Link Arms with Toads! (29 page)

It didn’t matter. She enrolled in the local university, where she decided to study aeronautics, because that science has no obvious connection with acting or shadows, but she didn’t graduate. She ended up flying away on a magic carpet instead. Curious.

(2009)

Discrepancy

It must surely have come to the attention of certain scholars that increasing numbers of people are appearing in more than one place at the same time. Individual scientists, travellers, pirates, geniuses, fools, musicians, and all other kinds of characters have been recorded living multiple lives in sundry locations; and some of them have even been observed dying several deaths instead of the usual single death that is our proper allowance. These inconsistencies of time and space must be explained and this brief account will attempt to do that.

High in the Alps at a point almost midway between Vaduz and Chur may be found the quaint city-state of Chaud-Mellé. It occupies an entire valley where also glitters a mysterious lake that tastes like wine. But this tale is not concerned with bodies of water; it wishes instead to focus on the body, and mind, and doings, of the lovely Coppelia de Retz, a maker of toys by trade who specialises in the design and construction of cunningly wrought automata. Coppelia is skilled at creating life-size puppets that are perfect working replicas of real men and women.

For many years Coppelia accepted commissions from rich aristocrats to duplicate them in order that they might send the clockwork puppets to boring soirées while they stayed at home; but some of her customers clearly also received a thrill at the idea of using their own doppelgängers as butlers or more lowly kinds of domestic servant. These commissions made Coppelia a wealthy woman but they failed to fully satisfy her hunger for mischief. She began making puppet doubles of unwary citizens at random and turning them loose in the world to comic effect.

Her method was as follows… She found an obscure alleyway near one of the city gates and she converted it into an optical trap by renting a house at a point halfway along the crooked street. Most newcomers to Chaud-Mellé proceeded down the main thoroughfare after passing under the gate; a curious or reckless minority close to explore the alley instead. Up the steep gully they puffed, resting for breath at the sharp bend that led to an even steeper stretch of cobbled gloom, and this inevitable pause was exactly what Coppelia required.

Her house was positioned on the bend itself and she had transformed it into a workshop full of remarkable devices relevant to her work. Lenses studded on the outside wall captured the image of her latest victim; while a hidden metal plate under his feet measured his weight as he stood immobile; the quality of his wheezing was also recorded by an artificial ear in order to gauge his probable manner of speaking. The lenses and ear were concealed by the natural darkness of the alley and not once did a passing traveller suspect any theft of vision or sound.

With this information Coppelia was enabled to create a perfect clockwork replica of her subject. At first she laboured at this task with her own hands but she soon realised the expediency of automating the process. In the centre of her workshop stood a machine resembling an iron octopus that possessed a rudimentary mechanical brain and was easily able to process the data collected by the lenses, ear and metal plate. The riveted tentacles moved unerringly, building each puppet double in less than an hour and delivering it to the world through a hatch.

The octopus selected suitable materials from the boxes full of springs, cogs, camshafts, levers, wheels, crystals and relays that stood around it in profusion. Coppelia’s instinct for domestic neatness was defective: the workshop was so cluttered with spare parts that her living space was cramped in the extreme; but in fact she only visited this house to monitor the octopus and make occasional repairs. She estimated that it produced ten puppets every week, which demonstrated the unpopularity of the alley as a public way and was a safely modest quantity.

One afternoon, while she was engaged in tightening a loose screw on the tip of one of the tentacles, a traveller happened to arrive in Chaud-Mellé. He passed through the gate and instantly rejected the broad avenue that stretched before him, preferring the picturesque ascent of the alley. Up he went, pausing for breath on the bend as they all did. His weight, voice and angles were captured by the monitoring devices, and in the very instant that Coppelia finished her adjustment, the octopus sprang into action, constructing his perfect double, while Coppelia watched with a frown.

Fifty minutes elapsed before the puppet was ready and functional. During this time Coppelia’s frown deepened; there was something about the clockwork being in progress that unnerved her; but she considered it an act of moral weakness to halt the process on the basis of nothing more substantial than an uneasy feeling. As a consequence the octopus continued working until it was done. Then it wound up tight the mannequin and released it through the hatch. Coppelia relaxed her frown but the corners of her mouth sagged with accuracy in the direction of the antipodes.

Her gloominess had suddenly increased because now she thought she recognised the face of the puppet. She needed to be certain. Examining a bookshelf in the darkest corner of the room, she finally selected a thick volume entitled THE LUNATIC INVENTORS OF EUROPE. She turned the pages rapidly, scanning each one. Long before reaching her own entry she found the page that confirmed her worst fears. The traveller was none other than Karl Mondaugen, originally from Munich, a fellow who was no stranger at all to the art of making deceptively realistic clockwork puppets.

Coppelia slammed the book shut with a growl. Creating spare copies of ordinary citizens, with or without their assent, was a pleasurable hobby for her; but she had absolutely no intention of increasing the number of her competitors and rivals. She had unwittingly ensured that the book of mad inventors would require an extra page in its next edition, unless the single entry on Mondaugen could also be said to represent his double, for they were identical in form, character and ability. But it was still Coppelia’s duty to rectify her mistake, with the aid of a blunderbuss.

There was one hanging by its trigger-guard from a nail in the wall. She had anticipated the necessity of destroying the occasional rogue puppet, but not for this particular reason. She took it down and loaded it with calcified teeth and fossilised bone fragments: a blunderbuss full of cogs and brass nuts might suffice to kill an organic being but the arbitrary insertion of such components into a machine could conceivably
improve
its function. At any rate, the symmetry was satisfying. Thus armed, she operated the hatch and hurried off in search of her prey.

But Chaud-Mellé is a labyrinth of a city. The false Mondaugen had vanished in the tangle. She ran one way, then another, lost count of the corners she turned and soon became lost herself. Several times she glimpsed the puppet at the end of a street, passing behind a row of columns or entering a tiny square with a broken fountain; he seemed to be taunting her. Once she spotted him crossing a narrow bridge above her and she raised the blunderbuss to take aim, but it occurred to her that this might be the man, not the replica, and she hesitated.

The opportunity was thus wasted. She wandered aimlessly until night fell, then she paused for a rest in a quiet alley, sitting with crossed legs on the ground and reviewing her options. For a long time she sat there and finally she decided that having an extra Mondaugen loose in the world was not an utter disaster. She rose to her feet and a chill of horror paralysed her limbs as she realised where she was. It was the bend in the crooked alley next to her workshop! The octopus must certainly have copied her while she lingered there…

She hastened to the hatch, shaking off the sensation of fear as she ran, fully prepared to blast her own double into oblivion. But she was too late: the octopus had already liberated the second Coppelia. So now there was yet another puppet maker at large in the city! And the new Coppelia was able to build another octopus and another trap somewhere else, capturing yet more puppet makers and perhaps the real Coppelia again, and so on, accelerating the duplication process to the point where every human on the planet would own at least one replica.

Overwhelmed with melancholy, Coppelia trudged home under the dim amber and smoky green lanterns of the midnight city. Her husband, the Maréchal Lore de Retz, was sitting on his favourite rattan chair, reading a newspaper,
The
Chaud-Mellé Chronicle
. She poured herself a glass of absinthe and told him everything. He advised her to destroy the octopus as soon as possible and offered to help her in this task. She nodded wearily and they retired to bed. The Maréchal snored so rhythmically that Coppelia began to wonder if he was a clockwork puppet too.

The following morning they set off together for the narrow alley and the workshop, the Maréchal carrying a sledgehammer over one shoulder that he had purchased especially for the occasion. When they reached their destination they opened the hatch and clambered through into gloom and dust. The octopus was silent, unmoving, squatting among its boxes of spare parts like a naughty toolboy; the Maréchal walked around it, found the most vulnerable spot of its exposed mechanical brain and swung the heavy hammer upward with a mighty grimace.

But destiny had other ideas and the blow was never completed. For a new traveller had just reached the bend in the alley and paused there, though not to catch his breath. His name was Wilson the Clockwork Man and he was already a puppet, but a puppet that duplicated no one; he was an original. The name of the inventor that constructed him is not known and it is not beyond the bounds of feasibility that Wilson made himself. Whatever the truth of the matter, he had entered Chaud-Mellé and planned to explore the city.

His artificial eyes immediately detected the lenses and ear on the outer wall of Coppelia’s workshop; he stopped to examine them. The information they gathered was relayed to the octopus inside, which followed its programming and commenced the task of building a replica. But a gross irony was the result. Flesh and blood humans are duplicated with steel and crystal parts; according to the logic of the octopus, a man who is already clockwork must be fabricated from bone, skin and gristle. It was a perfectly sensible assumption.

The metal arms reached out and pulled the Maréchal to pieces. His hammer dropped harmlessly to the floor. Before Coppelia could retrieve it, the octopus also seized her and began work. Wilson had a large frame and his duplication required plenty of raw materials; nonetheless there was some left over, indescribable globules quivering and cooling in little mounds. The finished article was thrust through the hatch in an absurd parody of a birth. And Wilson the Organised Man, who would never be aware of his name, drooled happily as he crawled off into the urban chaos.

(2010)

Afterword

ROMANTI-CYNICISM

“
Toad in a trombone!”

I coined that exclamation of surprise more than a decade ago; despite my best efforts, it never caught on. Yet I persist in maintaining it has an elegant resonance and conjures up a nice image, comparable to that of a fox piloting a biplane. Perhaps my brain works in a quite different way to the neural networks of everyone else.

Back in 1995 or 1996, flushed by the appearance of my first book and also by my own blood in my own cheeks, I made the mistake that young, bombastic, daft authors often do: I decided to invent a literary movement. I didn’t attempt this
just
for the sake of it, but because I wanted to define more clearly the essential effect I was striving for in my fiction. In other words I planned to label myself before anyone else got the chance. As it happened I was far too slow off the mark, for I had already been branded as a writer of humorous dark fantasy!

A reviewer of distinction had read many of my early stories and come to the irreversible conclusion that my work aspired to juxtapose the vision of Thomas Ligotti with that of Woody Allen. This approach was felt to be rather unwise because “horror and comedy always cancel each other out.” But my intention wasn’t that at all. Horror-comedy is one thing, perhaps a worthy thing in its own way, but it’s not
my
thing. I wasn’t hoping for any kind of contrasting or portmanteau effect; I was striving for a synthesis so complete that no join might be noticed.

To explain this more fully I like to fall back on a dubious analogy. It is fortunate for me that dubious analogies are almost sacred in my proposed literary movement. Ready? Here we go!

It’s possible to describe water as hydrogen-oxygen but this term is less useful than the one already in common parlance. Water is different from both hydrogen and oxygen, and no objective analysis of the properties of hydrogen and those of oxygen
before combination
can predict what the properties of water may be. There simply is no physical clue in the atoms of either element as to precisely what will happen when they are joined; we only know the result from experience. The properties of water are
not
predetermined by those of hydrogen and oxygen. The sum is different to, if not greater than, the parts, and has unique abilities. See the works of the philosopher David Hume for more details.

I wondered if what was true for physical elements might not also turn out to be true for genres. I have already admitted that an analogy between elements and genres is dubious, so go easy on me! Now then… If we take a pair of unrelated genres, for instance horror and comedy, and mix them correctly, the outcome shouldn’t be a chessboard of alternating squares or a salad-dressing of incompatible oil and vinegar, but a molecule, a brand new substance with properties of its own that the original elements don’t have. Horror frightens; humour tickles; a perfect blend of these elements should result in a substance that doesn’t scare or amuse, or at least doesn’t merely do these things, but is capable of effects beyond the reach of those two atomic genres. What those effects
will
be is something that can only be discovered from the procedure itself.