Black Marsden Read Free Page A

charmed countryside. Thus every whisper of wood accentuated the muffled tread of time as though silence were the art of wrestling with invisible presences.
    The room was dark. The darkness was accentuated by the fact that I had not drawn the curtains across the window which gleamed now with the light of the moon. I could see in my mind’s eye a clear sky over the city strewn with faint stars around the disc of the moon and as I visualized this I dreamt afresh of late afternoon and early evening walks and the conjunction I felt then of open sky and sea. The open sky delighted me. As much for its dreaming openness as for contrasting weathers and moods in which it steeped me from time to time. It sustained a divine rule or play of elements—hour to hour, day to day—in which the Castle over Princes Street symbolized a human and therefore man-made mist or legendary establishment.
    The open sea delighted me. I could hear the cry of the gulls as I descended towards the Firth of Forth….
    A rectangle of light at the end of the room or road (was it sea or sky?) insinuated itself into my dreams. Doctor Marsden had come in dressed as a Camera with a collection plate he deposited on the bedroom floor. I was struck by his great dignity and decorum: persona or camera fitted him well. At the same time I could not resist being almost overwhelmed by a sensation of weird and indefatigable humour beneath the black cloth or flesh he wore.
    “Call me Camera,” he said familiarly adjusting his wig of cloth. “Cloth of hair.”
    His head in the half-dark, half-light of the room was smooth on all sides—eyeless cloth, mouthless cloth, earless cloth, noseless cloth.
    “Call me Camera,” he said again jocularly pointing to a rectangle of moon or sea or sky he had now incorporated upon brow and eyes. “It cost a pretty penny this outfit.” He slid along the floor. “Embroidery of stars and haircloth. A pretty penny.” He came still nearer, his voice half-sinister, half-wheedling. “Penny for the Guy,” he said. “Penny for the Guy.”
    I proceeded without further prompting to lay out a pound, a dollar note, a franc, a pre-Columbian bone and a shell. Marsden put these on his plate as if they were the relish of his soul. “What a collection,” he said. “The Church like the Poor like Art is always with us. Give well and you give wisely.”
    I nodded. “Now,” he continued, “you will clap Knife and you will clap Jennifer Gorgon. A sweet name is Jennifer.” He clapped his hands as he spoke and quoted Robert Burns:
    “Here some are thinkin’ on their sins,
   An’ some upo’ their claes.”
     
    He clapped his hands again beneath the cloth of his flesh—clapping a hidden church or choir or theatre he carried around in his lusty camera. I saw now as he clapped that Knife, sharp as bone or sin, had stepped forth from him. And that Jennifer too had stepped forth from him naked as a sea-shell.
    In the darkened church or bedroom she seemed to absorb much of the radiance from Marsden’s rectangular window or brow and in her desire to absorb this more completely, had pulled her nightdress over her head but been unable to free herself entirely from it, so that her mouth and nose were extinguished in a featureless robe and bundle, and her breasts shone beneath, sagged a little, darkened a little into large bruised eyes and nipples.
    I felt cheated by those blind counterfeit eyes of hers ( half-falling , half-uplifted from her body) but fascinated and astonished as well that such a shell or woman—so fragile and lovely she seemed now—possessed such sculptured breasts into which were set such huge coins or currency of beauty. Currency of rage. Rage indeed. If those coins were to strike the floor they would ring with fury at the manifest way their owner had been entangled in a spell or net cast by Black Marsden’s ritual camera.
    All of a sudden, at the very edge of fascination, Knife slashed the camera, and Marsden stood stark