☼☼☼

When she came to at last, having dreamt of riding in a forest full of gymnasium equipment and clambering over hills made of grown-ups’ shoes, she found an elderly, corpulent, red-faced man studying her from an arm chair that had been brought into her bedroom.

‘Uncle Ferdinand, what are you doing here?’ she asked. Ferdinand beamed back at her.

‘I thought I’d surprise you, my dear. How are you feeling?’

‘What on earth’s going on?’

‘Oh, nothing that irregular. I’m paying my respects to the new additions and I heard you’d had a fall. Someone needed to keep an eye on you, so here I am.’

Melinda tried to sit up only to discover that she couldn’t move her limbs; and when she tried to raise her head it appeared to be stuck to her pillow. It crackled as she moved, some of her hair caught in whatever the adhesive was. She continued to writhe partly to find a comfortable spot, partly to rescue herself.

‘I wouldn’t try to move just yet, my love. You had a nasty fall.’

‘But what is this stuff?’

‘It’s just something to keep you from falling again. You’ve been ever so wriggly, you know.’ And he smiled.

‘How has mummy had more babies? Daddy has been gone all this time.’ ‘I’ll let her explain that, beautiful one. Now get some rest.’

And with that, Uncle Ferdinand left the room.

☼☼☼

Melinda was woken by the sound of vicious, hissy whispers punctuated by intense silence, the kind that vibrates. She was being held aloft in her night dress and it was pitch black and cold as her body moved through space. She could be anywhere right now, she decided; and she began to fall in love with this idea, picturing herself on the edge of her own newly created cosmos, beginning all over again. Then she caught sight of something spiky and dark-green whizzing by at eye-level: a conifer of some sort. She was in the woods after all and though saddened she was relieved to know that she was safe in the hands of her nagas.

☼☼☼

‘That was a narrow escape,’ said Manasa.

‘Why am I all sticky?’ asked Melinda.

‘Bee-glue. Their behinds are like big furry glue-guns,’ said Vasuki.

‘I don’t think that’s actually true,’ said Melinda.

‘Shall we tell her?’ asked Manasa. They hesitated but suddenly turned in unison as Vasuki began:

‘As I’m sure you’re aware by now, Melinda, your mother is the High Priest of a powerful order: the Venerable Order of the Hermetic Mason-Jar. This order is more powerful than you’ve perhaps realised. Mason jars have a discrete function during the maturation rites of all young women. According to the edicts of the group, young women must harvest their changes and mark them up in order to keep the sexual cosmos in harmony. There’s a certain amount of re ordering to be done in the domain of the female body and mind which, if left unattended, can result in a cosmological disjuncture.’

‘Vasuki knows it’s all nonsense,’ interrupted Manasa.

‘But what’s this got to do with my mother birthing two bee-larvae? asked Melinda.

‘They’re your replacements,’ said Vasuki, abruptly.

Melinda froze. It wasn’t so much the idea that her mother had no love for her; this she’d established very early. But the notion that her mother would go as far as to replace her with an unearthly admixture of human and apis-derived genetic materials struck her as beyond hilarious. She fell into paroxysms of mirthless laughter.

‘I wouldn’t laugh if I were you,’ said Vasuki, ‘If we hadn’t prised you out of the glue, you’d be glue yourself.

‘So, what’s the raison d’être?’ asked Melinda. This was the only French phrase she knew.

‘It’s fairly simple, really. You’re a very disobedient daughter, you don’t show the requisite concern for garden parties or for developing your repertoire of mannequin poses. You look set to disappoint all the very lowest of expectations and this will be a perpetual nightmare for your mother. You may not be aware that she is also of apis stock, having floated into your Uncle Ferdinand’s path off the petal of a particularly intoxicating wildflower. They were quick to notice that they were brother and sister, and the rest is history. Despite pressures to subscribe to the human order, it’s always been something of a worry, knowing the superiority of The Path of Pollen as she does.’

‘The Path of Pollen?’ asked Melinda.

‘The way of the bee. Your mother knows that bee-larvae are more servile and obedient than teenage girls. That’s the raison d’être, my dear. You’re redundant.’

Melinda was at a loss for some time, caught between annoyance, outrage, jealousy, despair and blind violence. It was a very muddy rugby pitch, and her moods swung about like the boys from the local preparatory school as they scrummed in her mind’s eye. Foreign bodies. Microbes. Pestilence.

☼☼☼

INTERMISSION

☼☼☼

The Haunting of André Breton

It happened again last night. This is becoming a habit and an unpleasant one at that; enough for me to need a stiff drink at lunchtime. What would you like? I’m buying.

Here’s how it normally unfolds: I’m on my velocipede, unusual enough in its own right. The location unclear, unremarkable; a cinder path by wasteland; the weather overcast. It’s some less familiar part of the Seine out of town. I’m looking for encounters as ever, but this dream shakes my faith. It’s as if it’s asking me uninvited questions in my sleep.

So, I ride along, head in the clouds for long enough that I’m almost asleep at the wheel. It’s then that the girl begins to run alongside me. I’m not able to see where she comes from. She’s just there, running. She’s wearing a ragged calico dress, fingers bitten down and grimy, thin faced and expressionless. Her shock of matted black hair is pulled into a bun. She must be about twelve years old.

I try to make conversation with her, thinking that’s what she wants, but she won’t or can’t speak. She just runs and runs until I’ve run out of inane remarks and now I’m becoming unnerved. The landscape never changes, same sky, same cinder path on this overcast day, and I simply cannot get away from her. What’s more, I fear for her by now. She must be far away from home. Sometimes my fear overcomes me and I pedal away. But she always catches me.

Then, unannounced, I’m the one on foot far from home and the girl has a bicycle. Somehow, I’m not far from an important building I must visit urgently to hand over some papers. I can never remember the compelling logic.

The girl rides her bicycle adeptly, standing up in the pedals, almost at a standstill at times, at others, hurtling on only to return to me, circle me, dawdle alongside me always without acknowledgment. By now I’ve given in on my attempts to engage her in conversation. She doesn’t like me; that much I can tell.

I curse her under my breath, to no effect. She simply stands up on her pedals and picks her way through the half-bricks on the path, absolutely focused. Up ahead now, the building is plainly in view and I can see many people heading in through its wide doors. I pick up my pace as unobtrusively as I can, hoping to lose her now that she’s sitting back in her saddle, toying with a greasy-looking comb. But she’s always exactly at my pace. Now the building’s even closer I can see inside to where a long queue snakes round the corner to a great hall. I address the girl loudly, telling her it’s nice to have shared this time with her but she isn’t listening, and I can see now that the object she’s toying with as she ambles along, no-handed, on her bicycle is not a comb but in fact a cut-throat razor. It’s then that I know she means to kill me.

I run into the building and forsake the queue, head straight to the official behind glass at the very front. The girl follows me on her bicycle, airily, unhurried, the crowd paying her no attention. And now I’m at the front of the queue, angry, declaiming and ranting to the mild mannered official: that this girl is a menace, that she has threatened me, that she means to kill me. She has a cutthroat razor after all! And what is this place that no one steps up to defend a lone citizen?

An old friend of mine near the front of the queue greets me as if nothing had ever happened between us, saying: ‘Just get hold of her, she’s harmless after all.’ I’m more and more angry with everyone around me. I insist – she has a dangerous weapon! My former friend takes hold of the girl by the shoulders, and she compliantly dismounts from her bicycle, leaving it in the middle of the floor whilst all the people in this queue study me as if I’m a zoo specimen. All these faces, from the club throughout its years, faces of men I barely recognise. I spend all my effort trying to put them back in place. When I look back for my old friend, and the girl, they have vanished.

I make my way out of the building without disclosing my identity. Later, at the club, Aragon tells me of a Mlle —— known to haunt the highways and byways; some dirty-faced ingénue with a shock of black hair who steals your oxygen just for the prank of it; and of how this girl is really a woman, an author famous now for several important works, all unassailably violent gems, full of painful truths.

I tell Aragon my tale, and now I long to hunt for her on those stretches of road. In fact, I’ve often tried to go there again in my dreams, but I never can. Make of this what you will – but the drink, at least, is on me. We don’t know each other, and I don’t need your reflections, after all. It’s unlikely you’ll ever see me again. Thank you for listening.

☼☼☼

END OF INTERMISSION

☼☼☼

As Melinda crept back towards the house, she’d lived in all her life, it looked different to her. It wasn’t just because of the information she’d been delivered by her faithful naga friends; it was because something was in fact different about the look of the building, its brickwork, its colour. There was something waxy-golden like a memory in the way the late afternoon sun caught the edge of its castellations, the soft glitter of porthole windows high up.

The air was drowsy with growth. The trees were breathing. Melinda wondered if she had the wrong house; for some time, she asked herself if she might indeed be a changeling, brought here simply to torment a perfectly respectable old family somehow down on its luck. It was only when the first drone clambered out of the hole in the roof and flew in a low, lazy arc past her, like a Halifax bomber about to crash or unload its cargo of bombs, that she realised her idle thoughts were not so self-indulgent after all.

☼☼☼

The sky, black with furry bodies, generated a new kind of heat. Everywhere, the scrambling after nectar, the scent of pollen numbed her mind. Darkness at noon.

There was just one chink of light in her skull, leading her forward from the lawn onto the paving stones and from there into the cool of the pantry. She took one final look back out into the gridlocked orange and black sky.

Now the light in her head was widening: at one end of her mind’s room, Vasuki and Manasa had lit candles. Fully transformed into great cobras, they sat still at the centre of their coils, brilliant and alert, waiting for Melinda to make her move. The scullery door beckoned.

‘I mustn’t go in,’ she told herself.

‘But you must,’ they said.

Up above her, the house was under reconstruction.

☼☼☼

The scullery seemed to be part of elsewhere. Transverse light entered timidly through a thick glassed miniature window deep in an alcove of the house’s outer wall, lending the space an air of ante-diluvian exclusiveness. Motes and particles danced to their new signature, the hive beyond infusing the atmosphere with the promise of celestial industry. Melinda drew breath, took stock.

Nothing seemed changed amongst the shelves until she noticed one had been added as an extension to mother’s collection. In the jars down here lurked objects she had difficulty seeing. This was partly because of bad light, partly because her eyes seemed to have become a faulty cash-register when they strayed too close to something impossible.

In one jar: a thick ochre broth out of which pressed tiny embryonic hands with inflated pads like whoopee cushions. A tail like a living vertebra whipped at the glass as she came closer. In another: a greyish-silver ball filled the jar preposterously like a sailing ship erected in a bottle. When she nudged the jar to get a better view, she saw its true nature: the gigantic compound eye of a bee, its myriad gridded metallic shutters flexing and re-focusing as she passed gingerly by, stepping as she did in something glutinous puddling beneath her feet.

It was blood. With her eyes, she followed its sloppy trail across the floor and up the shelves, coming to rest on the next mason jar in the row. Sitting in that bottle, all too squarely returning her look, she saw the severed head of Manasa. She studied the face for a whole minute as if it were a portrait at a great gallery. She modelled many postures during these sixty seconds as if to please her friend, not knowing what else to do.

Melinda came forward now and looked closer: those eyes, staring past her as if seeing an emerging catastrophe on a horizon as yet unformed, those eyes were not Manasa’s eyes at all; they were mythic eyes, not the eyes of a friend. They were the eyes in a painting, they carried the weight of history. At the bloodied, ragged throat, she paused and recalled it. This was the Medusa of Caravaggio.

‘How do you like my latest acquisition?’ asked Margarita. There she was in the doorway. ‘I found it lurking in the garden. Some sort of shape-shifter. It’ll come in handy somewhere.’

Now, she stepped into the scullery in a breezy attempt at dusting.

‘Have you considered my offer?’ she asked.

‘Which offer is that?’ replied Melinda.

‘To be Queen of All There Is or to be Nothing At All?’

‘I don’t remember that offer –’

‘I didn’t think so. Not all components continue to play their parts. That’s why we have these jars. Well, let me know what you think later, yes?’

And with that, she shut the door and locked it behind her.

☼☼☼

‘I thought my mother cut your head off?’ said Melinda, swinging in her forest hammock.

‘You know what thought did,’ replied Manasa, and she laughed her Medusa laugh once more, this time loud enough to shake the trees.

‘She’ll hear you!’ said Melinda.

‘We’re terrified!’ mock-cried the two nagas in unison.

‘Have you considered our offer yet?’ asked Vasuki.

‘Remind me,’ said Melinda, wearily.

‘To be Queen of All There Is or to be Nothing At All?’

It was at some point here, I believe, that Melinda began to realise that her life was perhaps part of the honeycomb she could hear being constructed in the distance; that this life, here, now, was merely a preparatory ritual and that she must acknowledge this, acquiesce to her lowly function in the Great Hive Mind. Perhaps she had been wrong to be so stubborn. The Great Transparents believed so. She should bow to their cosmological needs, these divines who governed the length of petticoats, the height of collars, the depth of a soup bowl. They were right, the Transparents, just like her mother, who even now reached out through the darkness to take her hand and guide her onwards.

And a voice in her ear whispered, ‘Follow me.’

☼☼☼

---

The Cinema beneath the Lake is now available from Orbis Tertius Press. You can order a copy here.

Stephen Sunderland is an academic and writer. He is the author of three BBC radio dramas and his AHRC-funded practice-led PhD, ‘Diving to The Cinema Beneath the Lake: a novel as immersive, synthetic-magical exploration of the surrealist prose of Claude Cahun, Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington’ was completed in July 2022. He is currently working towards the completion of his first post-doctoral research project, entitled ‘The Everyday Marvellous’: Collaborative Surrealist Methods for Creative Therapy, funded by The University of Salford. Recent creative publications include the visual poetry collections Eye Movement (Steel Incisors, 2022), Oneiroscope (Kingston University Press, 2023) and Refrains (Steel Incisors, 2023).