The Smell of Telescopes (8 page)

There is something on my roof again. Every night this happens. It is driving me to distraction: the tiles are scraped by unseen feet. At first I thought it was a levitating monk. Then I believed it was the wraith of my dead reader, the one crushed in the avalanche. But yesterday I levered open my window, thrust out my head and saw my own ghost scuttling behind the highest chimney. It is puncturing the eaves with intangible crampons. How did it get there? I have a theory. In the low pressure of the valley it swelled too big to fit in my body and was detached on the way to Colchester. Yes, my soul lives on a ledge. But the rest of me prefers the comforts of a furnished room.

Thanatology Spleen

He wore a cork leg and people said he kept puppets in its hollow. He was unable to prove them wrong. Fixed to his stump by rusty screws, it could not be removed; he had not peered inside for decades. While he slept, it kicked to be free of the blankets; he wondered what else was known about him. To reckon his age he carved numbers in his foot, and his sole ached like a goblet which has never held wine. He was too slow to be a dashing heel: he was a gradual rogue. His memories had turned damp and unruly, a crew of desperate images tossed into a chaotic sea from rigging unravelling in a storm. He creaked. 

Careful to avoid scurvy, he lacquered his knees with pressed limes. On the slopes of Sassolungo, he collected small stones for buttons. What better way for a vista to fasten a spirit as striped as a shirt? Worn at the edges, his breath nudged the frosty air like an elbow; he darned his lungs with liquorice. The eternal thimble of night roofed him with songs and bells, but let in stars. His attic was the mountains, always full of revellers dancing on ice. The yodelling proved inaccessible in the dark. Once he limped up, lost the path and tripped over an alpenhorn. Hammered flat, it became his longest needle.

In the ripples of the limestone peaks, he saw the petrified surf of Jamaican bays. Sixteen tattoos sailed his neck; the veins beneath were unfamiliar currents. Why had he chosen Wolkenstein for his retirement? Salt was unnatural here; a man was expected to flavour broth with edelweiss. Even the pretzels were sequined awkwardly with imported sodium. But he knew the oceans had once licked the valley; there were ancient shells lodged in the rocks. On the tumbled battlements of a precipitous castle which buckled a stout range, he measured a lobster’s waistline.

This ruin was the antique home of the most notorious local, Oswald, the winking troubadour. Most of it had sheered away into a gorge of untuned trees. What remained was a lute without strings; marmots made merry on the shattered steps until chamois appropriated them for serious business. The view, wide as a sail, relaxed his regrets. In the walls of the crumbled kitchen, he discovered a stave of fossilised limpets, fixed in the strata like chords. He played the melody on his false limb with a pair of scissors, treble blade a little sharp. Bats took flight, whipped his ear in leathery rhythm, a malign choir.

He preferred the flap of rags to that of wings. So fine a sailmaker had he been that Morgan asked him to sew his coats. During the siege of Panama, he trailed behind his comrades, picking up shreds of purple wool which had once been blue. The fighting was incredibly vicious, but there was a deeper quality to the havoc, an ineffable wiping of belief. Though he wore his name like a sealed pocket, it was picked when he passed into the Cup of Gold, city of burnished lips. A quick replacement came with a blast from a zumbooruk mounted on a donkey: the grapeshot riddled his spleen and eloped with his leg to the pit.

Why had Morgan, alone among the rovers, preserved his identity? His stocky, entrepreneurial character never changed, or changed like keys in an astronomical clock. The crew nurtured rumour, declaring that love for La Santa Roja, a female, had solidified his name in a house right at the base of the Cup, a theory backed by the ship’s carpenter, Lanolin Brows, who spied her on a balcony through a wooden telescope with lenses ground from pearls. She was wine, the reason for the attack. But Morgan refused to recognise love; he was Welsh, he insisted, and the grease of his diet had pasted his ego to his arteries.

“Do you think I value a girl over jewels? In my village, compassion comes from diamonds; women are harder.”

“You have torn your britches, sir. A knife.”

“Make me a new pair, green and crimson. And why not replay the raid with rag dolls? Entertain the sailors.”

The opportunity was too good to waste, though it meant intruding on ’Lin’s territory. The carpenter whittled automata in his spare time from driftwood and guano. His shiny figures, animated by little fires burning in their abdomens, were a delight to behold on the deck of long voyages. The men who could not read learned all about former campaigns and future barbarities from these shows: the capture of Puerto del Principe and the invasion of Maracaibo. Competing with ’Lin would not be easy, though the navigator, Omophagia Ankles, assisted him with yards of silk, tubs of rich buttons and perforated doubloons.

Now he descended the peaks with a sigh. He felt he had coins in his gums but nowhere else. Oswald’s castle cooled rapidly at dusk; in a long field beyond the tiny church of San Silvester, a goat and rabbit nibbled nettles, facing each other like virgin duellists. Never cut out for a violent career, his sympathies were with them; killing and rape hung on him poorly, billowing around the waist of his conscience. Jabbing his stomach, he sounded the hull of his pseudonym. The insertion of a puppet there to steer his blood was one of the navigator’s ideas. ’Phagia never joked, so a cloth spleen must work.

He reached Wolkenstein and entered his shop. A self reliant culture smothered his gables; the Ladini and Austrians were superstitious, quiet but rarely thirsty. They did not ignore him; he was too buoyant to drown in espresso neglect. Words came as infrequently as savours. From the far end of the varnished valley, where the lathes of Ortisèi span improbable camels for seasonal pilgrims, to the roughly hewn limits of Oswald’s own estate, he was liked in silence. Do pirates ever stop laying tables with cutlasses instead of spoons? He was doubted and welcomed for the wave in his hair. But no friendship sailed.

“Who is the foreigner in the toyshop? He waits in the doorway as if to greet customers. One thigh is vintage.”

“’Tology Spleen. A lateen soul who tacks images.”

“Does he hope for Sassolungo to settle? The odds are rigged against his sales. He will shift no figures here.”

The Ladini carvers were an equal to anyone at sea, however Swedish, and could fashion a pine-cone into a nativity scene with a toenail. This extreme skill with wood was the origin of their careful fascination with cloth. His own products, stuffed with napkins, were regarded as too wise for chisels, too soft for vices. His hands were slow with pins, and they chided his thumbs for not leaving home. They did not buy his work, which filled his shelves too well to be removed, but bludgeoned it with bread. They were looking for something horrid when they entered his shop, as if pumpernickel was a test for ghosts.

He had stitched a thousand puppets in his career and was determined to shipwreck his blisters. He had never gazed deeply into water or glass and his possible age scared him; retirement is a time to dilute ambition with rum. He remembered the aftermath of the Panama massacre, recovering from his wounds in a monastery, blessed by ’Phagia, who had the breath of a monkey. Not all helped him. ’Lin, whose teeth were serrated, rasped at Morgan’s delegation of entertainment duties, and challenged his rival to a public cabaret. Both toiled to reconstruct a cast of raiders from a surfeit of requisitioned materials.

Kissed by tapers, the rival shows were judged by Morgan, whose left eye was more cultured than his right. ’Lin raced ahead, his puppets bold as fuses, slick as decks. Controlling the strings with his ears, ’Tology dragged through the plot like an anchor and was proclaimed the winner by an audience bored with battles quicker in the telling. Mindful of his crew’s needs, Morgan agreed. Leaving Panama after three weeks of looting, mules overflowing with gold coin, so burdened there was no room for names, they halted in a field, within spilling range of the Cup, to crown ’Tology with a knotted napkin.

From that moment, as official puppeteer, he was persuaded to forget sails and collars. Concentrating on melodrama left him with pale cheeks and eyes broad as astrolabes. The cork leg came from a hop’s worth of sherry bottles. His cleverest performance turned a ship into a marionette and thus the crew into men who work on toys. Aided by the barber, who weaved hair into cable, he fixed two cords from the rudder to goblets of sherry on the captain’s table. Whenever Morgan raised a cup, he would steer the ship by taste; the darker sip to starboard, the tawny to port. In this fashion, destinations became drunk.

Things fell apart after Panama; there was no more need to live like buttons. The crew parted company, many wasting their share of the loot on chocolate. The greater part returned with Morgan to Wales; some said it was secreted in a cave unmarked on any chart. Others went into business and failed spectacularly, an error ’Tology avoided by declining to follow his profession beyond its horizon. In Wolkenstein, he bought a store already full of completed marionettes for a low price. The former owner had fled in unmentionable circumstances. In a local restaurant, diners mocked his decision and all his ensuing ideas.

“Now here’s a funny one! ’Tology Spleen thinks that Oswald borrowed tunes from fossils. Plays a clam a day.”

“But he doesn’t give a patch for vampires.”

“All the wrong superstitions, if you ask me. Lock your window, spit on a dog, stuff garlic cloves in cuffs.”

Desperate to escape, he rushed his meal, although to others it seemed as if he was chewing weeks and months rather than knödel. At the musty rear of his shop the most enigmatic stock lurked: teething sculptures and fake spines. Stitching the present into a shroud for the past had scuffed his fingers like slippers. To reclaim the whorls of each digit, he exchanged sewing for unpicking; he hoped his blisters would emigrate back into the needle. The shapeless flaps of cloth which had once been characters were placed in the window. He also pulped the wooden figures left in the room into linen, as if sacking a forest.

The smashed castle had no other visitors; he came to think of it as his own. Even the boy who was employed to sweep the entire valley with a broom neglected it. What was the secret which surrounded Oswald? Who was he winking at from his picture, which adorned the labels of Ladini wine? On the sill of an almost inaccessible oriel, a symphony of shells hushed in anticipation of his baton. Tapping his leg with his scissors, letting the melody thin out toward the temples, something brushed his throat; a falling mouse. If the undead had to support themselves with honest work, would music or dentistry hold sway?

He had learned about vampires from Morgan’s cook, a shining man who set tales like supper. To his home island, traders from the east brought the hair of penanggalans, bodiless parasites which fly about the country at dusk looking for victims. The creatures are fuelled by vinegar, cough often and can be thwarted with pepper and thorns. ’Lin and ’Phagia added a vaultsworth of advice to these declarations. Occidental vampires waste less energy in defying gravity: they transmute into aristocrats, who are lighter than air. Oswald might have strummed himself into a corner where refrains and anaemia were inflated.

The sun is the enemy of musicians, who enjoy the company of candles and glinting earrings. Working through the high, petrified cycle of songs was akin to climbing ladders without eyes. So the disease scraped off on him, like resin from a diseased bow. Playing the music of vampires might be a hazardous venture, when the arpeggios stretch like membranes over a performer. Tunes concealed vast power; a flat truth, a sharp fact. There were precedents: a drum in Bermuda turned a bosun into a shark. This was not a sailor’s tale, but a fish’s, and he stood at the rail when it told itself. Never underestimate minims.

At the hem of his first year at altitude, his work came so close to completion that he toasted his pins, dunking them in grappa. Every rag puppet he brought with him was reborn as a napkin or bandana, and the inherited wooden figures had been crushed into tablecloths. All that now separated retirement from rest was a single box. The previous owner had been eager to protect its contents, using a lock carved from garlic. He picked it with a sprig of parsley and groped inside, pulling out an exact likeness of himself, a puppet double. Even his cork leg sealed the same dry white panic, judging from the way it jerked.

Why would anyone want to carve a replica of such a mediocre pirate? A toy of Morgan, certainly; also of Montbars, or William de Marisco. But of a lame sailmaker? There was an omen here, a prefig- uration of doom. In the sombre light which filtered through the window, he turned his double over in his hands. He shook it; a rattle. He probed the spleen and felt another puppet beneath. It had purpose, he knew that with all his heart, it was still real, not worked with cords. But he could barely imagine what that purpose was. Then he reflected. In the restaurant, he confided the event in spaghetti, which was later read.

“’Tology Spleen is a dunce. Oswald was a mongrel rather than a full bat. His mother wedded an octopus.”

“She had no gills; the sea was up in arms!”

“Her blood fell to his right side, gave him half a face in mirrors. He looked for the other in melody.”

The waiters who washed the pasta plates were experts at decipher- ing messages in the uneaten whips; all diners write diaries in the dish. And it is difficult to lie in oregano sauce. He heard them chatting over the sinks and fled without paying; beer is cheaper at home, so he was forced to pay himself when drinking away his fear in bed. His false leg kicked sleep to death; he rose and fretted over the implications. Now there was no mystery to Oswald’s wink: one side of his gaze was simply rejected by reflection, which refuses to employ fables. The rays which hasten out of vampires are too brittle to bounce.

Again, he picked up the puppet and studied it carefully. There were only two anomalies apparent: size and life. Other details were flawless, including the numbered sole and gleaming knee. If a vampire is unable to use a mirror, how does it dress or shave? There must be other methods of grooming in the evening. Else they would be no better than werewolves, a deplorably scruffy subset of monsters. Would they not create mannequins, jointed dolls in their own image, which might be manipulated to mimic an act of dressing or washing? Yes, this was the answer; puppets were evil. Measuring silk was silvering fangs.

The existence of this replica meant that he was also a vampire. Somehow, Oswald’s music had nipped him on the fringe. But a life on the six seas, repairing sails soaked in the gore of innocents with his own nerves, and the gore of Spaniards with monkey’s, had lent him a degree of balance in judging the ludicrous. Unusually, he pledged to confirm his undead status before flying around the house. How had his predecessor guessed his appearance? That was another problem requiring a barrel of thought. It was necessary to catch a mirror first, to see if his face broke on the glass or jumped up into itself like human ugliness.