92: Andromeda

When every day ends up at the leech sanctuary, you have to hold yourself firmly by the arms, look hard into your face, and ask yourself: why do I always end up at the leech sanctuary? Looking at all the leeches in their jars, tanks, or on their donor hosts, reading all the information panels, that same information I’ve hoovered up countless times… Like, for example, ‘Did you know?’, asks the amiable cartoon leech’s speech balloon, trailing into ellipses that guide the eye over to the text frame, gaudily styled like an ancient scroll and crested with a bright clip-art light bulb, that universal signifier of ideation and illumination through the bookish absorption of didactic tidbits, ‘…The Andromeda Leech was first discovered aboard the frigate Prins Willem of the Dutch East India Company in 1654, after several of its crew were forced to wade through marshlands to reach the ship’s safe anchorage during a heavy storm off the coast of Batavia (now Jakarta)’. Yes, thank you little cartoon leech, I did know that, having read it countless times, along with the explanatory text accompanying the other displays, vitrines and aquaria. ‘Did you know?’, asks the same quippily drawn leech, this time wearing surgeon’s scrubs. ‘…Leeches have been used for medical bloodletting since the Stone Age, but the practice’s popularity peaked during the infamous Leech Craze of the early 19th century, at the height of which some 75 million leeches were traded globally annually, the primary exporter before 1848 being France.’ When every day ends up at the leech sanctuary, I suppose you’ve got to do your best to make the most of it. Especially considering, every day, you get locked in here. With the wolf. The wolf in the building moves quietly from room to room. The padding of its paws can be heard on some surfaces, the clip of a claw not so frequently, but by and large the bastard moves around undetected until it is at your shoulder. I’d long been innocent as to its existence, naive save for the discovery of the odd memo, stickied onto the occasional leech tank by members of staff now long gone-home, coupled with a pressing feeling, difficult to locate. You see, I’d be lost in some new discovery: Be it the walnut writing desk, piled high with genuine 14th century correspondence between the Count of Burgundy and the Countess of Flanders, written in leech ink (a courtship ritual long since fallen from favour); or the Vertigo Tank on the seventh floor, built to recreate the habitat of the rarely encountered species Hirudo Profundus, adept at enduring the kind of atmospheric pressure changes previously only thought to be withstood by the Jack Burton sea snail; or, I might be taking in the elaborate diorama imagining Victorian leech gatherers on the Somerset Levels, complete with a 75 square foot reed marsh, which you can wade through – no actual leeches being present in the waters – among the taxidermied mares being driven by waxwork peasants, animatronically threshing the reeds to encourage the imaginary leeches’ flight onto the imaginarily nourishing flesh of the leech collector and her equine companion. Incidentally, during the Victorian leech-rush of south-west England, among the ‘leeches of the Levels’ was found a particularly vigorous feeder, known locally as Janet’s Scowl. Medical practitioners of the era were unfortunately unable to distinguish this breed from the usual Hirudo Medicinalis, resulting in a spate of deaths to blood loss – a fact cheerfully recounted by the straw bonnet and burlap shawl-attired leech, its colour on this display panel fading to blue on account of being directly under one of the Sanctuary’s four sky-lights. The topic is picked up by a leech dressed as a Victorian undertaker on an adjacent panel: The Somerset Levels were so rich in leeches in the 1840s that, on top of the hundreds of deaths due to surgical error, some 1200 prospectors lost their lives from drowning, exposure, over-bleeding, or at the hands of rival leech gatherers, in the year 1847 alone. Each day I find a new pleasure in these objects, these displays, restagings, exhibits, and especially the Leech Lodgings themselves; the rows upon rows of little glass draws you can open, peer into, and if that way inclined, lend a hand to feed. There’s always a new discovery that challenges the ever decreasing loops of Sanctuary time that spiral, inevitably, into the infinite chasm. And yet, for some reason, every time I stumble on another object or experience a fresh event, I soon forget about it until much later, sometimes months, when the mind breaks through routine’s soporifics, clicks back, for no reason at all and then there it is again, within touching distance as though the initial encounter was a mere reflection and now it could be permitted to enter the sensorium. But the Sensorium cannot be entered. It is guarded by the only other human present in the Sanctuary at these hours. Well, I believe it’s a human. It’s hard to tell, seeing as she’s dressed head-to-tail in a scaled-up leech costume. She tells me her name is Tansin, and that she was named after a village in Burkina-Faso, but she’s never been there. In fact she can’t remember when she last left the Leech Sanctuary. And now she guards the door to the Sensorium: apparently a leech-filled pool the size of a super-yacht’s jacuzzi. On my first encounter with the wolf, I mention it to Tansin, who says it performs a more ambulatory security role than her own post. And yet, she believes it has its own office, possibly even two, one at either extremity of the building, “Perhaps it’s moving between them, covering two roles?” I suggest, “Or a runner, a conduit for a couple of departments? And which extremes do you mean anyway? Top and bottom, left and right, internal/external, territorial/celestial?” She shrugs, exhaling sharply in an apparent conversational tick, fungible with a change in the weather, or the sped-up credits of a TV nature documentary, “not that I know anything about extremes, stuck here guarding the Purgatorium”. “The what?” “Oh, nothing…” she says, her voice feathering into a wisp, as the leech costume crumples to a pile on the floor, Hirudo Citatus (the fast leech) gushing from its mouth like a swarm of spooked eels. It’s then I notice the lime green sticky note on the door: “Claes”, it reads, “this door is for you. In fact, it was only ever you that could open it. But you’ll need the right key lol” And then, below a crude smiley, winking and sticking its tongue out, “P.S. look behind you!!!” Reluctantly, but with a morbid compulsion, I do so. It’s the wolf. It barks once at me and then starts pacing excitedly in circles, panting and drooling, before stretching up on its hind legs, scratching at the wall behind it, barking once more. And, then, just above its grappling paws, I see that same display panel I first saw when entering the Sanctuary today. Only, it’s about ten-times the size of that one. And the cartoon leech is not smiling; it’s sporting more of a grimace. And the speech bubble’s different too. It says, “You should have known…” again trailing into ellipses that guide the eye over to the text frame, gaudily styled like an ancient scroll and crested with a clip-art light bulb. But the lightbulb is dim and cracked. The scroll reads: The Andromeda Leech. First introduced to Europeans by the unlucky sailors of the Dutch East India Company’s ship, Prins Willem, the Andromeda Leech was known by the ancient, animistic Javanese and used in sacrificial rites centuries before the colonial Dutch settled. Its saliva contains a venom that induces a succession of ailments of spiralling severity, starting with feverish symptoms and an itching sensation under the skin, progressing to cerebral dysfunction, confusion, agitation, anxiety, insomnia, hallucination and hydrophobia, culminating in seizures, the spontaneous failure of the lungs, liver, kidneys and heart, universal internal haemorrhaging, and death. At which point the Andromeda Leech disengages and sleeps for up to four weeks. After the deterioration and death of a dozen of the Prins Willem’s crew, the Andromeda Leech was eventually harvested, bred and weaponised by the Company against dissenting crewmembers and combattant native Javanese alike. When the wreckage of the Prins Willem was eventually located off the Ghanian coast in 1849, scores of glass ‘leech shooters’ in gilded cases were discovered. It is thought that… Just then, I’m snapped out of my reading by the sound of a large door slamming shut and the last thing I see is the display panel, with the grimacing cartoon Andromeda Leech, tipping off the wall towards me. Just like every other day.