4. Better that I be deprived of the “Festival” as practiced here — it resembles the real Festival only in the way a soggy cupcake resembles a wedding cake.
5. Alas, young squidologists, you are unlikely to see a woman in the places you’ll be traipsing through in your waterproof boots. Only a female squidologist will truly understand you — and they are few and far between; not every Furness finds his Leepin. You may find some comfort in documenting the sensual activities of the female King Squid, but danger lies therein as well.
6. Issues of Festival violence and the involvement of Ambergris’ subterranean inhabitants, the gray caps, lie outside of this section’s purview and therefore I have chosen to ignore such unpleasantries for the moment.
7. See: Cane, Albert.
8. At least at the level of drought-like fact, one may make statements about the history of the Festival that, while boring, could be sworn to before a board of inquiry.
9. As do, to be brutally honest, half of Ambergris’ current stuporstitions, including raw, chopped-up rabbit as a cure for eating poison mushrooms and the enchanting thought that lying in a pool of blood extracted from deer livers will bring back the dead. Believe me, if I thought it worked, I would have tried it first. (See: Stindle, Bernard.) At least the modern welt that is psychotherapy cannot be laid at the Dogghe’s door.
10. Written by a madman, if you can believe that, and yet still read today.
11. Unlike many human beings. Some, like my mother, could not stop preying off the local help.
12. Squid baiting has never been a popular sport.
13. These silent, solitary men must be of the sternest and calmest disposition while pursuing their work.
Many, in fact, left the employ of the squid mills to become solo squid hunters, or “squidquellers,” and were often found in remote parts of the River Moth, waiting patiently on their squilts for the slightest ripple of squid.
14. My mother was a devout Truffidian. My father and I would spend an hour at night with her, praying.
Although I did not, as a rule, get to go out — as now as then — mother did insist we go to church: that stale and perfunctory place where all the cattle sit like people in the pews.
15. I feel a great (s)urge, suddenly, to wax autobiographical, but shall contain the impulse until once again among my ancestral books. (Is this the “breakthrough” in my personal development long promised by the resident gods? Strange. It feels more like a death knell. I sense a great abyss opening up beneath me, a vein of deep water not previously negotiated by fish or squid.)
IV
DIVULGING AN ACCURATE SCIENTIFIC THEORY THAT EXPLAINS A NUMBER OF OTHERWISE PUZZLING THINGS THAT HAVE LONG PREYED UPON THE MIND OF THIS WRITER (AND A VISION)
THE THEORY
NOW, AS WE COME TO THE CRUCIAL POINT, I SHALL BEGIN TO shed my horrible verbosity as if it were just my human skin. My words, I promise, shall become sure and fleet, as if my feet were different than those a poet knows (this squidologist’s fleeting fancy). I realize that I have, for the most part, documented the ridiculous theories of others in hopes of dissuading the reader from holding credence in them. However, I beg for the reader’s indulgence and endurance as I expound upon my own, scientifically-based theory about the King Squid, derived from my ceaseless and exhaustive study of this fascinating creature, both in its natural state and flatly two-dimensional within the pages of various books. (I have tried to hold back and speak only of these matters at the end, when you might be most receptive to what could, in the light of day that is the beginning of an essay rather than the dusk at the end, appear absurd. But now I am duty-bound to discuss it.) Preamble is overrated: In short, I believe that the King Squid serves as host for the so-called King Fungus cultivated by the gray caps — the purple wedge of evil that so proliferated across the city’s streets and dwellings prior to the murder we call The Silence. I do not suggest, as some have, that the gray caps’
spores alone cause the violence and disorientation that is the Festival. No, the truth is more insidious and invasive, dear reader. The unique symbiosis between fungi and squid is the reason why we remain in subconscious thrall to the gray caps. We should not eat the flesh of the squid, for it has been contaminated by the fungus. (I say this having momentarily set aside my mantle as squid advocate.) Or, more specifically, the fungus incubating within the flesh of the squid. The fungus in the squid.
The concept may be difficult for the layperson to understand, or to accept, but I base it on very sound invertebrate intuition. Squidologists, for example, have long wondered how the King Squid attains the raw intensities of red and green that make it burn with light under the stress of hunger or courtship — intensities impossible in any other squid, and strangely akin to the lights seen over landbound Alfar directly prior to the mass murder of The Silence. Not to mention the evidence of intelligence, landward jaunts, and messages sent to squidologists writ in pulsing skin.
As all of these developments have occurred over the past 100 years, I believe it is only recently that the gray caps have fed a special fungus to the squid, using their submerged metal boats. These feedings have increased the squid’s color intensity and its ingenuity, while simultaneously contaminating the meat in such a way as to make Ambergrisians more susceptible to the gray caps’ spores during the (ironically-named) Festival of the Freshwater Squid. From squid steaks to squid stews, we poison ourselves more and more each year. Thus does the Festival violence spread and intensify.
If this monograph serves any useful purpose beyond the mundane, it is to caution against the eating of squid flesh.
A VISION
A vision may have no place in a serious monograph, but having come this far, I am reluctant to stop. This vision comes to me on days when I am fed squid meat. Alas, I cannot, even now, knowing what I know, being what I am, stop eating squid meat, such is the compulsion of the fungus within the squid.
The vision that has reached me in my sleep of recent months is worthy of the likes of Hellatose: I travel across a great chasm of Time that passes as quickly as clouds in a storm and as that time trickles past I see the squid taking more and more to the land, their bewitching eyes hidden by the globes of water, their skin a translucent silver, while, fed on spores and the meat of an animal more intelligent than they know, Ambergris’ true inhabitants grow watery and ill, their flesh moist, sallow, and ever more boneless, until eventually the squid take their place and the current Ambergrisians recede into the waters as if they had never been anything but a fiction, remnants, revenants, in this great city, globules of infected fat and skin — too dazed and decadent to fight back when the gray caps flood the city and we, long-prepped for invasion, scuttle into Ambergris, our arms and tentacles wrapped around buildings and vehicles, the very stones marked by the claw and the sucker, while the humans, pale underclass, pale underbelly, are but servants for our will.
The advance guard and scouting parties have already begun — what are the water-globed squid if not this? I would not be at all surprised if the King Squid were already among us, their spies having perfected the art of camouflage so as to replicate setting and human alike.
There are those idiots here who would escape their fate more literally, and with haste, their means as simple as they are and yet myriad — sneaking into the pill cabinet, sharpening a spoon for their wrists, tearing their clothes up for a noose. You see it here all the time. None of them in death will better understand the mysteries of their lives and I do not envy them this state, even when my own transformation seems so far away.