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First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Guerilla
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Copyright © 2013 Andrew James Lambie
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the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-907248-08-5
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or
The God Engine
Eats Its Young
This is a limited edition
No.
I
THE
BOY I N THE JAR
one-eyed dwarf with a face like a sack of
mashed plums shuffles up the beach and
urinates into an upturned top hat. His name
is Cedric, he is fat. His belly protrudes from a greasy
waistcoat as his buttocks, hanging like two rancid melons,
lurk in front of me, spoiling my view of the sea. He
urinates into that hat at precisely twelve each day, like some
horrid clock that ticks only noon and a metronome for each
day marooned on this grubby little rock. Rags around his
ankles and buttocks to the breeze, he shuffles back again,
whistling. Grabbing a ladies shoe from the wreckage, with
its heel he begins hammering a nail into the belly of a large
rusty contraption. He lost his eye around a year ago when
he passed out drunk on the shore and some devious crab
started picking at it, I saw the whole show.
1
As for my origins, allow me to summarise: I did not know
my parents. Apparently, one of them had a moustache and
was imprisoned for smuggling tobacco inside taxidermied
owls. These particular owls were a rare and endangered
species so the punishment was severe. I was duly placed into
the care of Uncle Vern and Aunt Glenda, although I was
never completely sure they were my real Aunt and Uncle.
My earliest memory is of Glenda screaming and clutching
a Bible to her chest. She had seen some lumps on my back.
‘You’ve got mud in your soul!’ she said, whacking me on the
head with the Bible. ‘You dirty boy!’ The name stuck and,
like some vulgar shoe, Dirty Boy was a name I grew into.
The second thing I remember is Vern placing me in
what appeared to be a jar. ‘Got to keep ourselves clean
from your dirty little parade,’ he said gruffly, fastening the
lid and stabbing some air holes through it with a broken
spatula. ‘Mind your head, Dirty Boy!’ It was a large glass
Mason jar about two feet high, which before serving as my
shackles had housed fermented parsnips in Uncle Vern’s
failed attempt at brewing parsnip wine. The smell of them
still lingered even today, and I must confess I’ve come to
associate the stench of rotten parsnips with life itself.
As I grew into my name I also grew into the jar, till my
neck was permanently bent, my spine arched, and my legs
withered to thin white broomsticks through lack of use.
2
I had to itch the lumps by rubbing my back against the
glass, which if anything seemed to encourage them, and in
time they spread from the base of my spine to the tips of
my shoulders. Aunt Glenda made Vern carry me down to
the shed, so sick she was of the sight of them.
I spent much of my childhood in that shed. It was
very dark and I could do little save talk to the earwigs
and spiders, who were never great conversationalists.
Once a day Vern would come down to the shed with a pot
of broth. He would pour it clumsily through the top of the
jar before departing as quickly as possible, locking the door
and leaving me licking my dinner off the glass and groping
madly in the gloom for lumps of carrot. Sometimes, late
at night, after an extended evening at the village pub,
he would stumble into the shed and mutter horrible
gin-soaked things…
‘Yer a turd with eyes, boy. Nowt more. A turd with eyes.
Little bastard. Eh, I’d send yer to the glue man on the heath
if yer had hooves. I’d milk yer and flog it down the market if
yer had tits. But yer got nowt...and y’are nowt. Little bastard.’
Time passed slowly in the shed, flowing like some long dark
river. I cannot remember how old I was when they put me
in the jar, but I must have been going on thirteen when the
Carny came to town.
3
Uncle Vern came down to the shed one day all sweaty
and very excitable. He had just come back from a day at
the carnival and was in the company of a strange man
who introduced himself as Lord Ving. Ving was a very tall
gentleman with an ivory cane, scarlet cape and enviable
sideburns. Rapping his cane on the side of the jar he shouted
‘I’m going to buy you!’ in a tone so loud and brash I jumped
and banged my head on the glass. After some time haggling,
the two of them eventually agreed on a price for me – score
ninety pounds of horse liver and half a barrel of tongue.
Lord Ving had been scouring the county in search
of new blood for his travelling collection of performing
oddities, dubbed by a tabloid of the day as The Black Circus
due to the wide range and particularly disturbing nature
of its freaks, or by its stage name: Howling Lord Ving and The
Waltz of the Flesh.
Oh we saw it all my dears, except for the freaks that
didn’t have eyes, they smelled it all. From Morecambe to
Marbella we plied our freakish wares - King Alfonso of
Spain himself found me so repulsive that he was promptly
sick on his favourite butler. Lord Ving was ecstatic, it was
an envious review for he who rears his shillings from the
macabre. ‘It’s a renaissance of the flesh!’ I recall him saying
to me from behind a wall of cigar smoke as he counted
4
another sack of coin. ‘Oddities are commodities!’
Things were going so well that Ving used some of our
earnings to buy the hulking wreck of an old steam boat. He
had the freaks repair it with little more than scrap iron and
sealing wax, then bade them decorate it in readiness for the
maiden voyage.
‘How should we paint it, sir?’ asked one of the dwarves.
‘Like my coffee,’ said Ving, running a comb through his
sideburns. ‘Black as night and sweet as sin.’
Two of the bearded ladies even knitted a flag, a grim
parody of a skull and crossbones, with the skull deformed
and having three eyes. We christened our ship The Merry Hell
and promptly set off along the south coast. I remember
distinctly the horror and wonder on people’s faces as the
ship pulled into Bognor, Lord Ving bellowing drunkenly
from a porthole:
Come hither, come hither!
You shall get flesh, you shall get flesh!
Come sons of dogs, you shall get flesh!
You shall get flesh!
Baying freaks marched two by two down the gangplank as
the crowd swarmed around us, eager to nurse its morbid
curiosity. The shillings fell like rain.
5
Then came the thunder. It was the night before our first
world tour and we were en-route to our Russian début at
the Tsar’s request when disaster struck. You see, the Captain,
a real wiry ol’ barnacle of a man with a wooden leg and a
silver tongue gained in the battle of Pacocha, conceived a
lusty inclination for one of my brothers in qualms, another
top freak on the bill. Namely, Snake Hips Quincy, who it
should be noted in his heyday was the scourge of boys from
Dover to Durham. He and the Captain made carnal down
among the shrimping nets one chilly autumn night and, as
they went down, so too did the ship.
In time, I would hear various accounts of the incident
from the Carny folk. Foamy hands hurled us from the vessel like
pigs from a cannon! they would say, We nearly went rudder-bound to
Heaven! This was accompanied by angry ranting about Lord
Ving fleeing in the last rowboat, his only passengers – seven
sacks of coin. I even heard whispers of how, after hearing
of Ving’s greedy escape, some of the freaks butchered the
remaining Smooth-skins in a desperate rage and cast their
corpses into the ocean.
My own account, however, is somewhat different, for
my jar had been stashed down in the cargo hull with the
luggage. Feeling giddy and sick from the ever rumbling sea,
I was trying my best to get some sleep – where I now recall,
since the riot is ended, I endured a dream that could only
6
be described as...unsavoury:
A mutilated girl scuttles around me nursing an enormous egg in
her lone arm, caressing the shell with her pus-leaking stump...the sounds
and stink of sex and death ooze from some unseen place, like scenes from
Dante are being acted out in some invisible dimension. The girl catches
me looking at her.
‘What’s in the egg, Miss – is it breakfast time?’ I ask.
‘Oh, this is the pudding!’ says she. ‘This is the end, the living end!’
7
II
THE
H O N E Y MO O N
awoke distinctly soggy, with a face full of
seaweed and my jar caked in gravel and shells.
I was staring at the sea, white foam splitting as
waves rose and broke. A hazy light glimmered on the water
hurting my eyes, and all around was the piercing screech
of gulls. I looked about me and soon realised two things:
one, that my jar lay on its side on a rather desolate brown
beach, and two, some sort of beast was shuffling along it
towards me. It was wearing a tattered bathing costume,
and approached me uneasily upon four spindly legs.
Be these the sheep of Heaven? I thought, somewhat concussed.
Or be these the scuttling goats of Hades? As it neared, it became
horribly explicit that the creature had two heads, both
human-like, and they were chattering to each other as
pebbles crunched beneath their feet.
9
‘I tell you! He is made one with nature!’ snapped the
left head then, sticking a hand in his mouth, retrieved a set
of false teeth and rammed them between the lips of the
right head.
‘Hush and cobblers,’ the right head said. ‘Ninepence says
the bugger’s still breathing.’
The arm belonging to the left head snatched the teeth
back again. ‘Half a crown says he’s copped it, an’ I’ll bet
an extra tuppence the crabs are already picking at his bits.’
Right head grabbed the gnashers and clamped them
‘tween his gums. ‘Half a crown, eh? You’re on!’ and their
pace quickened. As the beast came upon me I could see now
what it was, or rather, what they were: twins – Siamese twins
joined forever at the hip in freakish union, and not just any
freaks, these were members of The Black Circus. They began
to pace around me, running their grubby fingers along the
side of the jar and muttering, the teeth jumping from gob
to gob as they did so. The left twin, on noticing I was alive,
rolled his bloodshot eyes, annoyed at losing the bet. The
right twin wrinkled his nose and cocked his head to one side,
examining me with eyes like crab apples.
‘How marvellous,’ he said at last, licking his lips. ‘What
a treat.’
* * *
10
The first months on the island were the very definition
of squalor. Things started well, with the Carny folk
proclaiming independence from the lands of the Smoothskins and declaring this muddy little rock a new country.
Crude oaths were bellowed from mangled tongues and
there was much merriment, camaraderie and the slapping
of thighs. Then we ran out of wine.
Most of us went temporarily blind from drinking sea
water. Then came the fever, a dreadful pox that made one’s
neck swell and redden till it looked like a rusty pipe. In
addition to this, you could rarely sleep more than an hour
without waking to find crabs picking at your lips.
In time, a vague sense of order was established and
the island was explored by those fit enough to walk. A
shambling pack of freaks left at dawn to roam the land
expecting a long and tiresome journey. They were back by
noon for the place was little more than two miles from end
to end, and half as wide. They were asked to make a list of
anything notable on their journey, and on their return the
list was but one word: rocks.
Next came the founding of the camp, the new capital
of this country of outcasts. Knowing nothing but the way
of the circus, the freaks plundered the wreckage of the
ship and arranged all the wagons they could salvage in a
semi-circle in the middle of the rock. At the centre, the
11
big top was erected. An enormous red tent, it took six
days to put up, what with some of the beams being lost
at sea and the horrendous wind licking at our backs. After
many long hours of labour it stood proudly by itself and
everyone huddled inside away from the cold. It was the
crown jewel of the camp, that tent, and there was a great
sense of achievement among us after such manic and bitter
toil. A brief period of glee ensued, largely due to a case of
Lord Ving’s gin that had been found bobbing around in a
rock pool.
Food was next on the agenda, for the supplies nabbed
from the ship soon dwindled despite an attempt to ration
them. I still have my suspicions that Cedric the dwarf was
stealing pork pies, for he seemed to grow plumper as the
others grew thin and gaunt. Even the strong woman looked
weak and withered.
There were three major problems – breakfast, lunch
and dinner. As the grumbling of their stomachs grew, the
outcasts began to hunt for their supper. Makeshift nets
were fashioned with old rope and ladies beard hair, and
cast into the deep in the hope of getting something scaly
to suckle on. Some launched stones at gulls then pounced
on the injured birds, though this was not a very successful
strategy. Occasionally a seal pup would be unlucky enough
to venture onto the shore, and would be clubbed with
12
driftwood and dragged back to camp if a freak was quick
enough on his heels.
The only entertainment during those first few months
was when a Smooth-skin, one of the boys from the ship’s
engine room, was washed up barely breathing onto the
shore. The Carny folk took great pleasure in capturing him
and making him, a Smooth-skin, perform for them for a
change. The clearly emaciated and sickly young lad was
made to do long degrading dances in little more than a rag
to an audience of baying and jabbering freaks, sometimes
for hours at a time. When they tired of the boy they buried
him up to his neck on the beach. Then they hurled stones
with their twisted limbs till the boy’s face looked like a plate
of liver and jam that had been trampled by horses. Some
tried to cook him afterwards by throwing the body on a fire
but they misjudged the time and the gut swelled in the heat
and burst with a loud pop, showering stomach acid over
the hungry mob.
Like the fishermen say: The waves have some mercy, but the
rocks have no mercy at all.
Trust me when I say this was the least of it. Those first days
are distant to me now, and seem almost like a honeymoon
compared with what was to come; the macabre monotonous
years that would nibble away at the clothes of the soul.
13
It will not be a simple task to tell you what else went on on
that island. Not an easy task like walking a hound, combing
one’s moustache or collecting apples for a double-chinned
aunt. This is a task with...complications, and all because of
one unwavering yet often denied truth:
We are prisoners of language.
Or, as a puppet once said to me in a dream: Sing boy? How
can ah sing when ma tongue’s made o’ wood!
Yes, we are prisoners of language. We’re virtually
surrounded by sharpened commas and prodded into that
drab fortress otherwise known as “making perfect sense”.
Indeed, this is fine for exchanges concerning the weather,
or for the idle prattle of butchers and politicians, but what
about certain experiences and processes concerning the other
– of the shadows behind the curtains of the world? In this
respect, my fellow apes, we live in poverty, a poverty of
language so acute, so dire, that we lack even the ability to
speak the very things that blaze in the forgotten corridors
of our own minds. My tongue feels like a broken clock,
now, all bitty and clicking and wooden, able to fulfil its
function only in splintered fragments. But for your sakes,
my fellow apes, I will claw the walls of this prison in
the hope of a glimpse behind the curtains of the world.
14
Perhaps for some of this, the tongue is too simple an
instrument. I sometimes feel this whole slobbering odyssey
would be better communicated via some hectic abstract
dance, with hooves for feet and electric knees.
I stress this so you Smooths may understand: we freaks
have our own way. As time went on we built something out
there on that desolate rock – not something of stone or
clay, but something of flesh and of mind. I cannot say it
was pretty, sometimes it was monstrous, but we were The
Black Circus, after all, and not a man among us was not clad
in mangled skin.
15
III
CA
F
H E ADROUS EL OS ES
LESS HOR
ll is quiet save the slosh of the sea and the
rumble of Cedric’s stomach. I swivel round in
my jar to watch the waves and spy the Kitten
mooching along, his form black against the morning sun. A
strange and lanky figure, they call him “Kitten” on account
of his explicitly hairy upper body, coupled with his tail. Some
mistake of a half limb that sprouted at the base of his spine,
no fingers or toes on it but something in-between. It flips and
flaps along behind him, and if he stood too near you and
turned too quickly his horrid mangy tail would slap you in the
belly. He sweats profusely and incessantly stutters and slurs.
‘D-D-Dirty Boy!’ he calls from a few metres up the
beach, pointing a scabby claw in my direction. ‘The
Brigadier wants to see you. It’s a-b-b-bout what happened
this morning.’
17
* * *
Cedric rolled my jar across the island with the Kitten
prancing along behind and kicking the poor dwarf ’s legs.
With little else to occupy him, he had lately made a hobby
of dwarf baiting. It was a vile sport and the Kitten was a
natural. I was turned over and over as the jar was rolled
across the muddy rock to the Brigadier’s office, being the
upturned wreck of a Carny wagon covered in moss and
dead starfish. The dwarf knocked thrice with his little hand,
then ran, afraid himself of entering. The Brigadier kicked
open the wagon door with a loud bang. He was completely
nude, save his hat.
‘PIGS’ TITS!’ he screamed. ‘I was having a lovely dream
about the war and somebody woke me, tap-tap-tapping
like an orphan on a sweet shop window.’ He looked at me.
‘Couldn’t have been you I suppose, you jar-sucking lump.’
He heaved my jar into the wagon and slammed the door.
Inside was dark, the only light being that which streamed
through the holes in the wall where the termites had feasted.
I could hear the Brigadier wheezing.
‘Ah! Dirty Boy. Drink?’ he said, and began frantically
stirring some slop in a glass. His voice was the most gravelly
I’d ever heard, sounding more like a traction engine stuck in
a ditch than a man.
18
‘No, sir. Thank you, sir,’ I said. As my eyes adjusted
to the dark I saw he was stirring his drink with a dried
cuttlefish. He took a clumsy swig, losing half the brew in
his beard through some crack in the glass.
‘Dullards, scoundrels and hen lickers all!’ he shouted.
‘My kingdom and my kidney for an un-fractured glass.’ He
squeezed and wrung his beard like a washerwoman’s cloth,
salvaging a few drops. The drink was known as Velch – some
vulgar tasting syrup made by crudely fermenting a plant
that looked something like stinging nettles crossed with
rhubarb, one of the few things growing on the rock. Velch
was thick, white and pungent, like milk left out in the sun.
It seemed to make the drinker more manic, the plant no
doubt containing some intoxicant. It made the Brigadier
infinitely more erratic – under its influence he was often
transformed from eccentric to tyrant, culminating on more
than one occasion with the whipping of dwarves. Some say
he once garrotted a seal with a mandolin string after a dozen
of the brews; others say the seal was already dead and he just
jumped up and down on its carcass for an entire afternoon.
Bad news for the seal in either case, though it wouldn’t be
the last poor creature to suffer such addled wrath.
The Brigadier ran the show since Lord Ving had
abandoned us. His two greatest pleasures in life were
tobacco and guns; on this rock he was deprived of both
19
and he took it out on us all mercilessly. Behind him lay a
string of unsuccessful business ventures from his days in
North Africa. He had run a failed shoe-shine boy racket
in Casablanca, was a failed lead smuggler in Tunis and a
failed pimp in Tripoli. All his life he had yearned for a
role in the military but they wouldn’t let him serve, what
with his withered hand. He eventually slid into the Carny
scene as little more than Ving’s glorified tea boy, but never
lost his military pretences. Now, senile with age and rotten
with uncountable years on this rock, the lust for military
order consumed him, and he commanded over the others
as if they were some last twisted battalion defending some
insane ugly empire.
‘I must confess, my mood has more semblance to a
lemon than usual,’ he said.
‘Sour?’
‘Precisely, Dirty Boy. You’re not daft, even if you are a
jar-dwelling pug. But somebody is daft, oh yes, very daft
indeed.’ He stood and paced towards me. ‘This morning, as
you well know, every freak on the rock woke up with cold
heads on account of finding themselves the better half of
bald. Someone has been cutting our hair in the night, boy!
Whoever the twilight barber is, he certainly doesn’t possess
the finesse or indeed the equipment to chop evenly, his tool
of choice was almost certainly the rusty ol’ cleaver a bearded
20
lady found in a puddle at dawn. The rest of the Carny is
perturbed in the extreme by this hairy mystery, myself
included. It is rather cold, after all.’
‘One of the bearded ladies seemed rather happy with her
new moustache,’ I said, trying to lighten the mood.
‘Oh hush and tripe!’ the Brigadier bellowed, stamping
his foot so hard the wagon shook and my jar rocked from
side to side. ‘This is not the only mystery, boy. I presume it
has not escaped your beady little peepers that I am wearing
my second favourite hat today?’ He spoke the truth, it was
his custom to wear a fez when he talked filthy business to
those unfortunate enough to be invited into his wagon,
yet to any eyes prowling round his quarters today it was
explicitly absent. In its place, a poor second: the big black
tri-cornered thing with holes in it, usually reserved for the
Brigadier’s inspection of a freshly dug grave/latrine. ‘Do
you know where I acquired that fez, boy? Guess!’ He pressed
his haggard face against the side of my jar.
‘Moroc-’
‘Basingstoke! Eighteen Eighty-Nine. Stuffed up
a chimney it was, along with two taxidermied magpies.
Complete the ditty: one for sorrow, two for…?’
‘…joy?’
‘Exactly, Dirty Boy, you’re not just a glass-bound grub
after all. And let me tell you, that ditty was prophetic: the
21
very next day after I found that hat I engaged in coitus
with two milk maids.’ There was a silence as he fingered his
beard and stared out at the sea through a hole in the wall.
‘And now some vile little jockstrap has taken it! Buggering
barnacles boy, that fez must be found.’ He promptly
stood up, paced three times around the wagon and back
towards me, peering down into the jar and piercing
my very soul with his gaze. ‘It must be found, do you
understand boy?’
‘Yes, sir. Score forty yes, sir.’
‘Good.’ He smiled a smile that looked more like a
broken dinner plate. ‘You know, if they’d let me serve I
think I’d have joined a Highland regiment. The kilt is an
unrivalled garment for fornication and diarrhoea. I say, you
ever rub up against a black booooy?’ His voice trailed off
and was annexed by the wind. He always got like this after
too much velch.
‘I never rubbed up against any kind of boy, sir. It’s unChristian.’
‘Huh, that never stopped a priest. I tell you, when I
was in the cadets it was positively mandatory. Now I’m
straighter than the King of England, straighter in fact, but
a cadet has his duties. If you weren’t pickled in that jar I’d
get ol’ Kitten to teach you some tricks – basic training, boy.
Kitten would show you things so nasty you won’t ever be
22
appalled by anything ever again. You’d be prepared in every
sense for the savageries of the world, and like the scouts
say, always be prepared. An army marches on its balls, after
all.’ He fumbled with his beard as he walked back across
the wagon and perched on his desk. ‘Lord, how I miss my
Tripoli years... We must get off this beastly little rock, me
lad. What is the progress on Contraption C?’
Contraption C was the rusty thing Cedric was working
on, an alleged means of getting off the island. Contraption
A failed to sail successfully and was responsible for the
drowning of a cigar-smoking monkey. Contraption B was
aborted and set ablaze to keep warm some harsh winter’s
night about three years ago. Since then, apparently, there had
been intermittent work on Contraption C, though in truth it
was little more than some rusty art piece, the Brigadier used
it as one of his methods of control. As long as the others
believed there was effort being made to get off the island,
they went along with his regime. I noticed early on that the
plans for the thing were nonsense, the Brigadier consistently
amended the design, delaying building indefinitely. I had a
notion he did not in fact want to leave the island, probably
because it was the only place he could exercise his military
pretensions without fear of retribution.
‘Contraption C? Oh, fine,’ I replied.
‘Good.’ He took a shot of velch. His moustache
23
twitched. ‘You understand why I want you to find my most
cherished of garments, Dirty Boy? My lucky red beast, my
filthy scarlet crown, no less?’
I thought for a moment. ‘You trust me, sir?’
‘Goat piss, do I!’ he spat. ‘I trust nobody in this carousel
of headless horses. But I know it couldn’t have been you
because your sneaky little thumbs are confined to glass.
That’s all, Dirty Boy, you’d do well to remember it. I have
my suspicions as to who the fez fingerer could be, though,
oh yes.’ He began rubbing his knees excitedly. ‘You’ve heard
the news?’
‘The news, sir?’
‘Two Smiles Madison, that juttering, sputtering, doubletongued whelk of a man, has been missing all morning. He
was last seen around midnight, jangling about the rock,
falling over himself and generally behaving like a boar in a
brothel. As a…neutral party, I would like you to investigate
his whereabouts and the cause of his suspicious mirth. I
will of course make it worth your while.’ He was referring
to extra food rations: first pick of the eels. ‘Needless to say,
our intelligence suggests he also has something to do with
this.’ He lifted the brim of his tatty hat to reveal something
on his head that resembled a lop sided bouffant; it was so
askew, really, a blind yak with learning difficulties could
have been a better barber.
24
‘Yes Brigadier, sir, I’ll see if Two Smiles is planning to
open a salon.’
‘Good boy. And I must emphasise, report anything
unusual. Intelligence from the battlefield is vital, indeed
necessary, if there is to be no obstruction of order.
So report anything,’ – he stressed it again, with a rise of
one bushy brow –‘that you witness truthfully, so I may
personally see to it that the morals and values of the
Empire remain in place, even in this beastly hole. You have
my word I shall preserve order at all costs and continue my
legacy as a bastion of justice and piety. And may the devil
himself sodomise me with his gargantuan flaming percy if
it isn’t so.’ The Brigadier filled another flagon with velch,
staring maniacally and fingering his chest hair with his
manky hand. ‘Now fuck off.’
25