From the journals of Poet Anon on the lost glory of Whelm.
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I remember well the days when the Kaputin family first came to the old town of Whelm. I was working in The March, the old art and culture house on Buchan Hill, when, at a staff meeting, we were introduced to the new Animateur of Music, Llanna Kaputin. As we sat in the round and chorused her with cheerful greetings and welcomes, her withered face stretched into a rictus of a smile, the sort of politely forced grimace that dismisses a room full of bright spirits as if they were cockroaches on borrowed time. Which of course, with her coming to Whelm, we were.
Everyone was suddenly quiet, and in no small order troubled by that woman. The Director spoke urgently to fill an awkward silence, embarrassed. He tried to reassure us with testimonies of her past triumphs in the world of the arts, and I think he knew he failed. I doubted her credentials immediately and ever after. Mary Bligh, sitting next to me, remarked under her breath that Madame Kaputin had the most frightening visage she had ever set eyes on. Lucky Jim, sat on the other side of Mary, sniggered. I held my silence for fear.
Her bony fingers, overlong to my mind and sharply tapered, tensed and flexed in her lap, her tight smile faded like a pale sun disappearing behind heavy cloud. I thought she had the hands of a midnight strangler. When she met my eye (I was fearful she might turn me to stone, that medusan interloper) there was nothing. A great nothingness. The eyes of a cold dead herring lying on ice at the fish market.
How did this skeletal woman, sort of thin and stretched, wangle her way into our vibrant community? What did she want with us? She passed her herring-gaze from me to Mary, and from Mary to Lucky Jim. I felt the passage of a silent curse along the line. She must be some kind of harpy, I thought. I wouldn’t be surprised to find she’d arrived in an obsidian carriage pulled by six black warhorses in the hour before dawn. Jim told me later that he had a near-unquenchable thirst to discover if, as he suspected, her collar bones and the angles of her hips were as sharp as razors. “She has more than one set of teeth,” he said. “And friends in dark places,” he said. “And a collection of little childrens shoes behind a secret panel in her closet.”
I feared for my soul. A wind of change, not yet rancid but already chill, rattled at the windows of The March House. The waking dead had come to Whelm.
