coast and again looking towards the maelstrom from Copenhagen’s waterfront.

It wants to go back to the sea, just as it must have crawled from it all those years ago.

My stomach cramps, and as happens so often these days, unbidden and unwanted, an ancient image crawls across my minds eye.

A pregnant moon, yellow-white, like a blinded eye and incised with its waning self hangs in the night sky; the crescent like a polished sword blade laid upon a shield. Far below its bloated-corpse face stand the two great stone pillars carved with the wisdom of man, one of brick, one of stone.

It is to these ancient columns that the howling monsters are made fast. The first secured by a great iron chain, the second by a hempen rope, both of which are stretched taught as the two gigantic wolves pull and strain.

Their blood flecked saliva splashes into fast running stream, a stream that I know runs to the grey ocean, where slowly, but with purpose, a strangely formed creature emerges from the churning waves, its claw-like arms reach for the moon, and it screeches like a harvest of mandrake.

As I try to shake the image from my thoughts, I see what I was meant to see. The river. For there, subtle but sure, in the fertile soil by the rushing water are footprints.

The footprints of a wandering fool.

...

WIP

h.

LAST EDIT 20/10/05