(MADAME CONNERIE) A SWAMPLAND TALE OF SCENT AND SECRET
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: THE WORLDWIDE WEB
I’ve often wondered, as any journalist worth their salt has done, what psychics dream about. In the case of Madame Connerie, it involves becoming a cosmic spider, specifically one with “a magnificent violet and gold mottled abdomen.”
In this many-eyed gracile form she hangs on a vast, seemingly infinite network of webs. She’s dreamt of this place countless times since she was a little girl.
The webs are strung with twinkling beads of dew, each a coalesced world trapped within its own crystal ball.
What’s the nature of the ephemera caught in her dreamcatcher? Is it a condensing psychic mist from the collective subconscious? How symbolic, or literal, is this recurring image? Why does she like to envision herself as an ambush predator?
The Madame scoffed at these and similar questions, waving them off as she continued to describe her bizarre vision to me (she made clear it was a true vision, and no mere dream.)
“I felt a struggling, wriggling sensation. Vibrations, you know, a disturbance — southeast. The wobbles entered my steady claw and shook my entire being.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: THE WORLDWIDE WEB
A stabilizing stretch of the limbs, and I was off to investigate its source.
This place is–usually–complete tranquility. I can roam at my leisure, or hang with the coalesced fates in silent meditation. So rarely does one demand to be observed in this way, or otherwise make its discomfort so apparent.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing when I first approached it. Like I would any other dewdrop, I held the surrounding lattice taut to stabilize the image, training my many perceptive eyes onto it. It continued to writhe and swirl in on itself; a turbulent, murky scene in a bubble.
There was an embryonic shape– reptilian, a silhouetted fetal alligator twisting inside a transparent egg. I saw the gold flash of a reflective eye as it roiled and flipped.
But it was this “eye” that drew my attention closer, resolving the truth of the matter on closer inspection.
It wasn’t an eye at all, but a spotlight viewed from some distance above, partly illuminating a midnight swampland scene.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: THE WORLDWIDE WEB
The movement and shapes were an illusion, wind through the darkened trees and light dancing off the water like scales, further distorted by the convexity of the dewdrop.
But the mysterious nature of the swampy snowglobe sustained my interest, so more deeply I peered.
What was that light searching for out there? The surface tension separating me from the scene dimpled, until I was able to carefully stretch a limb inside without breaking it. I probed slowly, blindly, until I felt the man wielding the light and reached into his mind.
The first thing I noticed once I was comfortably behind the man’s eyes is that he only had one. At least only one real one. The right eye was a motionless prosthetic, though one of good quality.
The remnant left eye was very keen, intent, always analyzing, compensating for a lack of depth perception.
A headlamp served as the aforementioned source of light. His hands swept the magnetized coil of a metal detector from left to right as he walked along in swishing dark green waders.
His footsteps squelched steadily down the muddy path, walled in on either side by waving swordgrass and bobbing cattails.
The man wore headphones that pumped in alien sounds of calibration, like the pops and squeaks of an electric dolphin. He smoothly adjusted speed and direction in response to the noises, doing so with practiced instinct.
Decades of repetition had turned the metal detector into an extension of his arm, a sensory organ scouring the substrate for metallic curiosities.
Curiosity indeed. This man of flesh and blood, not a dream, was named ‘Louisiana.’
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: THE WORLDWIDE WEB
Louisiana Walker. Though his memories confirmed his parents had met and fallen in love in Lake Charles, he was born and raised in Michigan, mostly by a drunk and bereaved father.
A childhood of vicious bullying made him go by ‘Lou’ for years now, more specifically ‘Lookie-Lou.’ A mere glance at those memories confirmed the obvious: growing up a one-eyed boy named Louisiana, especially in one of the poorest areas of Detroit, wasn’t a stroll through the park.
But, self-effacing as the nickname ‘Lookie’ was for a young cyclops, it sure beat the pants off ‘Louisiana.’
What was Lookie-Lou on the lookout for in his namesake land? Why, other than proximity, had my vision been drawn to this eccentric hobbyist?
What did an armchair archeologist from Detroit have to do with fortune smeller Doris Lafitte, or my book about psychics?
I peered more through his memories. After his father’s passing he’d come to the bayou, newly orphaned and middle aged, searching for identity. It’d been close to a decade now…was he any closer to finding it?
Lou halted in response to a pure, high, sustained whine through the headphones. He swept the broad nostril of his detector over a conspicuous hump of mud. As he knelt down to investigate the noise he rested the detector on top.
The whine became so loud and piercing it began to pull me out of the vision.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: THE WORLDWIDE WEB
That’s when my perception briefly re-entered the van. I realized that a coincident loud beep was coming from that robotic nose the good Doctor Gandha brought along in her fancy bag. She’d taken it out and was fiddling with it in her lap, using the smallest screwdriver I’d ever seen, and ogling at it with a nifty telescopic lens.
From what I could see it was surprisingly…nose-like. Aquiline, metallic, with seams and screws and a sort of glowing harmonica-grate within the lengthy nostrils, but otherwise it resembled a disembodied android nose.
She managed to calm its protests with a deft turn of the screw, and I drifted away quickly. It was easy to find Lou Walker’s consciousness again, nearby as it was in space and time.”
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: CROCODILE ROCK
“The noise had dissipated in Lookie-Lou’s part of the swamp too; the headphones were off and he was digging into the mud with a small hand trowel.
In place of electric pops and whines came the steady green hum of the moonlit swamp.
Lou whistled a pleasing tune to himself as he worked, one that sounded familiar, though I hadn’t heard it since I was a confused young girl in Quebec.
My head–his head–vibrated with a melancholic melody. His voice rose in song with the crickets, his trowel chunking mud from the bayou’s gaping flank in time with the chirping frogs.
He crooned without shame into the heavy night air, and I felt my own face, not the spider’s but the old woman’s asleep in the van, grinning with the infectious joy of his toothy smile:
‘Tweeee-dly Tweedly Tweedle Dee,
I’m as happy as can be!
Jiminy cricket, jiminy jack,
You make my heart go clickety-clack!
Tweee-dly Tweedly Tweedle Dee….’
A tug of the web, neurons this time—-mine? No, his, a memory connected strongly to the lyrics, more than a memory, a woman.
Is that a glint of metal in the dirt?
Dee….he called her Tweedle Dee, and now she’s gone. She’s been gone for so long now. He loved…he loves her. Could she be the object of his search?
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: CROCODILE ROCK
I sensed no other consciousness nearby, save the many twinkling eyes of furtive spiders, and two juvenile alligators suspended in a mat of duck grass some ways beyond.
Having taken an odd shine to the fellow, I was hesitant to look inward toward his memories for answers. I feared what I might see.
Had he killed this woman, this Tweedle Dee? No. If he had, wouldn’t he know where she is?
My conclusion: If I’d crept up on Mr. Walker out here as my usual self, a mature human woman (not a psychic spider) he’d likely do what he’d done many times before. I could see it there, clear as flipping through a comic book.
He’d explain that by doing his thing at such a late hour he avoids competition from Lake Charles’ many detectorists; he can focus better out here alone. He would tip up his headlamp and smile to assure me he’s not worried about the snakes or the gators; he knows how to handle himself out here.
He’d explain the significance of the strange noises coming through the headphones, even offer to let me try out the instrument myself if I was careful.
Drawing forth smudged coins and shiny fragments from the pocket of his waders, he’d regale with stories of plunderer Jean Lafitte’s historical exploits in the area; how the famed pirate’s buccaneers stashed caches of treasure all over the swamp, seeding it with stolen artifacts using forced labor, christening it ‘Contraband Bayou.’ Once infamous, it was now…
A hobbyist’s paradise.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: CROCODILE ROCK
What he’d keep to himself, possibly until the grave, was that the one woman he’d ever truly loved had vanished into the swamp years ago without a trace, without a word, without an explanation or a goodbye.
Every time the metal detector cries, his heart stops at the prospect of finding the ring attached to her cold dead finger, or the necklace twisted around her naked vertebrae. Part of him hopes that day never comes. A bigger part can’t rest until it does.
Lou gasped—my attention snapped back to a faint gleam at the bottom of the muddy hole he’d dug. Our hands trembled like unsteady marionettes, but with determination they clawed and swept away dark clods of earth, tumbling pebbles and broken roots until…a statuette?
We dared not breathe. Heaving the golden tuber from its former grave, we hoisted it closer to the headlamp’s glow. We took great care in brushing away the stubborn dirt to reveal an ancient carved figure beneath.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: CROCODILE ROCK
Lou exhaled a mix of relief and disappointment; the moment of reuniting with his absent lover’s bones lay further yet down the road. He nodded to himself and set about identifying the metallic artifact. The erect humanoid figure bore a gator-like head, and a noble toothy smile.
‘There’s no way…’ an incredulous raspberry from our lips, left eye widening in utter disbelief, ‘This thing looks Ancient Egyptian. A crocodilian head on a human body…looks like a depiction of the gator god of death, Sobek! Did that tomb-raiding bastard Jean Lafitte loot pyramids too? I gotta get this thing looked at, I need to get it to a museum or something…that’s if it isn’t a tourist souvenir. Heh, that’d be just my luck.’
He placed the statuette upright atop the mound of dirt excavated from its former grave, like a holy temple at the summit of a small black mountain.
Flicking on the metal detector, he placed the headphones back over our ears and swept the sensor over the golden gator god, producing the same high, pure, whining tone in our ears. The figurine clutched its ankh and scepter, staring back with bright golden eyes. A predator’s eyes.
I couldn’t quite hear what Lou said to himself, but it was something like ‘That doesn’t sound like a piece of tin tourist tat…’
He flicked off the metal detector, removed the headphones, and slumped down cross legged in front of the glinting idol.
‘Hot damn…I really can’t believe it. I finally found something. After all the bottle caps and magnet fishing and accidental misdemeanors, all the haggling with those idiotic collectors at the hotel conventions, I actually found something worth finding, a real artifact,’ he shook his head.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: CROCODILE ROCK
‘I’m a bonafide Archie now… SHOVE IT, POPS!! I told you there was treasure out here man, real historic–significant stuff! The kinda stuff we used to light up about. But you were too broken to risk it, too sad to come back here after Mom passed on. I can’t blame you, but I wish you could see this, Pops. It’s like something out of the wild bayou stories you used to tell me. I wish my sweet Dee could see this too, I know she’d be proud. She always encouraged my…search.’
I thought the vision had begun to dissolve, that the dewdrop was falling away from me, but it was only the blur of tears in Lou’s functioning eye. He furrowed his brow and blinked away the tears in response to a faint but persistent gibbering noise.
‘The hell is that?’
At first it seemed to be coming from the headphones cradled in Lou’s lap, only the metal detector was off. It didn’t sound like an electric dolphin either.
It was a voice. Our shaking hands lifted the headphones over our ears, and I began to question my own perception of reality for the first time since the 60’s.
‘I can’t make it out. Dang crosstalk— gotta be a mixed radio signal, some kind of interference…does this shit even work that way?’
I had a feeling it didn’t.
Lou confirmed the metal detector was off, and like a man possessed by more than a shapely spider he swept the dead instrument over the statue. He centered it directly over the pharaonic head, like a mini UFO mothership in a B-movie about aliens in Ancient Egypt.
The voice grew louder, clearer, though no less difficult to understand. It was speaking, but not in a way that was recognizably male or female, nor in a language I’d ever heard.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: CROCODILE ROCK
The quality of its voice was like a smoker who’d had their voice box removed— just a strained hissing rasp, with a higher pitched whining undertone not unlike the sound of gold as interpreted by the metal detector.
Lou listened intently now, and when he fell to his knees before the statue it briefly ceased its gibbering.
‘My coptic is rusty, f-forgive me little god. D-did you say your true name is Souk-Shibeti, He Who Impregnates?’
The statue made a noise halfway between a hiss and a cough, followed by a ragged outburst of clarification.
‘I beg your mercy for my misinterpretation, Souk-Shibeti, He Who UNITES. Unites…I could see that. You reunited the severed parts of Osiris buried in the desert sands. Yes, I’ve read much about you.’
‘And you’re right, you’re not a god of death. It’s your aggression, your ferocity that puts me in mind of death, but of course you’re the protector of the great river of life! Please, forgive me for disturbing your resting place.’
A stomach-churning sound, a laugh like a hoarse mating call, thundered so close it was clear the sound no longer came from an external source.
Cold dread slackened Lou’s face as he lowered the headphones. When the voice spoke again, it was right next to me, almost on top of me inside Lookie-Lou’s head.
Now its quality was like wind whistling over an arid elephant graveyard, with an aroma of roadkill to match. This psychic presence, Sobek, Souk-Shibeti, was staggeringly large and old, crushing me into an ever narrower corner of Lou’s mind.
In my horror, and to my regret, I remained silent.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: DARK WATERS
‘So you say, Great Splasher…you brought Order to this world when you emerged from the Dark Waters before time began. You say you’re quick to forgive my trespass, as a lover of thieves and those who take what they desire. Though I’m a man of science and reason, and not prone to spiritual devotion, your immense presence is undeniable, profound, arresting…and it comes at kind of a strange time for me.’
‘You wish for me to be your vessel, to spread your power across Lake Charles, to make it your new Faiyum. Trading one Land of the Lake for another. You want to use my body to help you emerge from the Dark Waters again, into a New World. Is that right? Or have I gone totally insane?’
Lou trained his appraising eye on the statue’s gilded smile, and the god breathed a lengthy bellowing sigh in response. The stench, the sensation of heat, and the sheer weight of it pushed me to the brink of letting go. I wanted to shout, to grab Lou and shake him, but I was pinned, silenced, crushed. By then It was too late; I was a spectator by the tip of my psychic claw.
‘It may surprise you since we only just met…but I actually am willing to do this. No argument, no convincing required. See, I don’t have much to lose these days. Hell, my cat died last week so I don’t even have any real responsibilities.’
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: DARK WATERS
‘But if I do this…He Who Unites…will you help me reunite with my lost love? My Tweedle Dee. She’s like a missing part of me. I promise you, Lake Charles will feel the cradle of your jaws, the protective fortress of your teeth, but only once I’ve been united with my Dee, should she still live. Well, Great Snaggletooth, can ya do it? Can ya bring my girl back to me?’
The voice was silent, though Sobek’s presence was more swollen and pulsating than before. It seemed to be inflating, growing, like a well-nourished embryo.
That bloated lizard had hung suspended for so long in the dark waters of Contraband Bayou’s muddy earth, waiting for the right sick or lame visitor to set upon like lightning. That visitor had finally arrived.
Squished into a thin layer of albumen inside the egg of Lookie-Lou’s skull, I trembled with the effort of sustaining our connection. Any effort to communicate or reach out to Lou in some way would sever it instantly. Did Sobek sense this? Did it sense me?
A moment later the question was irrelevant. A psychic horror had crossed over into the realm of the physical, the bodily, the grotesquely real in the blink of a single eye.
If I hadn’t been enmeshed with Lou Walker’s soul I’d have more trouble describing the brief but violent sequence of events that followed, but I felt it. Acutely.
Before he could scream from the enormous eruption of pressure, what I can only describe as an egg-tooth emerged from poor Louisiana’s forehead, piercing the barrier between nightmare and reality, between sanity and pure chaos.
When he did scream, the voice no longer sounded as sweet or melodious. Or as human.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: DARK WATERS
The rest seemed to occur all at once, and mercifully quick. Our skin desiccated, fragmenting into a tight coat of shining black scales; our left eye bulged into a brackish orb sliced through with a vertical gator-wake, while the right remained humanoid acrylic; our nose retracted into tight slit-like nostrils; new teeth like pale white carrots pierced our gums, displacing our human teeth which pittered into the mud at our feet. Our feet had already lengthened into crooked reptilian claws.
In horror and pain we writhed in the mud, a Cronenberg death roll, a struggle between animal and human and god and an old woman asleep in a van some time in the recent future or possibly the past.
And then it was over. The pain stopped, and our muscles ceased to twitch and roll over our creaking bones. We lay for a time, utterly spent…I can’t say how long. Our mouth hung open, lined with wicked teeth, like a carnivorous plant. We felt so cold, so famished. Starving.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: DARK WATERS
We mustered the energy to drag ourselves along the mud, like an old canoe with limbs. Retreating through the whispering swordgrass, we seeped toward the burble of running water, and the safety of shadows. The headlamp had jostled off and broken in our struggle, but we could see just fine.
We reached the bank, and Lou, or Sobek, or possibly I, peered into the rippling stream, lent a mirror finish by the bright summer moon.
What I saw then I’ve since kept to myself. I didn’t dare bring it up to anyone after I woke up. It was too ludicrous. The craziest thing I’d ever seen, or envisioned. And I’m someone who frequently discusses the content of their dreams, in gratuitous detail. The only fool that would ever believe me was Red Starling.
Lou Walker was no more. In his place was a taxidermy reptiloid, a sideshow horror you’d pay a nickel to see and wish you never had.
But no amount of nickels thrown into this wishing-well of nightmares would change anything. This was clearly a permanent, and drastic change.
Lou Walker had become a monstrous Manigator. The wildest part is, he looked thrilled. Happy as can be. Though he had rudimentary scaly lips that could’ve obscured them, his teeth were bared in a satisfied needly smile.
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: DARK WATERS
He sloughed off the rent scraps of his clothing and leapt into the water, a scaled Narcissus merging with his reflection. A sigh of pleasure as he drifted, weightless.
A lazy paddle of the new tail and he was off with the stream, belly skimming the smooth rocks and shells of quivering crawdads.
The voice returned, a combination of Lou’s natural cadence and the gator’s hissing rasp:
‘I’ve never felt so alive…I feel connected, like I can feel every living thing around me, sense its electricity. So exhilarating! If I’m quiet, and I just float…yes, I can almost hear it too. Wait wait, is it her?’
He was quiet, hanging in the water with his limbs dangling, his nose and eyes level with the seam between water and air. This membrane, in one form or another, stretched across the whole swamp, like a taut web. He blew little bubbles.
A thunderous crash of the tail. ‘It’s gotta be her! It sounds like gold…but louder than I’ve ever heard, more pure. She’s alive out there, I know it now. That tone, the electricity, it feels like a fish, but…richer, more complex. No, don’t think like that! I’ve gotta eat something, clear my aching head. Souk-Shibeti’s sharp tooth will hook me supper, then I’ll take a swim toward Tweedle Dee’s sweet song.’
MADAME CONNERIE’S VISION: DARK WATERS
He sliced through the deepening water like a nimble river dolphin, wasting no time testing his new strength and perception. Despite his ease, the water felt rough and choppy to me, to the point that I began to wobble almost crazily. I was losing hold of the vision.
Before I could get a proper hold Sobek had successfully bumped me off, and I clung on for dear life to the jerking matrix of webs, a spider in a hurricane, trembling as dreams and fates were flung violently off the Great Branch into the Dark. What was the source of this quaking—was it my own fear?
I clung on so hard that the webs responded by merging into cushioned faux-leather. I could feel my magnificent violet and gold mottled abdomen narrowing into the bony arse of an old lady, my splendid limbs merging into flabby simian arms. As the sound of gurgling water and crickets receded into the van’s rattling frame, I could still make out, scarcely above a whisper, a hideous and lovely song:
‘Tweedly Tweedly Tweedle Deeeee…
Won’t you come on back to me?
Careful, careful, fishes bite!
I’m gonna see my honey tonight,
Tweeeedly Tweedly Tweedle Deee…’
“Madame, sorry, there’s someone ahead on the road. Madame Connerie, um, hello please?” Doctor Gandha sounded a touch worried, but too polite to shake an elderly woman into consciousness.
I rubbed the blear from my eyes, took a moment to recover from the shock of bodily transformation, and squinted through the dusty windshield into what I’d forgotten was late afternoon sunshine, fringed with dark clouds.
Indeed, someone stood in the road before us. A tall man.
Meet A Mysterious Stranger in The Fortune Smeller Part 3
NAVIGATE THE FORTUNE SMELLER: PART 1 // PART 2 // PART 3 // PART 4
