Vile Jelly
DUKE OF CORNWALL, UPON THE PLUCKING OUT OF GLOUCESTER’S EYES, KING LEAR
When we were children, our parents warned us to stay off the heath after sundown.
We didn’t know what went on there, or why our fathers might so often be seen breaking their own rule—we only knew that we would be punished if we transgressed.
Ten lashes across the knees with a gorse branch; an hour mucking out the pigs with our bare hands. The heath was forbidden land.
None of this stopped us from trying, of course.
We would dare each other to run down the heath path as the sun dipped, swap stories of our own brave trespasses.
The heath squatted on the land and laughed at us, flat and sandy, its tufts of grass and heather sprouting like the hair in our pubescent armpits.
Mocking us with its open spaces: there is nothing to fear here, is there?
Maybe our parents knew we would like it more there than in our squalid cottages.
Maybe they worried we wouldn’t come home.
Looking back, they were right. The heath was no place for children; no place for any man, if we’re honest, although a good few ply their trade there, under cover of darkness. Because that’s when the heath wakens, truly. When the sun sleeps and the light bleeds out of the world—then, it comes alive.
We should have listened to our parents.
* * *
Walter cries as he cleans. We had both missed the hurly-burly, our duke laid low—in his own castle, no less.
We had duties in the stables, and when we returned Walter had looked about the room with horror writ on his face.
Blood sprayed up the walls, piss on the floor.
Gloucester himself, our lord and master, a makeshift poultice of egg whites pressed to the weeping holes where his eyes should have been.
Walter couldn’t restrain a cry then, in fear more than sympathy.
I know where his thoughts resided: if this might happen to Gloucester, where will our futures lie?
“Stop your fretting,” I tell him, doing my best to take charge of the mess we are left in. “Get this place clean, we can worry about the rest later. Nothing is right here. Do your work and all might still turn out for the best.”
I see the tears crawl wet like snail-slime down his cheeks. He’s shocked, and scared, and I shouldn’t have spoken so harshly.
“Here.” I take the mop from him, ease it from his grip as others lead the duke away to rest. “I’ll finish this. See if they need a hand in the kitchens, or on the walls. I doubt tonight’s mischief is done yet.”
But still he stays, struck dumb by the violence that has visited our house. He watches as I push the mop into the corner, across the hearth, under the chairs. The piss is getting old already and the entire room stinks like soured wine. It reeks like another man’s fear.
I find it as I tidy. I push the mop beneath the last chair and it rolls out, dusty and smeared with our lord’s blood. Walter vomits in the corner of the room. I shall have to mop that up too , I think.
“Is that what I think it is?” he whispers, his bile-wet fingers half covering his mouth.
“Never mind that,” I say. “Why aren’t you at the kitchens already? Clean yourself up while you’re at it, won’t you. We still have standards.”
As he leaves, I pick up the eyeball between thumb and finger, and slide it carefully into my pocket. I know exactly where to take it.
* * *
It wasn’t on the heath that I first met Cleeve.
At least, I don’t believe it was. In the dark of night it’s sometimes hard to know exactly who you meet there, or whether they even exist in the daylight world.
But the first time I know of—the time I remember—he was sat on a wall outside the village, a sackcloth hood pulled up so far that I couldn’t see his face.
I would learn later that he rarely showed himself in daylight; when he did, he always hid his features from sight.
I can’t say I blame him, knowing what I do.
People are quick to judge around here, even at the best of times; and these times are far from good.
As I passed, he lifted his hand, and I thought I saw a lizard slither from his sleeve into a crevice in the rocks.
“Wait,” he said, his voice wet and broken, like water running over pebbles. “I need directions. Do you know a John Bayley around these parts?”
Naturally I knew old Brownbeard Bayley, we all did. I said as much.
“Can you point me there? I can make my own way, but the directions I have are vague. A yellow door? A discarded wagon wheel?”
I nodded. “You won’t miss it. Take a left here, then follow the street round. Brownbeard is there, behind the yellow door, as you said. Expecting you, is he?”
The hood moved, in what might have been a nod. “He has something to sell me.”
It was a couple of days later that I was told of Brownbeard’s daughter passing, and I figured I must have misunderstood.
Surely this stranger was there to sell him a coffin, or a burial plot—for what could Bayley have been selling on the day his child died?
Still, I knew what I had heard. I recalled watching the strange figure limp away down the road.
That was Cleeve. I’d come to know him better than I liked.
* * *
Night has already fallen by the time I leave the castle.
There is so much to do, with the master laid low and the country in turmoil.
Old Lear cast out by his daughters; every dark thing slinking from its corner as Nature turns her back.
The gates are bolted and I have to call in a favor to be let out at all.
They tell me to hurry and I do not wish otherwise.
It doesn’t take long to reach the edge of the heath. From the hinterland I can hear occasional rustles and yelps in the blackness. Stumbling, I push past the gorse, its slender needles scratching at me unseen. Something moves beneath a bush and scuttles away into the night.
The prize is wrapped in bandages now, cleaned as best I could manage, teasing out the specks of grit with the tip of my little finger.
Even divorced from its socket, Gloucester’s eyeball is deserving of our respect.
The cord still dangles from the back, thick like plaited string, where Regan ripped it from his face.
The pupil has glazed over with a milky film.
It smells a little like day-old fish, or soured vomit.
When the breeze blows the wrong way, the stench makes me gag.
I know where I’m going. Cleeve has his patch, same as they all do.
If he were elsewhere then none of his clients would find him; nobody would dare try to oust him, for fear of the war that would follow.
As wild as it looks out here, far from the light of the castle, there is an equilibrium to be maintained.
Upset that balance and what comes after may be even worse.
I do my best to ignore the noises as I follow the sandy path between mounds of grass and sun-bleached heather.
I do not turn my head when somebody shouts nearby, a guttural word that I don’t recognize but which turns my skin to gooseflesh.
I do not question whether the scream I hear soon after is one of pleasure or pain.
Instead, I stay true to my path, knowing I am safest within Cleeve’s domain—for whatever he is, he is a businessman, and what I bring is too precious for him to allow any intervention.
This thing I have found is more valuable than gold, in the right hands. This orb is worth a kingdom.
He’s there as I push forward through more gorse, its thorns snagging my sleeves.
He’s under his tree, its trunk bent like a wizened giant, branches spread, leafless and ancient.
I can see the shapeless hood, hear him shuffling to stand.
He is taller than I remember, although that may be a trick of the dark.
“You have something for me,” he says. His hand thrusts out from beneath his cloak. “Let me see.”
* * *
My mother died on Samhain, two years to the day since my father passed.
She lived with me still; I found her when I returned from work at the castle that night.
Bent double as if someone had kicked her in the gut, her body already stiffening.
I shed a tear for her then, but I’ll confess to the relief too.
They had been hard, these last few months, her mind no longer what it was as she slipped from the world.
My sadness was leavened by the lifting of a burden.
I wish I could say she looked at peace, but the opposite was true. Her eyes were wide and the fear had crystalized within them, the knowledge that this was the end of everything. I don’t know what she saw in those final moments, but it had filled her with terror.
Cleeve’s note was slipped under the door that same night.
There were precise instructions, written in brown ink the color of rust: what he wanted, where to bring it.
A price he would pay if I did as he asked.
None of us are wealthy, so I could not say no.
If my mother’s death meant I could eat for the next month, then it had not been for nothing.
We met under the same tree as that first time.
I could barely breathe for fear of whatever lurked in the dark, and I wondered if my time had come too.
Maybe Mother’s warnings about the heath had been justified, and I would be the poor soul who dies at the end of a morality tale, too stupid and mean to heed the advice he’s been given.
An example for all the children who might come here in the future.
Cleeve took care of me, though. I passed him the package, tied up in cloth I had torn from her dress, and he unwrapped it slowly and patiently while I waited.
Weighing them in one hand, he held her eyes up to the moonlight.
I’d had no implement to extract them, had made do with a blunt spoon; one was red from the trauma, its insides filled with blood.
“I can take these,” he told me, that unnatural voice of his hard to understand above the wind. “The price is as I stated. You will speak to no one of our transaction, or I shall come and retrieve my payment any way I choose. Is this acceptable?”
What else could I say? There was no returning my mother’s eyes whence they came. I had no use for them.
His hood shifted, and his hand reached inside his cloak for a purse.
“Our business is done.”
* * *
Cleeve doesn’t need me to unwrap the bandages for him. News travels fast on the heath, doubly so in troubled times. He knows of Regan’s treachery, and the price Gloucester has paid. He knows what I bring.
This time the purse he retrieves from his cloak is four, maybe five times the size of the one I received before.
I don’t count it in front of him but snatch it greedily; almost as greedily as he snatches the package from me.
There’s a waft of that sour stench again, although I’m unsure whether it comes from the eyeball or Cleeve. He cradles it in his palm like a pearl.
“This is good,” he says, something like pleasure in his voice. “You’ll find the payment is fair. Leave me now. Speak of this to no one.”
A choking noise comes from within the hood, and I think he may be laughing.
As I turn to go, I see him lift the sacking from his head and unveil the ruined mess of his face: his jawbone broken and fixed half open, the cheeks seared with burns like melted candle wax.
Nobody knows how he got them, but there are rumors that he was driven from his last home, set upon by those who did not appreciate his trade.
That he barely escaped with his life, and maybe not even that.
I turn away in disgust, but not before I see his hand lift to his mouth and that slimy pearl slide between rotted teeth, destined only to see darkness for ever more. I cannot return to the castle quick enough.
* * *
There is no ending to this story. We are not in a morality tale, you and I. There is no lesson to learn, no comfort in the sorting of right from wrong, no divine justice holding the scales. All is chaos here as the land weeps. We are all living on the heath now.
I have not heard from Cleeve since that night.
Some say he has vanished from our land; others that his bones are worm food beneath its sandy soil.
A few say that he obtained something which lifted him beyond us mere mortals, and that he now sits on a throne, looking down on us as we scurry like termites.
I tend to believe these people most of all.
One day, I know, there will be another note pushed beneath my door, with a time and a place written in rust. Because we made a pact, Cleeve and I; we are bound together in ways that I wish I could unpick.
And when my own story reaches its end, as all stories must, he will be waiting there with outstretched hand.