The Lost Journals of Pedro Piscator and Other Tales

By Lachlan Plain

The Lost Journals of Pedro Piscator is a collection of short fiction presented in various stylistic forms, written and illustrated by Australian author, puppeteer and artistic director Lachlan Plain. The playful and melancholic fictions engage with common themes, reflecting on the process of artistic creation and its relationship to reality.

The Lost Journals of Pedro Piscator and other tales is an eclectic illustrated collection of tall tales from across the globe and throughout the ages. Tales of daring, loss and madness. From fairy tale to science fiction book review; from desert parable to colonial crime fiction; from Soviet thriller to an early explorer's account of the dry and desolate interior of the great southern land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Impress Books
• Release date: Oct 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781907605468

Book preview

The Lyrebird’s Tale

Common belief has it that the lyrebird is a mimic, that all its utterances are repetitions of sounds gathered from the world. Yet in the lyrebird’s story, as it shall be told in these pages, the lyrebird is not a mimic, but rather the source.

In the beginning there was no monolithic consciousness that subdivided the chaos in a handful of days. In the beginning all things met at all points. The chaos defined itself gradually as it gained consciousness.

The eagle became an eagle, the platypus a platypus, and the rabbit was finally a rabbit, but the centre-point remained hazy, ill-defined, vaguely bird-like. Somewhere beneath its shimmering visage, as it flits through the bracken, darts between tree-trunks, is the point at which all things still meet. The naked eye cannot fathom it, but one can still hear the world in the lyrebird.

The Boy and the Crone

Because his father was a merchant and was often away from home for long stretches of time, the boy spent his days playing with the birds of the forest. One day, whilst wrestling a sparrow, the sparrow pinned him to the ground and the boy wept.

‘Never cry my friend,’ said the sparrow, ‘for Baba Yaga rewards only the brave, the rest she boils with her cabbage for breakfast.’

‘Who is Baba Yaga?’ asked the boy.

‘Baba Yaga lives in the middle of the forest in a castle of quartz, encircled by a fence of human bones and guarded by three white eagles,’ explained the sparrow. ‘Her bony nakedness is covered only by the white hair that hangs from her head and flows behind her like a river when she streaks across the sky in her magic mortar.’

Later that evening the boy asked his mother, ‘Who is Baba Yaga?’

‘Baba Yaga lives in the forest in the hollow of a tree,’ replied his mother. ‘If you are good to the birds of the forest then she will guide you in your dreams.’

‘Does she boil cowards with her cabbage for breakfast?’ asked the boy. His mother just smiled.

That winter his mother died and his father buried her beneath the cherry tree. That spring the tree’s blossoms were blood red.

The next winter his father re-married and they moved to his stepmother’s hut on the edge of the forest. The boy’s father left soon after on one of his important journeys. While he was gone his stepmother sent him into the snow every day for wood. His stepmother required a lot of wood for she kept her stove burning hot as a furnace. He did not mind venturing into the icy forest every day for his stepmother’s hut was so stifling.

Each day as he made his way into the forest he spoke with the crows and fed them bread from his lunch. The crows were the only birds who ventured that deep into the forest. They told him to never set foot where the black pines grew, for that is where Baba Yaga lives. The boy did not ask who Baba Yaga was, because he preferred his mother’s answer over anything a crow might say.

Before his father had left on his journey he had said, ‘Never use the black axe, for it is an inclement axe.’ The axe was cursed and spoke only in riddles. But one day the boy could not find his hatchet in its usual place and asked his stepmother if she knew where it was. His stepsister had loaned it to her husband, whose own axe was broken. His stepmother told him to use the black axe.

‘But father said never to use the black axe,’ said the boy, ‘for it’s an inclement axe.’

‘But we need wood for the oven, as your stepsister’s husband is visiting this evening,’ replied his stepmother. ‘If you only chop the black pines that grow next to my sister’s house, then the black axe won’t bother you.’ The boy did not ask who her sister was, for he knew her sister was Baba Yaga.

That morning the crows did not walk with him. He had only the black axe for company.

‘Who is Baba Yaga?’ asked the axe.

‘Yaga lives in a castle of quartz guarded by white eagles,’ replied the youth.

The answer was wrong, so the axe chopped off his right leg. The boy continued to hop down the forest path on his left leg, for he was still determined to chop wood for the oven.

‘Who is Baba Yaga?’ the axe asked again.

‘Yaga lives in the forest in the hollow of a tree,’ he replied. This answer was also wrong, so the axe chopped off his left leg. The boy continued to drag himself along the ground, for he was still determined to chop wood for the oven.

‘Who is Baba Yaga?’ asked the axe.

The boy remained silent, so the axe chopped off his left hand. The axe did not chop off his right hand, as it was the hand that held the axe.

The boy lay there for a long time. A black horseman flashed past on a black horse, almost trampling him. Night fell. The boy hurled the axe deep into the darkness where it lay weeping. When the crows saw that the black axe was gone, they approached the boy with their own eyes lighting the way.

‘Only Baba Yaga can help you now,’ said one of the crows.

The crows rolled him onto a large blanket. Each took a corner and flew with him to a little hut standing on chicken legs.

‘Little hut, little hut, stand with your back to the woods and your front to me!’ called the chief crow. The hut turned around to face them. The crows gave the boy a blanket and a comb. ‘If you are in trouble, throw down the blanket and a large river will form before you,’ said the first crow.

‘If you are in trouble, throw down the comb and a forest of thorns will spring up before you,’ said the second crow.

The third crow just wished him luck. Then they rolled him through the door and they were gone.

The boy looked around the room. Baba Yaga’s head was in the middle of the room, her right leg was in one corner and her left in the other.

‘Why have you come to visit a shrivelled old woman? Nobody visits Baba Yaga the bony-legged … unless they want something!’

‘I was walking through the forest when my black axe hacked off my legs and my left hand, grandmother,’ said the boy.

‘Well what use are you to me without your legs or left hand?’ exclaimed the bony old woman. ‘Be gone with you.’

‘I can still whittle if you have a sharp knife,’ said the boy. So Baba Yaga set the boy to work and all the next day he whittled figurines from the hard black pine that surrounded her hut. Yaga was so pleased with his labours that she said he could stay with her and that some day she would give him his legs back.

That night three skeletons materialised in the old woman’s kitchen and began preparing the dinner from thin air. One skeleton was white, one was red and the other black and the only light they needed shone from the holes in their heads where their eyes should have been. They prepared six pots of chicken broth, one leg of lamb and a bathtub full of cabbage soup. Baba Yaga ate it all down and left only a saucer of cabbage soup for the boy. She then rolled over to face the wall and started to snore. When he was sure the old woman was asleep, the boy dragged himself to the window and watched the skeletons undressing in the stable. First they took off their shinbones, then their thighbones. As they removed each bone they stacked them in a neat pile at the foot of their straw beds, arranging the smaller ones, such as their toes, in orderly rows where they could find them easily the next day. They grunted goodnight to one another before dismantling their arms and curling up to sleep.

For seven days the boy carved little figurines. He carved a castle with a mote and a tzar, an army of horsemen and a village of artisans, several churches and congregations to fill them, woodsmen for the forests and peasants for the fields. Every day Baba Yaga told him how pleased she was with his efforts and how one day she would reward him with new legs, but every day the boy lost a little faith in the wily old woman. Until finally, on the seventh day, with no faith remaining, he hatched a plan to steal into the stables under the cover of night, using his right hand and his teeth, and to steal the legs and the left arm from the red skeleton. But first he filled the eye socket of each skeleton’s skull with bread dough so that when they woke up they could not see where their limbs lay.

Baba Yaga woke to the sound of bones rattling in the stable. The whole house shook with the gnashing of her teeth when she discovered that the boy had escaped with her red skeleton’s legs. She scolded the skeletons for letting him go and beat them to pieces. In her fury she screeched that she would burn the figurines the boy had carved, but the little people unfurled the wings that the boy had secretly given them, and flew away.

Baba Yaga streaked across the sky in her magic mortar with her bony legs scrunched against her chest and her knuckles raw from clutching at the pestle that nestled between her thighs. She saw the boy running through the fields below on his new skeleton legs. These were no ordinary skeleton legs, they were magical skeleton legs, and the landscape buckled in on itself and he travelled across it, not like a man, but like a clap of thunder.

When he saw that the old woman was gaining on him he threw down the blanket that the crows had given him and suddenly a great river stood between them. But the old woman stooped her back and drank up the river in one long gulp. The boy threw down the comb and a forest of thorns sprang up between them, but the old woman set her teeth gnashing and gnawed through the spikes in no time flat.

Then, at the last minute, the boy unfolded the wings he realised he’d always had and flew away into the dark night sky.

The Mandrake in the Marsh

The black-haired woman hovered along the cliffs, appearing and reappearing on the rim between rock and the white of sky. Her skirt clung to her body and flapped at her feet, damp from the sea spray. She was all too aware of the superstitious beliefs of the fishermen and how their wives avoided her at the market. She’d learnt from their children, as they played in the woods that shouldered her home, of her apparent nocturnal transmutations into a fish. And, as she paused to gaze down at the churning ocean, she did fancy throwing herself over the edge and growing fins and a tail before hitting the water. But she turned from the cliff and made her way, as she did every