This isn’t my story, but I hope that I do it justice. I’m no great poet and these words that I string together are but an inadequate shadow of the story that was told to me on one cold, wintery night. I was working in a pub in the east end of Glasgow. The Red Dog was a small public house, nestled in the dark quiet of a hidden alleyway. Our clientele was old working class men, to whom winding down for the night, meant a pint and a shot at the slot machines.
It was late and I was cleaning the tables, anticipating that we’d be able to close early. The Red Dog had been quiet, unusually so. Our only remaining customers were, an old regular: Bertie, whom I suspected had a drinking problem and a rather out of place looking philosophical sort, who wore a tweed jacket with leather at the elbows.
“I’ll have another whiskey neat.” The tweed jacket said. “Lagavulin if you have it.”
We did. It was an expensive whiskey, one we usually didn’t touch. I blew the dust off the top and popped the cork, poured it into a little glass and handed it to the gentlemen, who had tipped his glasses down onto his nose.
“Long night.” Bertie said to the Tweed Jacket, whom nodded his head. “It’s ‘bout this time of night I like a good story. You look like a fella that has a good story, you don’t mind me saying.”
“I don’t.” The elder replied. Twirling a coiled string of his salt and pepper beard around his finger. “I could tell you one, if you’d like.”
I listened out of earshot, pretending to wipe down the bar. Bertie scooted closer to him.
I will relay the story to you know, in all it’s horrifying entirity, and perhaps you will see why it has stuck with me even five years on. Though I cannot mirror the poetic lyricism of the Tweed Jacket, I hope it will have the same effect as it did on me.
I’m a social anthropologist, that is to say, a professional time-waster. I suck up grant money, string together loose little theories and try to formulate, in my own way, the odd machinations in which communities form and function. I travel a lot for my job, my main interest is uncontacted peoples. Small, indigenous populations that have emmerged separate from modernity.
A common misconception is that they are less sophisticated and savage. This is a misnomer. They are merely different. Better in some ways, worse in others.
I was writing a paper on a rather obscure tribe in the Amazon. They had built their settlement in the crater of a giant meteor that had fallen five million years ago.
They were master astrologists, fine craftsmen, and exceptional hunters. None of them spoke any English, but I had spent a year or two with a linguist trying to decipher their language. I was sufficient enough to hold a small conversation. Interesting to note regarding their language, is that they always begin their sentences with their emotions. For example, they will say.
Humoured. You really thought that branch was a snake?
Or.
Aghast. How dare you call my wife a mushroom.
They were not violent nor unwelcoming, they marvelled at my pale skin and my red hair. I had so much hair then, and none of it grey. The children were scared of me, unused to my appearance but rather excited by all my bits and bobs: my torches and my walkie-talkie. Even the zip on my backpack.
I came to adore them. Their food was delicious and flavourful, their generosity knew no bounds. I was fed up like a turkey before Christmas, and no they didn’t try to eat me afterward. They were a matriarchal society and the elderly women made all the decisions. Young boys were interned under their grandmother’s, taught to respect their wives and protect their daughters.
The most perplexing part of the Crater People, as I have come to call them, was their religion. For they had no benevolent god, only a devil. They called him Bodach and by the Great Matriarch’s account, he was not only real, but here, bound by some invisible glue, to that crater in which they lived.
“Calm. See him you can’t.” The Matriarch waved her hands at me. “But this home, his home. You understand?”
Interesting to note is that home, In the Crater People’s tongue, is almost interchangeable with prison. Both mean the same thing to them. A home is confinement, a place in which you have to stay. There is no escape, no leaving. Per my record there have been no defectors of this lonely little tribe.
“Prideful. Our home too.” She pointed to the ground. “We have to stay.”
“But why would you build your… home… in his home, if he is so very bad and evil as you say?” I asked her. Her eyebrows twisted in confusion. “Why here? Why not up the hill where the sun is more plentiful?”
“Confused. Bodach is here. So we are too. He fell from the stars, not meant to be here. Keep him here. Better.” She informed me. “Our burden to bear.”
“How does he communicate with you?” I asked. She was slicing up some meat, being careful to strip it gently from the bone which she put into a large clay pot. Nothing went to waste here. Their bone broth was spectacular. “Or you with him?”
“Co-operative. He communicates with us. Through our heads. Only the weak ones.” She pointed at a rather sorry looking huddle of young boys. “Why we teach them to be better.”
“Only men?’ I asked. “Like me?”
“Curious. Yes. Weak ones. Not all men. Just some. That’s why we teach them. You need barriers in your mind. He can only get out if he has a weak one. He spreads. Like… infection. If one catches, then another and another.” She explained. “Happened once. My son. I teach him to be strong. Stop infection spreading. Keep Bodach down, pour a lot of salt. Doesn’t like salt.”
“Could I speak to him? Your son?” I asked.
“Bemused. Only if you are strong.” She laughed. She gestured to a scar on my arm. I picked it up during the second war. “I see you are.”
If only. What she didn’t know was that I had gotten the scar fleeing. I hid behind better men during the war, but that’s a story for another day. This was all superstition. Weak one or not, nothing would happen to me.
Her son was a fairly low-ranked male, you can tell this as their hair is shorter. The matriarchs cut hair and it is considered a great honour for men not to have theirs cut at their yearly trims. The “strong” men all had hair down to their waists. They were not always muscled or physically fit. They were valued on their mental fortitude, their resistance to Bodach.
“Regretful. He comes when I have drink of rotten fruit.” He said. Rotten fruit is a form of alcohol that is considered sinful by the crater people. It is not outlawed per say and many of the short hairs still partake. “He tells me to cut my brother down, for his hair is longer, and that I should envy him. I resist, but I grow weak over time. He whispers, tells me that stars have names and I’m smarter now for knowing them. I take my spear one night, but mama come in and tell me to stop. Holds my head in her hands and tell me I’m loved. I stop, but she cut my hair bald after.”
“I see.”
It was then I had my idea. Perhaps this rotten fruit was at the centre of the great delusion? Hallucinogens have long guided man toward religious pursuits.
There was only one way to find out.
“Can I have some rotten fruit?” I asked him.
“Uncomfortable. If you want. Mama says no, but it makes you feel warm inside.”
It tasted exactly like rotten fruit. Sour and wrong. It burnt my throat and coiled my insides into a twisted rope of visceral gnaw. I lay in my hay bed and stared at the stars, drunk with euphoria and rot.
It was then I heard him.
“Medusa cascade. Sirius. but you know the names already.” It said, deep and booming. It filled the air like a cloud of mushroom spores, reaching, clinging to me. “You hid whilst others fought. Your swollen brain, hubris, prideful. Envious. Never lain with a woman. Never worthy.”
“You’re not real.” I said. There was dread pooling in the pit of my stomach. The voice sounded… Wrong. Haunting. Like it had crept up from the bowels of my heart.
“I’m real if you hear me. I’m inside you. I came from far away. So far. I want to go farther, but they won’t let me. The women, the salt of the empty sea. But you will leave here soon, and I will come with you. I bid you not to strike now. Withhold your hatred for a different shore. Give me to others. Pass me on, pour me into glasses and drink me into life once more.”
The voice never left. I hear him still, as I sit here now in your pub sipping whiskey. He is always in me, rotten fruit or not. A part of me, an infection of the mind.
My boat came to pick me up the next day. My guide was a rather astute man, of forty-years, armed with a rifle and expecting some great outpouring of tribal warfare.
The matriarch grabbed my head before I left. Her eyes were heavy with grief and fear. She knew, I think, that I’d spoken to him. Perhaps her son told her, or perhaps, and I believe this to be the case, that there was some primal part of her that knew instinctively. They had the devil buried deep, but their god didn’t sit in the clouds, he suckled babies at his teat and sang gentle lullabies to wayward sons.
“Resolute. I love you.” She said to me and when my expression didn’t soften, she put her knife to my hair.
A loud bang, and she collapsed to the floor in a pool of scarlet red.
My guide looked rather pleased with himself. He whisked me away before the cries and spears were thrown. Savages, he doubtless thought, but the only savage was on the boat with him.
That was his story.
The tweed jacket glanced to the bottom of his whisky glass and put his hand out for a refill. I pondered not giving it to him. Refusing, guarding my poisoned chalice, as the matriarch had done for her son. He smiled at me devillishy as I poured. Fearful gnawing tugging at my intestines.
I was weak too and so was poor Bertie, and when the Tweed Jacket and my old drunken faithful left, I poured myself a neat lagavulin, the keys to the pub jingling in my pocket.
He said to me that night as I fought sleep, that formless nothing, that chained evil demon. In his terror inducing voice, laced with spiteful malevolence.
“Pour me into pint glasses. Drink me into life.”