Eskew by Episode #3: Excavation

In which Jon and Muna offer commentary, anecdotes & random thoughts on every episode of I Am In Eskew.

This week, we're talking about Episode III: Excavation, where David Ward goes underground (not for the last time).

Jon:

A lot of the early episodes dance around Eskew as more of a real fantasy city with nightmarish elements rather than a purely unreal place, and this is probably the one that goes furthest with that concept - here we have multiple living citizens, even a faction war that develops!

It’s expansive. It doesn’t make much sense in retrospect. But I like it.

Muna:

The opening paragraphs of Eskew resonate with me in a way they definitely don’t for and with Jon. I’ve lived in a lot of places. 6 countries across three continents, and perhaps 15 or 16 houses. One thing I’ve always thought of is that most places remind me of another place. 

Human beings are quite adept but also predictable in the way we build our worlds, warrens and burrows of streets. There is a street in Lisbon that reminds me of a corner in Prague. Plenty of roads in the UK have the same names - actually in London I’ve lived on two streets with the exact same names, miles and miles from each other!

I moved around so much that I like anonymity, disappearing into a big city, not so much reinventing but picking a different part of yourself to emphasise with every move. So to me the fact that maps don’t make sense in Eskew, that you change as well as the city changing - is the ultimate achievement of anonymity.

Jon:

We'll get to it, but I feel like this is a nice teaser for the fact that Riyo is, essentially, you with a rifle.

Anyway - doorways!

As liminal spaces, doorways and thresholds feature heavily in a lot of audiodrama horror, and it’s a conceit I’ve always loved for personal reasons - in the footnotes of an early Dostoevsky story (there are a couple of weird and not particularly good ones where he has a straight-up go at being a horror writer, and he returns to the idea of evil visitations in a few sequences like Svidrigailov’s dream in Crime and Punishment), I remember reading about a folk tradition that says you should never shake hands or pass items through a threshold, since this is where the Devil lurks.

I love that. That’s always stayed with me.

Muna:

I find that really interesting! In one of my cultures (I say one of, because while I was born in one country I have been raised across several cultures, so although I can and do pick one when pressed, it’s not a preference of mine to land on any one country or culture), doorways are actually a safe space! It’s more the open road that is dangerous. 

Cross-roads especially can cause travellers to splinter - a part of you fleeing one way while another floats off elsewhere.

But yes, you do prefer doors open at home, and I prefer them closed!

Jon:

But it’s more than that for me - I’ve always found doors particularly freaky and anxiety-inducing (David’s words about them here might as well be my own).

More than once I’ve stood pretty much literally paralysed in my own bathroom before the closed door, because what if I open it and there’s some nightmarish figure standing on the other side? What if I glance back to the open doorway over my shoulders and something is already there, watching me?

I think it’s probably a common enough fear; we set these boundaries to comfort ourselves, but on some level, we understand just how ineffective they are in making us safe.

Like the shower curtain in Psycho, maybe all they’re doing is concealing the threat from us; giving it a clear passage towards us.

And we’re so steeped as human beings in the visual language and the viewpoints of cinema that I think that knowledge follows us back into real life - we understand that if we linger on an empty space too long, it’s likely to be occupied by something.

We understand that if we turn too suddenly, something may appear that wasn’t there before - whether it’s a Sergio Leone gunslinger who’s magically appeared out of frame or whether it’s a monster coming to get us.

How can I be certain that I won’t open a door, and find myself stepping out of a grounded reality, and stepping into a place where the rules are different?

(On this note, I think it was Alfred Hitchcock who said he was anxious about everything as a child, and this is what gave him the authority to be a truly great horror director.)

Jon:

It always seemed like common sense to me that the ‘soldier ant’ class of a monstrous and shifting city would be a construction company, rather than police or government - hence the Orion Building Concern.

I probably didn’t do enough work at the start to plan out exactly what their role was in Eskew - eventually I came to the conclusion that this was a real-world company that had been tinkering with hostile architecture and got sucked through and replicated by the city it was attempting to reach, which sort of makes sense.

But at this point they’re very much just there as a tease. I’m an impulsive writer. I’m not a great world-builder.

Muna:

I actually think this is a nice way to highlight the monstrosity that is construction to a city, a place we call home.

This is so evident in London, being slowly stripped away to have obscenely expensive flats popping up everywhere. When I moved back to London after university, and went to visit a friend in Hackney I was so taken aback by the rapid change.

Come to think of it, that’s a rather frightening thought. What’s waiting for us out there, now we’ve been sticking close by home for so long?

Jon:

This is probably the first episode that’s really blatantly drawing on, or ripping off, Junji Ito and the way he explores obsession as a very human but literally transformative force.

Like the potter at the start of Uzumaki who begins fixating on creating spiral shapes in his art, but ends up being reshaped into a spiral himself, this is a story about a task so perfect and so fascinating that it changes its devotees into something non-human.

I used to love digging, though. We’d go to the beach when I was a kid, and I’d spend hours digging out tunnels in the sand with my hands - creating these great interconnected networks and hives, as the little grey hoppers danced around me.

It’s meditative, these acts of creation, forming the world into shapes. It transports us. No wonder we believe that it could transfigure us as well.

Jon:

It’s not exactly an original or particularly interesting observation, but I think the initial idea for this episode came during a commute.

You can end up piling onto the London train, amongst so many hundreds of people who - like you - do nothing tangible, build nothing tangible, pass emails around on behalf of corporations.

And you watch from the windows as people who are paid less and respected less dismantle and rebuild the city all around you.

David is too wary, too idle and too proud to get his own hands dirty, but you can understand that longing to throw away your briefcase, jump over the fence, and go dig a hole with other people all around you, working towards the same goal.

Jon:

This is a true story. About seven or eight years ago, I was waiting at a traffic light, with a lot of other pedestrians standing around me nearby.

A man came up to me. He was staring right at me. He had a grey shaggy beard and he looked dishevelled.

I glanced around at him and accidentally caught his eye.

He said to me in a low, confidential voice, “Do you know the Devil?”

A couple of the other pedestrians half-glanced at him. Most of them didn’t give any indication that they’d heard him.

I just stared silently back, caught up in his gaze, utterly petrified.

I could see where this was going - that it had the feeling of the setup to a punchline - and I didn’t want to know the Devil. I didn’t want to hear whatever this man had to tell me.

The man was getting angry with me.

He snapped, “Don’t f***ing look at me like that! I asked you a question. Do you know the Devil?”

I turned, and ran. When I glanced back, everyone else was just walking calmly across the road in their own individual directions, clearly relieved that the man hadn’t asked them whether they knew the Devil.

He was still there, waiting at the lights, presumably to find someone else he could ask the same question to.

I think experiences like that are very common in big cities - when someone behaves in a way that’s disruptive, when someone is very visibly displaying mental health issues - and there’s a sort of bourgeois terror that sweeps over us, an urge to maintain normalcy at all costs by simply refusing to see what’s happening, playing possum until the disruption goes away again. And the longer the disruption goes on for, the more it escalates, the more feverish and hilarious and awful our insistence on not seeing it becomes.

Anyway, that’s why I’m quite proud of this moment, where the commuter on the train is ‘digging’ through the carriage floor, paring her fingers to the bone, and everyone is ignoring her.

It feels horrific but it’s also real, in a number of ways,

But this is also the first and last time I tried to use actual sound effects to convey a visceral noise in the show - I just didn’t know what I was doing, which means the noise is really jarringly laid over the narration.

From this point out, we just make the sounds ourselves, which has its own attendant silliness, but which I think is less disruptive.

Jon:

Some people describe the show as relentlessly bleak, but I think it’s really funny! There’s some funny stuff in here!

I’m quite fond of just how bad David is at being an investigative journalist. He just doesn’t care about trying - if Eskew wants to reveal something to him, it will.

I think this scene where he investigates the Orion Building Concern was a reference to Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who gets information by waving a card to look official and then confidently asking questions.

Jon:

Part of what makes Junji Ito’s transformative horror so interesting to me is that he explicitly acknowledges dehumanisation as a potentially satisfying - certainly tempting - solution to the enduring problem of ourselves. (Which a lot of body horror hints at, but perhaps doesn’t go as far in spelling out.)

Because when we’re devolved into something less than human, the voice in our head whispers, we can perhaps be more complete than we are right now.

The guy who turns into a spiral is happy as a spiral. The kid who becomes a snail is pretty cheerful about being a snail.

And the worms, too, are more content and less tormented in their wormishness than David can ever be.

Jon:

I think the Magnus Archives / I Am In Eskew audience is less a Venn diagram and more one giant circle with a much tinier circle inside it.

But on the off-chance that anyone hasn’t checked out Magnus, definitely have a listen to their Ep 166, which also has a great portrayal of human worms. It’s the world’s most specific horror sub-genre!