1. Melanosis, or, The Blackening
I suppose that sourcing the ingredients should have been the hardest part. It was a stroke of luck – I think – that I managed to circumvent that problem about as effectively as I could have. Would a substitute have done the job? Maybe. Like garlic and herbs instead of fat and protein, or a Brandy Alexander with just the Alexander. But it would have lacked poetry. Maybe I was lucky; maybe it was where I went wrong.
I should probably explain.
I was a different person back then, when you knew me best. It’s funny how things can change, isn’t it? Days go past when I forget what has happened to me, and I will be walking along, minding my own business, reading messages on my phone and apologising to the lampposts I inevitably walk into, and something will shift. Some change of the wind or in the smell of the air, and I will remember that, no, I am not the man I used to be. That he would have recognised.
You all know who ‘he’ is. And you all told me – said the right things, the compassionate things, the things that were, perhaps, meant to save me from becoming who I am now. Maybe you just wanted to save my face, or the face of my father. It was an embarrassment all round – for me, who couldn’t find someone more suitable; for my father, who had yet to get past having a gay son; for yourselves, who had expected great things from me. But whatever the intention, I’m afraid it didn’t work. Love can break the purest of hearts and I am no exception. A lot of you said something like: you’re not that person, Ned. You don’t have this in you. The subtext being: save yourself now, kid, because though we know that you’re not going to break any records, we also don’t want to read the story of you jumping off Westminster bridge in the Guardian. You don’t have what it takes to love someone the way you’re shaping up to love someone. If you choose to call it ‘love’.
You were wrong. Or, perhaps, you were right back then, but not now, when the potions have been drunk and the promises made. When, inside my body, the black lake of this thing has burst its banks and flooded me with itself, taking out all the landmarks that previously set me straight, leaving behind the soggy remnants of better mooring places as distant, unreachable sights glimpsed from my current place, bobbing stupidly, in the middle of this darkest sea.
He had a son, you know. Ah, you didn’t know. That’s because I never told you. You see? Even back then I wasn’t quite this person you think I was, not where he was concerned. I mean, I wasn’t planning this back then. I couldn’t see the recipe, not in a baby boy, even if he did have his father’s eyes. It would have been different, maybe, if he had just gone, just left and never come back. But he was there, don’t you understand? And sometimes it was his thumb on my chin, tilting my face to the left, so he could press his mouth against the side of my neck and sometimes it was one word answers to my texts and a following silence, for weeks. I didn’t think he was that person either, you know? I thought the darkness was something solvable; something I could solve. We, all three, have daddy issues, it seems. For there must have been some reason he kept poking at the wound in my side, as well as a reason that the boy was sitting there, in that desolate little bar, in February, in a thin t-shirt and ripped jeans.
I had not been there before; I got the impression that he had. I used to tour the little bars, looking for test cases. (Do you begin to understand?) I never expected to see him up here – I expected to need to go ‘home’, to London, to the law firms or the architects, to the big name charities, maybe even to Westminster. I had a plan: a set of checklists for when the time came and a little suitcase under my bed. But I never needed to put the plan to the test. Here he was, skinny but with the promise of breadth waiting in his genes, the same black hair, the same smudge of eyebrow, the same eyes.
It was seven years after he died, fifteen since I’d last seen him (and he’d failed to mention the existence of his son who at that time had been nearly six). We agreed; we failed to agree. I begged and he shut the door in my face, with tears in his eyes. I called him and the message was clear: no more, we can’t do this anymore.
So, the recipe starts here.
At first I thought, maybe, he would be enough, just the boy. The boy’s eyes and hands and the echoes of another face that in the instant, always felt like a kind of magic. And although boys come with their own problems, I thought I was equal to them, and equal to the lack: that I would make up from myself the space between this boy and the man. That I was wrong I hardly need tell you. For every twist of his hands that was the same there was a turn of phrase that would never have formed in the father’s mouth. He had not known his father, this boy: he had been passed around the country by the care system, and been left on a few doorsteps which should not have passed the quality assurance check. There was an air about him that he knew this, that he was conscious that his life was in danger of becoming the kind of cliché that shabby memoirs delight in, and that he was trying, in his own way, to re-examine the motivation of this character he was playing, and try for a little more agency in the second act.
Not intellectual, he was physical, and understood the universe through his body. Like the father, like the whirlwind, he occupied more space than was visible: his breaths heavier than the surrounding air; his voice holding more resonance. And yet, like the father, there were shadows of awkwardness, of uncertainty. Better hidden in the boy than they had been in the man, but there for the experienced eye: the shift of the gaze away and back, checking the mood of the interlocutor, a seemingly anxious hand running down the centre of the chest, all manner of oral fixations. The boy bit his nails; the man had liked cigars.
Maybe this was just love talking, or infatuation, or memory. But he was both terribly like and terribly unlike, and perhaps it was that which caused the break. I said to him, one morning in the bed that was still, officially, mine: I’ve got a flat in London. Do you fancy it? And in the manner of people who have learned to take opportunities when they arrive, not impulsively, but almost impassively, he said ‘Yes’.
In my notes I have called him Hermes, though that is not his name. He called me Ned, for he had never known me while his father was alive and I saw no reason, by then, to conceal myself.
So the first, most important, ingredient has been sourced. And the pot in which it will be slow-cooked has been taken out of the kitchen cupboard and plugged in.
I hated that flat. As you know, it had come to me when my father died. We never lived in it together but later, when I was an adult and my mother was dead, and my father lived there alone, we would sometimes pass long, agonised weekends there trying to believe that we didn’t heartily dislike each other. There were views from the plate glass windows of great magnificence. If you find the rivulets and rammel of London magnificent. I tried to share with him once, one of the only things that gave me pleasure looking out of those windows: the passage of starlings across the horizon – that flooding cloak of birds that loosens and tightens its dance across the sky as it closes towards dusk. He looked at me as if I’d started speaking in Ancient Greek. Or, rather, like I’d started chatting in Yoruba or Gaelic: something (to his ears) colonial and carrying overtones of native frenzy. If I’d started quoting Aristotle, or even Pliny, in the original, he would have been delighted.
The flat is on two levels, though you might not guess that from the outside. Behind a double-thick front door lie the usual amenities: double bedroom, bathroom suite in grey marble, designer kitchen. Full of LED strip lights, it tries to impress you with its mightiness but, as with all such places, leaves me feeling cold and slightly depressed. Or not depressed, but anhedonic: I just don’t care much, about anything, when I’m there.
But, behind a door that is, if not hidden then at least deeply subtle, there is a stair, and down the stair there is a second floor, smaller than the first, at around half the size. It is not trying to dazzle you with its design, though it is well-lit and apportioned. It’s just not quite what one would expect in a London penthouse. Unless the owner was a Doctor H. Jekyll.
My father is well known to you and I will not rehash our various misalignments of viewpoints here. Suffice to say that I, and you yourselves, would never have thought that I would stand in his laboratory, and wonder, and think of the boy lying on the bed upstairs, and wonder.
* * *
2. Leucosis, or, The Whitening
Some time has passed since I last wrote.
Some changes have occurred since I last wrote.
The boy is dead.
And yet he is not. I have never seen anything so strange and yet so affirming. The breath went through me like a wind, like a visitation of god: the finger of god passing up my body from belly to brow, showing me the possibilities.
I will not detail the process: you know it already, if not from personal experience then from the literature of these endeavours: the cousins, all over London, of my father’s library, in which you have all spent time.
Of the black clay that I pressed to his face; of the mixture I encouraged him to drink – it’s a new cocktail, I said, and listed the ingredients as including Jack Daniels, stout and squid ink; of the way his body toppled, from his fingertips a cascading darkness that swept through him like a muslin soaking up dirty water; of the way his mouth turned silvery and then to tarnish, his lips losing their shape, becoming like the sugar rim of a cocktail glass, crystallising sweetness; of his tongue searching for words that might have sounded like ‘how could you?’ except, from the look in his eyes, in those same eyes, I knew he wasn’t surprised and that ‘how could you?’ was really ‘what took you so long?’.
Of all that, presumably, you already know.
He lay on the mortuary table in the lab for three days and on the fourth he stopped breathing and opened his eyes. But, gentlemen, it is not like in the books. Not destruction but a kind of respelling, a rearrangement. His body is the crucible.
Those three days, his skin slick like a seal’s, layer upon layer of impenetrable lustre: the clay, sinking into him. A thin liquid, like the leavings in the gutter outside a club the next morning – rainwater and soot and vomit, piss and lemon-scented cleaning products – dribbled into the table drain, but his skin, his whole body, was dry. There wasn’t a mark on him.
Today, he sat up and opened his eyes. They were white, like a dummy or a doll before it is painted. I could see shadows of him, the original boy, and shadows of him as well, but they were tricks of the light. His already pale skin has been leached of any remaining pinks and creams, and the veins in his arms are glowing slightly, as though the blood (if blood it still is) has turned incandescent.
I poured the last libation of the melanosis this morning, across his mouth, just clean water. Until that point he had been breathing, I swear it.
* * *
3. Xanthosis, or, The Yellowing
This is heavier work.
There wasn’t much gold left in the lab. When I came across it, in a little jar labelled ‘Au’ and rubbed the fragments between my fingers, I’d been puzzled. Wasn’t this the whole point of the thing – turning base metals into gold and all that? If he’d actually managed it, my father, forgive me, gentlemen, my father wouldn’t have been hanging around in an, albeit luxurious, London apartment building: he’d have bought the Hebridean island he had always inexplicably wanted; the rewards of capitalism for my father always somewhat idiosyncratic. He’d have built a wall and a castle and imported some rare breed cattle, bought up the local tweed shop and lived out his laird fantasies. His complete inability to appreciate nature aside, he’d always fancied being the lord of some grass and hills, unchallenged by everything except the gale force winds.
He would have shot the starlings, as well as the pheasants, the blackbirds, the heron, the geese. The cattle would breed to his command. Because he would have been the king.
So at first I thought the stuff in the jar must be iron pyrite – fools’ gold – and that I would be able, any minute, to hear my father’s laugh in my ears. But it wasn’t iron pyrite. I fished the only actual lump out of the jar and made a scratch in it that nitric acid did not discolour. I went back to the books (having not actually read to this stage at the time, mostly from apotropaic superstition but also because the reading was a hard slog, what with all the Latin and Greek I had not learned at my father’s knee) and was slightly shocked to find out what you, of course, already know: you need a little gold to get going.
I was artistic as a child, as you may remember. I made the usual things out of plasticine which ended as brown concoctions in the carpet. I was allowed clay a few times, and that plasticky stuff that you could put in the oven and use to make tacky children’s jewellery. At least, that’s what we made with it.
I don’t remember ever making a mask. But evidently there is a first time for everything,
Just a little to get you going, just a little supple in the fingers, a little slip on the vase. Into the mixture I put the only photograph of him that I still had, having destroyed most of the others some years ago, trying, trying to be rid of his image at least. But even back then, something in me knew better. It was a black and white thing, more than a snap but less than a portrait. Not the two of us together, just him, in the act of turning towards the photographer, so that his edges blurred. Into the crucible it went: the white of his shirt turning gold as the mixture caught, the last things to turn his eyes and the black of his beard.
In the hours it took for the mixture to become the kind of gluey clay I required, I sat and watched the boy. He had risen from the table and first gone to the door, then to the table, then to the tiny arrow-slit window on the east wall behind which the sun of the fifth day was rising. His fingers held on to the walls as if he was afraid he would fall. His feet made no sound on the lab floor but where his heels and toes pressed against it his skin, if skin it still was, would lighten up past even the whiteness of the rest of him; glowing slightly, footsteps in marsh light. Wherever he touched the more corporeal world it was as though it was causing him slight pain. His steps lightened as he proceeded around the room, just heel and toes, and the tips of fingers. He made circuits of the autopsy table and occasionally glanced at me with an expression on his face as though he knew where he was, and even who I was, but couldn’t remember how he got here.
Gently: hands on his shoulders – sit back on the table, sweetheart, that’s it. My fingers make impressions in his skin, fingerprints, just like the ones that lie in the clay.
Like Agamemnon’s mask it went on, battered in places by the tiny hammer I’d used on it despite it being soft enough, almost, to have its imperfections pushed out with my fingers. Long on the chin and too narrow on the nose. He sighed underneath it: a final breath and, with it, the mask settled and sank into the mannequin. Like that fake, for a few moments the mask was wrong – clichéd and amateur, the eyes like a child’s drawing. Then it was blank, back to the dummy again. And then – and then.
* * *
4. Iosis, or, The Purpling
“Jesus Christ.”
“Hello, Ned.”
“Do you … do you know me?”
He smiles. And it is the same under-the-eaves smile that he had, the shadows of his face thrown back by the glint in his eye. And his hands, as he levers himself off the table, his hands have turned to gold.
“How could I miss you?”
“... Don’t flirt.”
“Can’t help it.”
I laughed. I laughed! For the first time in years. Even in that lab which smelt of shame and strange mixtures, I felt myself filled up. With what? With the old elixir again – with hope, with hope for a small drink of what could cure me: three drops of a cordial only he could make. The press of his mouth and the warmth of his hands against my face. Those newly golden hands against my face. Nothing promised, just a chance to try again.
The only giveaway those golden fingers, that shining red mouth. But they flickered in and out of my awareness. As though a cloud had fallen over my eyes, all I could see was what I had wanted to see. I held his hands in mine and felt their warmth, their real heaviness. I let him go and stepped back to see him, to really see: the way he turned on his heel, so delicate and so awkward, drawing his hand down the centre of his chest before he turned to the bench, to the window, to me, back to the bench. His hands flashed as they picked up a cup and glass, bottle and stopper, a glass mixing stick.
“Do you think you could maybe get me some clothes?” he said, over his shoulder, turning to me from the bench.
I stared longer than I should have, at my golem. He was not beautiful except that he was beautiful to these eyes, that have never known any better, that are only carriers of pattern and form and texture and weight, and know what they see, and know what they love.
“You’ll have to wear gloves,” I think I said as I opened a drawer in one of the old cabinets lining the lab’s east side. I reached in and pulled out the pile of his old clothes, thinking madly that it no longer mattered that they had lost his scent years ago, that I had the real thing, that hoarding was no longer necessary.
“Ah,” I heard him say, as, turning around, I lost socks and t-shirts from out of my arms, “I see your Boy Scout tendencies have not atrophied with age.” I think I laughed again, and bent to pick up the socks.
When I faced him again he was holding a pair of mugs. Perfectly ordinary mugs, like the kind you’d bring with you to the office. The glass mixer was really a teaspoon and the smell of coffee was overpowering every other smell in the room.
We met in the winter. The first time I saw him there was snow melting in his beard and the wind had taken his lips up to a high, angry blush. The first thing I offered him was a cup of lacklustre coffee which, though he made a face, he downed almost in one. The sound of my name in his mouth and the smell of the coffee was the thing that turned the trick. Like a thunderstorm blowing in from the east, like the whirlwind, his passions rising like the rain on the wind, I fell in love with him like drowning and suffocating both.
“Ned,” was all he needed to say.
He passed me the cup and I drank. It seemed easier, though I knew. What took you so long? I said, whispered, as I swallowed the black water and looked up into his eyes, as he took the cup from my hands and tilted my face back into the light, his thumb on my chin.
* * *
5. Melanosis, Redux
Forgive me, gentlemen, for taking up my right of reply. Though it is now slightly difficult for me to hold a pen, I wanted to drop you a line, in my capacity as the experiment, as Ned’s monster, as the Magnum Opus. I thought you might be interested in the other side of the story. He won’t be back to carry on your correspondence, I’m afraid, though I think he is happy enough; as happy as he really can be. Don’t bother looking for him, please. It won’t be a successful endeavour.
We prefer, rather than ‘monsters’, to call ourselves the Golem Boys, these days. Like a boy band, suspiciously glowing hands our USP – revealed at curtain up but in ordinary daylight always, rain or shine, Australia to Austria, wearing gloves.
But you know the name already. It’s your name for us. Us, because I know I was not the first.
The internet’s a great thing, isn’t it? You might want to invest in some decent VPN software though.
You’re wondering why I’m bothering. After all, I walked into this with my eyes open. What is the recipe for this kind of sickness, you’re asking. Well, I think you can guess. Ned told it to you straight. I was a victim of all the usual clichés. Maybe I was too louche, I brought it on myself; the skirt of my soul was too short, and anyway, what business did I have, walking around with the eyes of his beloved in my face?
Yes, I knew. Of course I knew. Daddy issues we had in common, as he told you. And they’re so boringly predictable, and common, these days. Ned was right that I never knew my father; he had disappeared by the time I knew myself, but, as I think I have demonstrated, my detective skills are quite good. Ned too left a trail with his obsession – it was not difficult to follow.
But – I think it’s also because I believed in magic, just a little bit. I wondered, like Ned wondered, if another kind of life was possible. A hope fulfilled. And if the price was having to become someone else, well, from where I came from, that didn’t seem like too bad a deal.
Did I wait for him, in that bar, on that stool, with these eyes? Perhaps. Maybe I was just lucky too.
I daresay that you don’t care about any of this. Where is he? you’re asking. What have you done with him? Get out of there, you imposter. You don’t deserve to breathe the same air. Well, don’t worry about that. I don’t breathe anymore. And I know you’re coming for me. I know I’m not getting out of here, alive. To you, I’m a failed experiment. I’m part of the corpora vilia: to be disposed of. But, maybe, I’ll wall myself up here, maybe I’ll seal with my golden hands the locks and the gaps under the door and I will drink the rest of the potions and end up on the farther shore of your expectations. Or maybe I will be the monster that wails around the walls of your houses in the chill of the morning.
I wonder if you’ll hear me. Monsters are often strangely deaf to the calls of their own.
Kit Edgar (they/them) is a genderqueer writer from Sheffield, UK. They wrangle clinical trial data in the daytime and monsters all the time. This is their first publication. They can be found on Twitter @raedbard.