White Skull

By James Havoc

1666. The 16-year-old man-boy known only by the nom-de-guerre Misson sails to Madagascar in the wake of the English pirate William Kid. After months at sea he reaches the Butcher's Triangle and there encounters Captain Tew and his voodoo kingdom. Misson attempts to establish a republic on the island but his cohorts are overtaken by a holocaust of evil and the young voyager marries his own vanishing-point beyond the horizon of both sea and human experience. Misson was the precursor of Rimbaud and Lautreamont, the third part of a doomed teenage triumvirate destined to stain future consciousness by their actions and words. WHITE SKULL is his story, a story depicting the terrible violence of the imagination and the assassination of liberty by a savage universe. This special 15th anniversary ebook edition includes the bonus text SKULL OF SHE-HEAD, a coda to the original novella.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elektron Ebooks
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781908694621

Book preview

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Chapter One

1666. How Misson sailed from Marseilles to Italy on a teratological expedition, and saw the hypocrisy of religion. How he met the renegade priest Caraccioli, who joined his ship. How they set sail and were attacked by Sallee pirates. How they set course for Martinique, and were attacked by an English man o’war. How the officers were killed and Misson was elected captain, and they became pirates.

MUD in torrents, worms in the mud, in every worm the primal helix of future life. A million years of rain. Then the sun asserts its tyranny, evaporating oceans, fish cast ashore to writhe on bellies, grow limbs, shed scales, grow fur while the earth’s crust grinds, cracks and ejaculates columns of magma. Cities piled on a bedrock of predation, copulation, assassination. Every port a gate of fire through which each must pass who seeks his true and ancient parentage.

I inhabit a ring of worlds unlike a ring thereby subjugate to forms of atomic compulsion ecumenical to the diocese of a pale evaginator. Born at black zephyrs, borne by moonsoaked timbers from the meshes of Marseilles into lucent gulfs I ghosted nameless, and for land’s arid crypt our ballast of salt embryos keeled to stern, hull striking flint, hawsers looping over onyx posterns as lightning stitched sapphire gouges into cauls.

Cow bones coursed through rat canals, larvae sheared from feculence by raven gulls. Belltowers pierced the thunderclouds, guarded alleyways where sailors, Portuguese and Flemish, fisted hot sperm into craws. Naples. No rats followed.

In Rome, a purple armageddon simmered; without the Papal walls, beggars shaking teeth in cups while blind dogs suckled stumps, ribs cut through hide, urchins pissing blood-gorged flies off raw vaginal lips of mothers crowing for release. The gates of gold forbade me, yet by night I came again and mouthed the shadows’ sickness.

My hooded guide, who brought me Galvani’s relic swathed in muslin, ploughed down labyrinths by torch until we levelled with the chancel. Here the rubies spread to stain.

Clergy licking coin-eyed whores by ursine oathings, diamonds mink and claret rippled under firebrands, ringed fingers sliding silver stems of crucifixes deep in perfumed rectums, then the spur of nude dead mendicants booted to the bearpit. The crack of bones in lathered jaws, the moans and spitting brands, the guzzling painted lips upon the penises of priests drove me deep into the quarter, lungs of spittle, semen, smoke, blood and fur and faeces retching as I clutched my prize, the one who would preside upon our hold of marvels.

For luck I palmed the limbless, loped into an inn where with the three-head foetus bare and by my side I drank to vent the sins my eyes had downed. I saw that though yet sixteen years my life was set in sojourns, first to this accursed spit, the last to haunted reefs as dark and cold as tombs. Night oceans brought me solace. On land the fire and sun of demons charred me, ashes mulled by human dogs. Religion was a curb upon the weak who dwelled within the hells they sought to circle, plague and famine stringing barbs across their bones while in palatial churches orgies seethed with careless loathing. None could name me, none could claim me without bloody recoil. The brother foetus and the beer became my faithless form.

One Caraccioli took to table, introduced himself as priest turned preacher, sometimes necromancer, and through smears of smoke and deer grease interspersed the canine babel, whore’s handprint in fresh dung on wine-red straw, fan of chicken feathers, with his blasphemies. Dead men, he told me, tell no lies, and so their bones reveal the truth. My holy master was a sodomite, his altar flanked by mulesheads spitting maggots while he split the arse of altar-boys, and when the altar-boys were spent he sent for barrow-boys and revelled in the crusts of shit which glazed their bony flanks. I watched him piss into their mouths while candles made of baby fat flared up and mule-eyes suppurated in dead skulls. The graveyard was a cleaner place, whose tenants found autonomy in windless seas of humus.

Then from his coat he drew a femur, spun it once upon the wood, and where it pointed we embarked with wine and foetus, hounds and harlots hard at heel, found passage back to Naples while the moon howled.

Two days out from Leghorn a brace of vessels cut the sky, saturnine, and as they plumed to stern we saw the flag of Sallee pirates, nigger black encrusted with a ring of ribald skulls. One vessel drew to starboard, muzzles sparking in the dusk as small-gauge cannonballs, red-hot, vaporised the screaming spray, some bounced extinguished from the hull and one skipped through the quarter-deck and seared the shin of Jean Brocaire who knifed the Victoire closer, knuckles grinding on the wheel, and then our fifteen starboard guns removed them from the briny.

Portside