The Return of the Orange Virgin
by Rob Hunter
In the cellars of the Queen, where three corridors met to form a Y,
three stone heads graced the capital of a buried pendentive. The
settled dust of thousands of years had raised the level of the floor
and grown hardened by the footfalls of passing errands. Lime leached
from all the stories above had marbled the black granite walls and
joined with the dust of the floor to form a polished cement. The
heads were malign at first glance, a dead craftsman’s nightsweats
and horrors: vaguely a cow, a goat, and a manticore. Each had some
resemblance to the beast it portrayed – and not without an idiot
twinkle – but seen through a glass cast with a ripple in it,
reflected in a mirror with peeling silver. They were figments, and
existed nowhere in nature. The house that was a city grew and, as is
the way with cities, buried its past beneath an ever-advancing
present. They were the past and they were buried. They had been
surrounded, enveloped and eventually forgotten in a subcellar of the
great masonry sprawl as addition after addition was piled over them.
From the clustered heads a tongue thrust well into the corridor at
ankle height, a peril to trip the unwary. Mineral deposits had
whitened the Goat’s tongue and striped his head so that his tongue
appeared to have paused in the fastidious licking of an ice cream
cone. The Goat’s dead eyes were rolled back, hollow stone pupils
positioned to stare up the kilt of any passing visitor. This was a
nice effect, though an accident of positioning rather than
prurience, for the level of the floor had risen. In former times he
had been out-of-doors and his gaze had been heavenward, away from
the temptations of the earth and the flesh, an allegorical figure.
It had been a long time between entertainments. The Cow, the Goat
and the Manticore entered into silent transports as Lamprey and
Tawse one day appeared. Or night, the difference here was moot.
The well diggers were sweating and cursing, trailing wire behind
from a spool they carried threaded through with a pikestaff. They
stumbled ahead, the carbide headlamps on their miner’s harness
etching shadow pantograms on the walls. Tawse foresaw an
interminable future as a supplementary and semi-permanent work
detail for the Lady. He turned to his partner. "This place is not
natural, not rightly of our world: reeks of the Dancing Lords. It
gives me the creepy-crawlies."
The requisite paperwork had been completed and the quartermaster had
sent them into the dark. Today the generator was down and Lamprey
and Tawse were denied the consolation of even the rudimentary
dimness of a work light.
Tawse winked at the three heads. "Gladdening the hearts of the
tormented then, eh?"
"Who’s this fella, then? Ain’t he but a mean-looking cuss?" Even a
holy scholar inured to deciphering the identities of obscure saints
in isolated shrines where all the images looked alike but for their
associated implements of martyrdom would have been hard pressed to
peg the Manticore right off.
Tawse tumbled right away. It was the quills. Striking a light for
his cigar on the Goat’s tongue, he held high the guttering stump of
a wax match and, puffing blue mephitic clouds, studied the Manticore.
"It seems to be three chaps with their heads stuck in the wall,"
said Jack Lamprey. "One wonders what presumptions they were guilty
of to offend the Queen of Heaven. Poor old duffers."
"Nah, they’re not even human. They never lived at all. These are
decorations from the time of the Dancing Lords." Tawse was proud of
his memory. "This one, f’rinstance, is a man-dragon. See the
porcupine quills? If he was real there’d be a scorpion’s tail tucked
away on the other side of the wall. But he ain’t real. He’s a
figment." Tawse patted the comforting immobility of the solid rock.
Lamprey stared, pondering the face in the wall, then stooped to pick
up a hand maul. "According to Herself, modernity indicates auxiliary
lighting against an unspecified emergency. Love it or hate it, we’ve
bought ourselves a task and the sooner we’re through, the sooner
we’re home. Shake a leg, we’ve got five more of these things to get
up. Then we can be back up top with our well and our woollies."
Lamprey leaned into it with a will, swinging the maul while Tawse
held the drill. They punched two mounting holes into the blank
stone, pressed in lead slugs and bolted a battery and lamps in
place. They then picked up the spool of wire and prepared to
disappear further down into the dark.
"Hoy, hold up a bit." Tawse set down his end of the pikestaff. As a
final gesture to the fears that grow best alone and in the dark, he
returned to install the now-defunct butt of his stogie between the
Manticore’s bared fangs. "Ain’t he quite the dude."
They laughed uneasily and departed, trailing their wire behind. They
had been here long enough. There was a numbing air in the labyrinth
down the stairs, and most who went once avoided a second visit.
copyright 1993, 2006 Rob Hunter