Read Online Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor - Free Book Online
Authors: Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor
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Parliament. Fawkes himself was only a scruffy soldier of fortune, a well-paid dupe of some rich Catholics with a grudge against the king, but history has remembered his name and preserved his effigy. After planting explosives beneath the House of Commons, the conspirators fled to a hill at the southeastern tip of Hampstead Heath, hoping for a good view of the fireworks. This hill, incidentally, owes its magnificence to plague victims buried in mass graves on the heath.
From terrain shaped by millions of pestilent bones, the ruffians watched their dream expire. Fawkes himself was caught in the basement with a blazing torch and a great lot of gunpowder. He was tortured in the Tower of London, tried in Westminster Hall, then drawn, quartered, and hanged in the Old Palace Yard outside the Houses. The foundations he had hoped to see crumble and burn were soaked with the blood from his living intestines, and generations of yet-unborn English children were given an excuse for extortion and pyromania.
Pity. All those needly spires and pinnacles, all those soaring walls with their windows like little rotten pits in a great gray cheese, and the damned clock, all sliding majestically into the Thames! Of course the Houses looked quite different in 1605. But they are stamped in the memory of any lifelong Londoner just as they are now, eight acres of powdered wigs, musty scrolls, stone spindles shrouded in gray and purple fog. One cannot help but picture a brilliant flower of fire rupturing from the dark innards of the complex, and wonder whether Westminster Bridge would have gone too.
Without so much as a nod to the actual instigators of the plot, English sentiment required that a holiday be set up in honour of Guy Fawkes, and his effigy tortured and burned each year. And the C of E claims to have stamped out paganism!
Guy Fawkesâ Day plagues certain sensitive souls, haunts their eyes, keeps them looking uneasily over their shoulders and staying in well-lighted streets. The staccato of fireworks sets their nerves on edge, and the rich smoky smell of a bonfire is as charnel to them. They deplore the clamour of ragged schoolboy mobs; they say they cannot abide the taunts of âPenny for the guy, mister? Penny for the guy?â
But watch any of these sensitive souls when they are accosted, and youâll notice it is the guy they cannot look atâor cannot stop looking at. The straw guy in old coat and trousers and shapeless hat, sprawled on his bed of copper pennies in his rough wagon ⦠the helpless, harmless effigy seems to frighten them. He was born from the rag pile yesterday; he will die on the bonfire tonight. But they do not like looking into his ashen smudge of a face.
I think they can feel the anger given shape and form in these creatures, the incredulity of a soul made to burn perhaps a billion times for a crime that never happened. I hope forwhat the nervous souls fear: that one year the guys will rise up and finish off those Houses.
It was Guy Fawkesâ Day when I returned to life. Like a guy, I had been on the wagon too long; but I suspected I would be blazing merrily before the night was done, and by morning I would be but a memory to those who had once jeered at me, a bit of ash spirited away into the sky.
I came into London on the M1 and left the Jaguar in a quiet residential street near the Queensbury tube station. Then I descended into the creaky, dusty bowels of the Underground. This was an old station with no automatic ticket vendors. Using the window meant speaking to a person who might remember me. I was still dressed in Waringâs blood-spotted hospital greens and white lab coat, though Iâd put away my mask. In the end I pulled the coat up under my chin, went to the window, and bought a ticket for Piccadilly. Anyone could be going to Piccadilly, absolutely anyone. The ticket seller never even looked at me.
The empty echo of the platform, the bland colourful exhortations of the
From terrain shaped by millions of pestilent bones, the ruffians watched their dream expire. Fawkes himself was caught in the basement with a blazing torch and a great lot of gunpowder. He was tortured in the Tower of London, tried in Westminster Hall, then drawn, quartered, and hanged in the Old Palace Yard outside the Houses. The foundations he had hoped to see crumble and burn were soaked with the blood from his living intestines, and generations of yet-unborn English children were given an excuse for extortion and pyromania.
Pity. All those needly spires and pinnacles, all those soaring walls with their windows like little rotten pits in a great gray cheese, and the damned clock, all sliding majestically into the Thames! Of course the Houses looked quite different in 1605. But they are stamped in the memory of any lifelong Londoner just as they are now, eight acres of powdered wigs, musty scrolls, stone spindles shrouded in gray and purple fog. One cannot help but picture a brilliant flower of fire rupturing from the dark innards of the complex, and wonder whether Westminster Bridge would have gone too.
Without so much as a nod to the actual instigators of the plot, English sentiment required that a holiday be set up in honour of Guy Fawkes, and his effigy tortured and burned each year. And the C of E claims to have stamped out paganism!
Guy Fawkesâ Day plagues certain sensitive souls, haunts their eyes, keeps them looking uneasily over their shoulders and staying in well-lighted streets. The staccato of fireworks sets their nerves on edge, and the rich smoky smell of a bonfire is as charnel to them. They deplore the clamour of ragged schoolboy mobs; they say they cannot abide the taunts of âPenny for the guy, mister? Penny for the guy?â
But watch any of these sensitive souls when they are accosted, and youâll notice it is the guy they cannot look atâor cannot stop looking at. The straw guy in old coat and trousers and shapeless hat, sprawled on his bed of copper pennies in his rough wagon ⦠the helpless, harmless effigy seems to frighten them. He was born from the rag pile yesterday; he will die on the bonfire tonight. But they do not like looking into his ashen smudge of a face.
I think they can feel the anger given shape and form in these creatures, the incredulity of a soul made to burn perhaps a billion times for a crime that never happened. I hope forwhat the nervous souls fear: that one year the guys will rise up and finish off those Houses.
It was Guy Fawkesâ Day when I returned to life. Like a guy, I had been on the wagon too long; but I suspected I would be blazing merrily before the night was done, and by morning I would be but a memory to those who had once jeered at me, a bit of ash spirited away into the sky.
I came into London on the M1 and left the Jaguar in a quiet residential street near the Queensbury tube station. Then I descended into the creaky, dusty bowels of the Underground. This was an old station with no automatic ticket vendors. Using the window meant speaking to a person who might remember me. I was still dressed in Waringâs blood-spotted hospital greens and white lab coat, though Iâd put away my mask. In the end I pulled the coat up under my chin, went to the window, and bought a ticket for Piccadilly. Anyone could be going to Piccadilly, absolutely anyone. The ticket seller never even looked at me.
The empty echo of the platform, the bland colourful exhortations of the
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