Phantom (13 page)

It!

I lay very still, willing this nightmare away. It was only a dream, only a bad dream that would end…

When the sharp piece of wood splintered against my forehead, sending a shower of pricking specks into my eyes, I tried to crawl out of their reach, but they simply pursued me to the other side of the cage. I could see now that there were three of them, two thin olive-skinned Gypsy boys with black hair and dirty faces and a little girl in a torn dress, who hung back and began to cry.

"Don't, Miya… don't hurt it like that!"

"Oh, shut up, Orka, or I'll put you in the cage with it. Come on, Vaya, let's find some stones."

A huge shadow fell across the floor of the small cage and I heard the crack of a whip. Without waiting to be told, the children fled across the camp, possessed by one shared, instinctive fear; and as the door of my cage was unlocked, I turned to look up at my new master.

My first impression was one of size—immense size. He seemed to fill the entire cage, an enormous man with a great paunch of a belly which hung grotesquely over his tight belt. He bore no resemblance to any of the small, slender, rather graceful men I had seen around the campfire the night before; he did not look like a Gypsy—but he looked every inch a rogue. His eyes, sunk in a fat face which glistened with sweat even on this cold spring morning, were narrow and infinitely cruel as they rolled over me in a critical fashion.

"Remarkable," he mused to himself. "I've waited all my life to find something like this—something truly unique. They'll come from miles around to see a living corpse. Yes, that's it, that's what I'll call you—the Living Corpse."

I backed away from him against the bars of my cage and slumped down in a crumpled heap against the cold metal rods.

"I have to go home now," I said stupidly. "My mother will be looking for me."

"The devil she will!" He sniggered. "Have your little coffin all made up for you, will she?"

"Coffin?" I stared at him without comprehension.

"That's where corpses sleep, isn't it?" he replied obligingly. "Now, there's an idea! I'll have a coffin made for the cage. No harm in heightening the effect with a prop or two."

And with that he locked the cage once more and left me staring after him with dull stupefaction. My mind was quite blank, as empty as a worm's, a numb, frozen mass that flatly refused to perform the simplest feat of reasoning. I could not understand any of those few words that had been spoken to me in my native French—he might as well have spoken Russian. I did not understand why I was in a cage or what was going to happen to me, but I had sensed sufficient threat from the man's manner to be thrown into a mindless panic.

I began to claw frantically at the lock.

In other circumstances, with a calm, rational brain and a single hairpin, I could have freed myself in minutes, but there was nothing in the cage to have served my purpose, even if I'd had the presence of mind to look. That single clumsy lock had the power to reduce me to total impotence. I hit and bit at it like a wild animal, and not once in all the time that followed did I ever return to attack it with the full force of my intellect and my extraordinary manual dexterity. Even after all these years I am still unable to explain that strange mental paralysis, except to acknowledge that the mind is capable of erecting barriers far stronger than any physical fence. Such is the key to all illusion, and God knows it was a key I learned to turn often enough on others. For me, at that moment, the illusion of captivity was so complete that even had he left the door unbarred I sometimes wonder whether I should not still have sat there, staring through the bars, like a hopeless chained animal who knows no better than to wait patiently and endure.

I lay back on the pile of sacking and watched the pale sun sink into a dull glow behind the forest. The children came back with their sticks, but I fear they found me poor sport, for this time I made no attempt to escape from their tormenting. I let them draw blood with indifference, almost without feeling, and receiving no response, they soon grew bored and drifted away to more lively entertainments.

At dusk the man called Javert returned and pushed a tin platter of disgusting stew and a patched blanket through the bars of the cage.

I sat up hopefully.

"Please, sir, may I go home now?" I whispered.

I was like a very small child, repeating the only phrase in its repertory; and when I continued to repeat it day and night, he grew angry and struck me.

"Can't you say anything else, you stupid creature? I'm fairly sick of your whining bleat. Now, get this into your addled brain—if you have a brain at all, which I'm seriously beginning to doubt—you're
my
discovery,
my
creation, and
my
fortune! They tell me you won't eat—well, I've trained too many animals to fall for that old trick. You'll eat of your own accord, or I'll force every mouthful down your ugly little throat by hand. You're not going home—and you're not going to die on me, either, have you got that, you witless little monster? You'll do as you're told or you'll suf-fer for it, understand me? Now, pick up that bread and eat it—
eat
, God damn you!"

He caught hold of my head and began to force the rough, grainy bread into my mouth until I gagged and retched; but strangely, instead of angering him further, that merely served to make him very calm and coldly determined.

"Very clever," he said quietly, "but if you think that's going to stop me, you're very much mistaken. I'm a very patient man, though you might not think it. I can sit here all day and if need be all night, so it's up to you, little corpse, it's entirely up to you how long you want to go on being stubborn."

I do not know how long this torture lasted; it seemed like hours. The stars were winking in the sky and he was as soiled and stinking as the floor of my cage, before I reached the limit of my endurance and capitulated to his physical strength and his unwavering determination. When I finally took the piece of bread from his hand and began to nibble it wearily, he stood up and wiped his hands on my sacking bed.

"I like an animal that knows its master," he said with satisfaction. "There's never been one yet that defeated old Javert."

When he came to me next day I did not make the mistake of refusing to eat or asking to go home, but asked instead what he intended to do with me.

He seemed surprised by my question.

"I'm going to exhibit you, of course, what else would I do with you! People pay well to see freaks, don't you know that… don't you know
anything
about the world?"

I stared at him in horrified disbelief.

"They will pay," I stammered, "pay to
look
at me?"

"Of course—and pay handsomely too. In a few weeks' time, when word gets around about my new attraction, they'll be queuing all around this cage as far back as you can see."

A flood of revulsion swept over me and I started to shiver and vomit uncontrollably.

"Damn it!" he said irritably. "The greatest find in the world and what does it turn out to be? A puking brat! Just my luck!"

Storming out of the cage, he hailed a passing child, who immediately began to cower with fear.

"You—fetch me some milk and look sharp about it. Move!" He turned to glower through the bars at me. "And you'd better keep that down, you little skeleton, or I'll beat you senseless!"

I did not answer.

I knelt on the floor and began to pray silently that God would let me die before this terrible new shame was forced upon me.

I began my life as a freak exhibit with my hands and feet bound to the bars of the cage, so that I could not hide my face from the prying multitude. My first appearance had been a disaster that produced something dangerously close to a riot when the angry crowd demanded their money back; they could see nothing because I cowered in a corner with my arms wrapped around my head. They insisted they had been cheated and Javert—fearful of impending violence— promptly sent two men into the cage to bind me.

I screamed and kicked and bit like a wild animal, but I was no match for the strength of two full-grown men, and within a few moments I was secured with my arms at full stretch, like Christ on the cross, so that it was impossible for me to turn my face from view. Javert entered the cage and tied a rope around my neck so that I was forced to lift my head from my chest. As my skull jerked back against the iron bar, I opened my eyes involuntarily and saw people stepping back in delighted horror.

"Mother of God!" exclaimed a woman, pulling a screaming child into the shelter of her skirts. "Let us pass… for pity's sake let us through!"

The crowd parted a little to allow her to drag the hysterical infant away, but other children had also begun to scream and I could not take my eyes from their open, shrieking mouths. It was as though I saw myself once more in that mirror and shared with them all over again the horror of that first sight… but no horror could compare with the burning degradation, the unspeakable humiliation, of this obscene exposure. Panic numbed all other senses and I began to twist and pull like a frantic unbroken horse until the rope cut into my throat.

"Look!" someone shouted. "It's going to strangle itself!"

"How disgusting! Such things should not be shown in public…"

A new ugliness was rapidly infecting the crowd. They had paid good coin to be titillated and entertained, not disturbed and discomfited. My raw anguish was offensive to some, and once more Javert was faced with angry demands to return the viewing fees.

My cage was hastily withdrawn from view. I do not know how much money I cost him on that occasion, but it was sufficient to bring him to me a little later in a towering rage. He whipped me savagely for ruining his exhibition, but at the very moment when blessed unconsciousness promised to embrace me, he cut me down from the bars and stood over me with his arms aggressively folded.

"Well?" he demanded coldly. "Have you learned how to be silent now… or do you need a further course of instruction?"

I lay at his feet, staring in disbelief at the huge weals that were rising on my bare arms; my head spun and there was blood in my mouth from where I had bitten my tongue. But there was only one thought in my head, only one desire…

"Give me back the mask," I whispered.

"What?" He stared at me curiously.

"The mask…" I repeated dizzily. "Give me back the mask… please!"

Suddenly, without warning, Javert began to laugh, slapping his whip against his gross thigh and then leaning forward to poke me with the crop.

"Now, you listen to me, little corpse, and listen good. No one's going to pay to see a bloody mask, but half the women in France will swoon at the sight of your face. Don Juan himself could not have drawn more skirts in one afternoon. But I won't have any more of that cursed screaming, so be warned. You drive away any more customers as you did today, and it'll be a bad lookout for you. I'll flay every scrap of skin off your miserable body if you ever behave like that again in public." clenched my fists and stared up at him in crazy defiance.

"I won't be seen… I won't be stared at… I won't.
… I won't
!"

Surely he would kill me now. He would bring down his great fist and smash my suicidal impudence to pulp. I waited desperately for the end that would release me, but he did not strike me again. Instead he regarded me thoughtfully, as though he measured every lesion on my body and weighed it against the time when I could be exhibited once more.

"I suppose I could always gag you," he mused slowly to himself. "It's the screaming that does the harm… makes the women jumpy and spooks the crowd. Yes… I think I'll gag you next time. A beating's soon forgotten, but a gag—a gag will put an end to your defiance once and for all."

Next day we moved on. I did not know where we were going, nor did I care; time and place had ceased to have any meaning for me. But he kept his promise. The next time I was exhibited I was gagged and bound in an upright coffin, in a position where it was physically impossible for me to do myself harm. I was silent now, and this time no one complained or wanted their money back.

I was an enormous success, Javert told me with satisfaction, when he came that night to feed me like a trained dog. When I had learned to be sensible, he would remove the gag and permit me to earn my keep with a little more comfort. I watched him put the key to the lock in his pocket and walk away whistling cheerfully and I thought how much I hated him, how I wished that he were dead.

The wind whistled around the bars of my cage that night as I lay listening to the camp dogs barking intermittently and hating…
hating
!

But hating could not keep me warm.

Long before the campfires burned out I laid the coffin flat on the floor, crept back inside its narrowness for shelter, and fell asleep.

The gag defeated me, as Javert had known it must. His violence and cruelty concealed an innate shrewdness, a crude, instinctive sort of wisdom that showed him new and more subtle ways to conquer rebellion. It wasn't long before I came to accept that I was only adding to my suffering by my own stubbornness; and, though my flesh still crawled with revulsion when the crowds pressed around my cage, I learned to display the silent indifference of a dumb animal. That was what they wanted, what they came to see—an animal, an oddity… a
thing
!

Increasingly I ceased to feel that I belonged to what is loosely termed the human race. It was as though I had tumbled onto some alien planet where I found myself unable to take revenge upon my tormentors except in the dark prison of my mind. There, in that uniquely private domain, where I was free of chains, I conjured a thousand horrible deaths for those who came to prod and stare. I learned to live almost entirely in my mind, creating a landscape of my own and peopling it with the devices of my captive imagination. My world was strange and beautiful, an entirely new dimension where music and magic held sway. It was a second Eden, where I alone was God, and at times I retreated so far into it that I became indeed a living corpse, comatose and trancelike, scarcely breathing.