Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

Confessions of a Mask

AD 1607

It disappoints me to recount that lately I have found myself again afflicted with identity and so beset by a great pestilence of thoughts. Arid, inconsequential things, they rattle uselessly within the parchment seed-pod of this smirking mask I am become. Worse, they provoke a fearful itching at the rear interior of my cranium where, I fear, yet clings some withered clot of mind; grey husk of brittle sponge, wrung dry, crusted upon the inner shell like relic snots discovered on the pages of old books.

I find if I contrive to let my skull tilt back and forth, as in a breeze, the iron point of my spike will scrape against the irritation and thus bring some measure of relief, though this does not dispel the main source of my aggravation, to whit, that I am myself at all with the capacity for thought or for sensation when I fancied (fancying nothing) that I was, at measure, done with such bleak chores.

When did I last know anything? Without sight, I may not determine how much time I’ve whiled away in dangling here and stinking since I last came to myself. If memory does not play me false, that was in Summer, when this bone cathedral’s dome rang to a monk’s drone of green-bellied flies; the munch of grubs where once dreams shimmered. Summer last or Summer before that I cannot tell. As I recall, I had hung here but several months, which made it by my reckoning the year Sixteen Hundred and Six, three years into the reign of Good King James, may the Almighty rot his eyes (a skill which the Almighty has deployed with great success upon diverse occasions, to which I myself may testify).

Upon the creased corpse-paper of my brow the wind is damp with Autumn; brings a hush among the bluebottles. October, then? November? But which year? In truth, I scarcely care, longing to have away with dates and know eternity. I fancied that I had it, that last time. I fancied I was gone. Instead, mere sleep; a further crumbling of my worm-drilled wits, only to wake again, too bored for horror now.

I wonder, is my father yet alive? Poor Tom, as mad as I; almost as hampered in his movements, cloistered there through law on his estate by virtue of his faith, the queer, three-sided hunting lodge he built in which he meant to signify the Trinity, whereby to taunt his captors. Shrouded in a language all my father’s own, occult and mystical, I fear this taunt sailed high above his gaolers’ heads and altogether missed its mark.

Three floors. Three sides. Three windows made from triangles of glass on every side, on every floor. Great numbers, threes and nines, set in the brick, that signified I know not what, though I recall that once my father made great effort to explain their meaning to me.

‘They are dates, young Francis. Dates as reckoned from our true beginnings on this Earth, and Eden’s founding.’ As he talked, his great grey head rocked forward, nodding to make emphasis; the last exhausted peckings of a lame and ancient bird.

My father’s calculations hinged upon a calendar suggested by a certain Bishop (I do not recall his name) who had established to his personal satisfaction the specific date on which the world commenced. To my chagrin, I must confess this most important anniversary is also fled from recollection, one more memory eaten by the meatflies. I remember, though, that the Creation was accomplished on a Monday.

Thus far, while by no means sane in any ordinary sense, my father’s motives in the building of the lodge were at least still within my comprehension: he desired to raise up a triangular affront to all good sense, and in this fashion to commemorate the Holy Trinity in whose name he had suffered his incarceration. Further to this, he desired to date his edifice from that primordial Monday morn when the Almighty condescended to allow the Light.

However, this was not the limit of my father’s odd preoccupations. In addition to the massive numbers set out in relief upon his lodge, were also letters, most of them pertaining to quaint word-games played upon the family name, this being Tresham, which abbreviates to ‘Tres’, that is to say, to three, which brings us neatly back to Father, Son and their celestial pigeon.

(If I am allowed to venture an aside, and in some modest measure a rebuke, I must say that in all the months that I have waited to attain to the celestial realm, I have not once been visited by this aforesaid blessed fowl, although I wear a skullcap of his cousins’ dung.)

I’d stand within the arching door of Rushton Hall, watching my father while in turn he overlooked the building of his folly, there across the fields. He would strut back and forth and all the while call out encouragements to those who laboured on the lodge: ‘Pray, Cully, further to the right! Be sure to take your measurements in threes, sir, if you love me! Make the inclinations at the corner nice and not splayed out like whores’ legs!’

Here within Northampton is a church made in a round, raised to these blasphemous proportions at the time of the Crusades against the Saracen. According to conjecture, it is built this curious way that Satan may not find a nook wherein to hide himself. What of my father’s lodge, then? Surely he had fiends in every corner, devils on all sides, that drove him on through pride, through bitterness and into lunacy? What drives us all, that we engage ourselves in such catastrophes? Surely it was not the Almighty’s voice that guided him to such a sorry end, but rather that voice issued from the furnace, from the fire’s mouth, trailing spittles of white ore?

For all my loyal protestations that I shared my father’s creed since his