the hungry earth (1 of 2)

He watched the car from his window, his father step out and his mother too in their almost best clothes. The infant was wrapped within a cellular blanket and lay silent in her arms. Though it had died some hours earlier its cheeks appeared warm and alive. He wept as he saw them, such an awful party. The infants all perished in the Fenland township, it was the way things had to be. He himself had been the last of a generation to survive and he was now grown strong, yet the pain of the deaths never softened, and the infants continued to come, to be born and then to die, their short existences but memories of things unhappened. Contraception was worthless in the Fenland Township and its use unheard of; it failed with ferocious resolution against the immense fecundity the ancient moist earth bestowed upon its subjects. Life came so death could follow, so it was written in the book of the township.

The earth was hungry for the tiny bodies of the infants. They perished some three days post-partum, prey to the same condition that medicine was ill-equipped to explain but that the book of the township expressed in the complexity of its principles; they were offerings to the ancient fens themselves, as essential for the continued survival of the township as the commitment of its founders had been so many years previous. The relationship between township and landscape was an intricate and symbiotic one; whilst the township drew upon the resources of the landscape, so too the landscape drew upon the resources of the township. The sating of the earth should ever be the township’s priority, the book spoke, and the infant surplus of each and any generation – beyond those minimal required for the successful propagation of the township – should be returned to the earth that grew them.

Their breaths and needs unsustainable by the limits of the township the existences of the infants ceased very gently in deaths both sudden and foreseen and the worse because of it; their parents would forever feel their short lives in their fingertips and in their dwindling exchanges and in the threat of the coupling that occurred in the urgency of their grief and was itself further grief or the cementing of same. They would carry the infant dead to the earthworks at the edge of the township without ceremony and commit their bodies to the furtherance of the township.

His parents had birthed eight healthy infants after him, all surplus. As he grew older he thought he could see sometimes the disappointment in his mother’s eyes, especially, could see her wondering how things might have been if another of the infants had been the one, but such considerations were futile. Things are as are. This was written in the book of the township.

The book was written by the township founders, Messrs Flamsy and Klepte. Rumour and to a lesser extent history positions the two men as shamed Cambridge scholars who negotiated college influence and resources to pursue private investigations into the occult, by which both men were fascinated, and who were as a result expelled from the university for acts of an ungodly persuasion. The times were unenlightened for free-thinkers. Despite the University’s royally decreed movement away from Catholicism and canon law during the Protestant reformation, a growing puritan influence among a handful of the colleges made the city particularly hostile to Flamsy and Klepte’s increasingly esoteric lines of research, into satanic texts and symbology, ritual sacrifice and a skewed pan-atheistic belief system of tremendous pessimism, whereby within every aspect of the essence of the universe lay at once the seed of its own formation and end, the seed being dark, indifferent and cruel. Legend describes mandrakes – duck-like beings with huge legs some six feet long that whilst having fallen somewhat out of favour in popular tradition in the latter half of the twentieth century are nonetheless firmly rooted in the British and specifically East Anglian folklore of much of the last two millennia – as familiars assisting the two men in their deviance, and that while embroiled in acts of perverse and varied coition such familiars would simultaneously through ready beaks suckle lactose-like serum from secreted entry points around the emaciated bodies of Flamsy and Klepte in exchange for these diabolical ends; describes the two men chased from the city in mortal danger by outraged scholars; describes vast shadowy formations engulfing the hostile eviction party and the dreadful stench of human faeces so severe and grotesque as to render them invalid; describes the fleeing men quickly swallowed in the sodden silence of the wild fens, absorbed into the earth as they alone understood it to be, the societal expectations of the city but a trifle amongst the coarse grasses and spongy earth and endless pools. In the hinterlands they constructed a township free from law and propriety, founded on their principles and theirs alone. It would be a township of paradox, spoke the book. Streets would have no end and lead only to themselves. A town borne of pain that felt none. Rich with life and courting death. Change changes nil. Outside shall stay such and no more. Our young shall feed the hungry earth. The township would flourish, the beacon burnt and never faltered, aflame through the endless years.

The book of the township spoke of what wasn’t as much as what was if not more. Despite its purported location within the civic buildings, which were of red brick and varied architectural stylings, few if any living persons had bore witness to its presence. There were rumours of weight and power but each was unverified and conflicting. Its existence was beyond experience and was related to the pertinence held within the whispers of it that spanned generations.

He heard his parents open the front door and carry the infant into the house, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Their footsteps were purposeful and the refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. They called him in solid voices, called him again when he neither moved nor spoke. His father approached his bedroom door and knocked on it, had changed into carpet slippers; he now held the infant and offered it to his son. “Would you?” asked his father. He referred to the earthworks on the edge of township. His father passed him the infant and patted an open palm on his shoulder as though they were not kin but distant mates awkwardly reunited. It felt incredibly light to hold, almost unnoticeable and desperately cold. A bad world encapsulated in their barely meeting eyes. He pushed past his father and down the stairs and through the hallway and heard his mother crying and the sound of the radio and pouring drink and closed the front door behind him and at a slight jog with the infant clutched into his chest he cried himself.

Superficially the town was now as any other, of banks and discount outlets, of mounting traffic crises and closing businesses, its peripheries peppered with the modern fortresses of the supermarket and DIY retailers on a scale inconsistent with that of the township they served, vast squat hulks of brick and corrugated metal some great distance from the unseen town charter purportedly documented in the book of the township. Several months earlier a carnival had visited the town and erected temporary camp in the car park area of one such retailer, billed amongst the township as God’s Fenland Roadshow and helmed by a Parson named Grünther. The Christian foundation of the carnival’s message sat uneasily with the proud godlessness of the township and hostility had been quick to bloom. Citizens vandalised the carnival tent on erection and abused the performers determinedly, their aggression immediately magnified by Grünther’s incredible indifference. He bore silent witness to the worsening violence without intervention, an assured arrogance the likes of which aroused the citizens into even more advanced forms of retribution. In the hubbub of the shredded canvas a handful of citizens who claimed to be directly descended from Flamsy and Klepte restrained the carnival’s fat male whom the posters called Oaf Boy, and while Grünther and the other performers watched encircled they in lengthy thrusts stabbed the oaf dead, the oaf felled, face dumb as he got it, his blood an immense gurgling pool swallowed into the ground, his large assembly of dead skin and flesh like the peel of an orange rolled away from the fruit within. They thought him Grünther’s pet and no one contradicted them. The murder was neither harried nor considered but occupied some uncomfortable territory between the two. Crows cawed their approval in the trees about and Grünther had led the carnival from the township. There will be other oafs, said Grünther.           

He soon reached the earthworks where the infants lay. Unburied, he hadn’t realised or even thought. Around the mounded earth and furrows beneath – in places – but inches of loose soil were the remains of incalculable infants, arranged head-to-toe in long lines of death, their tiny bones stark white amidst the dirt and scraggy foliage. It was an unforgettable sight and truly dreadful. He retched drily and spat and scuffed the toes of his trainers into the mud then retched further to no avail or release. Carefully unwrapping the cellular blanket from around the body of the infant he knelt to lower it to the floor, and its body was sketched with deep bruising where the blood had settled; he looked at the infant, stroked its cheek with one hand and cupped the top of its head and kissed it very gently on the forehead as one would any sibling. He wrapped the blanket around it again and held it very tight, too tight it would have surely been had the infant been alive which it wasn’t. He jogged to the telephone box, there was only one in the town, its glass panels shattered but still somehow as one, ex nihilo sprayed in large vibrant pink lettering across the panels in turn. The presence of the graffiti in the Fenland township was a point of some consternation, but a petty attack on such obsolete technology meant that little had been done to apprehend the vandal. Holding the infant half beneath his jacket he put two coins into the slot and dialled for assistance, requested to be transferred to the police authorities in the next large township and not his own. Though he was justifiably certain that he must under no circumstances approach the police within his own Fenland township he nonetheless was not thinking clearly or really at all as he implemented the telephone call. He dreamt only of change and felt the cold mass of the infant against his chest. He conversed briefly with an officer and told him in fragments of the infants, the many infants. They would meet presently, the officer assured him, and he took his parents address and gave him a time about an hour from then.