8 Winderby's Last Case - Duncan McGibbon (read book txt) 📗

Institute intoned the argument
“A shepherdess has offended Diana,
by witnessing her mysteries.
In punishment she must hunt the boar...”

I hid in the forest, alive with foliage,
legs free to run at the slightest sound
of a rush from behind.
My strategy had to be to pin
the unknown beast down on three sides.
Pacing through the forest I chose a site
bordering the lake with the orchard on one side
and the palace wall on the other.
I held the fourth side open to the garden.
I waited kneeling on one foot, with the spear's butt
placed against the ground parallel
to her poised, right thigh.
She heard in a rush in the herbarium
undergrowth, instinctively she froze
her eyes rested on the blackberries,
Erato's phial, the scent of sleep.”

Must you go on? Is there more?
Yes, the story still has episodes to run.


 


4 File: Winderby Confounded


27. From Winderby’s Finite Journal

Iremember now the stories are telling.
The train stopping suddenly and the man
urgent, ungentle, passes the sleeping woman
After a thunderous night passage
from the brick-walled depot of my mind
out to a railway guard who takes them
with a nodding acknowledgement
of routine infamy and its parallel silence.
Northrop Frye’s familiar sacrificial scenario
hovers above, droning for snatched away victims.
I saw an old man in a frock coat
standing in the rich hallway
and the depth charged mirrors
of The Antico Terra Hotel,
staring at the walls.
His eyes are shut. He seems to speak.
He gestures impassionedly,
but his voice makes no sound.
The servants call him Le Maitre.
Meanwhile I have to make sense of Brindisi,
as the women have disappeared.2
28. A Brief History of the Kythera Island

Dear Winderby , I have these few papers regarding your island

1.From The Cycladic Turtle-Shells.

“I hide, exulting that my spouse, a boy,
strikes out for the inland ravine,
as once he sailed in to the tug of storm.
He has set his face calmly to dark clouds.
The offshore winds have buffeted my hair,
which flies, washed free of ancestral combs.
The tresses sing of his return, bashful with success,
as he gripped the vibrant tails of marlin.
I set new fires in the thrill of my dream,
remembering the shelter of the night.
He came to me as an embarrassed child
my intimate , he stuttered the word we spoke.
only in love-play; aselph. Know, descendent,
I shimmered like pale clay, exposed in the
hollow of a parched river, naked as
never before, my dark cloak gathered up,
a mangrove bank round my shoulders
to be mastered by one who pleads consent
that is the tap-root of one, the red tear,
that re-dyes my childhood shroud in the bright
expensive crimson of the history-cloth.
I am the prayer of these, his hands, uttered
to the moist pot that ripens into birth.
while I shelter from the strange, quick strength
of changing winds. Fear makes me write openly,
unsure what preparations to make as
the prey of an unknown predator.”

2. Appendix to Early Greek Shards Of Cycladic Two, A Monograph.
From the notebook of Midshipman Bright
“At anchor, in the lee of the volcano,
the tattoo on the Bo'sun’s shoulder,
showed the incidence of mermaids
filigree as a Portolani chart,
as its arm rowed his formal passenger to shore.
The Rev Philip Berry D.D. stepped down,
telling me of his missing chronometer left on board,
“Still the archaic Greeks might have a timepiece
to leave behind, once the treaty is signed.”
In the blockhouse, which he reached by evening,
the black-suited clergyman came upon a chest.
It was piled with potsherds and nothing else,
save for a scrap of parchment sewn under the lid.
“ I Glaucon, near lost my life to find these fragments.
My boat foundered on the Rocks. There is evil here.”
That night to the baying of strange mammals,
he took out the acid to test the potsherds
and read on beneath the grime.
“ I, Amun Seth, outcast from Egypt, tell all
who draw near to read;
there is an island off the mainland
to which I fled with all my family.
Here lives one who is immortal and swore
to protect us all in return for our promise
we would neither leave nor relate
to any traveller the secrets of this place.
Strangers, I break the second vow.
Would the first have been easier to break.
Even the silence breeds malice.
Beware the creature that leaves the womb of the dead
to return at dawn.” I saw the prelate’s eyes
brighten “Such evidence of scripts here
and not in Mesopotamia nor Egypt!
Excited , he turned down the lamp
settled his mosquito net and no more,
except a dream in which he and his sister
were disturbed by a creature running
through a field of wheat, unseen save
for the furrow made by the parting stalks
that seemed to end at the door to
their Swanscombe family tombs,
as he did relate to me on awakening.”

3. Letters of Legal Dispatch, Containing an Account of the Extinction of the Aselph

Kythera, Friday January 10th 1760
I have dreadful news.
Our little brother is dead.
I fear the worst, but cannot speak.
I am racked with guilt, yet I know
no-one would believe me.


Georgetown, May 11 1760

“Beth, my parents and I,
have just returned from
Georgetown Jail.
The Governor will not
accept the testimony
of our maidservant
that she saw a creature
of the most hideous mien
turn little Lewis to stone
and drag him into a cave.
At least she will be deported
and not suffer a crueller fate.
I do not know whom to trust.”


Georgetown, Kythera, May13th 1760

“No-one need ever know, save you,
my demon, my angel of cold crystal.
Gretchen is to leave for the dismal shore.
My silence sent her there, an innocent,
yet where in the world of discovery
can pure malevolence
like yours be found.
Would they had hanged her
then all tongues would cease.

Georgetown, Kythera, March 1800

I, Erasmus Potts, poet, Social Philosopher
and naturalist of this Island
re-mould the image of innocence
and guilt, of pain and pleasure
I fashion new worlds of violent mind
to keep the secret of this cruel survivor
from ships’victuallers, who clear the island
of its Eden’s flesh., leaving only my fiend
which feeds on the carrion of culture.
Now since Gretchen Green died
in the Tasmanian Women’s colony
the gates to the Berry Cemetery lie open
and the stones of history are being thieved
by this Monster’s ghost s of time.
They populate and are immune
to scriptural, or local exorcisms.


4. Summary Notes for Overseas Officers

Plural Socialis m has reached its Nadir.
a law affecting the wearing of masks
must be seen to be flouted to play safe.
The people hanker for the old order,
but cannot define it, as every book crumbles,
every note of music vanishes, the paintings
become merely framed reality
and tragedy must be real to be believed.
The rottenness of cultural decay
has become a cipher for
undeliberate freedom.
Generations mix dangerously.
Officers are advised to ensure
more formal dress occasions
are volatile with sexual jealousy and spite.
Utopianism is the only opportunity
for the people to show their reasoning.
The Church of Extra Planetary Salvation
is grave with debate. Time has only
just begun to get going with the islanders
as a commodity and is in short supply
Stocks are disappearing fast. Astral Colleges
are the only form of higher education,
though illegal ghosts swell lecture halls.
A typical evening out in Port Seth
may begin in the Time Back Bars,
but soon revolves around the great houses
whose parties take myth, rumour and allusion
as well as the more usual drugs and beverages.
yet it is our advice to overlook
the presence of illegal, bootlegged time.
It is advised to be seen in public
with whimsical, spirited teenagers
lest the spectres suspect you are among them.
These girls can be spotted in gossamer silk,
with the lozenges and paint to show
they are aliens. It is a law that
the officially extinct Azelph
should not be imitated, as this confuses
the metaphysical meditations of the watch,
but apart from this you can be whom you want,
as no-one’s identity lasts for long.
Do not disturb those who study the graveyards
and drift to the great cave that covers
half the island, including the jailhouse
with its globalised Gretchen Green memorial
and fast food chains with perching ancestors.
The drifters are in retreat from this world
of casual pleasure. You will find them
lapidary and cold, yet dancing
in a form of prayer for the elsewhere ones.
They have abandoned identity
and crave the mystic opportunism
to be lured away by undiscovered ghosts.
With kindest regards Attwater


29.The Palace at 1.61 am

My Dear Cedric,
The Temporal Office has released this description
of the Kerkyra Villa.
It is attributed to the author of the Chronaca

“His father, himself an academic
of no mean repute,
in accordance with the prevailing fashion
desired a villa, not far from home.
Pierfrancesco Silentio, Vice Chancellor to three
popes, arbiter elgantiarum, legate to the Marshes,
Duke of Candia, Apostolic Pro-Notary and
Keeper of the remains of Santa Artemia:
from Vignola and a garden from Amannati
half a day's journey from the coast of Kythera
and hence in no need of bedrooms
or servant's quarters.

It's design was intended to occupy
a disused quarry and was never completed.
It aroused great admiration at the time,
yet was never lived in by its owner, but by
his son, Silentio Silentini, when exiled from the Sacred College.
The cortile was never enclosed,
leaving the Mezzogiorno exposed to the olive trees
and Pierfrancesco's arboretum
to set arbitrary standards around the fountain
which stood in its centre.
True to Mannerist insecurity the triglyphs
of the entablature slipped, one in three
down to the wall face on all facades
Before the garden, a gigantic portico
larger in fact than the entrance gate,
was suspended on columns, before
it lay a moat of fish-ponds crossed
by an elaborate bridge from which
the garden ran to a semi-circular
colonnade which enclosed an open lawn.

Thus forming a Teatro Olympico
in the manner of Pliny the Younger's description.

Behind this was a huddle of unfinished buildings
including a loggia with an apse
carved into a side of the quarry
in domical, quadripartite vaulting.
The two remaining bays were open to the sky.
The whole edifice was heightened
by an attic and corniche with chimneys
which rose above the colonnade like a
stupendous feat of theatrical design.
The building stood on an island
in the river and in times of
flooding was inaccessible.

Deserted by the family, it became a hunting
lodge, for the local petty nobility
Brigands and Pifferari took over
the parkland, to be turfed out or hired
whenever the hunting parties arrived.
Pierfrancesco's (wife) had left parts
of the North walls deliberately breached,
these were surmounted by obelisks, funerary urns
and trophies and made unlawful exit
and entrance through a concealed arch.
The interior decorations had been
entrusted to hirelings who had run