This is the tale of a city long lost to the pages of history, the tongue once spoken by its people now perhaps lies buried somewhere beneath an inconsequential hill, etched into some withered fossil lips that whisper into the lonely breeze. Perhaps this city never really existed, and the whispers string together unheard songs of falsity. Perhaps this city exists all the time, all around us.
Perhaps it will exist one day. Whatever be the case, those nether lips tell of a king who once ruled over the city. The king was as wise, kind, and strong as the city was prosperous. A bastion of learning, culture, and commerce it was. The palisades that bordered the edges of this sanctuary gleamed with the rising sun, and all was wonderful and right. Till it wasn’t, and the sun began to descend over the brow of the liege lord. As the fingers of time caressed his skin evermore, with each passing winter the sheen over his flesh began to wither. His eyes started to droop, his smile lost its crispness, his gait melted, his memories became runny. His speeches, once sharp and sure, withered with his words as his sentences splattered like a leaking water pipe with too many holes. With some remaining semblance of his once gargantuan intellect, he decided that he needed to do something– to irrigate his parched soul, to bring himself back. He had to act fast. Thus, he consulted with the wisest and the most learned viziers of his city to devise a solution to his predicament.
He concluded that in the twilight of his fate, some darkness needed to be channelized to bring back the fading luminosity in his eyes. Such dark deeds would be done in this shade, and the shade would as a result forever hide them till the light returned and blotted out any semblance of such actions. What harm would a little discord do in the grand symphony of the city’s long and prosperous history under his righteous reign, especially if it served as a bridge to replenish the vitality of its draining, quivering heart.
His plan was thus– to let loose the iron surety of the forces of security and safety that spread over the city, to let a sliver of chill slip through inside its walls– to let crime run a tad bit unchecked, to disperse murder, thievery, and strife throughout the streets, the alleys, and corners. A city known throughout the world for its almost somnambulant peace, now became a breeding ground of vile criminality. Now, the reader may wonder why such a stance was taken by the king– was it all a consequence of the senility of his aging psyche, or was it founded upon some seed of cunning and ingenuity? It leaned more towards the latter, as after much consultation– the alchemy of the truest of the viziers pointed to a site of arcane significance. A plan was hatched to extract a certain remedy from this particular site that informed the exact architecture of this confusing project.
To the north of the city, hidden behind the darkest corners of a veiny, spiny, hairy forest lay a gray canyon. A prickly black ravine there was, bordered by craggy rocks that jotted out like violent misshapen teeth. If, like a bird, one flew over this site and looked below, one would perceive the whole structure as a gap in the earth that resembled a crude jaw almost smiling, or the tortured spinal cord of some beast badly beaten and malformed. It was said that in ancient times, the soul of a celestial being had gotten lost amongst the forest bark. After days of wandering through the forest, this being had stumbled upon the ravine, lost its footing and had fallen down. The fall had taken away all its breath, and with one laborious long gasp it had uttered a dying song. It is said that this song had echoed through the stones of the ravine and its rocky stern heart had given away and taken pity on this being. The song had continued to echo and echo until it reverberated and rumbled all through the gap and was firmly sealed into the walls of the ravine. It is said that even though it cannot be heard normally, by a human ear– there can be occasions when it can seep into your mind. A mind when tortured with violence, grief, guilt and anger can hear the discordant syllables of this hidden verse, and when such a verse is heard through the lips from one such soul it will open one’s eyes to certain hidden ancient truths of the world. Ancient truths that can rouse an ailing mind from languor.
The king let murder and blood run through the streets of his city. And upon getting hold of the soiled hands that would commit such misdeeds, corral them to a maze in the deepest part of the canyon and leave them to fight amongst other such lost convicts to try and carve a path out of their infernal prison. He would also station watchers hidden away in places within and over the canyon with hopes that a prisoner, while wading through such devastation with their ravaged mind would chance upon the hidden song and utter its syllables; to be ultimately carried as a missive to the liege, a healing jolt to his faltering faculties.
This project went on for days and then years, but no song was heard. The streets of the city became grimier and became ever more stained with the stench of ever growing crime and squalor, while the king leaned more and more into himself– like a once grand statue, bent into a ruin. The jaws of the ravine munched on the souls of more and more such sinners and convicts as the decaying flesh and bones of the prisoners, unable to claw their way outgrew like weeds on the barren soil of the deep.
It went on like this until one day, an innocent soul was mistakenly found at a crime scene, thought to be the culprit– and shoved into the belly of the ravine. A simpleton at heart, with shaky limbs and a slow mind, this poor soul wandered here and there in the darkness knowing not whither to go, whither to find solace, whither to gain respite from such suffocating darkness. He tried navigating around the maze to find patterns, a misplaced rock, a fortuitous crack, declivities on the rocky walls to climb on, but to no avail. The darkest corners would also be accompanied by shrieks and wailings of other prisoners. Some chased after him, some beat their skulls onto the rocks, some just sat in one place in a meditative way almost smiling, some curled up in the dust, tears running down their expressionless faces. He evaded them all and found a small cave tucked away in the maze and hid himself in its womb. The night he went inside that cave it rained. It rained where it had never rained before. It rained and rained, with hail and thunder. It rained and rained until all was quiet and pearl drops started to fall from the cave ceiling into soft puddles, like pebbles in a pond. Drip drop drip drop to the dance of a beating heart the pebbles dropped until behind the tune there erupted another. A child crying, gasping to the falling of the pebble, sniffing and wailing to the splashing of the pond. The innocent soul looked into the abyss of the cave, a black slate it was– but in the middle there was an orb of light. It was nestled in the distance, its light too bright to look at directly but did not light up the walls of the cave– almost too afraid to touch the darkness, lest it mingle with it and be drowned in its inky viscosity. The innocent soul inched closer and closer to the orb. The crying got louder and louder. It was so loud that it hurt his ears but at the same time it was calm, a hurt that soothed you, that welcomed you, that beckoned you to come closer. Soon the soul stood in front of the orb and saw that it was not an orb but a creature of some kind. It was curled into itself, a white furry coat with a fox-like tail. It had soft, thick wolfish hind legs, and furry arms that ended into human-like pinkish hands. Blunt, angular horns decked its head that poked out from a thick white bushy mane that ran to its shoulders. It had an elf-like pink face and streaks of red peppered over the white fur throughout its head and body. It was small in size. Its beady black eyes were wet with tears as it sobbed and sobbed and the sobbing slowly turned into a howl and into a song.
The terrible rain beat into the temples of the troubled king as his furrowed brows clenched into his mind when suddenly his eyes lit up. A messenger had arrived. The song had started. The long-awaited rime had poured forth with the rain and the hail and thunder and had echoed through the walls of the ravine. The king was brought to the cave. When he arrived he saw all the prisoners forming a circle around one prisoner. Each stood like a statute with a blank face, albeit with a smile. Peaceful sleepy smiles. The one in the middle was singing a song in an alien tongue while moving to its rhythm like a boat rocking to the rolling waves in an open ocean. The king sat there listening to the song for days till the singer collapsed into a slumber, to never wake up. The prisoners around the singer also collapsed, like a castle made of cards they all fell into a pile, on top of another. The sleeping bodies were all brought to the city center and were sainted as the slumbering saints of the deep. The king regained his vigour, his mind ran like the wind, his gait quaked the ground, his words pierced the stars. He spent the next few days cleaning up the streets, blotting out the ravine from all the maps, tightening up the safeguarding forces, and rekindling back the sentinels of peace. All was well again. Or so it seemed.
One day it started pouring again. It rained and rained till the streets were flooded, the walls were pockmarked with hails that lashed onto them, the thunder drowned out the cries of terror and dismay. Amidst all this turmoil, the king had locked himself in his chambers. A humming was heard from behind the gauntlet-like doors, a humming that never seemed to stop. After the passing of several days, the rain had stopped and the doors of the king’s chambers had opened.
The king was found with a smile on his face. A sleepy smile stood out pronounced over his otherwise expressionless face with blank eyes, huddled up in a corner. He was skeletal thin, his skin pale white, he had reduced to half his size. On the walls of his chambers, he had carved a tableau with his nails, a picture etched into the walls marked with blood and bone of the most hideous crimes that any soul can dare commit. In the middle of it all, of that severe scenery was a smiling face, carved into the stone almost breaching out from the walls of the most hideous make. The whispers tell the tale of this smiling face, and a long-lost city. Perhaps this face would be unearthed some day and be examined as the remaining vestiges of some long lost god or perhaps be buried forever in the belly of some hidden ravine. Waiting. Waiting for a listener, for its song.
Hiranya Mukherjee
Hiranya Mukherjee graduated from Presidency University, Kolkata with a master’s in English literature. He is an independent researcher of game studies with special interest in utilising posthumanist, psychoanalytic, and gothic studies methodologies. He has presented his research in various national and international academic conferences, and has published his articles in international journals such as Games and Culture and the International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences. Apart from his academic engagements he is also a poet and has published his short-story called “Bound” in the collection Fables by “The Cognition Tree Media & Publications” in which he has attempted his personal take on the Lovecraftian flavour of horror.
