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

went again to Mortlake after that, nor had they dealings with John Dee. It was not long before King James, a Godly Sovereign, ascended to the throne, whereafter the Magician found that he had fallen out from grace and so began his great decline. Not many years were passed before Dee had descended into penury and then, soon after, passed away at Mortlake tended only by his daughter, from which one assumes there were no spirits present in that instance to assist with his demise.

Pulling my night-gown on I mount the guest-room’s wooden-boxed commode to make my stool, this being hard and painful in its passing. With my labours thus accomplished I snuff out the candle that I have undressed by and leap straight into my bed, the blankets dragged up covering my ears, without which muffling presence, ever since I was a child, I may not sleep.

I am annoyed to find that still my thoughts are turned to Doctor Dee, for there is something puzzling in him that I cannot leave alone. There seems a great predicament in how one measures such a man, that was too well-accomplished in the sciences material and politic to be discounted as a fool, and yet believed he spoke with angels. Can so fine a mind have found diversion for so many years in copying pointless syllables on to his endless tables, charts and journals? If this be not so; if by some fluke of reason all the messages that Dee transcribed were real, then what are we to make of a Heaven populous with incoherent angels, spouting nonsense credos in the speech of babes? I saw the ‘angel language’ once, copied laboriously by my son into a journal that he kept. It was a grid of what appeared to me at least a thousand squares, each with some symbol or notation written in so that it seemed in sum a veritable map of lunacy; that mist-bound continent whence few return to tell what they have seen.

I shall concern myself no more this night with thoughts of wizards nor astrologers. The skull-capped and white-bearded vision of the doctor as my son described him to me dances irritatingly behind my eyelids until, with an effort of the will, I am enabled to dispel it and put in its place some several pictures of the Widow Deene in various shaming postures, these soon supplemented by a memory of the slab-thighed servant-girl that stood there by the cottage gate and stared at me with empty, stupid eyes.

My steam of thought condenses, beading into dreams against the coolness of my pillow, and a mumbling cloud descends. A crack is opened in the night to let me enter in, and slide, and sink, and sleep . . .

I wake before the sun with the attendant who assisted with my baggage tapping at the chamber door to tell me that a breakfast is prepared for me down in the dining room below. I thank him with a grunt and rise to dress as well as I am able in the dark. Whilst buckling my shoes I am reminded of a dream that was upon me in the night, wherein I was at Mortlake with my son and Doctor Dee, save in the dream his name was Dr Deene. He held a yellowed parchment up to us and said, ‘Here is a map of lunacy’, and yet when Francis and I leaned in close to study it we saw it was instead a map of our own shire, which is to say Northampton. More, it seemed to me as if the map were not drawn on to paper but tattooed upon a substance very much like human skin. I thought to look for Faxton but could find it nowhere on the chart, which filled me with a sudden formless dread. Here Dr Dee or Deene was moved to reassure me that all would be well if he and I were but to have our wives in common, though he may have said not wives but lives. At this, and for no reason, I began to weep and afterwards remember nothing more until my waking.

Properly attired now and removed unto the dining room, above a meal of scaith cooked in an oatmeal crust I’m introduced to my chief bailiff for tomorrow’s trial, a doughty chap named Callow with a strawberry nose and great side-whiskers that surround his crab-pink face in white. As I pluck fishbones from my cheek to set as on some tiny ossuary shelf beside my plate, he reacquaints me with the details of the case I am to hear. A local man of no account called Deery stands accused of taking from their rightful owner both a ewe and ram, the last of which he sold, whereafter salted portions of the former were discovered on his property, so that his guilt is plainer than a wart.

Chief Bailiff Callow tells me that with breakfast done we both may walk to Kendal gaol and view the miscreant there in his cell, along with those less serious offenders I am also called upon to judge once Deery has been sentenced: drunks and whores; a shopkeeper accused of giving out dishonest measure; several brawlers and a bugger.

Out of doors, with fish and oatmeal resting heavy on my gut and breath like smoke upon the frozen air, I walk beside the bailiff neath a gauze of shadow down the steep lanes slippery with frost. The sky is ribboned water-blue and gold along its eastern edge, where West of that there are yet stars and from the fields outside of Kendal comes a gradual fugue of birdsong, each voice lucid and distinct.

The gaol, built out of rough grey stones, is in the very middle of the town where it squats like a monstrous toad that has been petrified by its own ugliness. Its walls have gaping chinks and fissures so that it is no more warm inside than out, consisting only