Chamjari

Underwear

Underwear, underwear

Someone’s gonna wear some underwear

It sits there, so you can dance

Without the friction of your pants

Feeling good so you can funk

Like a glove on your junk

UNDERWEAR!

It covers things

So you can’t see

It covers up

And looks sexy

UNDERWEAR (pause)

UNDERWEAR (pause)

UNDERWEAR (pause)

UNDERWEAR (vocal stretch)

Look at me! Almost naked!

But you can’t see what’s protected!

You can’t see beneath these briefs

You can’t see what I hide from thee!

That’s UNDERWEAR

My UNDERWEAR

UNDERWEAR

UNDERWEAR

You’re looking at my funny undies

Looking at me, looking hungry

In your eyes I laugh and scoff

Now it’s time for underwear off!

HUG THAT DIRTY BODY

HUG THAT DIRTY BODY

HUG THAT DIRTY BODY

HUG THAT DIRTY BODY

HUG THAT DIRTY BODY

HUG THAT DIRTY BODY!!!

All hell howled in that night. Cries flew up into the sky like flocks of anguished sheldrakes, claws probed beneath doors, inquisitive ghost children despaired of their inability to shatter windows with their wretched fists of icy mist, and from time to time, a chimney toppled loud and fast like a broadside of curses.

-Jean Ray, Whisky Tales

We cannot put water on the back of our hand. Liquid can only be kept in two tightly clasped hands. Qwaya holds an oil stick with his fingers together so that he can listen to a dwindling low voice. His everyday memories that enter into his hands remain as records, just as a stray star in the universe is observed and called by its pet name.

The instrument was strangely festooned with what at first seemed a sea vine, shaggy purplish stalks draping both bowl and fretboard. But almost at once we realized their supple muscularity, and that it was their caress extracting these limpid euphonies from the shamadka. A voice began to sing, a soprano that was icy-sweet like children’s temple choir.

Its limbs were tough, snake-muscled things despite their looking nerveless as drenched plumes.

It trailed astern of the instrument, where a flabby, tapered sack of skin ballooned along just under the surface. Near its peak this bruise-colored bag of flesh — bald as bone and blubber-soft — was puckered into a jagged-rimmed crater. Half cupped in this and half leaking into a maze of bays and channels branching from it, was the being’s eye — a viscous, saffron puddle all starred within by black, pupillary nodes that burgeoned, coalesced, diminished or multiplied by fissure into smaller wholes, their evolution as incessant as the whole eye’s melting flux within its mazy orbit.

A mouth the thing had as well, down near the juncture of the skin-sack with the tentacular fronds. It was an obese blossom of multiple lips like concentrically packed petals. All of them moved, and you couldn’t pinpoint among them the exact source of their utterance.

A face you had to call it, though the stomach rebelled, and, for all the ambiguity of the features, it was a poisonously expressive face, always conveying something searching and sardonic in the way its pupillaries constellated. A veritable chorus of derisive smiles rippled across its lips as it sang on. Then the demon lay almost inert. Its lax fronds, floating frontally extended, made slight, teasing undulations in Gildmirth’s direction. At length it cocked its peak more upright. Its optic jelly regarded the Privateer, the honey-colored corpulence sagging and beginning to branch through its ragged socket. The steady sloth of this process put me in mind of a sand-clock’s drainage. Pupillary buds began multiplying in the jelly’s central depths, converging like glittery, dark hornets to torment the man with their scrutiny. Smiles and smirks of coquettish reprimand rippled out over the multifoliate mouth like water-rings fleeing a dropped stone. ‘My precious pet!’ it fluted. ‘Still so untidy? Oh gentlemen!’ — the eye now swung to us, pupillaries scattering to read us separately — ‘My stubborn little plum-eyed poppet here, he will not tidy up! I tell him if he’s going to stay somewhere, he ought to tidy up. He’s supposed to be a man of consequence, or was long ago at least. He’s told me so at any rate. Just listen. What’s your name? Are you still who you said yesterday you were?’ The pupil-swarm recondensed, gnawed busily at the Privateer’s impassive face. Plumes swirling, it whipped round in the water, and traveled squidlike The fact that the creature was a Spaalg, when I learned it, had meant little to me beyond the fact that the breed was relatively insignificant in terms of the threat they posed as predators on humankind. The conventional expression ‘dimwebbers, meeps, and ropy spaalgs,’ connoting the whole class of minor demonry, told me this much. But now, watching that plumed slug — swift and graceful as a fine-muscled cloud of oil — pour one lithe tickler down into a little agora, and tease with its membranously tufted tip the minutely fluted columns of a colonnade no higher than a gold Kairnish half-nilling set on edge — watching the Spaalg doing this, I recalled another jot of information. Undle Ninefingers refers to them somewhere as being ‘vermicles,’ which, in his nomenclature, designates the class of demons that are internally parasitic upon their prey. A cold squirming, originating from some point in the back of my head, made a fast, nasty trip down my back. Gildmirth’s body was so solid — square and hale. Did his composure mask the deep gall of worm-work, neat, lethal tunnelings serving somehow as the pathways of this Spaalg’s influence within him? The Spaalg’s body-sausage folded, thrusting its eye from the water. Spaalgs have a technique for infecting shape-shifters. Their larvae lie integrated in the body of a larger demon. If a man, or any creature, would acquire another being’s shape, he or it must enter a specimen and become congruent with its form, to learn it. If a Spaalg infects the study-specimen, it can transfer to the shape-shifter, and infect him by any means it devises.

The Spaalg is a type of demon found in one of the several hellish under-realms in Michael Shea's "Nifft the Lean" (1982). I've reread all the text describing it many times but still have difficulty imagining it's form with any defining clarity. I think that was the author's intention. In form it seems to be like a cross between a sea mollusks and a living pudding. Physically, it's not particularly (relative to demons) dangerous but it seems to have the telepathic ability to worm its way into your mind, pluck out your insecurities and shame, and then gleefully use these to try to break you down from within using conversation, songs, and even mocking poems. Some slight modifications were made to the text to make the disjointed quotes more readable.

When humankind make covenants with the more-than-human, or the less-than-human, you may buttress them with traditions and rites as you will, but there remains an unacknowledged horror that is never quieted in men’s hearts.