The Grin of the Dark

FORTY-ONE - RITES

As the celebrant approaches the altar he lifts his robes high, exposing his naked posterior. The congregation responds with emissions of wind, simulated or actual. The priest fills the chalice as he pleases and sprinkles all those present with his blessing. He (whose sex may be obscured if he is rouged and costumed as a woman) then leads them in confession. The more outrageous the offences, the more they are greeted with laughter and applause. 'Kyrie eleleleison,' he prompts, speaking not in tongues but as a sheep. Once all have brayed Glaury-a the readings are given in no known lingo, and the greatest senselessness is hailed with Allelallelulila. 'Credo in nihil,' the priest may then improvise, unless he chooses to utter less sense. His gabblings will be designed to confound the responses of the faithful, leaving them in mirthful disarray. 'Dominus go, piss come,' he may supplicate, while in place of the Sanctus he may intone 'Thank us, Dominus Deus Azathoth.' Hard on the heels of the Pater Jester comes the Agnus Daaay-eee, during which he may pretend, if only that, to sodomise a lamb. The excesses of the Communion, however, have been stricken from the record and from the common consciousness, except for the final cry of 'Mumpsimus'. To release the congregation the priest hisses 'Eassy misssa esst,' and the worshippers respond 'Deo gratiarse' as they join him in prancing around the altar and through the aisles. Further less restrained activities may ensue before all escape from the church or cathedral.

I'm even more unsure what Lane meant to do with all this. It reads as if he was preparing it for publication or as the text of a lecture, but how could he have imagined he would get away with either? I don't like to think that his research would have affected his mind. The conclusion seems unavoidable, however, as his notes progress.

The Black Mass at its most blasphemous? A saturnalian attempt to deride the Christian ritual? Neither, yet all is connected. This is simply an account of the Feast of Fools, that celebration which was held for centuries at the darkest time of the year, when the skies are emptiest and the world feels closest to the void. No less than Saturnalia or Yuletide, this feast sought to occupy and drive back that darkness. Or may its purpose have been forgotten like the nature and identity of its instigator? What if its intention was to reach back to a state which preceded any rite?

What indeed? I'm losing my grasp of the argument, such as it is. Does the last sentence refer to the ritual or to its creator? Surely there must have been more than one of the latter, even if Lane speculates that the tradition might have simply taken shape from chaos. Perhaps his archive doesn't consist entirely of fanciful nonsense, but the notes end up full of it or worse.

Nor was the rite concluded by the emergence from the church. Often the clergy would run through the streets, pelting the populace with excrement. Their approach was frequently announced by a clangour of handbells. Comic plays might be staged in the open, lampooning local dignitaries. The players were sometimes disguised with masks, ancient even then, or with elaborate makeup. This aspect of the festivities was certainly one reason why the practices came to be condemned by the Church. Perhaps it was also felt that they too closely resembled the anarchic Decembrian revels of the pagans, when for a few days the slave was the equal of his master. Despite the issuing of condemnations, the feast survived in that form for a further two centuries, although here and there it had already separated into twin ceremonies, namely the Troupe of Fools and the Black Mass.

They were sufficiently dissimilar for the link to have been overlooked. Not only do they proceed from a common source, however, but also both seek to overthrow an established order. Where those involved in the Black Mass were persecuted, the Troupe of Fools was not merely tolerated but often encouraged by the authorities as an apparently harmless alternative to unrest. That which is most seen is most hidden, and for centuries the Troupe would enliven the shortest days with appearances, sometimes advertised but more usually unheralded except by the ringing of bells, across the countryside. We must assume there to have been several groups of players for so many performances to have been mounted in towns and villages so widespread. In time their antics proved too subversive for the subjects of their parodies, the self-styled great and good. The misrule which the Troupe left in its wake caused by-laws to be drawn up which excluded the company from many communities. Just the same, appearances of the Troupe are documented as late as the 1850s, both in Britain and on the European continent as well as the American. Perhaps some found a haven in New Orleans, where in 1830 the first masked American parade appeared on New Year's Eve, ringing cowbells and throwing flour at the populace. Certainly the Troupe has been heard of in the town of Mirocaw. Elsewhere the players would often set up their tent under cover of night and depart before daybreak. Now the music-hall may seem to have subsumed their buffoonery, but it survives in a purer form, in that purely human circus whose members are clowns to a man.

What secrets may be coded within their performances? Each of my nightly visits seems to promise revelations that never transpire, unless they occur without my recognising them. Every performance is so unlike every other that the zanies might be enacting any maggot which hatches in their heads, and yet at times I feel close to grasping a plan amid the randomness, only for it to prance like its performances out of my reach. On more than one occasion I have dreamed that the show is being staged on my solitary behalf, and indeed I have sometimes been alone in lingering until the clowns take their deformed bows. If it were not for the advertisements which were posted, however transiently, about the town, I should be tempted to conclude that the Clan of Clowns was a fancy of my own, conjured up by an excess of research. Indeed, no one but I admits to having encountered the notices, nor have any of my colleagues or my students obeyed my exhortations to cast off their inhibitions and rediscover the joys of infantilism for a night. Do the clowns mean to reproduce the genesis of language, whether in the newborn child or in the newborn universe? Such sounds as escape their gaping mouths resemble formulae more ancient than intelligence, yet I persist in my instinct that close study may reveal a structure or the impossible absence of one. More than once I have seemed to hear some distorted remnant of a chant or other ritual. Am I embalming comedy in my academicism? Should it not be swallowed whole rather than picked at with my pen? Am I not the worst example of the timidity of which I have accused my fellows and my pupils, because I alone have been accorded the opportunity to open my mind? Every one of us is a portal to the universe, and nature knows no locks. The mind hungers for development, to what end other than encompassing the whole of knowledge and experience? Let us celebrate our cerebration, not idolise the id. Mime the mind! Uncork the unconscious! Laughter is the language of the world! Embrace the errant, love lunacy, loon I say, lune ace A, loo naice eh, cul any, you clan, lack uny, lacunae, naculy, naculy, naculy...

By now I've given up. I'm simply remembering Lane's papers – at least, I think the memory is accurate, although why should it matter? I assume that by the incoherent end of the paragraph he's making notes for some performance of his own; the gibberish reminds me of the intertitles of his films. There are few complete sentences after that. Sometimes the painstaking script degenerates into scribbles too introverted to be legible or symbols that might be some highly personal version of shorthand or just symptoms of an intermittent inability to write, if they don't betoken a rush of ideas too overwhelming for the pen to keep up. Occasionally a sentence coheres out of the babble, but with so little in the way of context that these interludes fail to convey much. One I copied with the pencil I was allowed to use seems either to foresee or to propose opening some portal to infinity. What this infinity might contain or consist of seems important but remains unclear. Then Lane sets about mutating and otherwise improvising on the word: port all, paw tall, gait weigh, pile on, en trance, can treen, can't reen, can't reen... Here as elsewhere there's a sense, if that's the word, that once he creates an utterly meaningless fragment of language he becomes carried away by its echoes in his head. I imagine Tubby prancing to the rhythm, grinning wider and more big-eyed at every step. I don't want to see that, nor to hear the words resounding in my skull. I'm grateful to be distracted by the librarian who has brought me a spool of microfilm. 'I'll try not to shut you down this time,' I tell her.

'I beg your pardon?'

'I'll do my best not to blow any of your fuses.' When she continues to give me a delicate frown I add 'Like I did last time I was here.'

'I'm afraid I'm still not with you.'

She's unquestionably the same girl, even if her black curls are now blonde, as if she's turning into a negative image. There's no point in offering my name. 'My mistake,' I say. 'Don't let it worry you.'

It appears to as she loads the spool into the reader. I turn to a blank page of my notebook, glimpsing Lane's notions on the way: 'The masque becomes the world' and 'Who shall say the guise is not the face?' and 'All shall be spoken behind a mask'. It seems impossible that they'll find any place in my book. At least today's research is more straightforward. Surely the newspaper I mistook for the Preston Chronicle was the Preston Gazette.

That's the publication on the microfilm. As I wind the issues for January 1913 through the viewer, every photograph of people in Edwardian dress reminds me of extras in a Tubby Thackeray film. Am I too immersed in my research? There were surely more significant events back then, not least the imminence of a world war. Then a pair of headlines makes me grip the rudimentary controls as if I've won a video game.

MUSIC-HALL PERFORMER BOUND OVER TO KEEP PEACE.

PERFORMANCE MUST BE KEPT WITHIN PROPER BOUNDS.

So this was the newspaper I bought from the Comical Companions stall. The idea that I could have misread it, especially since even the typeface differs from my memory of it, blurs my vision. Or is the display losing definition? I twist the focusing screw, which only aggravates my inability to read the headlines. I, FORMER, ACE... I'm barely able to decipher these letters before they succumb to the indistinctness that's blackening the page. I turn the screw the other way, and the image sharpens. It doesn't contain a single recognisable word. I feel as if nonsense is spreading through the text – as if the silent clamour of Lane's misshapen language in my skull is infecting a historical record – and then I identify the blackness that's overwhelming the page. The microfilm is charring like a cinema film that has become stuck in a projector.

'Excuse me,' I call, but the staff are nowhere to be seen. 'Excuse me,' I shout as a trickle of blackness rises from the monitor.

'Sssh.'

'Don't shush me. Where are you? Anyone,' I yell and give up. 'I'll do it myself. You don't want the place on fire.'

What could anybody do except twist the spooling knobs? The microfilm coils like a mutilated snake out of both sides of the viewer, scattering the table with flakes of blackened celluloid. The librarian hurries out from behind the shelves and emits a small cry at the last of the smoke but is otherwise as silent as any library could require until she's standing over me. 'I do know you,' she says.

'I didn't really pinch your power last time. That was just a joke.'

'We never did find out what went wrong.'

'Well, not me. Sorry about this. It must have jammed.'

She retrieves the sections of microfilm and carries them to the desk. 'Will you be wanting anything else?'

I can't judge whether she's being professional or sarcastic. I shouldn't risk another mishap – I can paraphrase what I recall. A charred fragment of microfilm is isolated on the screen. Rather than strain to be certain whether the letters it contains spell hack, I say 'Could I buy some time online?'

She moves to the table ahead of me and activates a computer. As I log onto my Frugonet account I hear brushing and sharp polite coughs at my back to remind me that she's cleaning the viewer. Willie Hart has emailed at last. I swallow a taste of my mother's defiantly unhealthy breakfast as I open the message.

si –

sore 4 silnce. no good nus im afrad. hop u got all u neded out of vuing. no 2^nd chanc. u got guillermo 2 nthusd. he wachd 1 film 2 ofn & it wnt on fir. so did rest whn he trid 2 put it out. all films dstroyd & he ran off. ull realize iv not had tim 2 chec w girls. theyr filming in la whil i try 2 sort out insuranc clam & carer. but im sur if tha filmd u it wud hav ben a jok.

wile

I spend far too long in decoding sore as sorry and carer as career and tha as they, and then I wonder why she failed to contract realize. She must be preoccupied with her loss. Confusion is spreading through my skull as the blackness did onscreen, and I have to stop myself fancying that the film in the library viewer might have ignited out of sympathy with hers. I can't think of a reply to send her; I need to check that Smilemime hasn't been active. But he has, and I swallow a harsh stale taste as I bring up the message that's strewn through the newsgroups.

So Mr Questionabble wants his link, does he? Sorry, I forgot his name's suppossed to be Simon Lester. Do we think he'll shut up and go away if I post one? That's what he said I had to do. Let's think of an address for him. How about www.missionleer.com? That's him leering at us. Or there's www.emitsmorsel.com, which is all he ever does. Then there's www.silentmorse.com that shows how he keeps using a secret code. Where else shall we look for him? He ought to have a site at www.imtrollsee.com.

'Don't you call me a troll, you skulking little shit. I'm not the one that's too afraid to say my name. It doesn't spell that either. It's not even the right number of letters. You can't count and you can't spell.'

'Sssh.'

'You try keeping quiet when somebody's calling you names.' I don't say this aloud, but perhaps I mouth it while staring at the librarian behind the counter. 'Carry on, get all the links out of your head. I won't be following any of them,' I vow under my breath as I scroll down Smilemime's message.

He should be at www.istoremslen.com. Len's his partner in crime, which is to say himself. What's his name suppossed to be again, Collin Vernon? If you take Len out of that you get www.iconvrow.com. Vrow is Dutch for woman, and I'll bet he's conned one like he's trying with the rest of us.

I fight off a memory of Amsterdam – of a whitish slab that quakes with mirth as it peeps wide-eyed from under the bed. 'Going Dutch now, are we?' I mutter and try to ignore a sense of being watched.

Let's hope she reads this if he doesn't do something bad to stop her. Maybe she ought to look at www.snormalsite.com to see what he thinks is normall,

'The opposite of you, you obsessive deranged Christ I can't even think of a name for it. Can't you even spell the same way twice?'

and www.msmoresin.com, because a mannuscript's his sin. But the one he's hoping nobody would find beccause it hasn't got his name on is www.tubbiesfilms.com. Hasn't it gone sillent all of a sudden? I don't think we'll be hearing anny more about Mister Vernon Lester's book that he wanted us to think was the first studdy of the subbject. Goodbye if you've got any sense. Let's have more silents.

I can't help hoping Colin has responded, but there's no riposte. I swallow a taste or an equally harsh laugh and copy the final link into the address box. The computer hesitates, and then a blue line that might be underscoring an invisible or non-existent word starts to crawl along the bottom of the screen. Before it's half completed, the screen flickers or my vision does, and a page appears. I grin so fiercely that my face feels swollen. The site hasn't been found.

It's as much of an invention as all the other sites Smilemime listed. 'Funny thing, I won't be keeping quiet,' I say and reach for the keyboard, only to be irritated by a possibility. Would even Smilemime have misspelled the name? Purely for confirmation, I type www.tubbysfilms.com in the box. As the blue line inches towards completion an eager page fills the screen.

THE SILENT FILMS OF TUBBY THACKERAY AND ORVILLE HART.

By Vincent Steele.

It looks like the title page of a student's thesis or some even more unpublished item. The typeface gives it the appearance of a manuscript that has been submitted for approval. I send the blank expanse of the rest of the page up the screen, and then I suck in a breath I can't hear for the throbbing of my head.

Chapter 1: An Overview of the Careers of Thackeray and Hart.

We shouldn't think of history as fixed. That goes for the cinema too now that so many lost films are being rediscovered. Sometimes we could think they're memories repressed by the collective unconscious. We can see why people preferred to forget Stepin Fetchit, but how long will anyone remember he existed? Audiences once laughed at Max Davidson, but by now few people even recall how his brand of Jewish humour was judged unacceptable...

It's my opening chapter with a few words changed. The entire text is, and worse still, it more succinctly expresses everything I wrote. As I scroll past the end of the chapter I grow insanely fearful that the screen will show me thoughts I've had but not yet written. The only further matter is the date the site was last updated. According to the bottom line, that was weeks before I emailed my chapter to Colin.

It isn't true. Whoever created the site – who else but Smilemime – could have put in any date. I'm clinging to the notion as the nearest thing I have to reassurance when the librarian comes over to murmur 'Please be quieter or we'll have to ask you to leave.'

I've no idea what sounds I may have been uttering – very likely less than words. I respond as best I'm able, but she doubles her frown. 'I beg your pardon?' she by no means begs.

'I said you can ask.' Surely I didn't say cunt arse. 'Who am I supposed to be disturbing?' I object. 'There's nobody else here.'

I mean other than her colleagues. Whoever's laughing uncontrollably is somewhere beyond the room, although the noise is so invasive that she would be better employed in hushing it instead of me. When her gaze doesn't leave me I blurt 'I'll go as soon as I've dealt with this.'

I email Colin that our correspondence has been hacked into and copy the address of the web site and exhort him and the university to do their worst. 'That wasn't too noisy, was it?' I say, only for my chair to rouse the echoes with a screech on the linoleum. 'Merry Christmas.'

I'm heading for the exit when the librarian says 'You've not paid.'

I struggle to contain my rage. 'Will you take a card?' I say like a Christmas conjurer.

'Not for two pounds. That's the minimum charge.'

I dig in my hip pocket, but my hand is shaking so much I can barely grasp my change. The librarian watches the jerky movements of my fist inside my trousers with disfavour until I dump the coins on the counter. 'Ninety shits, nine tits even,' I surely can't be saying as my almost uncontrollable forefinger pokes at the cash. 'And a big one, and another little one. Go on, take my last penny. You won't get all that in your pudding,' I seem compelled to joke.

I can't quite believe I'm seeing her recount the money. Suppose she calls security for the sake of a few pence? Here comes a guard – someone with big feet, at any rate. As the footsteps halt somewhere out of sight the librarian begins to plant the coins in various compartments of a drawer. 'I'll be off before I can cause any more chaos,' I tell her. 'Have a merry one.'

Does she murmur in response, or is it an echo? When I emerge from the reference library I can't decide whether the renovations have created a new maze. Plastic rustles beyond the stairs, where the unidentifiable towering figure in the ground-floor vestibule is still shrouded in the material. Outside, the chill that turns my breath white aggravates my shivers as I fumble out my mobile. I grit my teeth in an expression that makes several Christmas shoppers stay well clear as I suffer through the celebratory message tape. 'Eck your chemail, for Christ's sake,' I blurt, and my teeth also get in the way of my next line. 'We need to find out how this wastard stole my burk.'

I won't be emailing any more of it. That lets me feel a little less vulnerable, but not enough. Having no money in my pocket doesn't help. I skirt the covered market, where the stallholders are wearing almost every size of droopy red hat, and find a branch of my bank. I insert my debit card in the machine embedded in the old stone wall and type my secret number, and wait, and lean forward to peer at the display, which looks pale with frost or with my breath. Then the world seems to tilt in sympathy, and I become aware of saying no, louder and louder. In the queue behind me a woman says 'You should be in a film.'