The Grin of the Dark (31 page)

As the celebrant approaches the altar he lifts his robes high,
exposing his naked posterior. The congregation responds with
emissions of wind, simulated or actual. The priest fills the chalice as
he pleases and sprinkles all those present with his blessing. He (whose
sex may be obscured if he is rouged and costumed as a woman) then
leads them in confession. The more outrageous the offences, the more
they are greeted with laughter and applause. 'Kyrie eleleleison,' he
prompts, speaking not in tongues but as a sheep. Once all have
brayed Glaury-a the readings are given in no known lingo, and the
greatest senselessness is hailed with Allelallelulila. 'Credo in nihil,' the
priest may then improvise, unless he chooses to utter less sense. His
gabblings will be designed to confound the responses of the faithful,
leaving them in mirthful disarray. 'Dominus go, piss come,' he may
supplicate, while in place of the Sanctus he may intone 'Thank us,
Dominus Deus Azathoth.' Hard on the heels of the Pater Jester comes
the Agnus Daaay-eee, during which he may pretend, if only that, to
sodomise a lamb. The excesses of the Communion, however, have
been stricken from the record and from the common consciousness,
except for the final cry of 'Mumpsimus'. To release the congregation
the priest hisses 'Eassy misssa esst,' and the worshippers respond 'Deo
gratiarse' as they join him in prancing around the altar and through
the aisles. Further less restrained activities may ensue before all escape
from the church or cathedral.

I'm even more unsure what Lane meant to do with all this. It reads
as if he was preparing it for publication or as the text of a lecture, but
how could he have imagined he would get away with either? I don't
like to think that his research would have affected his mind. The
conclusion seems unavoidable, however, as his notes progress.

The Black Mass at its most blasphemous? A saturnalian attempt to
deride the Christian ritual? Neither, yet all is connected. This is
simply an account of the Feast of Fools, that celebration which was
held for centuries at the darkest time of the year, when the skies are
emptiest and the world feels closest to the void. No less than
Saturnalia or Yuletide, this feast sought to occupy and drive back that
darkness. Or may its purpose have been forgotten like the nature and
identity of its instigator? What if its intention was to reach back to a
state which preceded any rite?

What indeed? I'm losing my grasp of the argument, such as it is.
Does the last sentence refer to the ritual or to its creator? Surely there
must have been more than one of the latter, even if Lane speculates
that the tradition might have simply taken shape from chaos. Perhaps
his archive doesn't consist entirely of fanciful nonsense, but the notes
end up full of it or worse.

Nor was the rite concluded by the emergence from the church.
Often the clergy would run through the streets, pelting the populace
with excrement. Their approach was frequently announced by a
clangour of handbells. Comic plays might be staged in the open,
lampooning local dignitaries. The players were sometimes disguised
with masks, ancient even then, or with elaborate makeup. This aspect
of the festivities was certainly one reason why the practices came to
be condemned by the Church. Perhaps it was also felt that they too
closely resembled the anarchic Decembrian revels of the pagans,
when for a few days the slave was the equal of his master. Despite the
issuing of condemnations, the feast survived in that form for a further
two centuries, although here and there it had already separated into
twin ceremonies, namely the Troupe of Fools and the Black Mass.

They were sufficiently dissimilar for the link to have been
overlooked. Not only do they proceed from a common source,
however, but also both seek to overthrow an established order. Where
those involved in the Black Mass were persecuted, the Troupe of Fools
was not merely tolerated but often encouraged by the authorities as an
apparently harmless alternative to unrest. That which is most seen is
most hidden, and for centuries the Troupe would enliven the shortest
days with appearances, sometimes advertised but more usually unheralded
except by the ringing of bells, across the countryside. We must
assume there to have been several groups of players for so many
performances to have been mounted in towns and villages so
widespread. In time their antics proved too subversive for the subjects
of their parodies, the self-styled great and good. The misrule which the
Troupe left in its wake caused by-laws to be drawn up which excluded
the company from many communities. Just the same, appearances of
the Troupe are documented as late as the 1850s, both in Britain and
on the European continent as well as the American. Perhaps some
found a haven in New Orleans, where in 1830 the first masked
American parade appeared on New Year's Eve, ringing cowbells and
throwing flour at the populace. Certainly the Troupe has been heard
of in the town of Mirocaw. Elsewhere the players would often set up
their tent under cover of night and depart before daybreak. Now the
music-hall may seem to have subsumed their buffoonery, but it
survives in a purer form, in that purely human circus whose members
are clowns to a man.

What secrets may be coded within their performances? Each of my
nightly visits seems to promise revelations that never transpire, unless
they occur without my recognising them. Every performance is so
unlike every other that the zanies might be enacting any maggot
which hatches in their heads, and yet at times I feel close to grasping
a plan amid the randomness, only for it to prance like its performances
out of my reach. On more than one occasion I have dreamed
that the show is being staged on my solitary behalf, and indeed I have
sometimes been alone in lingering until the clowns take their
deformed bows. If it were not for the advertisements which were
posted, however transiently, about the town, I should be tempted to
conclude that the Clan of Clowns was a fancy of my own, conjured
up by an excess of research. Indeed, no one but I admits to having
encountered the notices, nor have any of my colleagues or my
students obeyed my exhortations to cast off their inhibitions and
rediscover the joys of infantilism for a night. Do the clowns mean to
reproduce the genesis of language, whether in the newborn child or in
the newborn universe? Such sounds as escape their gaping mouths
resemble formulae more ancient than intelligence, yet I persist in my
instinct that close study may reveal a structure or the impossible
absence of one. More than once I have seemed to hear some distorted
remnant of a chant or other ritual. Am I embalming comedy in my
academicism? Should it not be swallowed whole rather than picked
at with my pen? Am I not the worst example of the timidity of which
I have accused my fellows and my pupils, because I alone have been
accorded the opportunity to open my mind? Every one of us is a
portal to the universe, and nature knows no locks. The mind hungers
for development, to what end other than encompassing the whole of
knowledge and experience? Let us celebrate our cerebration, not
idolise the id. Mime the mind! Uncork the unconscious! Laughter is
the language of the world! Embrace the errant, love lunacy, loon I
say, lune ace A, loo naice eh, cul any, you clan, lack uny, lacunae,
naculy, naculy, naculy...

By now I've given up. I'm simply remembering Lane's papers – at
least, I think the memory is accurate, although why should it matter?
I assume that by the incoherent end of the paragraph he's making
notes for some performance of his own; the gibberish reminds me of
the intertitles of his films. There are few complete sentences after
that. Sometimes the painstaking script degenerates into scribbles too
introverted to be legible or symbols that might be some highly
personal version of shorthand or just symptoms of an intermittent
inability to write, if they don't betoken a rush of ideas too
overwhelming for the pen to keep up. Occasionally a sentence
coheres out of the babble, but with so little in the way of context that
these interludes fail to convey much. One I copied with the pencil I
was allowed to use seems either to foresee or to propose opening
some portal to infinity. What this infinity might contain or consist of
seems important but remains unclear. Then Lane sets about
mutating and otherwise improvising on the word: port all, paw tall,
gait weigh, pile on, en trance, can treen, can't reen, can't reen... Here
as elsewhere there's a sense, if that's the word, that once he creates
an utterly meaningless fragment of language he becomes carried
away by its echoes in his head. I imagine Tubby prancing to the
rhythm, grinning wider and more big-eyed at every step. I don't want
to see that, nor to hear the words resounding in my skull. I'm
grateful to be distracted by the librarian who has brought me a spool
of microfilm. 'I'll try not to shut you down this time,' I tell her.

'I beg your pardon?'

'I'll do my best not to blow any of your fuses.' When she continues
to give me a delicate frown I add 'Like I did last time I was here.'

'I'm afraid I'm still not with you.'

She's unquestionably the same girl, even if her black curls are now
blonde, as if she's turning into a negative image. There's no point in
offering my name. 'My mistake,' I say. 'Don't let it worry you.'

It appears to as she loads the spool into the reader. I turn to a
blank page of my notebook, glimpsing Lane's notions on the way:
'The masque becomes the world' and 'Who shall say the guise is not
the face?' and 'All shall be spoken behind a mask'. It seems impossible
that they'll find any place in my book. At least today's research
is more straightforward. Surely the newspaper I mistook for the
Preston Chronicle
was the
Preston Gazette
.

That's the publication on the microfilm. As I wind the issues for
January 1913 through the viewer, every photograph of people in
Edwardian dress reminds me of extras in a Tubby Thackeray film.
Am I too immersed in my research? There were surely more significant
events back then, not least the imminence of a world war. Then
a pair of headlines makes me grip the rudimentary controls as if I've
won a video game.

MUSIC-HALL PERFORMER BOUND OVER TO KEEP PEACE.
PERFORMANCE MUST BE KEPT WITHIN PROPER BOUNDS.

So this was the newspaper I bought from the Comical Companions
stall. The idea that I could have misread it, especially since even the
typeface differs from my memory of it, blurs my vision. Or is the
display losing definition? I twist the focusing screw, which only
aggravates my inability to read the headlines.
I, FORMER, ACE
... I'm
barely able to decipher these letters before they succumb to the indistinctness
that's blackening the page. I turn the screw the other way,
and the image sharpens. It doesn't contain a single recognisable word.
I feel as if nonsense is spreading through the text – as if the silent
clamour of Lane's misshapen language in my skull is infecting a
historical record – and then I identify the blackness that's
overwhelming the page. The microfilm is charring like a cinema film
that has become stuck in a projector.

'Excuse me,' I call, but the staff are nowhere to be seen. 'Excuse
me,' I shout as a trickle of blackness rises from the monitor.

'Sssh.'

'Don't shush me. Where are you? Anyone,' I yell and give up. 'I'll
do it myself. You don't want the place on fire.'

What could anybody do except twist the spooling knobs? The
microfilm coils like a mutilated snake out of both sides of the viewer,
scattering the table with flakes of blackened celluloid. The librarian
hurries out from behind the shelves and emits a small cry at the last
of the smoke but is otherwise as silent as any library could require
until she's standing over me. 'I do know you,' she says.

'I didn't really pinch your power last time. That was just a joke.'

'We never did find out what went wrong.'

'Well, not me. Sorry about this. It must have jammed.'

She retrieves the sections of microfilm and carries them to the
desk. 'Will you be wanting anything else?'

I can't judge whether she's being professional or sarcastic. I
shouldn't risk another mishap – I can paraphrase what I recall. A
charred fragment of microfilm is isolated on the screen. Rather than
strain to be certain whether the letters it contains spell hack, I say
'Could I buy some time online?'

She moves to the table ahead of me and activates a computer. As I
log onto my Frugonet account I hear brushing and sharp polite
coughs at my back to remind me that she's cleaning the viewer. Willie
Hart has emailed at last. I swallow a taste of my mother's defiantly
unhealthy breakfast as I open the message.

si –

sore 4 silnce. no good nus im afrad. hop u got all u neded out
of vuing. no 2
^nd
chanc. u got guillermo 2 nthusd. he wachd 1 film
2 ofn & it wnt on fir. so did rest whn he trid 2 put it out. all films
dstroyd & he ran off. ull realize iv not had tim 2 chec w girls.
theyr filming in la whil i try 2 sort out insuranc clam & carer. but
im sur if tha filmd u it wud hav ben a jok.

wile

I spend far too long in decoding sore as sorry and carer as career
and tha as they, and then I wonder why she failed to contract realize.
She must be preoccupied with her loss. Confusion is spreading
through my skull as the blackness did onscreen, and I have to stop
myself fancying that the film in the library viewer might have ignited
out of sympathy with hers. I can't think of a reply to send her; I need
to check that Smilemime hasn't been active. But he has, and I swallow
a harsh stale taste as I bring up the message that's strewn through the
newsgroups.

So Mr Questionabble wants his link, does he? Sorry, I forgot his
name's suppossed to be Simon Lester. Do we think he'll shut up
and go away if I post one? That's what he said I had to do. Let's
think of an address for him. How about www.missionleer.com?
That's him leering at us. Or there's www.emitsmorsel.com, which
is all he ever does. Then there's www.silentmorse.com that
shows how he keeps using a secret code. Where else shall we
look for him? He ought to have a site at www.imtrollsee.com.