October 16th – Meredith Davis – ‘The Accusing Voice’ (1923) – Read it here. Find the full challenge list here.

I actually didn’t realise that Project Gutenberg had the Weird Tales magazine volumes, and that this was published in Vol. 1, 1923.

This one I kind of liked, but found a bit underwhelming. It’s a supernatural-explained sort of story, it’s more what I’d call a thriller, or proto-noir, perhaps, but it’s a fairly good ride.

I struggled a bit to think of something to respond creatively with, and I thought I’d give you something with Ricky Porter (an unseen experimental bit I wrote in a What If exercise).

For this, The Accusing Voice is Ricky’s, to himself, and it’s in the way of him improving his skill as a bard as well as a Soothsayer. It’s a Ricky in the Otherworld snippet, not sure if it fits anywhere yet. It is not edited or fully fleshed out – this is purely as is, experimental and without context.

Ricky was a light sleeper, and the music woke him. At least, he thought it was music. A song like ice, like the dance of chaotic matter, rang through his head. He opened his eyes, and he wasn’t at home anymore.

“He is with us,” a silvery voice proclaimed. “Welcome, Soothsayer.”

Ricky blinked, and rubbed his face. He was standing in a circular, stone-walled room, set around with burning torches. A slab of rock like a rough-hewn altar stone was in the centre, and surrounding it were robed figures, all in mistletoe-white.

Banners of blue and green hung on the walls – Otherworldly livery, Otherworldly hues. This wasn’t the Outside, but something connected to his cunning-man inheritance, the deep roots of his family that went back further than the tentacles of Grandad, that had their origins in a soil steeped with myth and faerie tales.

Ricky smelt pomander and honeysuckle, roasted meat and fermented fruits.

“No,” Ricky said, shaking his head. “No, no. I’m not playing.”

“Good, because this isn’t a game.” The speaker wasn’t looking at him. He didn’t want to guess their gender, but he suspected that was a moot point, given none of these people were strictly human.

“You’re about to come into your powers,” another speaker said. “Let’s see if you’re worthy of them.”

Ricky made no move to enter the circle of figures. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he didn’t belong here. “An’ if I’m not?”

There was a pause. “We’re just curious. You’ll come into them regardless of our opinions. But maybe you have what it takes to be a bard, and if you do, you can stand here, with us.”

He looked around for the figures he might recognise, but those with beards looked much the same. Half of them were shapeshifters, anyway. Some might be present in the dancing flames in the torches, some might be stones in the wall, some might be droplets of sweat on his own brow for all he knew. He dashed the perspiration away with the back of his arm and scowled.

“Out of my own curiosity, what am I getting?” Ricky cocked his head. “Something powerful. Must be, for you lot to pay attention.” He misliked being pulled from his world into another without notice.

“What else would you be getting, but words of power? Let’s hear your own words, first. We want to see what power they have on their own.”

(Mad old bastards. What right have they got to drag me out of bed?)

Ricky set his jaw. “Right, well, am I not worth a formal introduction, or what? You got me out of bed for this, I never asked t’ come here.”

Someone in the circle heaved a testy sigh. “If you want our respect, show us what you’ve got. Then we’ll see if you qualify for a formal introduction.”

“On the stone,” someone else said from beneath their white cowl, and slammed their staff on the ground. “On the stone. On the stone.”

Ricky rolled his eyes, shouldered his way through to the middle of the circle, and climbed onto the altar stone. “If I do this, will you all piss off?”

“You straddle two worlds, Soothsayer,” said a voice he knew better than the others. It had a strong Welsh lilt, and made him remember things he would rather not. “None of your family are any better than they ought to be, so let’s see how good you are. Tell us who that is.”

“Let’s see if’n you start making sense,” Ricky retorted, but his chest squirmed.

He was a man with no education who liked the sound of words he’d read and mimicked accents he heard. He’d never spent years in caves crushed by stones, reciting epics until they embedded their cadences and modes into his brain so deep that he understood them as their own language-within-a-language. 

He’d never learned the forms of poetry that could kill a man, never learned how to praise a king by inventing words whose meanings were so obvious in context they needed no explanation, and yet fitted perfectly with the rhyming structure that once birthed from his lips they existed in perfect harmony as if they had always been. 

He had never sung of the prowess and skill of his patron for hours on end without repeating a single phrase or compliment. He had never learned how to sweeten his tongue on command, or to sour it enough to fill the ears of his listeners with fatal venom. 

He had not been a multitude of shapes, a tear in the air, a word among letters, the light of the lanterns, a hundred tormented souls, the string of a harp, a shield in battle. 

He was not Taliesin with his knowledge of animal speech, or any of the other bards he’d heard about, he was not a bard, he was not Myrddin’s equal. 

He was not even really a god, and he shouldn’t be here. 

Unless…

Ricky rolled his shoulders back.

He wasn’t anything like this gathering, who came from other worlds, other times, other legends. He was something else, and maybe that had its own power. Didn’t he know pain, like they did? Didn’t he know loss, and that prey-feeling of fear, didn’t he know how to look inside himself now, even if what he saw he didn’t fully like or understand, and didn’t he know how to hold on to something he loved?

He raised his chin and looked at them.

“Allus been better with other people’s words,” he admitted. “These’re my own.”

An expectant hush fell.

The torches guttered.

Ricky closed his eyes and thought of home, the only place he ever wanted to be, surrounded by her walls, supported on her foundations, sheltered under her eaves. He thought of her personalities and lives, room to room, and how they coalesced within her avatar. He thought of his cousins, the barbed wire of family around his heart and guts, perforating and impossible to disentangle, but a part of him he couldn’t cut out.

“Hear this!” His voice echoed around the chamber, and the music swelled in the back of his skull. Out of him poured a stream of alliterative verse, his mind always two steps ahead of his tongue, until he didn’t know if he was composing two lines ahead or anticipating the pattern that the poem wove for itself.

He could see the words, and where he misspoke in his hurry, painting the air in quickstep-time. His stumbles lessened as he relaxed into it.

When he came to the end, there was silence.

A staff thudded on the floor, and kept going. It was joined by others, until the whole circle was vibrating with percussive applause.

Ricky’s head was bursting with pressure now, a single tone slicing through his head and pressing against the back of his eyes.

He stepped forwards and fell face-down on his bed, stomach flipping over as he plummeted onto the mattress, and woke with a start.