“In my experience, if a jilky is involved, it usually gets put down to a mains explosion.” That’s the first sentence of “Not Even Legend”, the second story in Alan Moore’s Illuminations, and after the brothel and the split brain of Hypothetical Lizard it lands like a change of key. It runs to sixteen pages and first appeared in Uncertainties 5, which Brian J. Showers edited for Swan River Press in 2021. The speaker is a Whispering Pete, one of four kinds of creature he lists, “Snapjackets, jilkies, mormoleens and Whispering Petes”, and he’s frank about the first lot: “repulsive little insect-vegetable hybrids that can camouflage themselves as nearly anything and eat domestic pets”.

Alongside him runs a meeting. A paranormal study group gathers after hours in an estate agent’s office, Chalcombe & Bentine, because David Watkins, “always the most soberly dressed at the paranormal study group’s bi-weekly meetings”, is the branch manager. Conversations hang in the air and clatter “like atonal wind chimes”, and the narration drifts from one member to the next, as Koom Kankesan notes in his Comicon essay. Tall Brian is “proselytising about ghosts” at Adriana, “that goth media-studies lecturer who only joined, like, a few weeks ago or something”. That “like” isn’t Moore’s. It belongs to whichever head the narration happens to be in, and it’ll take on anyone’s voice for a sentence or two before moving along the table. Bloomsbury’s own blurb says the group has been “infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate”, and a point of view that slips into every member in turn is a very good place to hide one. I’ll leave the who alone.

The group calls itself CSICON, the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal, and Moore didn’t make that up either. CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, was founded in 1976 under Paul Kurtz, and Robert Anton Wilson turned the name inside out for CSICON, which he credited to one Prof. Timothy F.X. Finnegan of Trinity College, Dublin. In Cosmic Trigger III it “still offers $10,000 to any ‘normalist’” who can come up with the goods. Moore gives Wilson’s joke name to a roomful of earnest people sitting among “Chalcombe & Bentine’s orderly appraisals of the housing market”.

William Shaw calls the story “a loving parody” in Strange Horizons, and I’d put more weight on “loving” than he does. One member arrives having walked the length of Fetter Street before “remembering that the ring binder with all her suggestions was still in the back seat”. You only write that if you’ve sat through evenings like this one and didn’t mind them. The group is petty in places, but it’s the ordinary pettiness of any club with a rota and a borrowed room.

Whispering Petes live backwards, and the narrator can’t explain the name: “Nobody has the first idea why we’re called Whispering Petes, when we don’t whisper and don’t seem to have more Petes than any other demographic group. I mean, something like 58 per cent of us are women.” The best guess going is that the name is coined around “the twenty-third century” and then “transmitted to the past as an oral tradition”, handed down, for them, from the young to the old.

Then Moore stops joking for a page. The narrator remembers “my darling Mila, and our son Jan, who had memories reaching to the twenty-second century. The two of them were Whispering Petes as well. It was a nice way to undie. Those early, elderly years were idyllic.” They felt “younger, stronger every day”, though it seemed strange when Jan “reached childhood with more life experience than either me or Mila”, and all three “knew, to the hour, where things were heading”. Jan at six is “a strapping six-year-old”, and Mila stares at him shaking her head: “Look at you!” Kathryn Adams at Pixelated Geek says that seeing what “birth, and death, and the end of relationships” look like for these people took her breath away. It’s the saddest thing in the book so far, and Moore gets there in about four sentences.

The Petes don’t get choices. “There’s just things we’re definitely going to do, and how we feel about it doesn’t make a scrap of difference. This is our existence, working backwards through a diary that’s already written, from romance to massacre.” Read it in the order the Pete lives it and the love comes first and the killing after. Read it the way the rest of us keep a diary and the massacre comes first and the romance follows it, which is a strange sort of consolation and possibly the only kind on offer. Shaw says the investigators “meet a tragic end at the hands of a real-life cryptid”, which suggests whose massacre this is. Kankesan points out that the Pete’s sections can be read in reverse, each one starting where the next one ends.

Moore has done a backwards life before. Kankesan brings up “The Reversible Man”, a four-page 2000 AD short from Prog 308 in March 1983, drawn by Mike White, and Aditya Bidikar, writing on his blog, says the formal idea here is “pretty much a combination of two of his 2000 AD shorts from the early 80s”. He doesn’t begrudge Moore “a bit of recycling”, and neither do I.

I went looking for the title and found it in Kafka. In the Muirs’ translation of “The Burrow”, the animal in its tunnels is afraid of enemies from the inner earth, and says “not even legend can describe them”. I’ve no idea whether Moore had it in mind, and none of the reviews I read mention it.

Sources: