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

birds are building something delicate and terrible from strings of sound, from play of echo. We two are the last that shall be murdered thus by fire in England. This we have been told by Imps and things of colour that abide in higher towns where all the days are one, where are no yesterdays nor yet tomorrows. After this, no more of human tallow round a wick of petticoat. No more the fair cheek rouged by blister.

Now I slowly raise my weighted lids until both eyes are open, just as in that instant Mary does the same beside me. Seeing this, the gathered herd beyond our pyre make loud gasps of amazement and step back, their sty-born faces ill with terror. Widow Peak, who said she’d heard us talk of killing Mrs Wise, now draws a cross upon her withered tit and spits, while Parson Danks commences reading loudly from his moth-worn book, his words like smuts of ash wiped on the morning.

If you only knew, you barn-apes, what it was you burned here. It is not for me I say this, but for Mary, who is beautiful where I am plain. If you might see the corners of her eyes when she is saying something comical then you would know her. If you knew the strong taste in her cunt when she has not yet woken of a morning, you would look away in shame and quench your torches. Captured in her ladyhair, my dribble turned to jewels and each one had a water-painted mansion of homunculi tiny and bright within it. When she walks up stairs it is like song, and at the time of each month’s blood she may speak in the tongue of cats, but then, what of it? It is all of this as nothing. Put a light to it, render it all to cinder, her red hair, the drawings that she makes.

I will admit that we have had the conversation of those nine Dukes ruling Hell. Having now seen that place it holds no fear for me, for it is beautiful, and at its mouth are precious stones. It is but Heaven’s face when looked upon by the deceived and fearful, and in all my trade with its Ambassadors I have discovered them to be as gentlemen, both grand and fair of manner. Belial is like a toad of wondrous glass with many eyes ringed on his brow. He is profound and yet unknowable, while Asmoday is more like an exquisite web of pattern that surrounds the head: wry, fierce, and skilled in the mathematic arts. Despite their wrath and their caprice they are not bad so much as other to us, and are more than pretty in their fashion, that you should be envious of those who look upon such marvellous affairs of Nature.

Now a thick-browed man I do not know steps forward with his torch and touches it to knotted rags and straw there at the kindling’s edge. We close our eyes and sigh. Not long, my love. Not far to go. The unseen balconies are not so high above us now.

We met each other when I was fourteen and came from Cotterstock to Oundle up the road because my parents wanted quit of me. Mary was just the same age, pale and freckled, with big legs and arms. She let me hide out in her dad’s back yard those first cold months, and some nights in her room, if it should pass her sister and her brother were not there. We’d go about the town and play such games. With evening drawing in we’d dare each other into standing there beneath the Talbot Hotel’s cobbled passage, leading to the dark yard at the rear. We’d swear we heard the ghost of old Queen Mary that had slept there on the night before they took her head, walking the upstairs landing with it tucked beneath her arm. Squeal. Hug ourselves there in the gloom.

Sometimes we’d venture out across the piss-and-ale-washed flagging of the yard and through to Drummingwell Lane, at the Talbot’s rear. We’d stand and listen at the Drumming Well itself, that made a sound much like a drum the night before King Charles died and at other times beside, as with the death of Cromwell. We would cock our ears and hold our breath, though no sound ever came.

We’d run out in the fields to hide amongst the wild laburnum, and in fancy would be savage, blue-arsed men come from the Africas, that crawled half-naked with ferocious, droll expressions there between the drowsing, nodding stems. We stuck our fingers up each other and would laugh at first, become thereafter hot and grave. We found a dead shrew, stiff and with a gloss as though its death were but a coat of varnish, and one afternoon I watched her piddle in the cowslips, closed my eyes upon the wavering skewer of plaited gold that bored a sopping hole there in the soil beneath her, but heard still its pittering music and saw yet its braided stream within my thoughts.

Now comes the first kiss of the smoke, a husband’s loving peck upon the nose, and just as with a husband we both keep our eyes shut while it’s going on. Time soon enough for him to shove his sour and choking tongue half down our gullets. Raw and smouldering nettle-bite curls there behind our cringing nostrils, and I hope the faggots are not green and damp, or likewise slow to burn, for when our covenant was made, the Black-Faced Man said that we should not know the fires of punishment. A whistling silence foams up in my ears, as if at some unfathomable approach, but swiftly dies away, subdued amidst the papery crackling that is all about us now. Hush, Mary Phillips, and be not afraid, for we were made a promise, you and I.

We found a livelihood that suited me, and also found a little room in Benefield where I