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

conversion, still I found it difficult to countenance a God that would award Sir Thomas Tresham for his faith with house arrest and then direct him to pass his remaining days in the construction of a great stone wedge of cheese. (I make complaint here only for my father’s treatment at the hands of the Almighty. Note that I do not debate the Justice meted out to me, which I would say is fair, up to a point. That point, it must be said, is thrust uncomfortably up my ragged windpipe, whence it juts, not without pain, into my cobwebbed cerebellum. That aside, I must congratulate the Lord upon his widely mentioned lenience.)

The round church and my father’s three-faced lodge, these huge and simple solid forms set patiently upon the shire’s map; carefully, painstakingly arranged like children’s building-blocks across long centuries by slow, half-witted gods, too few pieces in place as yet to guess their final scheme, if scheme there be. Sometimes, as thoughts drift in the muddy, half-awake plane that alone remains to me, I know a sense of vast, momentous tumblers falling, somewhere far away; of an eventual unlocking there at Time’s rim, though of what I may not guess. If scheme there be, my present state tends to suggest that I am not considered vital in its outcome.

I decorate the North gate of the town. Though lacking eyes I yet observe they have not moved me while I slept and dreamt my sweet and silent dream of being dead. Moreover, it is plain that they have not replaced the watchmen billeted within the gate-house, John and Gilbert, whom I recognize both by their voices and by the distinct and separate perfumes of their water, which they make almost in ritual unison against the gate-house wall each morn when they arise.

It is like this: first Gilbert wakes with the full weight of last night’s ale upon his bladder and begins to cough, these hawkings low and gruff, much like his voice. Next, John is woken by his fellow watchman’s barking and begins his own, though in a somewhat higher register, being, it seems to me, the younger of the two. Meanwhile to this, Gilbert has leapt up from his cot, pulled on his trousers and his boots and stumbled out to piss. The sound of this seems to go on for ever and, as such sounds often do, provokes in John an awful sympathy so that he hurries out to join his fellow; adds his meagre stream to the tremendous gushings of the dam already breached. At the conclusion of their sprinklings, both men next break wind, first Gilbert and then John, the pitch again reflecting their respective age and temperament, one low, one high. A crumhorn and a penny whistle.

Every day they do this, as unchanging as the bird-calls that announce the dawn, nor do their other functions of the day seem less routine. From light through dark they labour at their work or else they labour harder in avoiding it. Such conversation as they manage is repeated daily, phrase for phrase. I do not doubt the thoughts they have today are much the same ones they had yesterday and will have served again, re-boiled, upon the morrow. Willingly they entertain this vile monotony. One might, if unfamiliar with our situation, easily assume that it were they hung on a spike, not I.

My father, penned within his grounds and left to nurse his three-fold madness; Catesby, Fawkes, the rest of them, all caught up in their diverse fervours, in the circles of their habit and their reason; we are all of us thus hoisted on our own petard. Each of us has his sticking place, and to each man his nail.

Of late, Gilbert and John have (when they speak of me at all) begun to call me ‘Charlie-Up-There’. ‘Francis’, a more upright-sounding name, is obviously not so suited to the slouching rhythms of their speech as ‘Charlie’: ‘Which way blows the wind, young John? You take a look at Charlie up there and take note of where what bit of hair he has flies out to!’ Once I had such lovely tresses, now a weather-vane for idiots.

Still, in all it pleases me to think that I have yet some function and some purpose to my being, slight and mean though it may be. Not only weather-cock am I but also trysting place, an easy landmark where young lovers may arrange to meet. Their brief and oft hilarious couplings against the bird-streaked wall below awake in me a phantom pang, much like the pang induced on hearing Gilbert’s loud, torrential micturitions every morn. Though my equipment to accomplish such be gone, I too would like to poke a wench or piss against a wall from time to time. In truth, I cannot say which of these satisfactions’ passing is the most lamented, though I wish that I had taken more time to appreciate the both of them while I was yet in life. Ah, well.

Besides my use as totem to the fumblings of young men, so also am I able to provide my services as target for the missiles of their infant siblings. Usually they fly wide of the mark, although on coming to my senses at this last occasion, I discovered that one of the more accomplished little hell-hounds had contrived to lodge a piece of coal big as a knuckle in the socket on the left. I must confess I am quite taken with it, fancying it lends my mask a roguish and yet gallant lack of symmetry as might a monocle, opaque and lensed with jet.

Upon reflection, a great while has passed since last I was Aunt Sally to the children’s stones. No doubt they are away about some new, more seasonal diversion now. If I were not a mask then I would call them back.

It seems to me that this has always been my stumbling block, that I may not speak out for whatsoever