The mascot’s head is coming off today.

That’s what they say, in notices posted to every pole in Wakeman. They—who is that they? Who tore the store down, months ago—they rang the cuckoo clocks of hell, that day.

They ran a crane wrecker off of Railroad Avenue. From my window across the way, I watched the pearshape of its pendulum clap into—then peel back again, and stave in the side of—the silo that was the drivethrough. That is, the silo the drivethrough ran through, in a piercing punch cutout: the void of it implied a square columnar die, shearing the curves of wide corrugate sidewall. Curves, since the silo was a circular column—a cylinder.

Not all silos are cylinders, but this was. In such shape, and unless there is a hopper—the truncate cone, or properly frustum, reversed, that serves as a funnel—a silo has a disk at base. At base, the drivethrough lane was defined by parallel secant lines, which cut chords with midpoints at radial midpoints. All such chords are congruent, and each of these intercepted an arc that spanned six sidewall stiffeners, demarcating a minor segment of disc.

Such segments would be congruent, except that the proximal arc was additionally encroached by the secant of the store’s red wall, and at height—with its center transpierced by an imaginary sagitta—by the sliding sash window recessed within the wall.

The window shattered now, interrupted with the wrecking ball, incurring into the drivethrough at an oblique angle. Midway in its ruinous course, the ball had implied an equilibrium position that I reckoned sufficiently high for an oncoming passenger car to pass: a terminal gravity stunt to the drivethrough’s dark ride. Then, with the pendulum arcing to its extremity—and with shrieks of steel on steel—the cable rose up sundering the sidewall, the clapper scattering blades of glass.

The spunsteel lid had long been flung from the silo’s fillhole, and with each impact of the ball, I watched crows and swallows erupt rifleshot from the cone of the roof—through there, and through the manhole’s obround opening—into gray air. Cliff swallows—but I saw starlings, too, spilling down in dark murmurations from where the silo was doubly vented: beneath crumpled fascial baffles in the eaves of the roof, and where at regular intervals over its upper surface, between tension strap and compression ring, it was ringed around raguly with open elbows. The wrecking ball had rung a change, which the birds resounded: in clacks and klaxons, in buzzer squawks, in black peals and snorts of buzzard scorn. Also, which my car alarm resounded, in unremitting bleats of horn.

From my window across the way, I fumbled with my keys.

Canopen now, the silo was dented in, but not destroyed. Bent double, it echoed the flexion of a wacky waver between gusts—and there was a wacky waver. With the black birds passing within the compass of its arms, and issuant—in its antic inflation—from an urn emplaced atop the adjacent autobody shop, the waver presided pistoning over all. It was unguled and attired with ribbons of sable crepe, and from crown to plinth along the column of it—on a hue of paler gules than the store’s wall—fading yellow capitals cried AUTO REPAIR. Which the wacky waver did—and the silo didn’t—through the exertions of its abject heart of air. The wacky waver wavered between store and silo high.

Under the exertions of the crane wrecker, the walls of the store wavered, and fell. Cross gable, the store came down in red steel cladding, in gunmetal gutters and galvalume panels, in white casement windows of sixteen lights. They would have done better to bring an excavator: shearing steel had at length unstranded the crane’s steel cable. When the clapper came crashing to ground, the fuel island canopy stood intact on its gunmetal colonnade, fire red fascia flashing a defiant candystripe of fainter gray. On the roof of the canopy, the mascot’s head had stood, and it stayed—until today.

#

From my window, I can see out onto the roof of the canopy. The roof is crawling with some of them, today: workers in white kettle helmets, gesturing obscurely as they tie lines, pace and measure. As they lean against the mascot’s monumental head, in their orange gambesons, or slime green: a conquering army at ease.

There are starshape puckers in the roof—galvanic corrosion, I think, where steel bolts have been quickened by contact with bronze finishes on the soffit underneath. There is a wider expanse of rot where shallow washes of standing rainwater ring the cervical column of the mascot, the cracked bell and jowls. The superficial fascia is of fiberglass cement, and pitted now, with brown arroyos winding down, where discolored waters have run in rivulets for years. Such rivers run now from the mascot’s eyes, as the workers struggle to smother it with white dropcloths. Such dark rivers, from the crownpoints of its antlers—those grim attires which will overarch us all.

#

She drew the Malory comics; she lived in town during those years, in an attic apartment of which the leadlight—and only—window is taken up entirely in the mascot’s gaze. I had proposed to mount an exhibit of her comics in a library gallery—the College archives hold her papers, as well as the full panels in which Malory nightly appeared. To my excitement, the attic apartment came up for occupancy on the very day my proposal was accepted; the grant would almost cover the monthly rent, and I was willing to make up the difference. I was convinced that seeing the mascot—seeing it as it had appeared to her, as immense as it had appeared, and as interminably—would allow me to present Malory as illuminated by its essential—and in the extant literature, unconsidered—intertext. Also, I had been looking for a place to stay.

On the first of the month, I put my deposit down at the bank in town, in the leasing company’s account, and my bag down on the quartersawn ash of the attic floor. I went to the window, and there I was. In the clear picture pane, there was the mascot’s head. I spent the afternoon crawling around on my hands and knees—the roof pitched too steep, in most of the room, to stand. I went about feeling for telltale give in the planks, and later, marking with blue chalk the coastline of a dark stain, which I observed in bloom on the floor beneath the window.

Nodding off that first night, from through the margin panes of camed cobalt and gold, I watched frames of light in intervals flash across my bed—from the streetlights, I supposed. My dreams were checkered with weird phosphenes, but otherwise obliviated when I awoke, choking.

#

Malory is sinister. He has no mouth, nothing I can call an expression. His eyes are dark upright almonds—voided vesicas piscium, but for beams of light radiating from an unseen recess between and within them—I mean, from an invisible third eye, ensconced in the inner space within his head, where sets of intersecting circles intersect. The lamps or lights of an imminent vehicle, as yet occulted, but coming forth from a tunnel. Or, maybe more precisely, blinding streamers of waterwhite shit, shot from deep cloacas. She put them down in washes of sallow gouache.

The idea of his third and hidden eye, by the way, isn’t my own: it’s widely known—in circles where Malory is widely known—that four circles of equal circumference, and intersecting center to circumference, can be drawn so that the empty aureoles of Malory’s eyes are superimposed perfectly upon the mandorle on the outsides. The perimeter of the outermost orthogonal circles touch at single and internal points the perimeter of his also perfectly circular head. Lately—faintly—on ledge, rafter, and underpurlin, I’ve discovered her drafts in French chalk: Malory in compass and straightedge constructions.

Malory’s antlers repudiate everything that would recommend the moose as corporate envoy. I mean, of course, the rounding off at the tips, the open palmate and imploring appearance of the mascot’s antlers. Coming up from the canopy, the mascot’s antlers are cupped hands, held to heaven to receive their righteous reward of milk and honey, manna, rain. Whereas Malory’s antlers are all in jagged points; when there is a curve—if there is a curve—it is only ever wicked. Malory’s main palms are a very crown of thorns, and still more points protrude from the beams—the artist’s jagging linework inveins each panel with black tines that proliferate as tesseractic caltrops, trident spines of locust that fork and fulminate in negative space.

The spines of locust, yeah—or the furious arms of a pollard oak. Heading east out of town, and glancing south, there is such a tree to be seen—and she must have seen it—which is not of a kind, but rather is the antlers that crown Malory in his final panels. Black scabrous boughs—and the horned phalanges that sprout therefrom—reach about the powerlines which traverse this wicked oak, and which have cleft its limbs from any order of apical dominance. A buzzard’s upswept beam feathers, a wicked bowl for catching blood. Abyssal jaws that distend to catch and glut on the spilt bowels of heaven. The old oak gathers in arms that bristle with witchbrooms, that would sweep aside and snap the lines, arcing current into the dark, the invisible ichor of ozone and gouts of spark.

The mascot hasn’t got any brows, whereas Malory’s brow palms erupt with spiring perlations, with tines upon the tines upon them. Malory’s brow palms manage—linedrawn as they are—by strange foreshortenings to strain outward from the picture plane. We would strangle you,they seem to say.

Then there is what Malory does say:

☞  Un freaking believable.   It’s a big
fuck, Ronald.  Is what it is. What did
you think the  S stood for,    can you
tell me that.  Can you please tell me.
Holy cow.  Am I going to go down to
see  Hemeyers in that.    How is that
going to look,  can you tell me.   Can
you tell me, Ronald.  Can you please.

His speech comes in a justified block, without outline, which floats to the right beside his head and under his antlers. The text is marked with manicules, and with italics or obliques—interchangeable, it seems, in the letterer’s mind —for further emphasis. It is invariably of eight even lines, and may cut off midword:

I  can  hear  them  up   there,   honey.
God,   that  makes  me   sick.  ☞ What
are  they   doing,   do  you  think.  Are
they   chewing   up  the   damn   walls.
What  are  we   going  to  do.  Do   you
want to  live  in  this,  come  home   to
this  every  day.  ☞ Is that the kind  of
home you want. Is that the kind of ho

On the original panels, all of this appears in a microscript, in comparison against which the most minute hand—of Lovecraft on his postcards, or of Walser, even—seems cyclopean. Previous authors have presumed that her writing on the panels is asemic, that the texts came later in her process. Through my plastic pocket loupe, I made a startling discovery to the contrary: the microscript is in written morse code. It corresponds precisely to the text of the published panels—she had come up with a bespoke shorthand system to denote Malory’s manicules, majuscule, italics.

When the mascot wrote on her mind in scorching flashes of light, it took much longer.

#

I know now, that when the mascot indicated italics, it was with strobing spondees and dactyls, with dits and dahs of galvanic light:

-… . –. .. -. // .. – .- .-.. .. -.-. …

That is, that it blasted ​​BEGIN ITALICS onto the backwalls of her attic—and her eyes. That it beamed out in luminous morse the intimate conversations of her near neighbors. That these lights could not, that they cannot be explained by what highbeams would pass beneath, in the night. I have slept—and not slept—these months in the attic apartment. I have seen the lights with my own eyes, and have stood to take the dots and dashes down through the night. I have read them reechoed in the day, in the wacky waver’s pink and incessant semaphore. I know now, that I have transcribed and translated messages which Malory was to impart, in time. That I cannot—I will not impart them.

I know her witchbroom lines for more than mildew’s oriflamme. That they stand, on the paper’s plane, for supernumerary, staminal antlers, which curve towards the towering style of an invisible and extradimensional pistil. That this rises from an ovary which is inhumed within and during the mascot’s head, and filthily fecund. That the filaments end in jagged anthers, and these are puckered with black pollens, inky floats of roe that disperse into the air, that drift on the wind and sink at length through roofs, into the homes and apartments of my near neighbors.

#

A line from Cotton Mather, that is, By my being made willing to come under the shadow of thy wings—

#

Among her papers, a last and unpublished panel:

saying is,   someone is going to  have
to  do  something about ☞ her.  No, it
sure  can’t go on  like that.    It makes
me   sick   too,    just   last   night—It’s
nasty  is what it is.  Those sounds she
makes,  do  you think  they  are,   you
know. You know it, brother. Are they

#

Last night, I woke up on the floor beneath my cot, the nylon membrane above me taut enough to show pores of intermittent light in its weave. From the tremors carrying up through the frame, those washes of light had infrasound values. The mascot was dictating.

Apprehensible over all in the attic was a fuming musk—almost of horses? But with sulfur in admixture. The odor fully perfused the atmosphere, in miasma interrupted only by an acrid tang, which was my human fear. And which I sucked in cathartic gusts through my flaring nares—I’d have huffed anything before that ungulate stink.

Then the mascot thunderstruck my attic again, and through reflex tears—as my eyes adjusted to the dark—I perceived a profound and other gust. Visible wind, in fuscum sub nigrum. Wind that had the anoxic gasp of brushfire stifled in acres of damp timothy, of burning butter of antimony, of pried wide mussels, rotting in white sun on their mantles of nacre. I perceived that there were pores in the cot which had become—or they had always been—occluded, pores which—but it was dark—I would swear had been clotted with coarse hairs.

#

Branches, wings, anthers, antlers. Hands turned toward hell.

#

The mascot’s black tears are streaking now in tendrils through the air—from the eyes, the antlers, the ears. Flames of jet, black bottlerockets. The workers are hauling on the ropes, on the roof and on the ground—they are oblivious, and all the time the tearstreaks are snaking down upon them, infolding them the way ink will sink in water. In vile pillows and plumes of smoke, in eddies of night, in black billows. The tearclouds swallow the people up, and if at length the obscure vapors disperse, there is no human trace. Others are taken in abyssal bubbles—these soon pop with wet percussions, and wink out of the world.

The mascot’s head is not coming off today. The tears flood the streets with black fog, condensing in a skin of soot upon the walls and windows. When their creosote climbs my window, I am writing furiously, watching for the light that flashes through the swarming black:

BEGIN IT—

---

Zebulon Horse is a white settler, born on unceded land of the Pennacook. They are the author of The psychic surgeon assists (Calamari Archive, 2024), and their work has previously appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, ergot., Propagule, and Sleepingfish. They work as a librarian, and play horror sound effects on the radio. Website: zebulon-hourse.xyz; Bluesky: @zebulonhourse