The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (29 page)

“Ah yes! Emperor Aurangazib. He often trampled his own citizens. He was the only sober man in Hindustan in the 17th Century. Totally insane, of course, but a snappy dresser.”

I pointed at the stadium. “And there?”

“Another despot, but a different age. I conclude it is Commodus and one of his special circuses. He enjoyed fighting gladiators himself, but only after they had been drugged. However, he was an accurate archer. He is shooting giraffes, by the sound of it. First time real skill has been demonstrated at the Vetch for decades!”

Thus we were provided with a commentary on the most terrible rogues from times past. All were there — Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel rode past us on a white stallion, with a string of tongues dangling from his pommel, which he poked out at us in sequence by jerking the cord, an insult only he laughed at. Cartaphilus lowered his voice. I learned that this was perhaps the most cruel man who had ever lived. When Pope Pius V excommunicated the entire population of the Netherlands in 1567, valiant Fernando was sent to carry out the sentence of death. He was diligent in his work, with pokers and shears.

Our street had changed for the worse. The submarine was burning and sinking in its pond of sick, while the bearded arms dealer counted a wad of roubles. Cartaphilus hailed him in Greek and the icy fellow held up a Mauser pistol for inspection. I doubted the value of bullets against the devil and shook my head. No sale.

“Basil Zaharoff, a most intriguing scoundrel. Started wars and sold weapons to both sides. One of the richest men who have ever lived. Satan was especially fond of him. And the mediaeval king is Stefan cel Mare of Moldavia. He will attend any party where there are sausages and gherkins on sticks. Clench your buttocks in his presence. You rarely know when he might slip a stake between them.”

I made certain to follow this advice. I resolved to ransack laundry baskets, both Odette’s and mine, for trousers, the moment we reached our house. On the telephone pole, the newsagent still writhed. Soon he would be lonely no longer. King Stefan was preparing a dog and milkman to keep him company. And now the Victorian gentleman approached and leered at my wife, suggestively flexing a saw.

“That is Francis J. Tumblety, quack doctor and pornographer, better known as Jack the Ripper. Does it surprise you he’s American? Misogynist all his life. Worked the canal banks as a boy, selling dirty pictures to navigators. Collected wombs even then.”

“The flying chap above? Friend of yours?”

“Simon Magus. A rival to Christ and the original Beast 666. I think he had a dispute with Crowley over the title. Played that trick once too often. Fell to his doom in Rome.”

Odette gripped my arm. “We’ll have to go round the back. Don’t care to push my way through that lot.”

The gang of hoods had erected another fire on the pavement directly in front of our door. One of the figures removed his mask and mopped his sooty brow with a voluminous sleeve. He was a coarse monk, with squashed nose and uneven tonsure, not the impressive features one associates with a chief inquisitor, who should be tall, slim and dark, with silver teeth and platinum earrings. I smirked.

“Oh come on, he’s gouty and decrepit.”

Cartaphilus growled. “Tomás de Torquemada. He has no love for Jews. I prefer your wife’s suggestion.”

He shivered beneath his woollens, the first time he had shown fear. It was infectious. We detoured down an alleyway at the side of the house and climbed a wall into our garden. A solitary light revealed that Billy was still in his room, probably snoring through the apocalypse. The back door was ajar and we pushed into the kitchen. There was laughter and the whisper of a lute. I wiped my bare feet on the doormat. Vomit had forced itself under my ingrown toenails.

Jacob Degen sat with the bishop at the table. Having cut his musket in half to carry it down the stairs, he was busy gluing it together. The barrel gouged furrows in the ceiling, another source of disbursement. No resentment at our escape glittered in their eyes. Cartaphilus joked with them in German and Langue d’oc and they nodded encouragingly. Turning to me, he identified the bishop, also a troubadour, as Folquet de Marselha, the crooning butcher of Toulouse.

I was careful to give them both a wide berth, though I did offer to make a pot of tea. The Wandering Jew secured the back door and shook his head. “No time for that. Can’t you hear it? He’s reached the bottom step and is mincing out of St Jude’s.”

Far away, a hollow booming intensified.

“Hark, cobbles! His hooves are striking sparks.”

Odette was more relaxed. “What are we supposed to do now? Just wait for the slob to diabolise elsewhere?”

“He won’t leave. This city is ideal for him.”

I pouted. “Suppose you tell us the whole story?”

“As you wish. Ever heard of Origen?”

“One of the Church Fathers,” announced Odette. “Gelded himself with a bronze sickle to avoid temptation.”

“Quite right. His knackers were preserved in an Armenian chapel for the edification of infertile pilgrims. But his real claim to fame is his heresy, which maintains that God and Satan will settle their differences and become reconciled. Despite his great importance to the early Church, he was reprimanded by orthodox historians, though Eusebius speaks highly of him. The point is, his doctrine never faded. A core of followers kept it going down through the generations. At last they seized the chance to restore harmony between the kings of Heaven and Hell by inviting them to a special meal in a celestial restaurant.”

“You mean the Stately Pleasure Dome?”

“That’s the one. Plenty of business deals are made in the convivial surroundings of a first-class brasserie, so why not a theological truce? Anything can be sorted out over a curry, even the fate of the cosmos. It took centuries for the Origenists to save enough money, but coin by coin it accumulated. Because I owe allegiance to neither side, I was hired to wait on table. To the incalculable relief of my employers, God and Satan accepted their invitations. A date was set for the opening night and six trillion animals were slaughtered. As you know, Christian archetypes are carnivorous. They can’t abide vegetables.”

“Why was Swansea selected for the venture?”

“It’s the only neutral location in the world. Everywhere else is an enclave of Paradise or Perdition, encompassing greater or lesser aspects of one or the other. Venice, for instance, is divine, while Bucharest is infernal. This is true for every city in creation, except Swansea, which is an earthly analogue of Limbo. It’s a void. That’s why the locals were also invited to dinner. It would have been awkward to have God and Satan sitting in an empty restaurant.”

“An astounding account. But it doesn’t explain the vomit and damned souls flowing down the streets.”

“Something went wrong. At first God and Satan chatted amiably. They had a great deal in common. The beer flowed, the plates came and went in rapid succession. Conversation grew more animated. Reconciliation seemed inevitable. Then the devil clutched his hirsute abdomen. He had terrible cramps and was barely able to lurch to a window before throwing up. This restaurant was in the sky, remember, so he disgorged the entire contents of his stomach over Swansea. Ordinary sinners boil in brimstone, but the worst are swallowed by Satan the moment they enter Hell. And now they’re free again, to mess the byways!”

Odette curled a lock of auburn hair around a finger. “Did Satan eat too much or was the food poisoned?”

“Who would wish to keep good and evil at odds?”

“The Archbishop of Canterbury? To safeguard his job.”

Cartaphilus was genuinely intrigued. “If true, it’s worked. Now the devil has decided to trump God by refilling his empty guts with virtuous mortals. Instead of gathering up Judas, Zaharoff, Hitler, Stalin and the others, he’s swallowing innocents!”

I exchanged glances with my wife. “What about us?”

“You’d better do something inhuman if you want to survive. He’ll be checking every home in due course.”

“Think of an abominable crime, Donald!”

Snapping my fingers, I hissed: “The imbecilic lodger!”

Whooping in counterpoint, we bounded up the stairs and crashed into Billy’s bedroom. The student was not asleep but quaking under the quilt. My wife relied on her superior strength to drag him out, while I scooped his pet hamster from its cage on the dresser. He chuckled unconvincingly as Odette pinched him down the steps into the kitchen. Losing no time, I clutched the scissors and wielded them as a dagger, thrusting the closed blades upward into his throat, while my wife held him still in her arms. We fell back to monitor the result.

It was unexpected. As the utensil penetrated his brain, the central rivet split and the blades parted. One severed his left optic nerve, the other sliced his right. With a slight slurping sound, his eyes fell out, spinning on the carpet, unable to blink at their misfortune. We recoiled from the bulging globules of jelly.

More farce was to come. Billy remained erect, groping for his loose orbs like a blinded puppet. His hands flailed everywhere but the correct place. Finally he reached the salad bowl and felt within its confines. A gurgle of triumph erupted from his lips as he slotted the uneaten olives into his sockets. Now he turned to confront us, proudly folding his arms across his chest. But then he rubbed at his pitted vision with a knuckle and fled groaning down the hallway.

Cartaphilus draped his ugly arm over my immoral shoulders. “Let him bluster his way into the lounge at the front of the house. That is where your monstrous act might be best displayed to Satan when he passes for a check. He’ll be here before long.”

We trailed Billy and discovered him on his knees, spitting a pallid blend of blood and bile. The thunderous footsteps were much louder. With a sudden inspiration, Odette kicked him to the floor. She beckoned to me for the hamster. I threw it and she caught it with atrocious grace. Flat on his back, Billy pleaded for mercy, not for himself but his pet, as if trying to assure us that his Kalamáta peepers really could weep. My wife is rarely responsive to guile. Squatting on his ribs, she began to tread the olives into oil with the feet of the hamster. Viscous juice trickled along his despicable cheeks. It was such a pastoral scene that I fancied myself marooned on an Aegean isle.

At the suggestion of the Wandering Jew, I urged her on with obscene imprecations. “Apply more pressure to the stale fresher!” The timing was perfect. While Billy’s death rattle was still at the back of his throat, making its way forward to his teeth, an enormous eye appeared in the bay window. It was not slitted like a goat’s but layered like a flower, dark petals within petals, inexpressibly delicate, peeling open in a morbidly fecund spring. For a harrowing minute it studied us, passing over Degen, Marselha and Cartaphilus, fixing its iridial corolliflorae on Odette and myself. The lodger twitched thrice.

A gargantuan hand pressed against the glass, a clenched fist with a raised thumb. Then Satan was off again, to harry our neighbours. Screams of terror, clash of teeth, a belch.

Cartaphilus patted my back. “Well done! You’ve passed the test. Now you are officially an evil couple.”

“Indebted to you for giving us the chance.”

“I didn’t do it for nothing. You owe me a special sight, one I have never seen before. That was the deal.”

Wasting no time, I opened my mouth and pulled back my lips. With an exclamation of disgust, the Wandering Jew squinted within. The cancerous gums on the right side of my face were in doomed contrast to the healthy examples on the left. Never had neglect been so impeccably asymmetrical, not in Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Byzantium, Sicily, Xanadu, or anywhere in the history of the aching world, not among deserts or forests, swamps or mountains, since the nailing of Jesus.

“I admit it! That’s completely original!”

Degen and Marselha tangled arms and danced a saraband, to celebrate my conversion to the accursed side.

The bishop was too ungainly for the complex rhythm and fell against his companion. Degen’s gun, held in both hands like a tightrope walker’s staff, sparked into life. A purple flash and a cloud of smoke frightened us all. A stone bullet, rounded in the rapids of an Alpine stream, burst the window and streaked upward like a rewound meteor. It punctured Simon Magus, who plummeted to the ground.

Cartaphilus shrugged. “He’s used to it already.”

Choking on the fumes, I cleared out my lungs on Billy’s corpse. The apocalypse was over. There was nothing more to do. Odette held me around the waist. “Up the wooden hill, chaps.”

Because I had endured the adventure nude, I dressed for bed, luxuriating in the weight of corduroy on my thighs. Odette dribbled peacefully by my side, slipping further beneath the quilt, only her fiery hair visible on the pillow, as if I shared my sleep with a crucified anemone. Despite my exhaustion, sundry distractions conspired to keep me awake. Embers still smouldered in the street, casting a throbbing glow through the curtains. Then there were new financial worries: two smashed windows and a damaged ceiling. Plus spiritual trauma. Few outsiders would ever credit what had happened to Swansea on this melodramatic night. The landscape has always looked like a rehearsal for Ragnarok.