The Smell of Telescopes (32 page)

Active rebellion was out of the question. Dennistoun Homunculus had issued a direct command—to ignore it would be to risk being sacrificed to one of the local members of the pagan pantheon. Such martyrdoms often involve plummets from great heights: offenders are cast over the side of the stone bridge on the edge of town; or defenestrated from the eyeless windows of the nameless tavern’s upper floor; or hurled into the smoking crater of Yandro, home of Cthulhu’s uncle.

The sea-defences proceeded slowly. Like I said, Lladloh is full of detached houses. Ramparts were extended from each building so that they inched closer to their colleagues. Halfway through the task, I made an observation. Previously there had been enough space for a falling house to crumple to dust without grazing a neighbour. This was no longer true. The range of tumblings now overlapped: the buildings resembled dominoes placed upright, waiting for a finger to push over the first and initiate a chain-reaction. I informed Delves of my anxieties. He simply wiped his forehead with his trowel and shrugged.

“No matter. The project must be abandoned. We should convene at the tavern.” He consulted the clock I had provided him with, calling to the others: “One hour to go! Down tools and follow me!”

Kingdom Noisette flapped between the departing labourers. “Good for nothings! Indolent fools! If you’d put your backs into it, the job would be finished! Now we’ll all be gargling!”

Olaf, always sensitive to the engineer’s needs, had lovingly sealed the cracks in the tavern. Also, on his own initiative, he had installed a periscope which protruded from the roof and offered excellent views of the town from the comfort of the lounge. We filed into the establishment and took our places at the bar, feet resting on the brass rail, symbolic glasses of mead raised to our lips. The Reverend wound up the gramophone and waited for the correct moment to engage the motor. Minutes passed as unevenly as pints. Sitting in state before the hearth, the mayor doffed his tricorne hat and wept dramatically. I considered clutching Elizabeth Morgan for comfort; I wisely desisted.

Scanning the horizon with his periscope, Olaf muttered: “Can’t see anything. Are ye sure Ragnarok’s today?”

“Absolutely.” The Reverend’s hand trembled over the gramophone. The timing was crucial—the inverse exorcism had to commence as soon as the village’s phantom gingerly poked its ectoplasm out of the cobbles. After an agony of waiting, the clock struck the hour. I closed my eyes. Delves still did not unleash the chant; a concerned muttering grew. I opened my lids. Outside, the village was silent. The crowd shuffled impatiently; I saw they were succumbing to boredom. Iolo Machen twiddled his crook; D.F. Lewis wrote his nine-thousandth short story in a puddle of beer; Medardo performed assorted ballet antics.

Keen to disperse the communal frustration, I volunteered to venture out, to gauge the state of affairs. The door was opened as narrowly as possible; I squeezed through. I wandered the plaza, searching for proof of looming doom. I walked to Cobweb Cottage, the edge of town. The sea was as peaceful as an exhumed grave.

While I rested in the obtuse shadow of the edifice, the breathless figure of the Reverend bounded over to me.

“Giovanni!” he gasped. “We must return at once. The clock you gave me! Where did you get it? It’s fast!”

Suddenly I understood my mistake. As I have mentioned, the clocks I caught were often broken; some were in perfect working order. Even these were inaccurate. Such timepieces still ran on Greenwich Mean Time. But Greenwich had not existed for a dozen centuries. Hours were now reckoned using Lladloh Nasty Time—a more brutal method.

When I told the Reverend that the clock had come from the ocean, he plucked at my elbow. “Hurry!”

I lost my balance and slumped against Cobweb Cottage. At once, with a horrid moan, the entire structure toppled. I knew what this meant—we were in the vicinity of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The building crashed against its neighbour and this also tumbled; an irreversible process. As Lladloh was arranged in a spiral, each house formed part of the domino matrix. Right at the end of the helix, the nameless tavern waited like a thumb ready to be pulped by a hammer.

There was one chance of survival: if we reached the gramophone and started the anti-exorcism before the last house crushed the life out of the tavern, we could exile the dying body of Lladloh and replace it with the solidified community spirit...

As I ran, I became aware that the houses were falling with a hush. Fate had placed a finger to its lips, perhaps in respect for the dismal irony. The collapse was accelerating, hastening toward a finale. We had a big advantage in being able to take the shortest route to the tavern, while the apocalypse was condemned to a roundabout approach. Around us, the noose tightened—the outskirts looped closer. I watched the chapel vanish; my restaurant; the lingerie shops. This scene felt unreal; like a camel’s dream of smoothness.

At last, we dashed into the tavern and the Reverend threw himself onto the gramophone. The motor was engaged and the chant flooded through the lounge. All else was static. When it was over, Delves wore a smile, the smuggest of his career. “Benediction!”

I stood. Something was not quite right. No light shone through the windows; an oppressive weight seemed to surround the tavern. In answer to my questioning frown, Delves opened the door. He was confronted by a solid stone wall. Turning, he matched my look with one of equal horror. We knew what had happened; a grotesque side-effect of our operations. I swallowed dryly as Olaf took his axe from under the counter and smashed the windows, revealing a similar expanse of impassible stone. The blond giant cursed: “Longships and runes!”

Stricken, I made the announcement. “Burghers of Lladloh! We’ve been more successful than I bargained for. We’ve solidified not only the soul of the present village but all of those which preceded it. As buildings were never erected in the same place, this simultaneous materialisation has surrounded us with a myriad variants of Lladloh. Only the tavern has always occupied a single location. Were it not for this happy fact, we’d now be embedded in living rock!”

Kingdom Noisette howled and grappled with the periscope. “It’s all true! I can see thousands o’ houses, meshed together at strange angles, without a gap between ’em! We’re trapped!” He fell before me. “I’ve got plans! We’ll drill through the walls!”

I pouted. “There are 665 taverns superimposed on ours. I consider it unlikely we’ll be able to break out.”

A triumphant voice interrupted me. It belonged to the mayor; he was perched on the apex of his small pyramid, long legs sliding on the glass sides, waving his tricorne hat in one hand. “Doesn’t bother me. I’ve got my time-machine. Mouse and hattock away!”

With a minor thunderclap, he disappeared. I arched an eyebrow. It remained arched for the rest of the day—I was determined to anticipate any more impossibilities. Sighing, I made an appeal: “Has anyone got any bright ideas? Wan ones will suffice.”

Padgett Weggs raised a hand. “Yn siwr! Psychological damage, that’s the problem! Stuck like colliers in a gold-pit. Pendrwm! Ought to occupy our fears. Play games, a bit of sport.”

I snorted. Weggs’ therapy was particularly inappropriate now. Olaf, on the other lobe, took up the request and amplified it: “There’s a book of rules on my shelf. Ancient game called ‘Cricket’. Read it in my spare time. Will ye join me for a few overs?”

Arms akimbo, I derided the suggestion. “Most foolish. No equip- ment is available for such a pastime.”

“Oh no?” Delves winked treacherously...

The sacred relics of Lladloh are no longer stored behind the bar in the village’s nameless tavern. The ear of a monstrous rabbit made a fine bat; a volume of poems penned by a legendary bard doubled up as a superb wicket; the stopper of a pickle-jar was the ideal substitute for a ball. Nervously, I stood at the crease, awaiting another of the Reverend’s sly googlies. With an athletic grace which amazed me as much as my fielders, I hit the ball over the counter for a six.

It struck a pistol left behind by a highwayman. Primed, the pistol discharged a lead ball at O’Casey’s glass of stout. The glass shattered. A fountain of Guinness erupted into the air, raining on our heads. Play was called off; the pitch was abandoned. Under chairs, we waited for the storm to subside. It never did. O’Casey’s glass has no bottom. Soon we were forced to climb onto the chairs, as the stout level rose higher and higher. The tavern was hermetically sealed by a plethora of congealed urban ghosts; we floundered in the surging brew.

“It seems we’re going to drown after all,” Delves remarked. “Though not in the way we’d anticipated!”

I swam over to the Reverend and belaboured him with my bat. I was not ready to accept my own responsibility. The undertow of Guinness pulled me away from his side. The stout had reached the windows; Olaf tried to stem the source with his beard; his chin was soon waterlogged and he fell aside, exhausted. Surprisingly, it was Kingdom Noisette who preserved the most sobriety. Balanced on a raft made from an hat stand, he called above our tumultuous voices:

“My underground tunnel! I knew ’twould be useful one o’ these days. Dive down and open the hatch, laddies!”

Elizabeth Morgan, the strongest swimmer, disappeared under the dark waters. A moment later there was a horrible sucking sound. The maelström was as unavoidable as an aunt’s kiss. The stout’s head was utterly pure, oppressively white. Round and round we whirled; I was surely delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of our several descents toward the foam below. Then, with no opportunity to make observations on which objects, whether spherical or cylindrical in shape, were absorbed at the greater rate, I vanished down a hole and was swept along a conduit at frightful speed.

At the end of the tunnel, I regained my feet, mounted a flight of steps and emerged in the pharmacy. When we were all inside, we closed the hatch and searched for an exit from the building. The pressure of eternal stout was immense; no door could hold it back. We had to leave the village and flee into the hills. Even there, we would be swamped within a generation. But this pharmacy only led to another; our ritual had turned Lladloh into a convoluted maze, a labyrinth more complex than any conceived by Minoan ingenuity. The ghosts of inanimate objects may not be malevolent; but they are certainly tricky.

We still wander the endless rooms, the surge of Guinness forever in our ears. It is essential to keep moving; the weak are left behind. Only Olaf is happy: he is able to loot the homes of his neighbours as we pass through them—they have plenty to spare. Each time we broach an earlier version of my restaurant, I prepare meals for the company. I no longer spice my creations with references to the past. Now I bake future hopes into my dishes. My belief is that ghost villages suffer apocalypses too. If true, it’s just a question of hanging on until the ectoplasmic walls tumble in some phantasmagoric cataclysm and we are able to emerge like worms from a stitched dog’s tongue.

The Sickness of Satan

The sickness began with the leaflet which was pushed under my front door on a damp Thursday morning. It was one of those glossy propa- ganda sheets used to announce the opening of a new restaurant. I detest unwanted mail and was on the point of compressing it into a sphere and kicking it into the nearest wicker bin when my nose was distracted by the peculiar smell of the paper. I raised it to my nostrils and inhaled. My mind swam under the onslaught of a myriad exotic aromas and I cried out in alarm. It was necessary for me to sit on the floor. 

Odette came down to see what the fuss was about.

“Have a good sniff of this,” I croaked.

She took the leaflet and her nostrils quivered. “Forty-nine billion Pork Vindaloos, twenty-three million Shashlik Kebabs, seventeen thous- and Orange Duck Curries, eight hundred and sixty-two Chilli Chicken Hotpots, fifty-seven Veal Jerks and a pint of lager.”

“There’s a Frog Moussaka in there as well, I believe.”

“No, it’s Toad. With a wart sauce.”

“Rotten salesman. It’s a stinking trick. I’m going to wire the door up to a generator. He’ll fry if he returns.”

Odette brushed her red hair back over flawed ears and chuckled. “It wasn’t a deliberate insult, Donald. How was he supposed to know you’re a vegetarian? He’s just doing his job.”

“I admit it’s a neat piece of advertising.”

“And it’s come just in time for our first anniversary. You promised to take me for a meal. This place is local.”

I sighed. Despite my basic apathy concerning morals, I rarely break a pledge. The execution of an oath, the display of its rotting corpse in the gibbet of my swagger, has little to do with conspicuous virtue. What I enjoy is the pleasure of contrast. When the burden of an obligation is eased off, like a pinching shoe, I am suffused with profound relief, the freedom of irresponsibility. Let us say my addiction to making vows must culminate in its cure—with the promise never to make another promise. Until then, Odette will suck my wallet.

“Very well, we shall feast in an abattoir.”

She pecked me on the cheek and I trembled. Despite twelve months of marriage, our relationship was still viable. Odette loved me in the same way a circle adores its circumference. She needed to be restrained by my embrace or else she would explode into emotional nothingness. I held her against my stomach, that basilica of rumbling egoism. The tenderness was interrupted by Billy, our lodger, who paused at the top of the stairs on his way to the bathroom. His face, with its divergent eyes and the frown of an athlete who smokes, annoyed me intensely. Odette twisted out of my clutch in embarrassment and vanished.

Billy smiled timidly at me and resumed his voyage to the sink. This violation of my grope seemed an evil augur for the remainder of the day. We both disliked sharing our home with a stranger but the revenue gained from renting the spare room was crucial to our solvency. Since losing my job at the hospital, our combined income had been reduced by a third. It was unfair to criticise the idiot student for his presence—he was not unreasonable in his habits—but his shambling gait and scratched vinyl giggle presented an easy focus for resentment and I was unable to resist radiating disgust over his footsteps.

I listened to the flushing toilet and scrape of brush on teeth, two sounds I had forsaken. Picking up the telephone in the hall, I jabbed at the number printed on the leaflet. As I waited for the connection, which seemed to take ages, as if I was dialling across an interstellar gulf, I studied the sheet more carefully. The lettering writhed over the surface like mangled hot pokers on a frozen lake. Impregnating the laminate with an excess of cooking scents was a whisk of genius. I wondered how it had been accomplished. I was still debating when the connection was made and an attenuated ringing tickled my ear.

The voice on the other end was faint: “Yea?”

I cleared my throat. “Is that the
Stately Pleasure Dome
?”

“It has been decreed as such.”

“I wish to book a table for two on Saturday night.”

“Divulge your appellation.”

“Donald and Odette Saunders.” I paused while a distant pen wandered across an invisible register. “Tell me, do you serve vegetarian food? I mean, there was nothing on the menu.”

The silence was gratuitous, like a nun’s ovulation.

My discomfort grew as the passing seconds became minutes. Was there a fault on the line? I bit my tongue.

“I’m quite happy with a simple salad.”

Again there was no response. Desperately, I continued: “So we’ll be there at half past eight. Thank you.”

And hung up. I had a feeling the call was going to prove enor- mously expensive despite its brief duration.

Later, after Odette had left for work and Billy for college, I went up to the attic and stared out of the window at the urban mistake called Swansea. A tedious life I led, moping through rooms, licking books which no longer intrigued me. Even my taste in pompous music had dulled—the stereo now belonged to silence. There was only one activity left which was wholly mine—isolation. And every recluse knows that the best way of widening an ache in a soul to abyssal dimensions is to spy on happier folk.

Our house catches its breath on the steepest hill in the city. Down toward the grainy sea, with its burden of rusty ships shaving the waves, innumerable filthy streets staggered. The windows of most buildings were bleary, lapped by mist stale as the breath of a cider-drinking donkey. There was little movement on the cambers and slabs. A solitary figure in a remote avenue stooped to slide something under a door. I grappled with my binoculars and focussed on his form. He was sheathed in a cassock and the bag of leaflets slung from his shoulder was actually a giant censer. For a halo he wore a garlic poppadum.

It never occurred to me to check out the exact location of the place. On Saturday night, after Odette and myself had performed the common rituals with soap, brush and mirror, we set off up to the summit of Constitution Hill. The
Stately Pleasure Dome
supposedly lurked at the junction of two ugly roads, Penygraig and Terrace, where litter brewed in fumes like the tea of a liar. Although the location was less than five minutes from our habitation, neither of us was familiar with it. We preferred to tramp in the opposite direction, to Cwmdonkin Park, unloading our stale loaves on vermin and mallards. I wore my purple shirt for the occasion and stubble brutal enough to impale spare crumbs. 

We strolled to the address, confident of finding a typical licensed ethnic eaterie, with a Mughal facade and a flock of doormen to match the gaudy wallpaper. Instead, to my bewilderment, we approached a church, St Jude’s, a Gothic edifice with those depressingly asymmetrical towers one associates with Welsh Catholic architecture. The opaque windows throbbed with a sticky effulgence, like lemon curd spread on sacred hosts, and an excited muttering issued from the open portals. I compared the number on the iron gate with that on the leaflet. They were identical. We were not alone in our alarm—two other couples lingered outside the entrance in parallel dismay, hairstyles curdling.

Odette shrugged. “It’s a typographical error.”

I shook my head scornfully. “No, it’s deliberate deceit. I observed a priest deliver the things. A recruitment drive for a flagging diocese. I find this absolutely outrageous!”

“Do you really think they’d pull such a desperate stunt to increase their congregation? Maybe it’s a believer’s theme night? I’ve heard what can be done with fish and a few rolls.”

“Well I’m not eating in there. Papist cheats!”

I craned my neck to peer inside, in the unlikely event it was all a joke, but what little of the interior I could see was resolutely church. Shaking my fist at the gargoyles dribbling oily water onto the railings, I snatched Odette’s hand and pulled her away. The other couples followed our example, dispersing along secular sidestreets. We cantered back down Constitution Hill, the Mumbles lighthouse winking slyly at us across the bay like a headmaster with an erection.

“We’ll feed in the
Bengal Brasserie
instead. Or that Austrian place next to it,
Mozart’s
. How does that sound?”

“Look, Donald, I know you don’t really want to spend money on me. I realise you’ve become a worthless miser. That’s fine. I don’t expect any charity from a misanthrope. We’ll go home.”

“Curse your mature womanly sentience!”

I fumed and blustered but gratefully took the opportunity of saving cash. Odette wanted too much from my pocket—I had already treated her to the cinema the previous month. We returned to the house and because I usually weaken when I triumph, I offered to make her a special meal with my own hands. She accepted without a smile and I raided the refrigerator for pugilist celery, fussy lettuce, cucumber, radishes, beetroot, yellow peppers bigger than cowardly hearts, avocados, watercress and coriander. Then I plundered less frigid regions of the kitchen for onions, parsley, pumpkin seeds and olives. This was going to be the mother of all salads, a denial of the flesh of the world.

Tarragon oil and rosé wine vinegar splashed the pageant. I shredded miscellaneous herbs over the bowl with a pair of broken scissors. As the central rivet worked loose, the blades pulled away from each other, like the legs of a newt employed as a wishbone. I tossed the result with fork and spoon, tuning the roughage to the pitch of a rabbit’s tooth. Thunder rumbled in my gut and elsewhere. Casabel chillies are testicles scorched by lightning in any raw dish. I cast them in whole, as if to fertilise a womb of chicory positioned alluringly on the vegetable bed. Beckoning my spouse to table is a tricky recipe in itself—she is always performing mysterious chores in the furthest corners of our abode. Lighting candles and dimming the bulbs, I waited.

She eventually appeared with a handful of vitamin tablets, a signal that I was permitted to begin. She often chides me for the acidity of my dressing, so it is crucial to blunt her taste with caustic conversation. Yet I had nothing to say. This awkwardness was punctured by noises which had another source. Billy was wallowing about in the bath again. Despite the vibrancy of the Swansea college scene, our lodger led a mundane life which alternated between tub, pet hamster and secret cigarette. On those few occasions when he left our home to play badminton, Odette and I were so pleased we sometimes had sex. As I crunched the fibres with the teeth on only one side of my mouth, I listened to the student breaking wind in the soapy water. The candle wicks flared.

“There’s going to be a huge tempest,” Odette remarked.

“Can you tell that from the clap of a bum?”

“Yes, because little storms come up the other way. We belch isobars when they can be digested poorly. If they can’t be digested at all, they hurtle straight down. Nature is brewing.”

We gorged ourselves sick in anticipation. Then we rested on a couch and sweated out the condiment. All that remained of the noble salad were two olives, shining at the bottom of the bowl like pineal glands plucked from the fused craniums of Siamese twins.

The storm broke just after midnight. Rain slapped the roof like soup and I stirred out of a dream with the grace of a convecting lentil. I groped for Odette but her side of the bed was icy—she had gone. As I blinked into full awareness, the windows burst open under the weight of a horrid shape. A man dressed in lederhosen sprawled on the floor, accompanied by a dreadful stench of vomit. I threw back the sheets and jumped up, using a rug to cover my nakedness. The intruder stood and brushed fragments of wood and fabric from his narrow shoulders. He carried an antique firearm and levelled it at my head, sighting along a warped barrel longer than a tusk. I closed my eyes but no explosion came. There was a different sound, an avian trill which pecked my lobes. 

When I regained my composure, I realised he was questioning me in a fluting voice. “
Darf ich das Fenster öffnen?
”

“Sorry, I don’t understand you. Damages must be paid for in full. I hope you won’t turn this into a legal issue.”

“
Können Sie mir helfen? Ich weiss nicht, wo ich bin
.”

“I think you should leave now. If you refuse, I’ll call my wife. Do you have any idea how angry she’ll be?

I backed toward the door and shouted for Odette. There was no reply and I briefly wondered if she had employed an assassin to remove me from her life. The intruder followed, the muzzle of his weapon poised over my spleen. It was an extremely unwieldy carbine and even he seemed slightly ashamed to be bothering me with it.

Retreating down the stairs, arms elevated in a pacific gesture, rug dropping to my feet, I was disturbed by a feeling of mythic recognition. During my housebound explorations of our bookcases, I once spent an hour with a volume on the history of aviation. Before fixed wing gliders were developed by Cayley, Langley and Lilienthal, a few pioneers attempted to conquer the skies in devices which mimicked the flapping of birds. These ornithopters usually failed to clear the ground, but in 1809 an Austrian by the name of Jacob Degen managed to stay aloft strapped to a hybrid of flexible vanes and hydrogen balloon.

His success inspired imitators who were less clever. After numerous accidents in Vienna, Degen was proclaimed an outlaw. He escaped with his apparatus and was seen circling the peaks of the Niedere Tauern, waiting for a gust to carry him to Salzburg. The authorities put up a reward for his capture and he became an aerial bandit, swooping on travellers after maiming them with his musket, which he supposedly carved from a sapling. He was a merciless assailant, by popular report, and his romanticism was always tempered with an insensate brutality. It was not inconceivable he had been blown off course to Swansea.

I tried out my theory on the visitor. “Herr Degen?”

He recoiled in surprise, then offered me an ironic grin. “
Ja, freut mich! Ich habe hier Schmerzen. Es wird Schlimmer
.”

“You should have died centuries ago!”

He shrugged and jabbed the gun into my belly, squinting through one eye as he squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened and he scowled, less in fury than resignation. “
Es klemmt!
”