Angels of Music (26 page)

Stage-hands carried off the limp, dripping
concierge
– who bent in the middle like a real woman, rather than a dummy.

The list of the disappeared contained several women who might have been cast as a
concierge
. However, it would take a degree of insanity compounded by sheer cheek for a murderer to commit his crimes before paying witnesses. There must be a trick she wasn’t seeing.

Now, Guignol sat on the edge of the stage and chatted with the front row, advising patrons on how to get stains out, admiring hats and throats and eyes. He slowly turned his head, an unnerving effect inside his mask, and looked up at Clara Watson’s box, blowing her a kiss. He leaped to his feet, did a little graceful pirouette, and flourished a bloody rag in an elaborate bow.

Was the clown on to the Angels? Kate couldn’t see how. He was probably just playing up to whoever had bought the most expensive seats in the house.

‘Now, heh heh heh, to the
meat
of the matter… the
red
meat.’

Iron latticework cages lowered from the proscenium, each containing a wretched specimen of humanity. The cages were lined with spikes. Chains rattled, groans sounded, blood dripped.

Guignol set the scene with, ‘Once upon a time, in the dungeons of Cadiz…’

Tall figures in black robes and steeple-pointed hoods dragged in a young man, stripped to the waist and glistening, and a fair-haired girl, in a bright white shift…

By now, Kate understood the
Théâtre des Horreurs
well enough. Whenever she saw white on stage it would soon be stained red.

‘There was a plot, once,’ Guignol continued. ‘A wealthy young orphan, a devoted lover, a cruel uncle who held high office, a false accusation, a fortune for the coffers of the church if a confession could be extracted. Scenes dramatised all this. Lots of chitter-chatter. But we have learned it is wasteful of our energies to go into that. Really, what do you care whether an innocent’s gold coins be diverted to dry sticks of priests? The preamble is stripped away here, for we understand you want to reach this scene, this
climax
, as soon as possible. And so our piece
begins
with its climax, and then…’

The youth and the girl were clamped into cages and hauled aloft. The girl uttered piteous cries. The youth showed manly defiance. A canvas sheet was unrolled beneath the hanging cages.

Braziers of burning coals were wheeled on stage. A burly, shaven-headed brute in a long apron entered. An eye-patch didn’t completely cover the ridged scarring which took up a third of his face. Shouts of ‘Morpho
bravo
’ rose from all corners of the house. A popular figure, evidently. Morpho grinned to accept applause. He unrolled an oilskin bundle on the table, proudly displaying an array of sharp, hooked, twisted, tapered implements. Picking up Guignol’s cast-off poker, he straightened it with a twist – exciting more cries of approval – then thrust it into a handy fire.

‘Which to torture first?’ Guignol asked the audience. ‘Don Bartolome or Fair Isabella?’

‘Maim the whore,’ shouted someone from the circle. ‘Maim all whores!’

‘No, open up the lad, the beautiful lad,’ responded a refined female voice – not Clara, but someone of similar tastes. ‘Let us see his beautiful insides.’

‘What the hell, do the both of ’em!’

This audience participation was like a Punch and Judy show, only with adult voices. The caged actors looked uncomfortable and alarmed. No stretch, that. According to the programme, the roles of Isabella and Don Bartolome were taken by performers called Berma and Phroso. Few in the company cared to give their full names.

Morpho took out his now red-hot poker and applied the tip to the callused foot of one of the background victims, who yelped. Claqueurs mocked him with mimicked, exaggerated howls of sympathy pain.

No one on stage in the
Théâtre des Horreurs
could frighten Kate as much as their audience.

‘You, Madame,’ said Guignol – tiny bright human eyes fixing on her from deep in his mask – ‘of the brick-red hair and thick shiny spectacles… which is your preference?’

Kate froze, and said nothing.

‘Bartolome, Isabella, the both… neither?’

She nodded, almost involuntarily.

‘A humanitarian, ladies and gentlemen. A rare species in this quarter. Madame… no,
mademoiselle
… you are too tender-hearted to wish tortures cruel on these innocents, yes? Would you care to offer yourself as substitute? Your own pretty flesh for theirs? We have cages to fit all sizes of songbird. Morpho could make of you a fine canary. You would sing so sweetly at the touch of his hot hot iron and sharp sharp blades. Does that not appeal?’

Kate blushed. Her face felt as if it were burning already. The elderly gent beside her breathed heavily. He looked sidewise at her as if she were a Sunday joint fresh from the oven. His pale, long-fingered hands twitched in his lap. Kate wished she could change places so as not to be next to him. She looked to the plump family on her other side – Morpho supporters, to the smallest, roundest child – and was perturbed by their serene happiness.

‘So,
mademoiselle
, would you care to join our merry parade?’

Kate shrank, shaking her head. Morpho frowned exaggeratedly, sticking out his lower lip like a thwarted child.

‘I thought not,’ snapped Guignol. ‘There are limits to humanitarianism, even for the best of us.’

Guignol stood between the hanging lovers, hands out as if he were a living scales.

‘Confession is required from Isabella, before she can be burned as a witch and her properties seized by the church,’ he explained. ‘I think the most ingenious means of eliciting such a statement will be… to push in her beloved’s eyes with hot sticks!’

Morpho jabbed his poker up into Don Bartolome’s cage… twice.

The stink of sizzling flesh stung Kate’s nose. The young man’s cries set off screams from Isabella and quite a few members of the audience.

Red, smoking holes were burned in the young man’s face.

…or
seemed
to be. It
must
be a trick.

Isabella sobbed and collapsed in her cage, then rent her hair and shift in shrill agony. She was too horror-struck to sign a confession – a flaw in the wicked uncle’s plan. Though, as Guignol had said, the audience didn’t really care.

They were all just here for the horror.

Morpho considered a medium-size set of tongs, then shook his head and selected the largest pincers. Cheers and hoots rose from his partisans.

Kate couldn’t look away but didn’t want to watch. She took her glasses off, and the spectacle became a merciful blur… but she could still hear what was happening.

Putting her glasses back on, her vision came into focus just as a long string of entrails and organs tumbled out of Don Bartolome’s opened belly, then dripped and dribbled and dangled…

Just sausages in sauce, she told herself. The
Théâtre des Horreurs
bought pigs’ blood and horses’ offal in bulk from the local slaughterhouses.

And so it went on. The scene changed, and other ‘plays’ were presented. Simple situations which allowed for atrocities. In a gloss on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether’, Morpho returned as a maniac who takes charge of a madhouse and trephines his own head-doctor. Isabella and Don Bartolome were done with, but Berma and Phroso came back with other names to be violated and abused all over again: as harem captives of a cruel Eastern potentate; passengers sharing a lifeboat with hungry sailors, drawing lots as to who would be eaten when the rations ran out; a brother and sister sewn together by gypsies who needed a new star attraction for their failing freak show. Kate fancied that Berma, though luminous in suffering, was a little bored with it all, but handsome, wild-eyed Phroso was eager for each new indignity. He all but begged for the knife, the flail and the cudgel.

Early in the evening, Morpho did the heavy lifting, but his energies flagged as Guignol became more animated, more active. The maestro personally wrestled a bear, throttled a baby, killed the King of Poland…

Saint Denis interrupted the proceedings, his disembodied head preaching against the immoral spectacle. Guignol snatched the head and booted it into the wings, blowing a spectacular, swazzle-assisted raspberry. What was it about Paris and severed heads? From Saint Denis to Dr Guillotine, the city had decapitation on the brain.

The saint’s headless body blundered comically and was hauled off by a music-hall hook. Since the usual neck-yank was out of the question, the hook had to snag him by the midriff.

Kate checked her programme. No interval was promised.

K
ATE GOT HER
fill of horrors. The elderly gent in the next seat kept his eyes on the stage, but – under cover of his folded
Vie Française
– let his hand wander to her knee. She touched the back of his hand with the point of her tiny blade, prompting a swift withdrawal. The roué didn’t take rejection in bad humour. He licked a blood trickle – a darker shade than the stuff spilled on stage – from the shallow cut. He was lucky not to have been seated next to Yuki. She’d have cut off his hand and dropped it in his lap.

The last act was more like conventional drama than the succession of gory spectacles which made up the bulk of the evening’s entertainment. Someone must actually have written it.

Members of the company posed as
statues vives
, on display in a waxworks. Guignol acted as guide, recounting crimes which earned respectable-seeming gentlemen and ladies sobriquets like Ripper, Razor, Poison Marie, Black Widow or Werewolf. This scene transformed as the figure of murderer and corpse-molester Bertrand Caillet came to life and crept into a graveyard to clutch the throat of a lingering mourner.

In a change of pace, Caillet was played by Phroso, given the chance to slaughter instead of being slaughtered. Memory of the actor’s earlier sufferings lingered, making his monster pathetic if not sympathetic. The date was 1871. The arrest and trial of the madman was black farce, carried on during the fall of the Paris Commune. So many committees and sub-committees were in session, debating the aims and achievements of the Commune and its increasingly desperate defence, that no official courtroom could be found. Caillet’s case was heard in a disused horse-butcher’s shop. Witnesses, lawyers, policemen and victims’ relatives were called or dragged to the barricades as the Army of Versailles retook the city. Offstage fusillades rattled those giving testimony. Caillet’s confession was interrupted as pitched battle spilled into the makeshift courtroom, leaving the shop floor splashed with human blood. The skirmish done, Caillet resumed a stuttering account of his crimes and compulsions.

Guignol cavorted and chortled through
la Semaine Sanglante
, the bloodiest week in the bloody history of Paris. Caillet’s homicidal mania was a trifle amongst greater, more cynical horrors. Most of his ‘victims’ were dead when he got to them. He strangled two or three, but found the results unsatisfactory. Fresh-killed was too dry for his tastes. To prick his amatory interest, a corpse had to have the sheen of rot. Meanwhile, one hundred hostages, including priests and nuns, were executed on the orders of the Committee of Public Safety. In reprisal, the victorious army murdered thirty thousand – the innocent, the guilty, the uninvolved, anyone who was passing.

To Kate, it seemed every one of the deaths was enacted on the tiny stage. Berma appeared as the Spirit of Liberty, tricolour sash barely wound across half her torso, and was shot down. She danced at half-speed to the drum-rattle of rifle discharges. Ribbons of thin, scarlet stage blood splashed around. The orchestra played ‘La Marseillaise’ out of tune. The
prima diva
of horror – who had been earlier tortured, violated, shocked, throttled, mutilated, dismembered, disfigured and degraded – received wild applause for her last death scene of the evening. Even Morpho’s claque joined in. Funeral garlands were thrown on the stage. Without breaking character, Berma died under a pile of black and red flowers.

This piece was closer to home than mediaeval dungeons or exotic locales of Guignol’s other horror tableaux. 1871 was within the memory of much of this audience. They’d lived through the Commune, lost friends and relatives, suffered wounds. In all likelihood, some of the moneyed, middle-aged folk up in the circle had taken part in the slaughter. A pack of bourgeois women had poked a dead Communard general’s brains with their umbrellas, while regular army officers arranged the efficient execution of whole districts.

As the barricades fell, the bickering Committee of Enquiry into the lunacy of Bertrand Caillet remained in session. Proceedings were disrupted by fist-fights, a duel, assassination and the purge. Through an error of transcription, a Monsieur Dupond was thrown before a firing squad convened for a Monsieur Dupont.
Enfin
, the senior judge – who’d absent-mindedly signed the death warrant of the Archbishop of Paris while listening to Caillet’s confession – proclaimed
himself
insane in a vain attempt to evade his own executioners. When Guignol took the judge’s head, no one was left to rule in the case of the sad, forgotten prisoner. A venal turnkey (Morpho) let Caillet go free.

The dazed maniac was drawn by his lusts to his old stamping grounds. Caillet arrived at Père Lachaise Cemetery as the last of the Commune’s National Guard were put against its wall and shot. No one paid the amateur of murder any attention, except a guard dog which bit him as he was rooting in a grave for a sufficiently putrid corpse. The ragged ghoul succumbed to this festering, untreated wound and joined the pile of corpses.

At last, Guignol – who played the guard dog himself – was making a point; albeit while dancing in entrails and tearing the eyes out of dwarves, nuns and a disapproving censor. If Bertrand Caillet was a monster on the strength of his crimes, what was to be said of the politicians and generals who could have a hundred people – a thousand, thirty thousand, a million, ten million! – eradicated at the stroke of a pen? The
tableau vivant
returned, but poisoners, stabbers and stranglers were replaced by politicians, judges, officers, priests and newspaper editors. Their hands were red with stage blood.