Unknown Immortals: In the Northern City of Success

by Herbert Moore Pim

The Willick woman.--The rent man.--The rag, bone, and balloon man.--The fish man.--The soul of Smithfield.--That which is called Johnston.--Monsieur among the mushrooms.--The boiler of bones.--The madman.--Julius McCullough Leckey Craig.--The little child, the wisest of all

Excerpt from Unknown Immortals: In the Northern City of Success

From childhood I have had a special affection for certain queer people. And when I came to an age at which I could write about them, I found myself puzzled, because I knew instinctively that realism would be quite useless as a method of describing them. So I treated them in a manner of my own. It is not idealism; it is, as the reader will see, something more than idealism. Yet I claim that they are truly described, and that just the impression which they made upon my mind has been truly reproduced, at least for myself, upon paper in the form of words.
I remember, as a very small child, visiting a lunatic asylum with my mother. Lunacy attracted me strangely; and to gain the experience which I required in order to sketch a lunatic in words, I "signed on" for the final lectures in a city asylum....

108 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

Herbert Moore Pim was born in 1883 to a distinguished Quaker business and philanthropic family in Belfast. His father, Robert, was the secretary of the Friends Provident Insurance Company and Pim followed his father into the insurance business. From the age of seventeen, he began circulating manuscripts of his poetry and short stories and developed an interest in the occult. In 1903 he married Amy Vincent Mollan, the daughter of a successful Presbyterian linen merchant.

Reviews

[Osiris Oliphant · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://archive.org/details/unknownim...
or,
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i...

lt is not chance which makes nurses fill the brains of little drowsy people with tales of the fish-man; that he's a sort of hobgoblin who will come for them if they cry.

Perhaps he really has a cavern for his journey's end,
that opens to greet him, and closes when he has entered.

The darkness is as day unto him; and lest men should speak, and by questioning comprehend his mystery, their mouths are stopped, and their stomach-souls are satisfied.

There is a crackling of paper; things emerge from behind trees, are driven away immediately and scattered; but the temple of that which is called 'Aunt Jane' remains.

And from her cauldron there arose the vapour of bones... and all the scums of our sphere : the crutches and corset-busts, turbines and teapots, sewing-machines and Salvation Army tambourines, weigh-bridges and whetd stones, yard-rules, and Yule-logs, zithers and Zulu-shields.

The fish-man had often heard the cries of frightened children. It didn't interest him.

In his knowledge of 'the mushroom' he was all-powerful, but half his truth slipped when he said the word “alive", and we grasped the whole of his secret. The strange flatness of his baskets... How the sides came together at the place where the handles began...

Sometimes his baskets would be laden down with things so heavy and full of dread that he could scarcely get them to the shore, to sink them into the water, to fill the places from which he had taken the fish.

Long-stalked toad-stools had long ago replaced the flowers in his vases. And puffballs were seen rolling around at his feet. The very sky seemed to split open above him and the sand of some celestial desert to descend upon him.

“ Why, then," he sang, “ shall we not drown ourselves, and be in harmony with the unnumbered things of the sea?"

He had gotten as far as the Cathedral, intending to confess to them his dread secret; but at the last moment he decided to postpone for a whole year. By then the beetle he had buried under Saint Patrick's Spire would have eaten away most of the foundations...

And when he departed he left behind him a litter of fish-bones and forgotten chips. And, at the noise of his departing wheels, cats without number descended from roofs and came forth from laneways, and made a pavement of fur until nothing remained.

Perhaps he was seen very early the next morning at some fairy farmyard gathering the balloons, which may really have been eggs, left for him by fairies in exchange for some of the horrible bones and jam he brought from town.

Quite a small army of police are now employed to loiter near the end of the lane and act as private detectives.

"Who is this that boileth bones in the darkness? Who is this, sister of a parent, she that offereth curious sacrifice? She hath the hill of caves for a companion....We shall wait for her night and day. And exclaim afterwards, as ones expounding the unspeakable, "The majority here are mushrooms! Man, their toy, is nowhere!"

[Manos (hoarding books) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A weird piece of literature that recently came to my hands.

The author explores the city of his time, observing everyday people and analysing the occult side of their life.

My favourite of this collection of short stories was the "Fish Man". Beware of what he hides in his basket..."all alive".