I heard a man say once there are no mysteries anymore, and I would say he’s right—not about the world but about humanity’s knowing of it. These days we believe everything can be understood, explained. Maybe not by us but by someone. As long as we find the right expert, we believe, it’ll all make sense in the end. A comforting thought, I’ll give it that.
I used to be a cop.
I’m not one anymore, and the story I’m about to tell is the reason why. There just wasn’t any more use to it. When you’ve seen what I saw, and pondered over it, you can’t but come to the conclusion that the world is an unimaginable place, and no expert’s going to make a lick of difference. The only two things experts sell are opium and snake-oil.
It started with a supposed murder. Victim in his thirties, no rape, body intact save for his tongue cut off. Found in a swamp. I remember the night I got called out there because I was about to sit down to a warm supper when the phone rang. Well, supper was cold by the time I got back home, not that I had the stomach for it anyway. I slid it off my plate into the garbage and watched the mess glide slowly down the side of the black plastic bag like a man’s innards might if he got them pushed out his body. (I saw that too once, down in Mexico.) and the whole time I kept thinking about the dead man’s eyes. They looked like they’d seen God right before it ended for him—and the image stayed. It stayed so that when we looked we ourselves had to look away because it was too bright, and too black, too bright and too black at the same time, the distorted reflection of some shining blinding void. It was only a missing tongue; gruesome, but we’d all seen worse, yet there was an anvil gloom to it, a nether-fog hanging over the swamp in whose every drop of moisture was potential of a word suspended, a putrid word none of us could understand, but even so we knew: that if these words were ever spoken it would be the end of all.
I couldn’t sleep that night.
The peace had been broken. Not the peace of a comfortable life in good country, nor my inner peace, but the existential peace of a million years passed down generation to generation, the peace of covenants making possible the hope of human progress. What are we without that—as a species? Rodents running in wheels, powering the unknown. How long had we been fooled into thinking this road we travel leads straightly somewhere, when in fact it is a loop, leading nowhere. But when one takes instead a cosmic perspective, that’s when the line of the horizon becomes the wide and subtle curve of a planet, and our understanding shifts. I gasped, doubting it was murder at all.
I think the man had cut off his own tongue and drowned himself, because what if whatever it was he’d seen had got it into his mind to say the words that cannot be said? I’d have drowned myself too, I imagine, for it’s better to be filled with swamp water than non-existence.
What shook me finally from my ponderous tossing and turning was a sound: of rattling, followed by a wet scrape. I grabbed a flashlight from my night table, turned it on and let the beam of light guide me down the hall—empty, undisturbed; and stairs, stepping carefully, quietly, as the sound grew ever louder and the fear in my chest became a pounding, until I had crept into the kitchen and saw, rendered by the harsh light, a cat with glowing eyes lapping greedily at the cold, dead supper in my trash with its pink and hideous tongue.
For a while I let it feast then clapped my hands and watched it scurry out the open window through which it had no doubt come.
Although we didn’t talk about it, it was clear to me that the dead man in the swamp had affected us. We skulked about in the weeks that followed, skittish as wounded animals that had for the first time realized their place in the world and were naturally terrified, except our wounds were not physical but spiritual. Physical wounds kill you or heal; spiritual ones fester, draining your essence until madness sets you free.
It was midsummer and on the thermometer the temperature read high, but the days felt cold.
The world felt cold.
About three months later we got a call about a disturbance at the local mausoleum. This happened from time to time, the usual cause being wildlife or kids trying to prove themselves by spending the night, but from the moment we got there, my partner, Schoonmaker, and I knew this was different. The mausoleum doors had been assaulted but had apparently withstood because they remained locked, and instead a nearby window had been shattered and the glass mostly cleaned out. Mostly: because a few pieces were still attached to the frame; jagged and pointed inward, these were coated in drying blood. We radioed dispatch, announced ourselves (the words echoed within the mausoleum, but no answer came) and entered.
The interior was dusky, its sole illumination being stray moonlight filtered through unclean windows that painted the darkness in variations of grey, but even in this dismal light we saw that the tombs had been ransacked. Schoonmaker went first, I followed. Every few steps, I called out into the deepening silence amidst the desecrations on either side of us.
Bodies in various stages of decay had been pulled onto the floor, the entire limbs of some becoming detached in the process. Cracked bones jutted out. The inhuman faces of the dead gazed at us as if in awe at their own disintegrating brittleness. When I paused to look at one, I noticed that its tongue was missing.
Just then: a deafening sound—
Bang!
Schoonmaker and I took cover.
More banging.
Slowly and without exchange of words we moved forward toward the source, communicating by gestures and the panic on our faces until we came upon him: human but frenzied, wielding a heavy sledgehammer and wrecking crypts with it.
We trained our weapons on him.
Bang! thundered the sledgehammer.
Something cracked.
I yelled at him to stop, to lay down his hammer and put his hands behind his head, but he didn’t obey. It seemed as if he didn’t hear or didn’t care. Schoonmaker screamed at him. No response. I screamed at him. Still nothing but the methodical rising and falling of the hammer.
Bang. Bang, crack.
Bang. Bang, crack.
Finally Schoonmaker stood up, arms unsteady in front, gun ready—and approached. “Police! Stop!” he yelled so loudly his faltering voice filled the entirety of the mausoleum.
Bang. Bang, crack.
I fired a warning shot into the ceiling.
Perhaps that got his attention, or perhaps it was mere coincidence, but he lifted his face then, caked with dry human slime, and stared at us, the heavy sledgehammer held in both his hands and his chest heaving. “Put it down,” Schoonmaker said.
He dropped the hammer and darted—
at Schoonmaker.
I fired.
The bullet caught him in the shoulder, pushed him backwards but only temporarily. He growled, gargled bubbles rising in his throat, escaping his dark lips, and came at us again. My hands were shaking. I was shaking. I fired, and missed, but Schoonmaker got him in the chest and this time he fell backwards, hissing as he tried to scuttle away on his backside but Schoonmaker was on him, pummelling him, smashing his face with the gun. I was frozen to the spot. It was so dreadfully cold, so impossibly cold. I thought Schoonmaker would kill him. “Stop!” I yelled—at Schoonmaker, at him, at the both of them fighting on the mausoleum floor—when it happened: he grabbed Schoonmaker somehow by the head and pulled Schoonmaker’s face close to his own, ear to mouth, and after I strained to hear just the faintest trace of something said, Schoonmaker’s body stiffened, he scrambled backwards, lifted his gun and shot himself in the head.
Screaming, I unloaded.
Then: silence.
Broken only by the gentle pattering of brains dripping from Schoonmaker’s exploded skull.
I lurched forward to look at the man—the thing—lying before me, vomited, wiped my mouth, and kicked at it to make sure it was dead. Its chest no longer heaved. No bubbles escaped its lips. Killed, it looked like any other man, but I noted two particular details: its tongue was missing, and stuffed into its ears were bits of rotting human flesh.
Next I kneeled beside Schoonmaker.
One of his eyes had been projected from his head. Although still attached to him by some vein or sinew, it rested peacefully on the floor, gazing with the same black brightness as had the eyes of the dead man in the swamp.
I don’t remember much of the immediate aftermath. Flashing lights, a trip to the hospital, interviews and debriefs, being told to take my time and explain exactly what happened. Well, I couldn’t. That’s when I understood that what they wanted wasn’t an explanation at all but a sequence of events. No one was after the truth. They were after the facts, and once those had been compiled they brought in an expert, a clinical psychologist, who made a series of post-mortem diagnoses that added up to an illusion of comprehension.
They also identified the dead man. He was an academic, and found among his papers was a series of notes, written in erratic handwriting, in which he made mention of “speaking in tongues,” of “being in communion with dead language,” and of belonging to a cult whose goal was the destruction of the Ankyloglossiacs. He was also in possession of an ancient tome on the topic of elinguation: removal of the tongue.
I was placed promptly on paid leave, apparently because I was recovering (I had, after all, killed a man and seen my partner kill himself) but also, I believe, because it was obvious I would not adhere to the official story.
When I returned to the force, the only officers who spoke to me were those who’d been with me in the swamp and seen for themselves the dead man’s eyes. With them I maintained cordiality, for we were mutually haunted. Everybody else kept their distance, and I gained the reputation of being mentally damaged goods, a kook, a suicide waiting to happen.
It happened one night maybe six months later—dead of winter—that I got a telephone call from a farmer who lived outside of town, a woman by the name of Kat Wilhelm. She’d called me, not the police, and was frantically pleading for help. Someone had broken into her barn, she said, and sliced the tongues off her cattle. She said she remembered the incident at the mausoleum. When I assured her I’d get a couple of officers over to her, she nearly shrieked that she didn’t want them; she wanted me, because it wasn’t the slicing that had gotten her spooked, she said, her voice breaking up as I listened, but what she had seen after that, the tongues themselves scrambling about her property. “Some of them single-like, but others having joined up together—into a—in…”
The line hadn’t gone dead.
Her voice had ended, as if dispersed into sudden nothingness.
Hiss. Then back:
“No… no, can you hear them? They’re talking to me. No, no! They’re talking and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. The things they’re saying. I cannot. Do you understand? Get away! Do you understand? Away—”
Now I dropped the receiver and ran outside to my truck. It was snowing. The engine turned, and I roared out my driveway towards the Wilhelm farm.
Arrived, I got out, noted the silhouette of the barn through the falling snow, and headed for the farmhouse, where the downstairs lights were on. The front door was locked, but a kick got it down, and together with the blizzard I entered. Looked left: stillness; right: the muted flicker of a television. At the stairway I heard no sounds coming from the upper floor. I crossed into the kitchen and saw Kat Wilhelm dead, fallen to the floor, the telephone receiver lying beside her and a flow of blood running along the uneven floorboards from where she’d stabbed a screwdriver into her ear to where a lone, severed human tongue was lapping it up.
Her tongue.
I tried to stomp it, but to no avail.
It scampered away.
I was about to follow, when through the kitchen window I caught a flash of movement. Something big. Bigger than a tongue.
Back to the front door, where the blowing snow was already accumulating like so much static, and out: into the winter night, and through, in the direction of the barn. No call for backup. No second thought. Just fear, and the human desire for knowledge. I remembered the swamp, the mausoleum. I remembered the moment Schoonmaker detonated his own head. But was it the bullet that did it—was it the bullet or was it what the thing had spoken into him? And what about the swamp man’s eyes, what if the black brightness continued in them not because he’d experienced (…) but because he continued to experience (…). What if death was no end. Straight roads terminate. Loops infinitize. My boots crunched in the snow, like walking upon a field of bones. Here I was: my body shedding sweat. My mind expelling itself—
It was upon me!
From the dark sky it had fallen—from a snow-covered tree branch—
Draping me. How hideously warm it was. Covering my body like a blanket, heavy and squirming, enslimeing me in its excretions, which ran into my eyes, burning them, and past my lips and down my throat, tasting of unfathomable saliva. I punched! My God, how I punched its inner side. It felt like punching a tenderized slab of meat. But the worst—the worst were the sounds, the utterations and disarticulations, spoken in a universe of voices, foreign, inhuman, some terrible, imploding my sense of self, my implicit point of reference, but others sublime and beautiful, imploring me to stop and sit and listen to their unworldly harmony forever, comforted by this steaming cloak of lingual flesh in the coldness of the enveloping snowstorm. What else is there but to listen? What point to act, to be. Why even am I? What should I have ever been…
I opened my mouth—willingly—and licked it, tasting of its moistures. In response it purred, and its multitude of tongues fluttered in excited unison, massaging me, guiding me as down a cosmic gullet. Licking, I became a descending bliss. Walls of organic velvet, I rubbed myself against them. How they caressed me, welcoming me, their docile pre—it gagged: an image into my mind: infernality from which there could be no escape!—y(?) The symphonic melody ruptured into a continuous screech of broken strings and I felt that while I was sinking the tip of my tongue remained secured atop unnaturally extended and itself now vibrating, adding to the cacophony I tried to will to cease lest I go mad.
Now upwards I shot, propelled from within the cavity, along the same oozing orifice through which I’d fallen and—
Melting of snowflakes on my cheek.
The whirl of frigid wind.
I was free!
I was: consciousness—speeding toward its focal point: my human body, gasping for air just outside the Wilhelm barn—
and impact!,
a self returned to its physicality in space-time, I became reoriented, and perceived before me the familiar perspective of everything, including the lingual beast itself, like a twirling, inverted cone of writhing tongues, upon which I saw also my saviour: a common cat, screeching as it clawed at the abysmal despicability.
The beast was perhaps fifteen feet tall, rendered violently pink in the sweeping snow drifts, and the cat rode it, ripping at its tongue-limbs. The beast reverberated, a living (or more!) waveform in three (or more!) dimensions, and yet this cat—was it, I wondered, the same cat who so long ago had lapped greedily at my garbage?—did battle with it!
My gun lay on the white ground.
I picked it up and fired.
The bullets hit the beast with dull thuds but nothing more. Unaffected, it began instead to gyrate so that its rows upon rows of tongues flared outward like the ruffles on a spinning flamenco dancer’s dress, ejecting the brave cat and spraying the surroundings with sticky strings of vile salivas, which turned varicoloured as they dissolved.
The cat scampered off.
The beast stilled.
Unspun, it stood. Only it and I were left, facing each other, if one can ever face a thing that has none. There was no expert in the world who could have explained this to me, only those who would dismiss it as the fiction of a troubled mind, yet I swear to you it was true. Everything I’ve told you has been the truth. I have presented it chronologically and in detail, the way your ankyloglossiac mind prefers. Then like the cat the beast scampered off, although perhaps glided would be the more accurate term. Like a mess down the side of a black garbage bag, into the woods, into nighttime it went, and mercifully I was left alone, collapsed in a cold accumulation of snow and mystery, frightened, cowering like a primitive animal in the fragmentary presence of a god.
I quit the police force after that. Like I said, there wasn’t any more use to it after what I’d seen. Every child one day walks away from the sandbox. Officially, it was one unsolved murder, a mentally ill academic shot by the cops and two suicides—all unconnected. Everyone put stock in what the clinical psychologist said. No one took at face value the academic’s writings or my own experience.
My life since has been quiet. I moved into a cabin in the woods and keep generally to myself. I try to keep my sleep shallow. Whenever I fall too deeply into dream, it comes back to me: the bliss, the terror, the language and the sounds, bursting as bubbles above the decaying surface of reality. I wake then with my hands covering my mouth. Because they’re in me, these words. I have heard too much. I struggle to suppress them. When I look at my reflection, I see the beginning of a bright blackness in my eyes. I keep a knife on me at all times, as should you. Don’t be afraid. When the time comes you’ll know what to do. Let the experts die forever knowing finally they know nothing.
Let the experts suffer.