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

this nature stays with me: one of the luckless crew — not Catesby, Fawkes or Winter; one I did not know so well — was taken to his place of execution and beheaded, then cut into four. Lifting the head to wave it at the mob, the axe-man cried, ‘Behold! A traitor’s head!’

At which the head replied, ‘Thou liest.’

I have since wished that I might share a basket with a head that had such spirit, or yet rest beside him on some ossuary shelf, but it is better it should never be. With nothing else save face to show, I could not face him.

Somewhere in my dark, the children sing above the roar and crackle of the flames. Before they sang for us or raised their bonfires to support our effigies, they’d burn a doll to signify His Holiness the Pope, and prior to that no doubt some earlier sacrifice back unto that primordial Monday, that first fire.

The burning and the song are one. If I gaze hard with the black jewel that is my only eye, I see the spit and flare of it, away there in the centre of that cold, wet coal where is my night. It was my friends they set alight, not I. I was denied that last deliverance, to be consumed within that timeless bright that is in truth one single blaze decanted down across the aeons.

The tongues of heat and brilliance surge and leap and cast their shivering light within the sockets of the mask, so that the shadows quake and seem to give the face expression where, in truth, there is no such expression, nor was ever one.

Angel Language

AD 1618

I carry in my coat a snuff-box, though I’m not much in the habit now. Inside its lid there is a painting, done in miniature, of Greek or Roman ladies at their baths. They sit with thigh and buttock flat against wet tile and lean one on the other, nipple grazing shoulder, cheek to belly. Steam-secreted pearls are beaded on their spines, the hairs about each quim curled into little nooses by the damp.

I think, perhaps, too oft on women for my years. The maddening petticoated presence of them, every sweep and swish a brush-stroke on the sweltering canvas of my thoughts. Their sag and swell. Their damp and occult hinges where they open up like wicked, rose-silk Bibles, or their smocks, rime-marbled underneath the arms. Their ins and outs. Their backs. Their forths. Warm underhangs and shrew-skin purses, dewed with bitter gold. Imagined, they burn fierce and sputtering, singing, incandescent in my prick, my centre. I may close the lid upon this snuff-box filled with nymphs, yet in my dreams its clasp is broke and its contents not so quickly shut away.

Once, I believed that when I’d grown into a man and married, I’d be plagued no more by the incessant posturings and partyings of my bordello mind. I would no longer suffer the relentless elbow-cramping visitations of these succubi, that mapped the foam-splashed shorelines of my passion; penned their snail cartographies upon my sheets and clouded my good sense with humid, feverish distractions.

So I hoped, but it was not to be. Though wed with an obliging wife whose cosy hole was made a velvet-curtained stage where to play out my lewdest skits, the tide of jiggling shadow-pictures did not ebb, but only boomed the louder in those bed-wrapped, warm-lapped latitudes upon the shores of sleep above the snore of spouse and cot-bug’s measured tick. Denied thus any hope of swift reprieve from satyriasis, I sought to slake my thirst for carnal novelty with whores and serving-maids. When this did little more than whet an appetite already swollen, I drew consolation from the thought that soon I should be old, the imprecations of John Thomas surely grown more faint and hopeless, easily ignored.

Alas, with snow upon the thatch, there is yet wildfire in the cellar, stoked with willow limbs and jutting trunks. So much for good intentions. Often now it seems that my desire is worse than ever, with nought but the flimsiest of hints required to set my meditations on their soil-strewn and indecent path.

The lurching of this coach along the pitted Kendal road is all too readily become the pitch of marriage-couch, the pelvises of all aboard rocked back and forth in unison so that the fancy comes to me that but for some few feet I might be rocking to and fro inside the young wife sat there with her daughter on the seat opposing mine. When her pond-coloured eyes (what glistening secret tableaux have they seen?) glance up to catch my own, their frog-spawn pupils seem to widen, dark and open; querying. Lest any of my musings may be glimpsed in miniature upon my gaze, I look away to where the Lakeland hills are sprawled beyond the carriage window, a titanic slate-skinned harem, all asleep with wet grass slick and tufted on their tilted mounds, or tracking in a spidery Jacob’s Ladder up each pregnant slope, to nipple cairns.

It has been some few weeks since I set out from Faxton for my tour of the judicial circuit, going first by way of Northampton itself, where to confirm my various schedules and appointments, then by coach out through the town’s North gate, off on my yearly rounds. The gate was hung about with heads like blackberries upon an iron thorn-bush, ripe and heavy, these the dire fruits of sedition. Though the heads of Catholic plotters hung here many years ago have long since come unglued and toppled down to shard and dust, the sharp saltpetre tang of insurrection lingers in the town’s stale air. The faces of the men seem all the time suffused with red like blisters on a firebrand’s fingers, that may yet result in blood.

Things are the same throughout the land. I have presided at assizes ranged from Nottingham to Crewe, to judge such ruffians as are brought before me: poor men who are thin and