Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we continue Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black with Chapter 13. The novel was first published in 2005. Spoilers ahead! CW for sexual assault and violent maiming.
“There’s no point, when it comes to your own flesh trying to knead it into precision; flesh doesn’t yield that kind of answer.”
Alison continues her journey into her past. “At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself”, or the past will ambush you from behind. “Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess.” At last, heralded by the sound of smashing crockery, her mother Emmie staggers in, bringing Alison’s miserable childhood with her: the succession of pimps and johns, the poverty and hunger and abuse.
Morris, she’s told, once worked in a circus. He used to saw women in half and kept his hand in by practicing with Gloria and Alison, but Emmie always insisted Morris stick Alison back together again. MacArthur put down a deposit on Alison’s virginity, which Morris disputed, but Keith Capstick snuck in ahead of them both. Alison was always making up to him since he pulled the dog off her.
On present day Admiral Drive, the neighbors chant Out out out. Elsewhere, Colette’s assuring Gavin she’ll only stay with him until she figures out “how to extricate [herself] from [her] ties to Alison.” From Admiral Drive, Alison slips into her past. Gloria has been sawed in half too many times; the dogs come in handy, but Pikey Pete warns against dogs that have tasted human flesh. Alison wanders among the outbuildings, past the van in which Gloria “rests in pieces” to the hut where young Alison lies howling and bleeding after the men teach her about knives.
The present: Colette and Gavin arrive at the flat they once shared. There’s no sign of his model girlfriend Zoe: no lingering perfume, no fashionable clothes. Gavin vaguely claims Zoe’s gone on a photoshoot.
Mrs. McGibbet, Alison’s childhood spirit-friend, appears and mourns over her son Brendan. Gloria, it turns out, was his sister. Brendan ran off to the circus, where he met his end in one of Morris’s trick “disappearing” boxes. McGibbet would help Alison in her memory-journey, only decent people wouldn’t talk about how MacArthur and Capstick were passed out drunk in Emmie’s living room. How a little girl scissored off Capstick’s balls and spoon-scooped out one of MacArthur’s eyes, heading out afterwards bloodied, smiling, a bowl for the dogs in her hands. Morris laughs at how Alison’s paid Capstick back, but he flinches from the eye.
Alison once more asks Emmie who her father was. It could’ve been any of the usual gang, Emmie answers, or six others. How could Emmie see when “they always put a blanket over your head”? Back and back Alison goes, to infancy and birth and the moment in the womb when someone’s knitting needle pricked her skull, to let “in the light.” Back and back, in darkness, finally diminishing to a vanishing point. Somewhere beyond that point she plods home, aching, rubbing her knotty scars, stooping to drink ditch water, then squatting to await moonrise.
After snooping around Gavin’s sticky kitchen, Colette confronts him: He doesn’t have a job; the rust-bucket is his only car; and Zoe the model never existed—he invented her to make Colette jealous. Colette roots Gavin’s laundry out of the dryer, finding a single gray sock that looks like “roadkill”—she’s seen its brother sock, but where?
Gavin can’t remember why they split up. Colette can’t really remember, either. She throws away the roadkill sock. Gavin, she thinks, looks like a humbled dog, and “her heart was touched: where her heart would be.”
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On Admiral Drive, the neighbor-mob chants on. Alison accepts that Colette’s not coming back—not that Alison would have her. She’ll sell the house and its now infamous shed. Memories are short in real estate. The police escort her to their car, head swathed in the raspberry throw Colette once gave her. Mandy meets her at a shopping center. Alison will stay with her for a while, but first shouldn’t they have lunch and then treat themselves at the new nail bar? Alison flashes on her bloody hands and envisions a tape unspooling in the empty house, “her past unspooling, back beyond this life, beyond the lives to come.” “That will be nice,” she says.
A conversation follows among the fiends, including new recruit Mart: the usual squabbles about money owed and antique foodstuffs missed. Then they argue about how it’s Morris’s fault they can’t go back to “the missus”—he instigated hanging Mart, thus depriving her of her “good deed.” Perhaps Alison’s dad could mend matters, but they all have alibis to prove they didn’t do the deed. Which means, they’re awed to conclude, that Nick himself must have fathered her!
In October Alison drives herself to psychic events, passing through a flooded landscape of “spillage and seepages.” Terrorists and fanatics are everywhere, but she has good backseat company in the finally reunited Maureen Harrison and friend, who look on Alison as the daughter they never had. Storms make the highway treacherous, but as if the “great mind” of the universe has its “absences,” they pass on “unmolested, unobserved,” to their destination and a rich teatime.
This Week’s Metrics
What’s Cyclopean: Everything is ghosts: Colette’s clothes “hang like a rack of phantoms”; living fiends deliver truckloads of “spirits”.
The Degenerate Dutch: Dean wants to get a swastika studded into his tongue and hang it over walls as “mobile graffiti.” Pikey Pete announces that painting racehorses to look like other racehorses is “an old Romany skill.”
Anne’s Commentary
Alison has spent twelve chapters of Beyond Black struggling to escape the past. In Chapter Thirteen, she finally turns to face it. That she could have gone so long without confronting certain crucial events proves her capacity for denial; the past has pursued her relentlessly, lunging at her heels, rarely far enough behind for its baying to be muted. Common metaphors for unwelcome memories are houndings, demons, haunts, ghosts. Alison’s ghosts have not been metaphorical. Morris has been her seldom-absent “guide,” while the other Aldershot fiends have made increasingly frequent appearances. Gloria, whole or in pieces, has popped in for visits; eventually she takes up permanent residence with Emmie. Emmie insists that she knows Gloria’s dead, but sometimes she forgets.
When you forget, when you let down your guard, the ghosts come back. Coming back, revenanting, is what ghosts do. It’s what they are. Even benign ghosts can be annoying. The malign ones bite. They strike until they get their teeth in your nape, and then you’re bleeding meat in the ditch. Worse, you’re one of them now. Maybe even one of the gang at subservient entry level, like poor Mart.
Mart may welcome the opportunity to start over. If the afterlife means a return to Aldershot, Alison wants nothing to do with it, and so she has to “start walking back towards” herself. Herself is the crucial goal. Only the genuine Alison can have genuine weapons.
Alison’s been seeking those weapons already. To Colette’s irritation, she pads somnambulistically through the kitchen to rummage in utensil drawers. What’s she after, the biggest serving spoon with which to stuff forbidden food into her maw? It turns out Alison is searching for a spoon, and for some scissors. They’re tools she’s used before, as ghostly Mrs. McGibbet will relate.
Because McGibbet was Alison’s truest childhood ally, it’s McGibbet Alison summons to voice the most repressed of her memories. Even then, Alison can only bear to hear the story told in negative terms. McGibbet is sure she wasn’t looking, she was too busy to notice, she can’t recall at all how MacArthur and Capstick lay passed out at Emmie’s one night. She’s sure she didn’t see a little girl with scissors “snipping about a man’s private parts.” She must have dreamed seeing MacArthur’s eye “plop off a spoon and fall into a dish” and Alison going down the garden to feed the dogs, blood running down her arms, no more than ten. And Alison smiled as she did it, too.
Alison feels less horror than vindication. For once she’s acted, she’s had power and used it, paying back two tormentors and making others like Morris afraid of her. What have you bred in Alison, MacArthur used to ask Emmie. But Emmie still can’t tell Alison who else took part in breeding her. Alison only learns who her father was after she’s regressed to Emmie’s knitting needle piercing her fetal brain and “letting in the light.” The light of what, the psychic perception that will become her adult livelihood? Beyond the botched abortion, beyond the black of nonexistence, is an Alison clad in sweat-stiffened sacking, plodding home on a rutted path, knotty scars chafed, breath coming hard. She squats and drinks ditchwater. She waits for the moon to rise.
Is this some ultimate gray truth about Alison’s kind? A vision of some like-gifted, like-cursed ancestor, driven into the wilderness by witch-hunters as Alison is driven from Admiral Drive by mobbing neighbors? Alison’s eviction, however, isn’t into exile but into Mandy’s care, which includes unrestricted lunches and colorful makeovers. From Mandy, she’ll graduate to driving herself and managing her own business. Far from fiends, her new guides will be the most comfortably benign of spirits, the “poor little lady” and Maureen Harrison. However banal, at least these two can replace Mart as recipients of Alison’s good actions.
The last tape of fiendish conversation reveals Alison’s paternity. Through a process of elimination, Morris and crew determine big boss Nick must have spawned the girl! That explains her cold-blooded bloodiness and hungers after redemption—what else could you expect from the daughter of the Devil Himself?
As for Colette, essentially unchanged after seven years with Alison, what could you expect but that she’d return to her previous life with Gavin? It’s balm to her that he’s also essentially unchanged, having only pretended to the achievements of a good job and shiny car and model girlfriend. He remains Colette’s to look down upon and boss, a dog humbled by being left out too long in the rain. He touches her heart, or rather, the place where she likes to pretend that she has one.
If Gavin’s needy, Colette’s needier still to need such need. It’s a match made somewhere between Nick’s realm and whatever Alison found beyond black, a match made in a mundanity where estates go up over “the worms and voles who used to live here, and the foetus dug in under the hedge.”
In closing, however, Mantel bids us remember that the real world isn’t all tiny skeletons under shrubbery. There are also iced cakes at teatime, enjoyable even by spirits, and that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Huh. Well. I dunno, maybe you can make horrible spirit guides go away instantly by facing your childhood demons and remembering the times you fought back against them with bloody success. Especially if you turn out to be Old Nick’s kid.
I cannot now track down who it was that said that as psychological science goes, Freud makes for great literary theory. But I could have done with a bit less neat Freudian psychology in the wrap-up. That’s not so much the transcendence that I could dimly spy last time, as a pat realization of vague agency.
It feels like missing a beat that Colette left without Al actually ever acknowledging that she was abusive and controlling. Al ends up getting rid of both Colette and Morris without ever having to directly confront either one, or act on her ability to act against them. Colette goes because she can’t deal with Al dealing with the fiends; the fiends go because [Step 1: Confront past -> Step 2: ??? -> Step 3: Profit!]; the fiends stay away because it suddenly occurs to them that Al must be Old Nick’s kid. Why have they not done this math any time previously? (Because they couldn’t do the math until she did? Assuming she actually did?) Why does it suddenly matter when Nick has gone this long without eating Morris over how he treated her? Why are ghosts so obsessed with foods what you can’t get like you used to?
There’s a larger thematic failure at work here: the mirroring of airside and earthside abuse, so similar that the two blur into each other, has been consistent throughout the book. So many dead people are petty and vicious because so many living people are petty and vicious. Colette and Morris reflect each other. But this mirroring isn’t resolved properly at the end, because it’s fundamentally not set up right: for Alison’s breakthrough to work properly, I feel like she should either have parallel breaks with Morris and Colette, or sharper contrasts in how they leave her. But Colette is too self-centered to even approach realizing Al’s power and personhood. So her failure to do so simply feels predictably bland, no true contrast to Morris’s epiphany. Colette is a cardboard monster with no heart, and thus no real opportunity for change.
But at least Mandy is taking Al to lunch, and her new spirit guides are making cake. This is the most satisfying part of the ending for me: people finally get to eat without guilt. Except for Colette and her ex-husband, to whom she has returned full circle as someone utterly incapable of character development. With the belated realization that he made up his model girlfriend, and a pang where her heart would be if she had one. And a determination not to let him “revert” to fried chicken.
I would still like to know if Colette is secretly dead. But perhaps it doesn’t matter: the afterlife remains banal, with little difference between life and death for the Colettes and Admiral Drive neighbors of the earthside world. Some hint at ways out of this trap for people other than Al and her medium friends would be nice—I feel like there’s an unconsidered binary here. Some people can see beyond the surface of reality, and some people are doomed to think forever about diets and property values. Or about pickles and organized crime, as the case may be. Only Al has color; only Al changes, or seriously tries to change. Unless you count “taking a course in being a worse fiend” as an attempt to change. Only people with hellish connections have agency? I don’t like that; the book seems to think it reasonable to treat ordinary mortals—Colette foremost among them—as NPCs.
Perhaps newly-transcended Al can find some route towards a better way to spend eternity, or perhaps her half-devilish nature will help put that transition off for a while. Compared to Adam Young or Rosemary’s Baby, she isn’t causing much of a stir—though I do see how, for a potential antichrist, not making a stir is itself a good action. And against the backdrop of her own bland world, an apricot silk scarf stands out.
That world is not only bland, but still going to hell. Seas are rising, cannibal moo-cows and toxic bunnikins lurk in underground tunnels, and the fiends still have jobs preparing for apocalypse. Indeed, it seems they’ve always had power: circus magic, cutting people in half, making them disappear on stage and off. With or without their “missus,” they’re going to keep making both earthside and airside worse places. They’re going to continue the same looping conversations, repeating chapters with no hint that escape is possible. Perhaps even the denouement of actual climactic apocalypse may not be possible, with Nick’s kid off the job.
But even while all that keeps happening forever, you—or Al, at least—can enjoy a drive to Sevenoaks, indulge in a walnut cake, sing hymns with spirits who are decent company. Can live—or something like it.
We’re taking next week off for July 4th. We’ll be back the following week with Kelly Link’s “Skinder’s Veil” and the horror of not having finished your dissertation. You can find it in When Things Get Dark. After that we’ll start on our new longread: Max Gladstone’s Last Exit!
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as [email protected], and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
