Anteo travelled, extolling the virtues of his pioneer language
and persuading converts to remedy the defects of their ill-shaped throats.
He persuaded the operation on his associates with mixed results
and the death of both of his wives aroused public suspicion.
Although cleared of their deaths, Anteo declined to marry a third time,
considering his marriage certificate to be a guarantee of fatality.
Pandist Fallaspy,
biography sub judice, pending investigation for embezzlement
from the World Society for the Protection of Birds.
It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here...
Three years after the VUE,
Anteo Fallaspy was in Holland with his camera.
He met music and language teacher Sashio Tempesta in Amsterdam,
where they were at a linguistics conference.
They travelled through Holland and married at Valkenswaard.
The Directory states Sashio had webbed underarms,
a bone-marrow deficiency, a scratched face
and that she is a dreamer, Category One. Water. Flight.
She is also a sufferer of après-radiance,
a radiant, flushed condition after exertion and stress.
Sashio was converted to the use of Hartileas B by her husband
and had alterations made to her mouth cavities
to better accommodate the shrill characteristics of that language.
She accepted an invitation to train with the birds on Bardsey Island
off the Lleyn Peninsula.
In good weather, the boat trip to Bardsey lasts about 20 minutes.
The small boat, laden with books, surgical instruments,
a cello, a portable harmonium,
a tea chest of cosmetics and valuable recording equipment, sank.
Only the helmsman escaped, saying the boat had been attacked by cormorants
soon after his lady passenger started singing and shrieking.
It was presumed that Sashio had been practising Hartileas B.
Sashio's decomposing body washed ashore four days later.
It still shone with après-radiance,
so excessive had been her physical determination not to die.
Three years after the death of his first wife, Anteo Fallaspy
was in Paris recording his enthusiasm for the written word,
and teaching Hartileas B at the French Ornithological Institute.
The Institute allocated Anteo an assistant, Vyanine Entasis.
Thanks to the VUE, Vyanine was a speaker of Ipostan,
suffered intestinal blockages, was allergic to the house-dust mite
and had an incurable desire to stay in a different place every night
and never to eat two successive meals at the same table.
She married Anteo for the opportunity to travel that he represented.
Vyanine had been a student of linguistics at Cairo
and had a working knowledge of some ten different VUE languages.
She studied with Parmitter on the Ayers Rock graffiti
and with Tulse Luper on the bogus Olduvai Papers.
Any likelihood that she was overawed by Hartileas B was remote.
After the marriage, Anteo and Vyanine were awarded a grant
to study the song of the aurally dull godwit
on its long-range migration around the world.
They had made plans to travel to Australia, Antarctica,
Alaska and Hawaii, when Vyanine was knocked down by an electioneering van
in the Rue des Oiseaux.
Making too slow a recovery for her own liking,
Vyanine discharged herself from the hospital.
Travelling by metro to the flat of a friend,
she had a relapse in the Rue Moineau.
The ambulance taking her to hospital was delayed by crowds
and Vyanine died, officially outside the Café Hirondelle,
unofficially opposite the Café Renard.
One, two, three, four...
Capercaillie,
lammergeyer,
cassowary...
Castenarm Fallast, occasional pianist, professional indexer
and itinerant propagandist for a well-known opera company.
The VUE has not impaired his livelihood
but has widened his outlook on birds.
... dotterel,
pratincol,
phalarope,
sanderling,
bufflehead, tanager...
Castenarm acknowledges the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds
and believes the epicentre of the Violent Unknown Event
was the Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, West London.
Somewhere on this western section there are two places, maybe three,
where the epicentre of epicentres might have been situated.
The first is Stamford Brook Underground.
And the second is The Raven public house.
27 people died in the lounge bar on the night of the Event
and 14 had died in the saloon on the morning after.
Seven more had been variously blinded in the beer garden at the back.
Capercaillie,
lammergeyer,
cassowary...
The VUE has introduced Castenarm to insulin, Ventolin and praemocetylene,
widened his feet so that he now takes a larger shoe,
and has given him arthritis.
He now indexes for a publisher of popular ornithological literature.
... sora,
grosbeak,
hawfinch,
lanner,
barbet,
lory,
mooruk, trogon...
A third possible VUE epicentre is this maternity hospital
where 30 children born in the 24 hours following the VUE
all showed a physiology that would suggest flight.
... scoter,
chukar,
killdeer...
In celebration of the Goldhawk Road, Castenarm researched the indices
of the ornithological text books sent to him by the publisher,
and compiled a list of the 92 most unfamiliar bird names he could find.
With this list he is hoping to achieve several ambitions.
One is to find a sympathetic composer
willing to use the bird list as the libretto for an opera.
Ardenaur Fallatter died at sunset
on the 17th anniversary of the Violent Unknown Event.
The VUE had increased his stature, and had given him nine lives
the first four of which he used in the Gabon,
diving off the Letoke cliffs to rescue VUE suicides.
The remaining five lives, along with details of his biography,
became the property of the United African Congress,
who persuaded Fallatter to export his skill at exhibitionist-jumping.
Fallatter lost his ninth life
leaping from a grain store into a barley field
at a VUE flying gala at Stowe in Cheshire.
His body was flown back to the Gabon, and fulfilling his last wishes,
it was ceremoniously thrown off the Letoke cliffs.
Agropio Fallaver alone represented the 92nd language.
His language began and ended with him.
He was classified as a middle-aged female man and he spoke Fallaver.
That is to state the fact three times,
and make up for the incomprehension he was treated with for so long.
But at present, no further facts can be published, broadcast or used
until he and his unique language have been totally investigated.
It has been suggested that Agropio is an unsuspecting vehicle for FOX,
the Society for Ornithological Extermination.
Despite attempts to amalgamate them into one person
there have in fact been three Cissie Colpitts in Goole since 1931.
Propine Fallax is chronologically the third.
The accident of a marriage licence got her into the survey,
which is fitting, for she was President
of the Goole Water Tower Film Vault, home of the VUE Commission's archive.
Cissie Propine Colpitts grew up in the streets around the water tower
and must have known many of the Yorkshire cameramen
who made up the Goole Experimental Film Society.
The original brick water tower, the Pepper, built in the 1900s
became inadequate for Goole's growing population
and in 1933 a new and larger concrete tower, the Salt,
was erected by the Humber Authority on allotment land
leased from Propine's grandmother.
The tower filld the space between the railway line and an abattoir.
The tower was bequeathed to Propine on her fifth birthday
on the understanding that the rents were paid into an account
whereby half the interest
was available for the Goole and District Camera Society
and the other half paid for dancing lessons.
The second Goole Cissie Colpitts
married a bicycle manufacturer and moved to York.
She bequeathed her local film material collection to her namesake.
It was stored in hen coops, in the abattoir
and in the base of the old brick tower.
Propine, worried about the collection deteriorating,
felt it imperative to find it a permanent home.
In 1951, due to demand for yet more water, the tower became obsolete,
and after a two-year conversion, Propine, on her 18th birthday,
reopened it as a film vault.
On the night of the VUE, along with Arturo Fallax, owner of the abattoir,
Cissie Colpitts was on top of the tower with some friends
watching the fires at Hull,
when she fainted and began to bleed from the mouth.
She now suffers from anaemia, splayed thumbs and vertigo,
and to underline her new aversion to the darkness of cinemas
she has made a clean break with her past,
changing her Christian name by deed poll and her surname by marriage.
Biography number 28 has been meagrely reconstructed
from evidence found in an overturned car, licence number NID 301.
The occupant,
inconclusively identified from laundry marks on his underwear,
was a middle-aged man with red hair.
The carrion crow has a deep, hoarse caw
that often punctuates the other bird sounds of March.
Evidence of the VUE's influence on the body,
an engorged throat and petagium fellitis,
were obscured by injuries sustained at the accident.
It's possible that Cash Fallbaez was the victim of bird strike.
A large white bird, probably a swan, maybe two swans,
had smashed the windscreen. On the seat beside the body
was a shopping list written in the VUE language O-Lev-Lit
and a commercial recording of birdsong.
Sometimes in February and March,
you can hear a strident motor-horn note from the crow as well.
(crow caws like a motor-horn)
Antopody Fallbats.
Biography sub judice pending cruelty-to-birds investigation.
The Directory has registered Coppice Fallbatteo
as an Italian-speaking young male man,
though the VUE has taken away his teeth,
made him short of breath, flattened his nose,
made him allergic to cats and rats,
changed his balance and restructured his colon,
it had left him with the language he had learnt as a two-year-old child.
Coppice wished it had not.
Coppice tried very hard to learn one of the VUE languages
but ambitiously he had chosen Betelguese,
the language of unlimited vocabulary
and rapidly changing grammar and syntax.
As fast as he had mastered one small area of its possibilities,
he found that the same area had developed,
aligned with a new set of meanings or had become entirely obsolete.
Dispirited, Coppice had made a hesitant start on Katan,
one of the more popularly spoken of the mutant languages.
But his experience with Betelguese
was like studying a consonant alphabet of two letters
after experiencing a vowel alphabet of 200.
Coppice was an art historian who,
trying to make a novel cultural theory out of the VUE,
had wholeheartedly taken to the idea of the Responsibility of Birds.
After exploring the significance of birds in European painting,
Coppice focused his interest on Francesca's Brera Virgin,
also known as the Egg Painting.
Coppice knew everything about this painting.
Its conception, mathematics, the constituents of its colours,
the hagiography of its saints,
its value in lire, dollars, gold and osprey feathers.
The centre of all this fascination was the suspended egg,
to Coppice, the symbol of the Violent Unknown Event,
and the one perplexing feature for which he had no explanation.
Coppice asked his students to copy the painting and kept the results,
some bad, some indifferent,
some eccentric, some three or four inspired,
two almost impossible to tell from the original
and one considerably better, painted by a girl who spoke Betelguese.
Her name, Adioner Perdona.
When Coppice had first tried to learn Betelguese,
"Adioner" could be translated into Italian to mean "yellow".
At the time Coppice began to take an interest in the della Francesca,
the word had shifted its meaning to suggest the concept of yolk,
and when Adioner had told Coppice her name it had meant "embryo".
The coincidence was too great for Coppice
and his wish to possess, marry and own Adioner was violent.
He found a reason to fail her in her finals exam,
and under the excuse of giving her extra tuition,
he won her confidence and seduced her. She had a child.
Coppice had the boy fostered by his married sister
and had him christened Piero dell'Adioner.
By that time "Adioner" in Betelguese
could only legitimately be translated into Italian as "egg".
Agrendo Fallbazz. Drowned in a ship's swimming pool.
Bereavement clause honoured for 16 weeks.
Full biography in later versions of The Falls.
Cisgatten Fallbazz lived off the Goldhawk Road
in a house fronted by a monkey-puzzle tree.
He was a designer and manufacturer of VUE novelties.
Soon after the VUE, Cisgatten had bought a licence to sell bird hats
and made avian upholstery for several years
until the Responsibility of Birds Theory became commonplace.
He turned to the children's toy market,
and in partnership with his brother, Agrendo, was very successful.
Thanks to the VUE, Cisgatten was obliged to wear rubber gloves
to stop his hands from drying out.
The VUE also robbed him of his sense of smell and impaired his sight
though apparently not at night.
His enemies and competitors called him Moreau Fallbazz
and accused him of experimenting on birds
to make the species interchangeable.
They hinted he kept owls illegally at his house
and that his brother had committed suicide for fear of prosecution.
The brothers bought a cottage on the Lleyn Peninsula, since burnt down,
where Cisgatten had met Cathine Fallbutus as a child.
They had both gone to the same primary school in the Goldhawk Road.
Against his brother's opposition Cisgatten proposed marriage to her.
Now that his brother was out of the way,
Cisgatten is keen to approach Cathine Fallbutus a second time.
The Violent Unknown Event
concentrated its vehemence on the head, face and neck
of Hasp Fallbazz.
Inoperable glaucoma, muscular collapse and skin discoloration
had persuaded Hasp to wear a mask.
For this film he asked that he might use the face of Jean-Paul Marat.
He agreed to an interview under conditions of his own choosing.
Hasp Fallbazz was a U-thalian- speaking convert from Entrée.
Hasp made the difficult language conversion from Entrée to U-thalian
as his interests were mechanical and technological
and Entrée had lacked even a word for "wheel".
The sketchy introductory nature of that language well deserved its name.
As a dreamer-of-water, Category One, Flight, it was not lost on Hasp
that U-thalian also had 47 words for water,
each one describing it in less than three syllables and under 14 letters,
for various of its states, like its purity, scarcity,
temperature, weight, salinity, iridescence, distance from the sea,
height above sea level, colour, rapidity of movement and its age.
Hasp has respiratory problems, is lame in the left leg
and is partly paralysed in the left arm.
He has been advised to keep exertion to a minimum, to eat no meat,
avoid the dark and stay near water.
Catuso Phelpus has said
it is fortunate Hasp is creatively interested in technology,
especially hydraulics,
for these irritating prohibitions could be eased to an extent
by machinery of his own invention.
Hasp's machines, drawings and patents
are die-stamped with the emblems of an inverted left leg,
taken, according to HE Carter,
from the last evidence of the birdmen in Breughel's Death of Icarus.
Rapper Begol has stated that after years of experiment,
Hasp made a claim that he was able to grow bone
and manufacture feathers.
He works alone and is financially supported by the WSPB,
and the Kite Association, who send a weekly cheque from the Yellow Bank,
a fund financed by the sale of kites in China.
(artillery fires)
Thanks to the Violent Unknown Event, Canopy Fallbenning was immortally 83.
She spoke Abcadefghan,
and her favourite Tulse Luper story was The Cassowary.
(speaks foreign language)
During the First World War,
she worked in an armaments factory at Stoke,
and suffered from sympathetic tinnitus.
(artillery fires)
The VUE had neither ameliorated or exaggerated the tinnitus in any way
but had regulated it to a cycle of 30 seconds.
Canopy could time an egg by it.
To suit her pragmatism
and perhaps allow her some measure of self-retribution
Canopy gave the VUE an explosive origin, no doubt man-made.
She kept a diary and with home-made inks whose strength waxed and waned,
wrote authoritatively about everything.
(artillery fires)
For example, at a time when the ink was running strong,
she argued about the sexual quadrimorphism
that was a perplexing characteristic of the VUE.
She was old enough to have read Tulse Luper's Quadruple Fruit
and saw the implications of quadruple bonding
in the Violent Unknown Event's division of two orthodox sexes
into a heterodox four.
(artillery fires)
However, Canopy believed the division,
like so much else about the VUE, had been inconclusive, even bungled.
There had been too much indecision, too much hesitancy.
There was no clear role for the four newly formulated genders.
The original explosion perhaps had not been strong enough,
had been sidetracked by unnecessary adjuncts
like compound articulacy and immortality.
Canopy's original insistence on the VUE's incompetence
mellowed as each 83rd birthday passed by.
It took a strong personal event to revive it.
Like the death of a daughter,
when she wrote of a god who was a charlatan,
an inexperienced quack whose sense of time was irresponsible.
Three days after this entry she relented a little
and put the unsatisfactory incompleteness of the VUE's efforts
down to a god who had suffered the loss of a necessary skill.
A day later, in a pale and yellowing ink,
she softened more, and wrote that it was difficult
for one magician to accomplish successfully another's magic.
At a perpetual 83, her problems were not going to involve reproduction.
She was determined to enjoy immortality
and to reserve her splenetic attacks for agents of the VUE Commission,
especially those who believed in the Responsibility of Birds.
Cole Fallbird.
Biography sub judice pending trial for misconduct with a mynah.
It's a good field. It runs from a north-south direction...
Before the Violent Unknown Event,
Castel Fallboys was a competent pilot and a hang-glider enthusiast,
happy to discuss his enthusiasm on film.
After the VUE, Castel's ability at both skills became phenomenal.
The VUE added four inches to his height, shed him of 3 stone,
encouraged hair growth, raised his blood temperature,
shortened his vocal cords and taught him Instantaneous Dekis.
...where you just take off and become part of the elements.
Castel achieved his significant personalised flight
by a prodigious mastery of technique and by the use of new materials.
He was able to stay in the air for long periods,
his record was five days and four nights
and his longest recorded flight being 917 miles.
...designs into computers and getting much better designs out of computers.
His skill at assessing weather conditions,
and his ability to manoeuvre in poor visibility were not equalled.
He left his competitors so far behind that his skill isolated him.
He bricked up the doorways of his house
making it compulsory for himself to enter by the roof.
To minimise muscular growth that would inhibit flying
he used his legs seldom, until his gait resembled a starling.
Castel developed a great restlessness at every change in the weather
and on autumn nights accompanied migrating birds far out to sea,
always turning back with the greatest reluctance.
To extend his range and comparability with birds,
Castel ruthlessly streamlined his body by exercise and diet,
growing very lean in the leg, muscular in the shoulders,
long in the arm and short in the neck.
He was finally and fatally caught out.
Flying with a flock of terns, he banked too steeply, too sharply,
too suddenly and broke his neck.
His corpse dropped like a stone into the sea at Hell's Mouth
and his last pair of nylon wings are preserved at Slimbridge.
Acataloope Fallbus. A last-minute entry into the VUE Directory
due to very late-developing symptoms.
No details of biography as yet available.
Of all European countries affected by the Violent Unknown Event,
France has only a known total of 512 victims
and on investigation it seems only seven of these were French by birth.
The VUE Commission have put forward various reasons for this immunity
and rejected them all.
The Aérospace Nationale have suggested
that France had already paid an excessive quota of flight victims
in the early days of experimental flying.
(speaks Italian)
Was anything wrong with the car?
The Italian Institute of Languages
hypothesised that the French language is responsible.
...30 mph. - Had you been here before?
No. It was the first time and this is the second.
Astraham and Loosely Fallbute
were touring on holiday in central France at the time of the Event.
On the night of June 12th they were driving on a little-used road
near Voile d'Argent when their car stopped.
The clock on the dashboard showed 11:41, Greenwich Mean Time.
Is this the place where it happened?
Yes. The engine stalled and the car stopped.
Astraham Fallbute, formerly a designer of sports facilities,
is now a designer of hospital equipment.
Loosely Fallbute, once a cosmetician, is now a catalogue researcher.
Did you have any sensation, any clue what had happened?
The Fallbutes both began to speak Cathanay
within 24 hours of the Violent Unknown Event.
Loosely Fallbute was employed by an insurance firm
to examine a possible topographical pattern in VUE incidents.
Among the many sites receiving her especial attention were number 23,
the maternity hospital in the London Goldhawk Road,
with special reference to delivery room seven.
Number 37, room number three of the Commission's own library.
The room was once the office of a film-production company
specialising in ornithological projects.
And site number 59,
the intersection of Broad Street and the Yarmouth Road, Norwich.
Appreciating firsthand accounts in her research,
Loosely was happy to help the Italian Linguistics Laboratory
investigate the paucity of VUE incidence in France.
What happened then?
Astraham, now an authority on the rehabilitation of VUE paraplegics,
suffered from partial paralysis and was keen to aid his wife's research
on sites where there had been a high toll of VUE malignancy
appearing as muscle collapse or muscle deterioration.
As at site number 119,
the railway bridge and electricity station at Cloudheath, Suffolk,
where Tulse Luper says the information on signs is significant.
And site number 171 at Fountains Abbey, near Ripon, Yorkshire,
where 310 people complained of sudden and involuntary muscle paralysis
which intermittently froze their lower limbs.
Both Astraham and Loosely share certain VUE symptoms
suggesting that proximity to a site or another victim might be relevant.
Most noticeable in the Fallbute case is the matching skin discoloration.
The Fallbute pulled themselves together and drove on
and at about midnight they arrived in Nevers
where a film company was making a film about a holocaust
and the Fallbutes were not surprised to be taken for extras.
Six members of the Fallbutus family living in England
are registered victims of the Violent Unknown Event.
They have an especial relevance to this study of the VUE
by owning property near the two main accredited VUE centres,
off the Goldhawk Road, London
and near the Tyddyn-Corn Farm on the Lleyn Peninsula.
Betheda Fallbutus had come to England with her American husband
to take advantage of the Welfare State to raise a large family.
She wanted the best gynaecological attention she could find,
anticipating labour pains to rival a wren laying the eggs of an ostrich.
So she insisted on being close to the Maternity Hospital in Goldhawk Road.
Betheda had been an air hostess, a milliner
and the owner of a restaurant.
She had flown too often, wasted too many feathers
and cooked too many chickens.
On her admission, sufficient excuse for herself and her family
to be plagued by the VUE in both their houses.
The family lived in various apartments along the Goldhawk Road
whilst they continued the search for a family home.
After the birth of her only daughter, Cathine,
Betheda's husband inherited his parents' Lleyn farmhouse
where Betheda could recuperate from further pregnancies.
After the birth of her second son, Vacete,
the Fallbutuses finally bought a town house off the Goldhawk Road
where in 1827 Audubon had lived while he worked on his Birds of America.
After her husband's death, Betheda spent her time
ferrying her children between the two houses.
Eventually she ferried her grandchildren back and forth.
And it was to see Cathine and her grandchildren
that Betheda drove down to the Lleyn farm, the House of the Two Palms,
on the evening of the Violent Unknown Event.
She arrived at five o'clock in the morning, two hours before dawn.
Her grandchildren had strung a rope
between the two palms that fronted the garden to the west.
Both children were hanging by their legs.
The nose of the elder child was bleeding, dripping onto the gravel.
The younger child had a bruised forehead and was singing.
As Betheda took this in, she started to sneeze
and then to blow bubbles of mucus from her nose.
Groping in her sleeve for a handkerchief
she saw a hoopoe was sitting in one of the palms.
From then on Betheda suffered from an excess of catarrh
that blurred her speech, forced her to breathe through her mouth,
tainted her food and irritated her digestion,
making her life so wretched that she often contemplated suicide.
She said it was the excitement of immortality
that stopped her cutting her wrists.
But more likely a concern for her grandchildren
made her accept her disabilities.
(speaks Welsh)
Cathine Fallbutus, after six years in America,
returned to the Lleyn peninsula and the House of the Two Palms.
Now a divorcee with two daughters, she planned to buy a guesthouse.
As a child she had known the Tyddyn-Corn Farm
and half in jest had always planned to marry its owner.
Now the owner was gone and the farm was empty.
Cathine contacted the farm agents, found out the highest price offered
and bettered it, and in anticipation of owning the farm,
bought a can of paint called Canary Ochre and painted the front door.
Against the whitewashed walls, the door could be seen for several miles.
The agent gave Cathine the key and with her two children she explored
the house, barns and outbuildings that fronted the Boulder Orchard.
On the eve of the Violent Unknown Event,
Cathine and her daughters were at the Tyddyn-Corn farmhouse.
In a yard in front of the house on a washing line strung between two trees
was a rag, possibly a dishcloth or floorcloth.
It might have hung there for months. It was grey with age or dirt.
Menenome, Cathine's eldest daughter, asked her mother what it was.
Cathine replied that it was a clout.
The children were amused at such a dead-sounding monosyllabic word.
Their laughter surprised a ewe...
That night, the VUE struck, maybe in the Boulder Orchard, maybe not.
Cathine, the following morning, was found unconscious in bed.
The Boulder Orchard became a restricted area
and the Tyddyn-Corn Farm remained unoccupied for a further six years.
Cathine was registered as a Maudine-speaking young female woman
with a passion for symmetry. Her body reabsorbed her breasts
and the top digits of all her fingers and toes.
Not uninfluenced by her mother, Cathine reverted to her maiden name
and legalised Fallbutus as the surname of her children.
Adept at all languages, Cathine relearnt Welsh
and opened a guesthouse for VUE victims at Aberdaron,
living quietly, rejecting numerous and persistent offers of marriage.
When Coppice had first tried to learn Betelguese
Adioner could be translated into Italian to mean "yellow"...
Bwythan Fallbutus was Betheda's eldest son. Until he was killed,
he was the officially appointed VUE Commission's linguistic expert.
He lived just off the Goldhawk Road
within three minutes' walk of his mother, whom he visited every day.
Wish to possess...
The VUE had given Bwythan a bone-marrow deficiency,
wattles and cobs along his backbone
and a foot disease that shredded his toenails.
He could drink salt water without harm
but felt listless away from the influence of chlorophyll.
Bwythan could speak 14 VUE languages
and interpret successfully in nine of them at a diplomatic level.
And it was Bwythan who had organised the examination of Agropio Fallaver,
the sole speaker of the language named after him.
Although Bwythan came to the private opinion
that Fallaver was somehow a fake manoeuvred by FOX,
the Society for Ornithological Extermination.
...an antidote to all the world's feathers.
Bwythan has privately researched the 10,000 most popularly used words
in 43 of the main VUE languages and produced a comparative dictionary.
From this research he wrote a book, The View from Babel,
to explain, or attempt to explain,
the gift of tongues and the fragmentation of language.
A fox watched a crow...
In trying to do this,
and in his associated search for a common linguistic denominator,
he successfully demonstrated that the names of birds
were important key words.
It was rumoured that because of the conclusions of his research
Bwythan was run down by a white van, registration number NID 92,
on a zebra crossing in the Goldhawk Road.
A van with this registration had been seen outside his house
an hour before the accident.
The police later found the vehicle on a deserted airfield.
It was supposed the assailant or assailants had escaped by air.
...what you lack are wits.
Cathine's daughters, Menenome and Olivine Fallbutus,
spent the summer months in the company of a red chair.
In honour of this chair and in his pursuit of Cathine
the toy-maker, Cisgatten Fallbazz,
had given Menenome and Olivine a picture book.
Menenome, perpetually eight years old, spoke Maudine,
was prone to toothache and nosebleeds,
and was happiest hanging upside down like a bat.
She sang a lot, swam well,
and like a velvet scoter, could stay under water for five minutes.
Olivine, perpetually four years old, a Maudine speaker,
frugivorous and neuralgic, spent much of her time asleep.
When awake, she accompanied her sister
in an extended dance, song and talk marathon with the red folding chair.
Dragged along the tide line, floated in the sea,
tied to a breakwater, the chair only lasted a summer
and always had to be replaced.
Menenome remembered one word of English which she taught her sister,
though Olivine may have remembered it.
They used the word to describe the VUE's malevolence.
They pronounced it with a fierce, sharp, monosyllabic stab.
The word was "clout".
Vacete Fallbutus was Betheda's youngest son.
Mother and son seldom communicated
because Betheda disapproved of how her son earned his living,
though Vacete rarely left the vicinity of the Goldhawk Road.
Vacete could do all the tricks of the body conjuror's repertoire.
He could waggle his ears, spit 80 yards
and blow smoke rings through his nose. He was a gifted petomane.
There were dubious and dangerous tricks that Vacete would do
for special prices in the public houses of the Goldhawk Road.
He stayed in The Swakeley,
named after the collective noun for immature carrier pigeons,
in The Wheatsheaf, changed from The Wheatear because the publican
had no belief in the Responsibility of Birds, in The Goldhawk,
and on the night of the VUE, Vacete was found sightless and breathless
in the beer garden at The Raven public house.
He was running in small circles.
The blindness was impermanent, and only returned
when the light was less than f11 on the Weston scale.
Later Vacete became allergic to travelling at speeds over 10mph,
unless it happened when the light was under f11,
when he couldn't see how fast he was going.
Lf, in spite of all precautions, he did see light flashing by at 15mph,
he was sick, painfully giddy and found it hard to catch his breath.
His personal hero was Reichfelt,
the patriot airman who threw himself off the Eiffel Tower in 1909.
Vacete's family scorned the hero worship,
knowing Vacete was scared of heights.
To prove them wrong,
Vacete climbed the railway bridge in the Goldhawk Road and leapt off.
He survived the jump,
but under the bridge the light registered less than f11.
Stumbling in small circles, temporarily blinded,
Vacete was run over by a white van.
At the buzzer, in 30 seconds
name as many birds as you can think of.
(buzzer)
Great northern diver, red-throated diver, black-throated diver,
bean goose, barnacle goose, red-breasted goose, snowgoose...
Astra Fallcas was a very responsive interviewee
in Falluper's ornithological survey
filmed some 18 months before the Violent Unknown Event.
...whimbrel, curlew, redshank, greenshank,
marsh sandpiper, terek sandpiper...
It is difficult to interview Astra again, for he has disappeared.
Everything points to his having gone to earth.
Capercaillie,
lammergeyer,
cassowary...
In a hospital ophthalmic test
after the Violent Unknown Event, Astra amazed his examiners
by recognising three-dimensional shapes in almost total darkness
but they noted his ability did not extend to written letters.
Pratincole,
phalarope,
sanderling...
At the buzzer, in 30 seconds,
name for me as many birds as you can that start with B.
(buzzer)
Blackbird, bar-tailed godwit, black-tailed godwit, bobolink,
black vulture...
Astra was an experienced speleologist and ornithographer.
...booby...
Through the VUE, he'd combined these interests
to identify himself with the Caprimulgiformes,
the birds that flew at dusk or twilight, and a year after the VUE
he disappeared on a night ferry to Le Havre.
(buzzer)
Capercaillie...
He'd taken his camping equipment, his savings, his maps,
a supply of food and a cassette tape recorder.
For three years Astra's sister received picture postcards,
all of which featured cave systems.
Then came a last postcard from Peru
saying that Astra had found a colony of guacharo, or oilbirds,
at San Luis Rey and was preparing a paper for the WSPB
on echolocation sensibility in birds.
At the buzzer, in 30 seconds
tell me as much as you can about the Bittern.
(buzzer)
The Bittern is one of the Ardeiformes, Botaurus stellaris.
This Bittern, Botaurus stellaris stellaris,
is a crepuscular animal.
Five years ago, Astra's sister and three of his former caving friends
went to Peru to see if they could find him.
They spent four months in the cave systems of Tualito,
searching, asking local people and leaving provisions and equipment
at useful cave landmarks.
They also left tape cassettes of some of Astra's favourite music.
But with no result.
Some 24 hours before they were due to return to England,
Astra's sister was in the Castcatapel cavern at Tualito
when she heard the Bird List Song echoing along a deep cave system.
She was convinced that Astra was responsible for, characteristically,
the treble frequencies were accentuated,
the instrumental backing to the song had been tuned out
and only the high-pitched female voice was audible.
David Fallcash. Directory error. Non-VUE victim,
entered into Directory due to false representation.
No criminal charge pending.
Bewick Fallcaster is an alias given by the Directory Commissioners,
only knowing at the time of the first edition the maiden name of his wife.
Since there have been no objections from him
the name has been ratified and is legal.
Seven days after the VUE, Bewick registered as a VUE victim at Zagreb,
suffering from intermittent amnesia, a singing migraine,
ravenous appetite and decalcification of the teeth.
14 days after the VUE, Bewick was in Budapest,
where he described a VUE tinnitus to a radio engineer
who attempted to convey the nature of the condition with a tape recording.
To mask the insistent repetitious sound,
Bewick composed 92 variations on his tinnitus theme
and at night, to help him sleep, he played them back through headphones.
Bewick sent his family money, fragments of taped music and slides.
The money was in different currencies
and the music was always recorded in the neutral spaces of a studio,
so it was to the slides that Bewick's family turned
to search for clues of Bewick's whereabouts and state of health.
When asked why Bewick didn't return to his family,
Bewick's wife had four possible answers.
A change in name obliterated a sense of place.
Bewick Fallcaster is dead and the money, taped music and slides
are sent by an imposter, perhaps on behalf of the FOX.
Tinnitus might be contagious.
Bewick Fallcaster was busy collecting music
for an encyclopaedic work of biography.
Catch-Hanger Fallcaster had been a teacher.
She had taught Russian to Germans and, before the VUE,
would not have claimed knowledge of ornithology.
(buzzer)
Stork, heron, swallow,
swift, penguin, cassowary...
The VUE had made Catch-Hanger three inches taller,
paralysed her index fingers and improved her eyesight.
She now taught Abcadefghan to anyone who wanted to learn.
Abcadefghan is often used in papers on engineering,
metallurgy and radiophonics.
It is said that Lapps and Finns can understand Abcadefghan,
which is not that scientifically valuable
since there aren't that many technical papers in these languages.
Catch-Hanger has translated Tulse Luper's
Birds of the Northern Hemisphere,
establishing pronunciation equivalents for the Falconidae.
She has also started work on a Abcadefghan English primer
that is based largely on three nursery rhymes,
Goosey Goosey Gander, Who Killed Cock-Robin?
And I Shot a Little Duck.
Before the VUE, Clasper Fallcaster, Bewick's mother-in-law,
had always been very sensitive to natural forms of electricity.
Brushing her hair produced sparks that lit her bedroom,
and she reluctantly entered any building
that did not have a lightning conductor.
The VUE had magnified this sensitivity
and Clasper was now allergic to large expanses of water.
She kept away from the coast, inland lakes and large rivers,
and she was apprehensive of open-air swimming pools.
Her sense of direction became phenomenal,
but family car rides now had to be planned to avoid bridges over water,
and, in England, to especially avoid the towns of Bath,
Leamington, Harrogate and Tunbridge Wells.
The city of Clasper's nightmares was Venice.
Her sensitivity to the Earth's, electric field
was favourably compared to night-flying migrational birds
that could accurately navigate without the moon and stars.
Catch-Hanger's brother, Felix, was a furniture designer.
The VUE struck him when he was on a subway train in Toronto,
which he pronounced Ter'ono,
so customs officials took him for a local and ceased to search him
for the feathers he imported to plump up his sofas.
The subway train driver was killed by the VUE.
Felix was trapped for 12 hours without lights beneath Lake Ontario.
As a result, he was nervous of the smell of leather in the dark,
a professionally debilitating experience.
Felix was sure he'd twice bumped into his missing brother-in-law.
Both times it wasn't a facial recognition.
First came a furniture auction in the house of a musician outside Nice,
where Felix recognised a repetitious tune being played on a broken piano.
When Felix investigated, the pianist had gone.
The second meeting was in a drugstore at Frère Jacques, Delaware.
Felix had queued behind a man wearing earphones
who filled in, then abandoned, a customs declaration form,
copying an address with difficulty from a printed envelope.
The address was Catch-Hanger's.
The man bought a postcard of the Frère Jacques Municipal Bandstand
and a cassette of birdsong of the Great Lakes.
These items in due course turned up the 14th time
Catch-Hanger celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary.
Max Fallcaster, Bewick's father-in-law,
was an architect's photographer.
Before the VUE, Max had illustrated a classic textbook series
on European rural building.
After the VUE, he studied ornithology and photographed nests.
He is now planning a book
on the buildings of man and bird in symbiosis,
storks on Bavarian chimneys and swallows on English country houses.
It may be with his father-in-law in mind
that Bewick photographed these pigeon roosts.
Max watched his son-in-law's slides with critical interest,
offering a geographical position for Bewick's whereabouts
based on his knowledge of nests and vernacular architecture.
Orian Fallcaster
had Orian Bye entered as his name on his birth certificate,
Orian Oddmansson stitched onto his first pair of swimming trunks
and Orian Setolier printed on his first lifesaving certificate.
Nine months after his mother expired in a ship's swimming pool,
a fourth set of adoption...
Before his biographical material could be compiled
yet another set of adoption papers has been taken out on Orian's behalf
and his name is now Orian Niagara, thus putting him, much to his regret,
officially outside the scope of this present collection.
What do you get when you cross a chicken with a cement mixer?
A bricklayer.
On which side does a chicken have most feathers?
On the outside.
Which birds can lift the heaviest weights?
The crane.
"Throper Castor Fallcaster, born in an egg, 11:41 pm on June the 13th,
the year of the Violent Unknown Event."
That was the tiny inscription written
on every egg in Throper's secret collection.
For true mythological accuracy
it should have been written on a swan's egg,
but they were protected.
What kind of bird do you find down a coal pit?
A mynah bird.
Throper, oologist, infant polymath,
collector of bird jokes in English, Greek, German and Vionester,
was Catch-Hanger's youngest nephew and the survivor of twins.
His brother Idis had perished of embolism, and his mother of grief.
As to his father, no one knew where he was.
Pursuing the Leda connection, gossip made Bewick Fallcaster the father.
Catch-Hanger denied it.
Heard about the woodpecker? It's boring.
The VUE changed the colour of Throper's hair and darkened his eyes.
His average pulse rate had quickened and he began to speak Vionester.
Most Vionester is spoken
with the teeth, if not the lips, tightly closed.
When the lips and teeth were parted, it was only to whistle.
Why did the owl owl? Because the woodpecker woodpecker.
Throper collected eggs, perhaps because it was forbidden.
A few domestic birds were exempt and occasionally Max Fallcaster,
Throper's uncle, notified Throper of an abandoned nest.
Why do birds fly south in the winter? Because it's too far to walk.
Throper devised a way of drawing a photographic picture
of the spots and freckles that characterised eggshell markings,
and devised a Responsibility of Birds Theory of his own.
What is a certain way to get a wild duck?
Buy a tame one... Buy a tame one and annoy it.
Cutting photosensitive paper to wrap around the egg,
Throper placed a fibre-optical light source through a pinhole in the shell
and exposed the film through the shell.
Why did the chicken cross the road? For some fowl reason.
From the negatives he made slides and projected them onto his bedroom wall,
making detailed and scaled drawings to present to the VUE Commission
along with his personal conclusions.
What's red, white and black? A sunburnt penguin.
In recognition of his effort, the Commission sent him an ostrich egg.
Raskado Fallcastle was a retired ship's navigator
turned farmer who invented maps
from the black-and-white hides of his dairy herd.
The Easter before the Violent Unknown Event,
while staying with his sister-in-law near Hereford,
Raskado met Gandy Ova, a cartographer
employed by the Ornithological Society
to plot the distribution of owls in the Black Mountains.
Raskado and Gandy exchanged maps.
At 11:41 on the evening of the VUE,
Raskado and Gandy Ova were standing under a hot shower
in a caravan site wash house on land owned by Raskado's sister-in-law.
The following morning, Gandy Ova's body,
covered in red and white blotches, was found on the wash house forecourt
and the local police accused Raskado of murder by scalding.
The police confiscated the cow maps as evidence.
Refused bail, Raskado was held for seven days
before the full details of the VUE were known.
The imprisonment, the bereavement, a sense of guilt
and rapidly developing VUE symptoms of deafness and nausea,
unbalanced Raskado's mind.
On his release he bought a rifle,
slaughtered his herd and tarred out the white patches on their hides.
With money from the knacker's yard, he bought building materials
and attempted to reconstruct the wash house on his Suffolk property
as a memorial to Gandy Ova.
Then, learning of the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds,
he bought a shotgun and two untrained retrievers
and began a vigourous campaign of ornithological slaughter,
incinerating the corpses every Friday in the reconstructed wash house.
When the police began circulating his photograph, Raskado left his farm
and found his way to the bird sanctuary at Minsmere
to continue his onslaught.
After three days of mayhem, Raskado took the cow maps,
the clothes Ova had taken off in the shower house and a can of petrol,
and burnt himself to death in a bird hide in the marsh by the sea.
Appropinquo Fallcatti spoke Agalese and Orthocathalian
and was classified a an elderly male man with a body temperature of 109°C,
the average temperature of sedentary passerines.
Appropinquo lived on the sea front at Barmouth,
in a two-roomed ground-floor flat that faced the Atlantic.
Fallcatti started his working life as a veterinary ornithologist in Turin,
staging musical pageants,
until book reviews under the pen name Gargeny earned him enough
to give up his surgery and concentrate on the production
of what he called "ecological" dramas
that earned him the derision of theatre critics and biologists alike.
Even public sympathy for dramatised natural history
in the years after the VUE did not make Fallcatti a household name.
Seeking a reputation with the British Ornithological Establishment,
Fallcatti with his wife and adopted son came to England.
To attract attention
he wrote a biographical series on celebrated ornithologists,
and canvassed for commercial sponsorship.
In conjunction with the BFI, the Bird Facilities Industry,
Appropinquo Fallcatti organised critical screenings
of films with an ornithological bias.
To ingratiate himself with Tulse Luper
he anticipated showing a little-known film called A Walk Through H
or The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist.
This film had been used by Van Hoyten to reinforce the view
that Tulse Luper was incapable of distinguishing good jokes from bad,
and was described by Gang Lion as "a piece of cinematic guano."
However, nobody could find a copy of the film
to check on Van Hoyten's sense of humour
or on Gang Lion's ability to tell film from birdshit.
It was consequently believed that the film no longer existed,
or indeed had ever existed, but was a hoax set up by Fallcatti
to dupe a public eager to identify with any ornithological red herring.
Some members of this public had been persuaded that Tulse Luper
was merely a pseudonym for Audubon.
After this unsatisfactory introduction to the British public,
Fallcatti moved to Barmouth.
In the evening, when the light was not too bright,
he ventured out and sat in this promenade kiosk,
sometimes with his wife, sometimes alone.
Fallcatti is now planning a dramatised version
of the Violent Unknown Event to rival the Passion Play at Oberammergau.
Agrimany Fallchester was arrested and fined £80
for exploiting the area round the Boulder Orchard for financial gain.
If he had not pleaded guilty and not cooperated with the authorities
the fines would have been ten times that amount.
A not-guilty plea would have easily been refuted.
The police had film of Agrimany collecting material
from around the Boulder Orchard site on three occasions.
Thanks to the Event,
Agrimany spoke Glozel in the Northern Hemisphere version,
had a six-part heart, incipient petagium fellitis,
enlarged ischial muscles
and suffered from various mild and seasonal skin changes
which are associated with moult in birds.
Finding his London relatives appreciative of samples
taken from the Boulder Orchard during his duties as a soil sampler,
Agrimany was persuaded by an uncle in the bird-token market
to keep him supplied with suitable mementos for the tourist trade.
Eventually, with his girlfriend, Agrimany began operating on his own,
packaging three or four items in a plastic bag
and selling them through a friend in Aberystwyth.
Agrimany cooperated with the authorities
to demonstrate the sort of material he was collecting.
Organic items were favoured, especially the skeletons of birds.
His girlfriend's handwriting on a label accompanying a crow wishbone
started the police on their investigation.
Agrimany says that his prosecution was a test case
to deter others from entering a potentially very profitable market.
Biography unavailable. Subject suspected of being blackmailed by FOX
over a tar-and-feathering prosecution.
It is useful to believe the Boulder Orchard
is indeed the epicentre of the Violent Unknown Event,
if you want to believe in the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds.
Both mythologies, and they are myths,
appeal to those with a vested interest in ecology...
The Commission interviewed five people
who claimed to be Ostler Falleaver.
Not one of the five spoke in a fully authenticated VUE language,
and they all made the identical obviously prepared statement
that denies any credence in the Boulder Orchard.
(speaks French)
The VUE Commission assumes that this multiple identity has been prepared
to confuse the identity of the real Ostler Falleaver, who in 1946,
as a college graduate, we understand is featured in this photograph.
Until this is sorted out, we can only usefully quote the VUE Directory.
Ostler Falleaver is a middle-aged sufferer of respiratory problems,
glaucoma, involuntary speech and compound schizophrenia.
Edio Fallenby was classified as an elderly female woman.
She spoke Untowards with a Yorkshire accent
and suffered from fluttering eyelashes, excess numeracy
and a high blood temperature.
Edio came from a very large family, sisters, brothers, aunts, nephews,
cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
Between the Second World War and the Violent Unknown Event,
as many of the family as possible, met for a fortnight's holiday
on one of the beaches on the East Yorkshire coast,
Filey, Scarborough, Saltburn, Redcar, Whitby and Bridlington.
They occupied more than one guesthouse at a time,
and gathered on the beach in fine weather and in bad,
staking out a territory known as the Fallenby camp.
They were noisy, exhibitionist, friendly, energetic,
gregarious and generous. The VUE wiped them all out.
All except Edio Fallenby and her husband.
Edio was an officer in the Woman's Voluntary Service,
and at the time of the VUE, when news arrived from the west
of a disaster of large proportions,
she was made responsible for the welfare of her neighbourhood.
Windows were criss-crossed with tape,
and sterilised dustbins in the back alleys cooked soup to feed 5,000.
Every household container was filled with water
and left standing in the street in case of fire.
When the first fears were not realised
and the help needed was of another kind,
Edio Fallenby and her neighbours went off to the hospitals.
The soup was sold to a pig farmer, the windows were stripped
and water in the containers was used to wash down the pavements.
Several containers were never claimed and stood in the streets
as a reminder of the sort of disaster usually expected of a Violent Event.
Shey Fallenby's occupation in the VUE Directory
is listed as a ship's plumber, retired, or ephemerologist.
Either way, Shey drove a green van in circles in Tooley Park Nurseries
because, being a VUE hallucinist,
he was not officially permitted to drive on a public highway.