The Smell of Telescopes (9 page)

There were no reflecting surfaces in Wolkenstein. The valley was so clean that all shallow images had long since been scrubbed away. Chalets with wooden cheeks and baskets of red blooms for ears make poor heads for the stuttering eye. The ship’s barber kept a mirror; perhaps he could borrow it? Sassolungo is not the only wild peak in the Süd Tirol; there is the glimpse which collects wings. He had no idea where a pirate with combs might hide after singeing a city, but ’Lin would know. He prepared an appeal for the carpenter, chipping out the stomach of his puppet double into a greedy hearth.

A fire supplied the doll with motion. He allowed it to stagger away from the village, toward the high northern passes. The messenger and the message were one and the same; ’Lin would understand. A carpenter should bevel anxieties as well as cabinets. Meanwhile, there was little more he could do. From sailmaker to tailor to puppeteer to vampire; life is an odd collection of stitchings. Had he picked up an infection after losing his spleen? No, the petrified music was the virus and Oswald had calculated precisely its effect on the generations who scaled his castle for melodic inspiration.

A mulish combination of leech and squid, the winking troubadour was unable to create heirs in the conventional manner. Using his connections with the denizens of the deep, he persuaded limpets and lobsters to rise up, and set early on his wall. A normal man casts seed on a wife; Oswald was compelled to scatter shells on a stave. Anyone who sounded the notes would become pregnant with vampirism, and to escape the curse they would have to seek new performers. The previous owner of the shop waited patiently for the sailmaker, hiding in the rafters, chiselling a puppet from life, a mannequin as a substitute mirror.

The pirate had one regret. Why had he not snapped off the false leg before sending it on a journey? He might have seen whether other puppets were stored inside or not. Too late now; he had to assume there were and that they resembled his successors. The chance it was a fantasy, a story hoisted up the mast of reality like a pair of trousers, closed with each passing collar. He was ready for failure; he designed a patchwork coffin from the coloured scraps in his window. From sails to puppets to napkins to sarcophagus; the hems of existence are stranger than its cuffs. Quite a comfortable fit: he snored there.

Days were digested like scales. At last there was a thumping on his door. A sextant was demanding admittance; he was astonished to encounter Omophagia Ankles on the threshold. The navigator lifted a glittering hat for his inspection. It was not a mirror but the fragments of one, soaped along the brim, as if a shaved pistol had smashed it. Taking it from his visitor with due reverence, he offered a bottle of cognac in exchange. A man who mends purses is aware of the price of favours; other pirates may fritter boons like cannonballs on the Main, but sailmakers fold them up. With a sigh, ’Phagia chastised him.

“’Lin received your appeal. He’d already planned to see the barber, so you owe him nothing. He gave it to me.”

“No problem. I just need to upset its looks.”

“Morgan is reforming the crew for our last voyage. You are slow and thus have a whole year to meet us in Sardinia.”

He swallowed his tongue as the navigator departed. It tasted of ice and mountain petals, rather than shoe and salt. Joining the splinters of the mirror together was work as arduous as patching a cathedral’s wounds with silk. He was so tardy finishing it, even sluggishness died from old age. He knew what to do if the news was poor; he would end Oswald’s line with an improvised stake. When he finally gazed into the mirror, fingers reached for his spleen and the contours of the puppet inside. It was not another victim in there, but a shape of death. What would his neighbours say about this overthrow of tradition?

The boldest yodellers found him, impaled; they stumbled into his shop and over the longest needle in the world, which darned his spleen to the floor. He was buried in his rag coffin, under the altar of San Silvester. Strings were attached to his arms and legs, and whenever a pilgrim entered the chapel, an unseen jig was danced six feet below. The coffin is no longer there: by all accounts Morgan himself seized it for a sail. However, shards of the barber’s mirror can still be found on the hats of the locals, each carrying a reflection which arrived too late to convince a corsair of his humanity.

The Tell-Tale Nose

Atchoo!—runny—very, very dreadfully runny it had been and is; but why
will
you say that it is sore? The cold had numbed my nose—not pained—not tormented it. Above all was the sense of smell diminished. I sniffed nothing in the pantry or in the oven. I quivered no nostril at the laundry basket. No wonder the young man nearly caught me unawares, despite the condition of his socks! He has told you his version of the affair—it is time to hearken to mine. 

I knew he wanted to kill me, on account of my eye. It bothered him, my blue iris, the eye of a vulture. Though myopic, it noted his anxiety, his increasing panic, observed all his little preparations with a cool, albeit hazy, detachment. He shuddered when I turned it upon him, as if the orb was a supernatural window into some forbidden realm: the tinted, bulging pane of a beaked god’s bathroom.

He had never been so kind to me as he was the week before the murder. He cooked my meals, brushed the pale locks of hair which crawled on my shoulders, wound the ebony clock in the hallway, secured the house against robbers by nailing the shutters. He even dressed up in my late wife’s underwear and plucked a mandolin, as she had done, so many years before. He cared nothing for my gold, but expressed an interest in a box of wicks I kept on the mantelpiece—spare wicks for a dark lantern I used for fishing the fetid lagoons which ringed the city.

I gave him the box and busied myself with the construction of a giant puppet from a spare nightgown and candle-wax. I stuffed its false torso with my previous week’s catch and fashioned a crystal eye to fit in the single central socket of its lopsided skull. This bauble was covered by a leather eyelid on a spring, and the entire mannequin was operated by cords. Then I arranged the puppet between the sheets of my bed, crawled under the frame and waited. It also had a heart: the mechanism of the ebony clock, fully wound and secreted in a suitable cavity.

For seven nights I lingered in my cramped confines, on the frozen bare boards, while the young man looked into my room, taking an hour to open the door and thrust his head through the gap; but each time he did so, I lost my nerve and felt unable to pull the cords which would cause the mannequin to sit up and open its eye. My arm was paralysed as if by a mystic stiffness. I think it was the dark lantern! Yes, it was this! Its hinges creaked ever so quietly, and this almost imperceptible sound filled me with anguish, as do all the quietest noises in the world—cell division in lambs, execution with a guillotine made from cheese, an illicit affair between a barometer and a balloonist.

Naturally, spending a whole week out of bed impaired my resistance to germs and I developed this horrid cold. The sixth and seventh nights passed in unbearable suspense, my mouth set in a rictus grin as I tried to prevent myself sneezing. I welcomed each morning, for at the first note of birdsong the young man would withdraw his head and allow me the freedom to slither out of my confinement and give vent to the meteorological pressures within me. Listen to my nose as it expels the emerald typhoon! Does it not sound like a second voice?

On the eighth night I succumbed. A sinusoidal wave of phlegm rushed along my nasal passages. In desperation, I covered my nostrils with my generous tongue; a useless precaution. Might as well attempt to cap a geyser with a mouldy rug! The detonation echoed off the underside of the bed like a carbine shot. “Atchoo’s there?” my nose cried, and with the spasm which racked my body, my arm jerked involuntarily, tugging the cords which crossed the floor, climbed the wall, ran back along the ceiling, tripped over a pulley and speared down to hook the mannequin.

The puppet abruptly sat erect, and the young man kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour, he remained thus, and I guessed the single eye had sprung open, but that it was too dark to glimmer. Presently I heard a groan, a slight noise which may have been the wind in the chimney, a mouse crossing the floor or a cricket which has made a single chirp, but it was clear that the young man would interpret it as an expression of mortal terror from his intended victim.

When he had waited a long time, very patiently, he resolved to open a crevice in the lantern. I imputed this not from a change in the level of illumination in the room, for I knew he would contrive to permit only a single ray, the slenderest possible, to flee the apparatus—one incapable of diffusing from its rigid path—but by an extremely subtle odour from the oily wick, as well as the unbearably quiet grinding of those glacial hinges.

I then heard an intake of breath—an intake sharper than a peeled bell. The ray had connected with the puppet’s vulture eye. How could it miss? The blue crystal I had selected was immense; it dominated a full half of the face. And the leather eyelid quivered on its spring. Yes, it must have been like this! With the clockwork heart pounding within the wax breast! Pounding like a plum ready to burst, in an excess of anguish! The young man would not tolerate this; he would be compelled to silence it.

With a loud yell, he threw open the lantern fully and leapt across the room and onto the puppet. In an instant he dragged it to the floor and toppled the heavy bed over it. Now I was exposed and aghast at the possibility of discovery, but the young man was so intent upon finishing his grisly task that he paid no note to anything outside the diameter of that azure eye. I fled, unseen, scuttling along the boards and out of the door. Now it was necessary to hide away. But where?

I have already alluded to my evisceration of the hallway clock. So too have I related how the young man was wont to wind it every day of that fateful week. Too deluded was he to realise he was winding nothing which might be construed as a
precision
instrument. No, no! I had replaced the mechanism with an orange! Thus there was quite enough room to conceal my body within its sable depths, and accordingly I slipped inside and closed the door.

Here my knees knocked and my teeth ached, with trepidation, no doubt; but my occupation of a timepiece did not suggest to my mind the gradual yet unstoppable progress of decay and death. For there was no pendulum or escapement to count the twists on my mortal coil. Betwixt chronometer and orange there are few points of similarity—only the pips are the same. I gained courage as I listened to the young man pulling up the planks in my chamber. The rasp of a saw, the sloshing of a tub, confirmed his wise precautions.

He was dismembering the puppet; carefully, so as to collect every drop of blood. And blood there would be in plenty; for the figure’s hollow limbs were filled with fish from the fetid lagoons; or what I assumed to be fish; and I rubbed my hands in glee, believing that my revenge on the young man was nearly complete. He was never a real son to me. He had turned up at the house uninvited on my wedding night and refused to leave. My wife and I had come to regard him as a piece of furniture. We regularly adopted chairs and tables. Why not a man?

By the time he completed his labours—about four o’clock, though I could not be sure, for an orange does not strike the hours, though a puppet’s heart under floorboards does—there came a knocking at the street door. He descended with a light step, confident that he had nothing to fear. There entered three men who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play had been aroused. At this, I chuckled softly to myself. The neighbour in question has hearing almost as sensitive as my own; it is a trait found in many of the inhabitants of our street.

The young man led them about the house. He bade them search—search
well.
He was more confident of escaping detection than a chameleon in a hall of mirrors. And so was I, for the ebony clock, with its warped and twisted frame, did not seem a feasible hiding place for any object, but luckily my own bent limbs and mutated body slotted exactly into its bonebreaking curves. As I expected, in his mania to be of assistance, he even carried chairs into my bedroom and insisted the officers rest from their fatigues there, directly above the grave of the puppet. Satisfied, the officers chatted together, all very amiably, of trifles and other confections.

Now I knew that the clock would be ticking beneath the young man’s feet and that he would gradually find this fact unbearable. He had lived too long in the neighbourhood not to have developed acute hearing. I listened to him arguing with the officers—
trifles were inferior to profiteroles!
—in a high key and with violent gesticulations, and I knew I would soon be rid of the fool. He gasped for breath, paced the floor with heavy strides, foamed, raved, swore! He swung his chair and grated it upon the boards—
custard slices were the lowest class of cake!
—but then betrayed himself with a scream.

“Villains!” he shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!”

Immediately, there was the sound of stressed wood, popping nails, a triple gasp of amazement, a creak of knees bending. I ground my molars in repressed delight. This was the culmination of my plan! The police officers were certain to judge the young man insane when they reached down to retrieve mere hunks of wax, cogs and fish scales dusting a great glass eye! Confessing to the murder of a puppet! They would have no choice but to arrest him and carry him off to a madhouse.

Such was my hope. But all too soon was it to prove forlorn, for one of the officers announced hoarsely: “Yes, it is a heart! And here are the kidneys! And there the lights, folded around the tongue!” And he called for a handkerchief to wrap up these items as evidence for the prosecution. I was much too stupefied by these revelations to account them a jest. Then, as I uncreased my deformed brow in an inverse frown more conducive to profound thought than the standard kind, an abominable fear came upon me, a feeling that my past was catching up with me, like a skeleton on a unicycle—unsteadily, clankingly, ludicrously, bone shakingly. . .

I have mentioned my late wife and her mandolin. Also her underwear. However, I have neglected to offer an account of how her plucking drove me to distraction. From our wedding-night, when the young man first turned up, right through all the early years of our marriage, she kept me awake between midnight and dawn with the infernal silences of her melodies. Truly, she was the
quietest
mandolin player on the globe, and as I have already intimated, it is the
barest
sounds which I cannot
bear.

In the middle of a dull and fitful slumber in the autumn of one year, I was roused by an even more excessive silence than usual. I opened my single central eye and beheld her sitting on the edge of the bed. Either from deliberation or impulse, she had neglected to string her mandolin. Consequently, the airs she sounded were no more than that—the rustle of fingers on the stale vapours of the chamber. I rose in a passion and wrested the instrument from her grasp. How many blows were sufficient is unknown. Perhaps it required a dozen—who shall tell?

I cut her up into very tiny pieces and flushed her down the toilet. Doubtless the young man observed me from some hidden recess. He was fond of lurking in corners; I dare say the genesis of
his
crime was in this scene. As the cistern refilled, I presumed the matter was at an end. But now, so many years later, I was forced to reconsider the matter. Not all the municipal sewers flowed to the sea; a few older ones, twisted by a geological upheaval, deposited their effluvia in the fetid lagoons which ringed the city. Why had I forgotten this?

It was more than possible that her remains were channelled into the lagoons, partly preserved by the formaldehyde discharged by the chemical works and mortuary establishments on those clammy shores. For more than a decade, her viscera might have risen and fallen with the secret sluggish currents, drawn not by the moon but the mass of the city, to lap the crumbling jetties and rotting boardwalks where the oddest fishers sat, rods in hand, hooks catching on the corrugated surface of the infinitesimal wavelets and straining up to lift the lid of scum from the deeps, the toxic fathoms.

Yes, this was it! And what if I had caught her pieces on my last expedition? No use berating myself for not noticing the coincidence at the time; I never actually
look
at the results of my catches. Oh no! The dark lantern I carry through the hollow streets and beyond the deserted suburbs is merely for the sake of appearance. I wish to fit in with my nameless colleagues on the quays. I do not open the device, for the reason I have already elucidated—the hinges, the excruciatingly
quiet
hinges.

Now I discerned the sounds of a brief scuffle. The officers were grappling with the young man. The rattle of handcuffs, the echo of a truncheon. It occurred to me that I was still safe. In those days, forensic medicine was a primitive art; the officers would never know that the recovered heart, kidneys, lights and tongue were not mine! Who was clever enough to open the handkerchief where they nestled and tell the gender of their owner? Nobody, not then! So all I had to do was remain hidden a few more minutes while they left the house. The young man would be locked away, as I originally hoped, but for a different reason.

They came down the stairs and passed the ebony clock in the hallway. A little longer and I would be free! But now I felt a twitch in the nostrils and a momentous pressure building up within my lungs. My head ached, and I fancied a rushing in my ears; but still they lingered at the door. Why would they not be gone? I pinched my nose between callused thumb and finger, but the pressure increased. Was it possible that they felt my presence inside the clock? No, it was the partial vacuum occasioned by my voluminous intake of breath which kept them here, tugging them toward my place of concealment. They fought this force, they strained against it.

At last I could stifle the eruption no longer. I must let it loose or die! Then it came, a miniature hurricane!—Atchoo!—With the release of pressure, the clock shattered. The door blew open, a backward slam, and the orange rained juicy segments on my head. I stood exposed, my twisted frame shivering before the three officers. I saw that they carried one enormous handkerchief between them and that they had faces sewn up in the wise way—one without eyes, another without ears, the third without a mouth. So here was the end of my chances for peace. I would be carried off with the young man, possibly to occupy the same cell, while the old house was locked up and auctioned off for its construction materials. But something had to be said.