He
watched the car from his window, his father step out and his mother too in
their almost best clothes. The infant was wrapped within a cellular blanket and
lay silent in her arms. Though it had died some hours earlier its cheeks
appeared warm and alive. He wept as he saw them, such an awful party. The
infants all perished in the Fenland township, it was the way things had to be. He
himself had been the last of a generation to survive and he was now grown
strong; yet the pain of the deaths never softened, and the infants continued to
come, to be born and then to die, their short existences but memories of things
unhappened. Contraception was worthless in the Fenland Township and its use
unheard of; it failed with ferocious resolution against the immense fecundity
the ancient moist earth bestowed upon its subjects. Life came so death could
follow, so it was written in the book of the township.
The earth was hungry for the tiny bodies of the
infants. They perished some three days post-partum, prey to the same condition
that medicine was ill-equipped to explain but that the book of the township
expressed in the complexity of its principles; they were offerings to the
ancient fens themselves, as essential for the continued survival of the
township as the commitment of its founders had been so many years previous. The
relationship between township and landscape was an intricate and symbiotic one;
whilst the township drew upon the resources of the landscape, so too the
landscape drew upon the resources of the township. The sating of the earth
should ever be the township’s priority, the book spoke, and the infant surplus
of each and any generation – beyond those minimal required for the successful
propagation of the township – should be returned to the earth that grew them.
Their breaths and needs unsustainable by the
limits of the township the existences of the infants ceased very gently in deaths
both sudden and foreseen and the worse because of it; their parents would
forever feel their short lives in their fingertips and in their dwindling
exchanges and in the threat of the coupling that occurred in the urgency of
their grief and was itself further grief or the cementing of same. They would
carry the infant dead to the earthworks at the edge of the township without
ceremony and commit their bodies to the furtherance of the township.
His parents had birthed eight healthy infants
after him, all surplus. As he grew older he thought he could see sometimes the
disappointment in his mother’s eyes, especially, could see her wondering how
things might have been if another of the infants had been the one, but such
considerations were futile. Things are as are. This was written in the book of
the township.
The book was written by the township founders,
Messrs Flamsy and Klepte. Rumour and to a lesser extent history positions the
two men as shamed Cambridge scholars who negotiated college influence and
resources to pursue private investigations into the occult, by which both men
were fascinated, and who were as a result expelled from the university for acts
of an ungodly persuasion. The times were unenlightened for free-thinkers.
Despite the University’s royally decreed movement away from Catholicism and
canon law during the Protestant reformation, a growing puritan influence among
a handful of the colleges made the city particularly hostile to Flamsy and
Klepte’s increasingly esoteric lines of research, into satanic texts and
symbology, ritual sacrifice and a skewed pan-atheistic belief system of
tremendous pessimism, whereby within every aspect of the essence of the
universe lay at once the seed of its own formation and end, the seed being dark, indifferent and cruel. Legend
describes mandrakes – duck-like beings with huge legs some six feet long that
whilst having fallen somewhat out of favour in popular tradition in the latter
half of the twentieth century are nonetheless firmly rooted in the British and
specifically East Anglian folklore of much of the last two millennia – as
familiars assisting the two men in their deviance, and that while embroiled in
acts of perverse and varied coition such familiars would simultaneously through
ready beaks suckle lactose-like serum from secreted entry points around the
emaciated bodies of Flamsy and Klepte in exchange for these diabolical ends;
describes the two men chased from the city in mortal danger by outraged
scholars; describes vast shadowy formations engulfing the hostile eviction
party and the dreadful stench of human faeces so severe and grotesque as to
render them invalid; describes the fleeing men quickly swallowed in the sodden
silence of the wild fens, absorbed into the earth as they alone understood it
to be, the societal expectations of the city but a trifle amongst the coarse
grasses and spongy earth and endless pools. In the hinterlands they constructed
a township free from law and propriety, founded on their principles and theirs
alone. It would be a township of paradox, spoke the book. Streets would have no
end and lead only to themselves. A town borne of pain that felt none. Rich with
life and courting death. Change changes nil. Outside shall stay such and no
more. Our young shall feed the hungry earth.
The township would flourish, the beacon burnt and never faltered, aflame
through the endless years.
 |
| M. Flamsy |
 |
| M. Klepte |
The book of the township spoke of what wasn’t as
much as what was if not more. Despite its purported location within the civic
buildings, which were of red brick and varied architectural stylings, few if
any living persons had bore witness to its presence. There were rumours of
weight and power but each was unverified and conflicting. Its existence was
beyond experience and was related to the pertinence held within the whispers of
it that spanned generations.
He heard his parents open the front door and
carry the infant into the house, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
Their footsteps were purposeful and the refrigerator hummed in the kitchen.
They called him in solid voices, called him again when he neither moved nor
spoke. His father approached his bedroom door and knocked on it, had changed
into carpet slippers; he now held the infant and offered it to his son. “Would
you?” asked his father. He referred to the earthworks on the edge of township.
His father passed him the infant and patted an open palm on his shoulder as
though they were not kin but distant mates awkwardly reunited. It felt
incredibly light to hold, almost unnoticeable and desperately cold. A bad world
encapsulated in their barely meeting eyes. He pushed past his father and down
the stairs and through the hallway and heard his mother crying and the sound of
the radio and pouring drink and closed the front door behind him and at a
slight jog with the infant clutched into his chest he cried himself.
Superficially the town was now as any other, of
banks and discount outlets, of mounting traffic crises and closing businesses,
its peripheries peppered with the modern fortresses of the supermarket and DIY
retailers on a scale inconsistent with that of the township they served, vast
squat hulks of brick and corrugated metal some great distance from the unseen
town charter purportedly documented in the book of the township. Several months
earlier a carnival had visited the town and erected temporary camp in the car
park area of one such retailer, billed amongst the township as God’s Fenland Roadshow and helmed by a
Parson named Grünther. The Christian foundation of the carnival’s
message sat uneasily with the proud godlessness of the township and hostility
had been quick to bloom. Citizens vandalised the carnival tent on erection and
abused the performers determinedly, their aggression immediately magnified by Grünther’s
incredible indifference. He bore silent witness to the worsening violence
without intervention, an assured arrogance the likes of which aroused the
citizens into even more advanced forms of retribution. In the hubbub of the
shredded canvas a handful of citizens who claimed to be directly descended from
Flamsy and Klepte restrained the carnival’s fat male whom the posters called
Oaf Boy, and while Grünther and the other performers watched encircled they in
lengthy thrusts stabbed the oaf dead, the oaf felled, face dumb as he got it,
his blood an immense gurgling pool swallowed into the ground, his large
assembly of dead skin and flesh like the peel of an orange rolled away from the
fruit within. They thought him Grünther’s pet and no one contradicted them. The
murder was neither harried nor considered but occupied some uncomfortable
territory between the two. Crows cawed their approval in the trees about and
Grünther had led the carnival from the township. There will be other oafs, said
Grünther.
He soon reached the earthworks where the infants
lay. Unburied, he hadn’t realised or even thought. Around the mounded earth and
furrows beneath – in places – but inches of loose soil were the remains of
incalculable infants, arranged head-to-toe in long lines of death, their tiny
bones stark white amidst the dirt and scraggy foliage. It was an unforgettable
sight and truly dreadful. He retched drily and spat and scuffed the toes of his
trainers into the mud then retched further to no avail or release. Carefully
unwrapping the cellular blanket from around the body of the infant he knelt to
lower it to the floor, and its body was sketched with deep bruising where the
blood had settled; he looked at the infant, stroked its cheek with one hand and
cupped the top of its head and kissed it very gently on the forehead as one
would any sibling. He wrapped the blanket around it again and held it very
tight, too tight it would have surely been had the infant been alive which it
wasn’t. He jogged to the telephone box, there was only one in the town, its
glass panels shattered but still somehow as one, ex nihilo sprayed in large vibrant pink lettering across the panels
in turn. The presence of the graffiti in the Fenland township was a point of
some consternation, but a petty attack on such obsolete technology meant that
little had been done to apprehend the vandal. Holding the infant half beneath
his jacket he put two coins into the slot and dialled for assistance, requested
to be transferred to the police authorities in the next large township and not
his own. Though he was justifiably certain that he must under no circumstances
approach the police within his own Fenland township he nonetheless was not
thinking clearly or really at all as he implemented the telephone call. He
dreamt only of change and felt the cold mass of the infant against his chest.
He conversed briefly with an officer and told him in fragments of the infants,
the many infants. They would meet presently, the officer assured him, and he
took his parents address and gave him a time about an hour from then.
It is unclear where the rumours pertaining to the
truth about the contents of the book of the township that circulated amongst
the youth had started, but they spread hurriedly amongst the mid 20s and
younger. The long-held beliefs and principles purportedly contained within the
book of the township and which formed the bedrock of the community and the very
existence of the township were as if from nowhere cast into doubt, their
veracity questioned, their morals considered in rigorous argument . The youth
sought placement within, they said, a bigger
picture, a picture bigger than the Fenland township that had given them
everything. A global picture of which they – the township – should be a part. They questioned the
early settler’s interpretations of Flamsy and Klepte’s texts, accused wilful
corruption of their mutual intellect for social or political gain and mass
cover up of same, demanded access to the book of the township should it even
exist or indeed ever have existed. Its secretion, they said, spoke volumes.
Whilst once the township had thrived, secure in its own sense of significance
and its own shared values, the revolt of the young dispelled certainty and
principle like devastated futures. They committed to alcohol, they sought
formal educations outside of the township, they fornicated amongst themselves
and swore to reproduce, they made plans to leave the township. These were
horrendous betrayals. It was the greatest crisis in the long history of the
township, acceptance mangled by clustered broadband connections, the
information age incompatible with principle.
He carried the infant back to his parents house
and waited around in the street outside in the falling light, the grass damp
and thick and incredibly green beneath his feet. A simple car turned slowly
into the street and crawled past the houses looking attentively at the numbers
on the front doors. It was ten minutes early but he was sure it was the officer
he had spoken to. The car stopped outside his parents’ house and he approached
it and held a hand out to the officer but was too afraid to speak. The officer
looked at him and infant both and told him everything was going to be okay. He
shook his head to say no, the officer had a gentle face, the sky was blue as
the sun set which happened so quickly, the officer said it again and that he
was here to help, and they approached his parents’ front door together, and
though he had his keys they knocked regardless. His father opened the door and
looked at the officer and at him, then at the infant, and his eyes narrowed
just slightly; the officer showed him some ID and said he’d taken a call from
me, something about some infants. There was no mention of the infant he was
carrying, it was a topic best left. From the front doorstep he heard his mother
talking on the telephone in the next room, saying police, saying come quickly,
the sound of the receiver going down, and her slight footsteps and polite
greetings. The officer repeated himself to her, mentioned infants, and
telephone calls, and my mother nodded as he spoke and her face was very
concerned. As they spoke around him he cradled the infant. Within second some
five or six of the township’s elders were encircling the front door, shaking
hands with the officer and patting their hands upon his shoulders and each
others. The officer was watching him, his gentle lined face piecing together
the cracked strained normalcy of terrible truths, and conversation multiplied
in directions worlds away from the infants and the earthworks. The youth, they
said, were dissatisfied. It was simple rebellion, not an issue for the law,
officer. They spoke convincingly and much. The officer listened politely but
watched him carefully, as though he had a sense for these things. Earthworks. He spoke only to the officer
but he spoke aloud. Earthworks. You need to see the earthworks. The officer
looked around the gathered faces. The boy’s father lunged forward and slapped
him in the face once, and then twice, and the infant fell to the floor wrapped
tightly in the blanket. His mother picked it up and carried it into the house.
Two of the elders restrained his father and the officer took a mobile phone
from his jacket pocket, but of course there was no telephone signal in the
township, this was ever ensured. That’s enough, the officer said, to the father
ostensibly but to all in truth. I’m going to need you to take me to the
earthworks. With their eyes the elders consulted then conceded, and they
explained to the officer that whilst there was little of interest to see at the
earthworks they would of course take him, that they would be proud to assist
the police with any investigation as required, and on foot they set off the
short distance to the earthworks, the sun dropped like loose change. He remained
close to the officer.
In fact the book of the township spoke only of
tolerance in terms distinctly utopian, of patience, of kindness, and
acceptance, and it was for these reasons that it had been left to rot within
the recesses of the civic buildings, to prevent the truth from manifesting. The
body politic consumed integrity. No township could function with tolerance, the
Fenland township no exception. They thrived on doubt and mistrust. Flamsy and
Klepte had been fools to theorise otherwise; good men, almost certainly
homosexual, privately, but no matter. The lost everything and founded the
township as a response to this grave loss: it was a mechanism for coping with
it, a patient place, a kind place, an accepting place. The early settlers had
quickly corrupted the ideals of Messrs Flamsy and Klepte, had united the
township and its successive generations in the very paranoia and gross
injustice they had sought refuge from. The honour of their memory was long
faded. They bore atrocities in essence centuries posthumous.
When the path turned sharply into the earthworks
the officer gagged, then harder almost immediately, spewed a foamy small pile,
the awful stench worse than new shit in the air. The elders were oblivious; the
rich reek of decaying flesh and bones and of bodies disintegrating into their
constituent fluids and eventually molecules and atoms and into the earth was as
inseparable from the township as the dwellings and persons who made it. The
earthworks thrummed with death. The officer pulled a pocket torch from his
jacket and shone it into the shadows, saw infants decomposing in its meagre
beam, countless infants deceased and piled texturing the landscape like cairns.
My God, he said vomiting, my God he said again. He shone his torch a second
time, as though the bodies might have vanished, as though it could have been
imagined, but the infants remained. He staggered from the elders and the boy
followed him and took his arm; the officer took his mobile phone but there was
still no signal. The township was a blackspot. A void best avoided. What is
this? he asked the boy. It’s what I tried to tell you, the boy said. It’s what
they do to the infants here. For the earth. The officer felt incredibly aware
of the darkness that was of a sudden profound. He turned lost to the elders and
thought of his family, lost also. How can I explain this, he asked. This can’t
be explained. The boy’s father stepped forwards towards the officer and drew a
blade of some form across his throat as though marking points on paper. The
officer felt little but did feel blood gushing down his front and gurgling back
up his throat and into his mouth and it tasted iron rich like good offal, and
he dropped to his knees and from there to his front and the earth took him, its
bits in his bits, the whole thing so quick it seemed like an act of prayer, the
sounds of his death so full of life.
We’d
better get home, the boy’s father said putting a hand on his shoulder. It’s
getting late.
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