To celebrate, we’re sharing the first “chapter” of Valkyrie Loughcrewe’s upcoming novella, PUPPET’S BANQUET, with our readers for free. It’s out May 14th and available to preorder now.
PUPPET’S BANQUET is a surrealist nightmare; a “diseased Gothic”; a hallucinatory treatise on medical abuse; the systemic disease of colonialism and patriarchy; and the limits of human perception. Equal parts Cronenberg’s The Brood, Scorcese’s Shutter Island, and Silent Hill.
Cover art by Donna A. Black.
Interior illustrations by Trevor Henderson.
About PUPPET’S BANQUET:
Married couple Celia and Martin are brutally attacked on their drive through the Irish countryside. The attack leaves Celia with a violent schism in her mind, seemingly existing in two places at once: one the “real” world, the other a howling maelstrom of abstract monstrosity.
Of her husband, there is no trace…until weeks later, when Martin is discovered in a hospital for rare and abnormal diseases, his body spliced together with that of an unknown woman.
And they are very pregnant.
***
Now, please enjoy the disturbing early events of PUPPET’S BANQUET:
“Sub-Ornament Creaking Carcasses
Stagger Blackest Harbours
Moored Frothing Profuse”
Portal, “Werships”
“I’m coming home, I’m home, I’m coming home”
Axis of Perdition, “Heaving Salvation in the Paradise of Rust”
There we are, coming back into the flesh.
Were you dreaming?
Still a bit groggy. That’s ok.
No, don’t try to speak, you might damage your tongue
Against the wire gauze, in your numbed state.
Follow the light. That’s it.
That’s it.
It is a very special thing to have you here
for you to be part of this procedure.
Unfortunately, however we—or you, rather, do not
have a lot of time before you begin to…
Well,
Let's try and keep things pleasant for now.
I see you’re shifting a little in your bonds,
I do hope the restraints aren’t too tight.
Toxic shock would really interfere with what we’ve come to do here today.
I’m going to put something up on the screen now and I want you
to focus,
focus on the image, and the sound of my voice.
Some of it will be pre-recorded,
the rest of it will be alive,
in here with you.
With us.
And hopefully, once this ends,
you and I will finally understand
why all of this had to happen.
Slide 1: Verminations in the carrion infinity
Humans were meant to exist in living tribes,
gathered around the fire, bustling nonstop
from sunrise through sunset and beyond
children were meant to sleep to the sound of
crackling fires, murmuring conversation
the tapping of drums and the flutters of music
memory is a network of nodes reaching out to
one another, connecting through story and song
when humans are separated, sorted into right-angled
living catacombs, a kind of decay that sets in
a decay of meaning
and memory
can you imagine the kind of things that
certain people might
get up to?
in their desperation
in search of a signal through the noise?
First, we must draw our attention back to a large, well-kept house nestled in the misty veils of the Irish countryside, as the last clink of cheap porcelain on a tray of expensive silver signalled the end of the evening.
It was followed by an exaggeratedly satisfied sigh, and an equally exaggerated rubbing of hands. It was not taken as obnoxious or unnecessary by the guests. The party had started at twelve in the day and it was approaching eight in the evening. The drinkers were drunk, the drivers were tired, and the gossip had long run dry.
Celia and Martin needed no excuse to be the first to filter out, though they did wait for a couple of the older family members to make their way out across the misty gravel driveway to their cars before they followed suit. They didn’t want to be rude, and it wasn’t as if they didn’t get on with Martin’s family, or his Uncle Paudy, whose birthday they had been celebrating.
There was, however, a kind of underlying tension to any sort of family gathering, on either side. They were from wealthy stock, our husband and wife, families with ties to heavy industry, real estate, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness and communications, ties to the twin dominant political parties which had robbed the countries blind for decades.
So where did the discomfort come from? Were dear Martin and delicate Celia, beneath it all, revolutionary socialists in the time-honored tradition of their ancestors, aghast at the rape of their beloved green isle? Of course not, the truth was far more banal—the pair had fallen on hard times, their mortgage getting out from under them. Their meagre jobs—Celia a schoolteacher, Martin a middle manager in a floundering infrastructure startup—were not quite cutting through the rolling waves of debt.
Being good Irish Catholics the pair of them, naturally they refused any offers of nepotism, plenary or partial, and by the point of the evening of Paudy Fitzmaurice’s seventy sixth birthday, the family had accepted their honourable stubbornness.
For the most part.
“Do you not think maybe you could take yer man a little more seriously?” Celia said, in a small voice as the car door shut behind her.
“Who now?” Martin asked, checking the rear-view mirror of his SUV to make sure there were no children standing behind it for him to reverse over.
For what it's worth, if there had been, he wouldn’t have seen them.
“Sean’s brother—what was his name?”
“Hannon. Bit of an odd name.” Martin sniffed.
“It’s a good job he was offering. You’re well cut out for it.”
“He’ll have me doing nothing. Same as me father, sitting at a desk doing piss all while I rake in cash, it’s no way to live. I’d turn into a fat-berg and then shrivel up.”
Martin chuckled to himself as they pulled out of the driveway, heading down the country lane. The light was failing, the sunset lost to wispy layers of cloud, all stacked on top of each other, such as the otherwise gorgeous view from the Fitzmaurice house was lost to the darkening grey haze.
“A fat-berg?” Celia asked, sounding perturbed.
“Ah, you don’t want to know what that is, you’d be put off your dinner, sorry I said it.”
Celia would be put off making Martin’s dinner, more like. Inside her pale and pretty head, Celia weighed if she should wade into the thorny issue of the futility of Martin’s employment. She knew that eventually when the pay dried up completely, he would move on to something better, but his stubbornness, his insistence that the firm was going to have some kind of breakthrough success that would wipe their slate of debt clean, was a menace.
Said debt was always ticking up, as far as Celia was concerned, Martin’s machismo was not only prolonging their suffering, but inflaming it. As far as Martin was concerned, the worse things seemed like they were about to get, the more satisfying it would be when the dam broke.
It would be damn near orgasmic, a hand delivered climax to his righteous suffering, eased into being by way of his diligent practice of prayer and Sunday worship. His faith was unshakable, unlike his wife’s confidence in her own assertions.
All this aside, to call their marriage unhappy would be disingenuous. Life can’t be measured in pennies and pounds, and the pair were known to make each other laugh on occasion. They still enjoyed the warmth of each other’s bodies as they drifted off to sleep at night, and their fruitless attempts at fertility were for the most part adequately pleasant experiences.
They were used to the deep, rich vein of discomfort and anxiety in their relationship. Its amniotic fluid carried them, floating, together, from day to languid day.
It is what it is
Driving through the countryside, from lane-vein to road-artery,
to town-organ, barely conscious of the routes
patterns traced like the fingers of God
grooves in the vinyl
wrinkles in the brain
in waking sleep
until some external stimulus comes along
to
There is a featureless field, along an uninteresting road, through an uninteresting stretch in the countryside. The odd ivy-choked tree, decaying fenceposts being pulled into the earth by relentless vegetations. Rusted barbwire and unreliable electric wire.
And gates, almost always closed, aside from when the local farmer, all crotchety gait and gaunt, tanned-pink skin, herds his local cows from place to place; always signposted by bright orange traffic cones, flimsy rope barriers. Always in the daylight.
That night, a gate was open along the road, one that Martin did not expect. Darkness had long since fallen as they passed it, not far from the home-stretch, a cosy evening ahead of them of microwave mini pizzas and a glass of wine before bed.
In the split second before the car drifted by the open gate, the driver in his comfortable state of road hypnosis, a pale figure came flailing out of the blackness.
Just a flash of white and the impression of a figure,
the brain having barely a split second to alert the body
fragmentary instant of sheer abject rejection
and the first collision, barely a thump,
she went up and over,
to the second collision
the one against the windshield
turning the clear vision of the road
into a scattered scrunch of bloody material
tumble tumble across the roof
to the third collision
flesh on tarmac
skin shredded and bones mangled
a body he didn’t need
for what was to follow
Their screams were the kind of hysterical shrieks of panic you never hear in movies, the kind of animal sound that can’t be faked. You probably would never hear such a sound in your life, unless you happen to be in the vicinity of a car accident, or disturb a dreamer in the midst of a nightmare.
Martin opened his door first, as he found himself beginning to projectile vomit on the dashboard, and figured such emissions were better suited for the tarmac. It wasn’t a conscious choice, he was still in shock, but his manners were impeccable, it must be said.
Celia, ever the dutiful wife, followed suit, hearing the click and the hydraulic swing of the door.
She gasped in the night air, seeing only the very edges of the plant-life at the edge of the road, picked up by the very outer limits of the SUV’s headlights. Milky-pale, jagged leaves, the impression of a rotted fencepost, and off to the side, the yawning of the open gate.
A cool breeze from the field, the distant braying of the animals.
While Martin knelt in his own vomit on the tarmac, besmirching his Sunday best, Celia walked as if in a dream toward the figure that lay broken behind the car, bathed in the red of the brake-lights.
She was smiling, the body. A small pale dark-haired woman, facing Celia, almost a mirror of herself—in fact, for a moment, Celia did feel as if she was looking in a broken mirror, one arm bent backwards across a naked torso, legs positioned demurely, as if the body was just relaxing there. Most of the mortified flesh was hidden out of sight, but in the red light the body’s smile looked a little too wide, and it was true, the cheeks had been torn ragged.
And the eyes were staring, glistening in the red light.
“Oh God, Oh GOD” Martin howled.
Celia turned and saw the passenger door of the car shut closed. She screamed, and Martin turned as well, ostensibly to look at her, but in the process he caught a glimpse of the man reaching across to him from the passenger’s seat. A haggard mask bedevilled by age and overgrown white hair, a shock on top of the head and growing from the lower half of the face.
A baby’s glee in the expression, the body naked and pockmarked. All Celia saw was a pair of muscled arms reach out and pull her husband, struggling, into the car.
Now, watch for this
because something fascinating occurs here inside Celia’s mind.
the situation unfolding splits, duplicates,
mitosis of the consciousness
It’s nothing like a split-image effect in a film, not as if the observer within her
is sitting in a darkened, smoke-filled theatre watching a pair of screens
each showing a slightly different cut of the same film
no, she is experiencing both simultaneously
and fully
In one life she screams as the SUV rocks
Martin’s screams becoming strangled.
in another, she screams for a different reason.
over the barbed wire, through the bushes,
from the gate, from the swung open doors
of the vehicle, come pale figures
like the one her husband struck
indistinctly formed, perfectly illuminated
by no light, flailing toward her
as in the other life, she calls out for
Martin one final, pathetic time,
hears the sound of the gear shift,
and the SUV reverses toward her at speed.
A single neural impulse fired—shared across the vast gulf between those twin experiences, those parallel lives—to turn, and to run. Both instances were too slow, far too slow, as Celia turned in a blur, in slow motion, the red light of the SUV creeping up on her, the horde of flailing, drowning-victim screams just a breath away.
The body stared up with the sightless eyes, smiling, as from the darkness above her another vision emerged, into the red light, a skinny body hanging from a bloated head, ballooning beyond the limits of her vision, pore-pocked with glistening black eyes, pulling the night around it like a cloak.
and the fourth collision
***