*****
The Critics
Rhys Hughes
When I began reading fiction many years ago I soon came to the conclusion that I didn’t like stories in which the narrator was a writer. And I vowed that if I ever became a writer myself I would never tell a story from the viewpoint of a writer. Now it seems I am breaking my pledge. I became a writer and I am the narrator of the following tale. I offer my apologies.
But I had no choice really and it isn’t my fault. I had been visiting a friend in his lonely old house outside the town, as I did once a month, in order to drink wine and discuss literature. The hours passed, it grew late, and by the time I said goodbye it was long after midnight. I left his house and set off for home, a walk through a dense forest down a narrow path.
The moon had not yet risen and I could see very little. I wasn’t concerned. I had walked this route many times in the murk and in fact the path glimmered sufficiently for me to see my way. I had to walk more slowly than I might have wished, but I was in no danger of straying off and losing myself among all the trees. It was just a night hike, a dark stroll.
I should have taken an electric torch with me, but I am a writer, as I have already said, and not very practical. I am a dreamer, an idealist, and I forgot to carry a source of illumination. No matter! I just had to keep going and I would end up back in the town. It would have been childish and churlish of me to be anxious at this point. Nothing was wrong.
After I had been walking for about fifteen minutes, I saw a faint light just ahead and to the side and this surprised me. I did wonder if I had mistimed the rising of the moon, but then the light flickered and I realised it was a flame and nothing celestial. I increased my pace and the sharp crackling of wood became audible. Now I was worried that this fire might spread and burn the entire forest down and so I decided to tackle it myself.
I supposed that someone had lit a cooking fire earlier and failed to properly extinguish it and the embers had burst into renewed flames. It never occurred to me that it might not be an unattended blaze. I quickly left the path at an oblique angle and made for the source of the flicker.
Threading between the trunks of trees, I soon saw that the fire was located in the exact centre of a circular clearing, a glade like a small arena, and when I reached the edge of the ring I stopped and held my breath and chills ran up and down my spine in a manner that sounds like an awful cliché now but didn’t feel like one back then. The glade was occupied!
And occupied by such strange figures too: figures dressed in hooded robes, thirteen of them, arranged in a circle around the fire, insane monks from another age, imposing and repulsive at the same time. They had hunched shoulders and were more like goblins than human beings.
They were chanting, but in an unnaturally soft manner, with a cadence so remote from legitimate musicality that it was no wonder I hadn’t registered the sound while approaching them. The chills on my spine seemed to flee in panic from my skin’s surface, seeking refuge deep inside me, burrowing to the core of my numb bones, petrifying the marrow there.
But that’s just a metaphor, of course, for the chills weren’t living beings, as I’m sure you already know, and I was much more worried about the evil monks in the clearing, who weren’t symbolic at all but very real, and I knew they were malign because they radiated a cruel energy.
I saw nothing of their faces and couldn’t discern their expressions and felt repulsed by the very idea of peering into those hoods. The chanting was all the time increasing in volume and tempo and it became clear it was part of a ritual of occult significance. I wanted to fall to my knees and cry out, but my knees in a rare display of fortitude refused to bend.
From the forest on the far side of the clearing, directly opposite me, a new arrival entered the circle. This figure also wore a hooded robe, but it was silver instead of black and covered in painted eyes. Now the chanting rose in pitch as he held high the large axe he gripped in both hands. It was a black blade of iron with a crudely fashioned shaft of stout oak.
At last I was able to decipher some of the words of the chant. They were so unexpected in the context of the scene that I wondered if my ears had stopped working properly. “Poor use of metaphor,” they sang, followed by “Too much reliance on coincidence,” and “Feeble characterisation”, just three of the phrases I remember clearly. This couldn’t be right! I shook my head to settle my brains in a more favourable position. I was baffled.
The silver monk with the axe shouted louder than the others and I felt some perverse relief as he did so, for his words were more conventionally diabolical, a litany of awful names, a list of foul powers, the major demons of black magic, and his behaviour was thus rather more acceptable to me. I heard the evil names Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Belphegor, Astaroth, and others. But once he concluded this recital, the weirder song of the lesser monks again dominated the glade and the urge to turn and flee grew stronger within me. Why I remained where I was has been a dismal mystery to me ever since.
Morbid fascination or ossification might explain my lack of movement but I don’t truly believe either of these options was responsible for my negligence in not making my escape. I simply don’t know what kept me there as the chanting washed my ears in filthy cascades of rising and falling volume. “Inept pacing,” came the drone, “Striving for an unreachable effect,” and “Incompetent usage of the mechanisms of suspense,” then my entire body began to throb like a devilish drum’s membrane in excruciating response.
But this was only the beginning of the nightmare. The silver monk shuffled forward until he was close to the fire. The axe was high above his head and with a hideous laugh he opened his jaws wide. The middle of his robe parted like two curtains and a human shape was revealed behind the rippling cloth. But it wasn’t his own body. It was an independent figure.
Yes, it was quite a separate character, a naked man who stumbled forward, his eyes blinking, and steadied himself against one of the jutting logs of the fire, recoiling with a yowl of astonished pain as he burned his hand. He was bruised and battered and terror had turned his eyes into pools of doom. His teeth began chattering and his knees knocked together.
The silver monk remained standing, his robe parted, and now I saw he was hideously thin, so lacking in substance that he resembled one of the stick insects we see in glass cases at the zoo. It unsettled me that such limbs had the strength to carry an iron axe of that ponderous size.
The monks in black, still chanting, now moved as a tightly disciplined unit, stooping low to pick up rocks that were concealed in the grass, and they rapidly used these to erect an improvised but symmetrical altar over the fire, with a flat stone of great length as the sacrificial slab.
“Stilted dialogue,” and “Premature denouement,” were the phrases emitted by their concealed mouths as they seized the naked man and lifted him up. With greater concentration I studied the victim’s face and felt shock. It was my friend, the one who lived in the lonely old house, whom I visited once a month to drink wine and debate literature. My poor friend.
Why was he here? How had these monks managed to snatch him and bring him to the clearing before I had arrived here? There was magic involved, yes, an abuse of the powers of the dark underbelly of the cosmos. But why pick on this kind fellow? He was a harmless individual.
All he ever did was drink wine and attempt to write a book now and again. But that was the answer! The shudders which had undulated me during the ritual became more powerful. I also wrote books now and again. Therefore I was also in danger! As I tried to break away from the spell of this place, I heard the clunk of the axe as it fell and chopped off his right arm, finishing with a chime and a flurry of sparks as it struck the stone below.
He screamed but the monks were louder and drowned him out. “Mawkish sentiments in the later chapters,” they droned, and “A plethora of clichés for the entire duration of the text.” Which of his books were they talking about? Once again the axe was lifted high in order to descend, and now it was his left leg that was sent flying from his body. “Tedious exposition,” boomed the monks, as the limb landed in the undergrowth. “Unoriginal to an extreme degree,” they added as an accompanying remark to the mutilation.
It was clear that they intended to grant him no mercy during the ordeal. As the sacrifice proceeded, with such utterances as “Passive voice” and “Too many adjectives”, the thin monk in silver performed a peculiar dance. His hood was a tunnel of darkness and the twin lights in its depths rotated around each other. If I hadn’t known better, I might have assumed he was a robot only pretending to be a monk. But in fact he was a sinister sorcerer.
My friend had his left arm and right leg removed with the blade and as the silver monk raised the axe a fifth time, I assumed this final blow would put the unfortunate fellow out of his misery, removing his head from his neck. But these monks were worse than murderers. The blade removed only the top of his skull, revealing his pulsating brain but leaving him alive. The black monks pointed to areas of the exposed organ with heinous glee.
“Awkward syntax,” they roared, and “Split infinitives,” as if they could see the parts of his brain responsible for those errors. Some of them even poked the grey matter with their fingers. My friend continued to scream but his voice was becoming feebler. I shifted my weight abruptly and a stick snapped with a loud report under my foot, exactly like a gunshot. All the hoods turned slowly to regard me. “An ungrammatical interloper!” shrieked the black monks, while the silver monk bellowed the names of demons.
The web of magic fell in tatters around me and I jerked free of the spell. In the blink of an eye, I had turned and was running out of the forest. I was dimly aware that the monks were pursuing me but terror accelerated my escape to the velocity of the wind. I leapt obstacles like a young deer, weaved through trees, a series of electric jolts blazing through my muscles. Never had I run so fast, with such grace and fluidity! I was a champion.
I joined the path and found myself hurtling back towards the house of my friend. It was the only refuge available. I flung open the front door and slammed it behind me, bolting it securely. Then I panted until I had caught my breath. For anxious minutes I stood near the window, watching for the monks, but the night remained empty. Had they abandoned the chase? I fumbled for the light switch. The interior of the house was in disarray: furniture knocked over, the wallpaper shredded by scratch marks, the bannister splintered. My friend had certainly put up a struggle when the monks came for him.
I climbed upstairs and decided to make my stand in a bedroom, barricading the entrance with the bed and wardrobes piled on top of each other. How could a coven of mad monks break through that? In the morning I felt I would be safer but I couldn’t say exactly why. There was no telephone in the house. My friend had always been an old-fashioned sort, one who shunned most of the trappings of the modern world, and this also explains why his large house was filled with antique clutter and useless junk. I would hunker down and wait for morning and not make any escape attempt before daylight.
The house itself was eerie, I must admit, and although I was grateful to be inside it, rather than outside, the climb up the gently curving staircase to the first landing was unpleasant. The electric lights were dim, the shadows thick and the creaking loud. But I heard no sound of monks trying to gain entry. No blows of an axe against the front door, no smashing of the windows with altar stones, and I was almost ready to heave a sigh of relief.
Then I reached the landing and at the exact same instant all the lights died. The moon through the windows provided the only illumination. I vacated the landing and groped my way down a corridor. I knew that a bedroom stood at the end of this passage. As I stumbled in the gloom, my outstretched hands touched something soft and furry, an object pernicious and thin, and a mirthless laugh of utter madness nearly melted my eardrums.
I blinked rapidly, straining to see the peril. Two eyes, horribly alien lights like dying stars revolving slowly around each other, confronted me. The silver monk himself! Then his voice scoured me. “You dabble in fiction too, do you not? No point denying it, my foolish friend.”
“I know exactly what you are!” I screeched, and I somehow swooped past his abnormal body and reached the bedroom door. I turned the handle but it was locked. I rattled the handle, hoping that the ancient lock would break. The silver monk turned and began gliding towards me. His axe was a shadow even darker than the night. I cried, “You are critics! That’s what you are! You are the critics! You have come from hell to criticise us all!”
The handle turned, the door gradually began to swing inwards. It was being opened from within. The silver monk now said, “You are wrong about that, dear chap, quite wrong. We aren’t critics. We are far lower than that. One day, with a good deal of hard work, we may aspire to become critics. But at the moment we are reviewers. Nothing worse. The critics you allude to are vastly more horrible than we are. You will soon learn this lesson!”
He was enjoying my terror and despair and he savoured it as my mutilated friend who had owned this house had once savoured wine and books. The eyes on his robe, although mere decorations, blinked rapidly. “Reviewers,” he added with a smirk, “only deal with one work at a time. They say what they don’t like about an individual book. But critics have theories. They interpret books while using some academic system as justification. Reviewers are emotional, critics are intellectual. We are as frightened of critics as you are of us. And that makes perfect sense. Yes, we are only reviewers.”
And with the word ‘reviewers’ still blistering my ears, he pushed me with great force through the opening door. I tumbled into the bedroom. The door shut behind me and was bolted. My eyes were tightly closed. I opened them, without a doubt the biggest mistake I have ever made. The word ‘critics’ replaced all the phrases uttered by the silver and black monks and my ears screamed. And yes, it is possible for ears to scream under the most extreme conditions. Surrounded by critics, I had no chance. Neither would you.
I died, of course, and if you are wondering how I’m able to tell this present story, I might reply that I am a ghostwriter, but that isn’t true. Even ghostwriters have all their molecules gathered into one mass, into a recognisable form. I was not so lucky. My body was reduced to powder and blended with the juice of my soul, and now I completely cover the four walls and ceiling of my prison in thin layers of glossy torment. I don’t wish to paint a rosy picture of my afterlife, but the room has been decorated pinkly with me.
