Worming the Harpy and Other Bitter Pills Read online

  ‘I know Papa. It is fortunate that I am the most highly skilled maker of mechanical toys in the Province. It is a pity, though, that your lungs keep wearing out so quickly. This is the fifth set this year.’

  ‘It is the smogs, my child.’ And then, squinting in the unsteady glow of the lantern, presided over by shadows and spiders which drop from their webs on the cracked ceiling, he adds: ‘I cannot sleep now. The handprint has disturbed me. I will rise and pace the garden.’

  ‘Of course.’ Between her fingers glitters a tiny silver key. She bends towards the rusty flap in his chest, lifts it and then pauses. ‘Shall I wind you up now, Papa?’

  ii

  A pair of gibbets swing softly in the night. Dark air circulates around the cages and from between the bars moths pour forth in a powdery horde. They swoop and flutter as they digest the mummified scraps that constituted their supper.

  The gibbets hang from the branches of an enormous gnarled oak that dominates the crossroads. The prisoners within are like gingerbread men: desiccated and stiff with eyes that register little. Their lank white hair straggles their bony faces, their withered arms and legs still show signs of where they have but lately attempted to gnaw upon themselves.

  The men who wait below are even thinner, more insubstantial, broken. They stand and watch for solitary travellers. One of the roads leads up into the blue hills, another twirls away into a dense forest, the third courts bubbles in a malodorous swamp. The fourth leads down to the town and its redundant pleasures.

  ‘We really must stop meeting like this. The chills are not beneficial to the health. Tell me Jakob, would you do it all over again if you could?’

  ‘You jest!’ Jakob breaks into a grin, showing teeth like dominoes. ‘Of course I would! We nearly pulled it off, you know. Did you see the look on Bishop Knecht’s face when I snatched the ciborium from his sweaty hands and raced out of the Cathedral? Astonishment!’

  The other sighs. ‘The same old questions, stories, jokes. As if we can ever stop memory slipping away! As if we can ever reverse the hourglass whose vermilion grains are moments in time! But I do remember; and that chase through the market? We knocked over stalls selling copper-work, earthenware, imported fabrics. Many overpriced goods stamped their mark on my frame that day. My ribs were sore for weeks.

  ‘And even more sore when the Bishop ordered them broken with an iron bar. He thought we were iconoclasts: heretics! He would not believe we were simple thieves. Tell me Jakob, do you think we should have stuck to pilfering bread and cheese and the odd jug of wine from the taverns of Dask? Ah, but I remember that ciborium, all jewel encrusted as it was! Tell me, was it your idea to steal it or mine?’

  ‘Shhh!’ Jakob raises a reedy finger to his chapped lips. He motions his companion to step back into the shadows. ‘Be quiet Tomas,’ he whispers. ‘Someone is coming. . . .’

  Along the road that leads down from the hills, a jaunty figure is capering. Jakob and Tomas watch as he bounds towards them; an ill-set, jangling fellow, dressed in faded motley, with a fiery beard and skin as polished as obsidian. Over his shoulder he carries an odd looking, battered brass instrument and his shoes are soft and worn. Neither Jakob nor Tomas make a move to accost him.

  ‘You let him go!’ cries Jakob, once the strange man is out of range.

  ‘So did you!’ Tomas shudders and pulls his rags tighter about his shoulders. He glances fearfully at the road that curves towards the town. ‘I had a bad feeling about that one. I think it was wiser to leave him alone.’

  Jakob nods and scowls. ‘But we’ll be lucky if another traveller comes this way tonight. We might have missed our one chance. . . .’

  There is a sudden crash in the branches of the tree above them. Twigs and acorns shower down upon their heads. The gibbets sway and moan. More moths spiral away into a dark scented with wild garlic, wormwood and decay. The stars are blotted out; a whole constellation.

  ‘What is it?’

  Jakob shields his eyes and squints up at the sky. ‘It has the face of a demon! It must have been lurking there all along, listening to us. It is heading towards the town, spinning and diving. I can no longer see it. I can see only the blackness of sleep; the blackness that plays tricks on the mind. . . .’

  ‘What shall we do? Report it?’

  Jakob throws back his head and looses a guffaw into the silence. His laughter is the croak of a toad. He clutches his stomach and his laugh becomes a wheeze and then a gurgle. Finally it is his eyes alone that show mirth. ‘Well done Tomas!’ he declares. ‘A new joke at last!’

  Tomas is sitting on the hard ground, knees drawn up in front of him. He has also been laughing, but his joy is salty; the humour of tears. ‘It is a difficult existence, is it not? A thorny life, a Stygian reality.’ He cocks his head and listens, as if expecting the demon to return.

  ‘Aye, it’s no fun being a condemned prisoner.’ Jakob pauses and his jaw works silently, as if it is the mouth of a tongueless puppet. But Tomas can read his words from the undulations of his shattered throat. ‘Especially when you’re already dead!’ He grinds his heel into the dust and a single droplet spills down his own cheek. ‘Look, the moths are returning!’

  Tomas glances up, and suddenly the air is alive with a cloud of the hairy insects, wings bright with owl’s eyes. ‘Tell me Jakob,’ he asks slowly, ‘how long do you think it will take for them to eat all of us?’

  iii

  The ebony musician enters the town with a light step and a pained expression. He is condemned to move as rhythmically as possible. This was part of a bargain he made—the other part was that he carry his soul over his shoulder.

  It has been a difficult week, all in all. He has visited several unfriendly towns and walked rutted roads with little food in his belly. He still recalls how the burghers of Hermannstadt once chased him out of the Cathedral Square with curses and stones. In Kolozsvár his cap netted a single groat.

  He has travelled westwards, across the Hortobágy Plain, through Pest and Györ, with a longer sojourn at Pressburg and then Wien, and a hard lot of it in the Tyrol. Finally he has reached another border. His strides are irregular, for his rhythm was forced to be complex, as timeless as his quest.

  There are moths everywhere and a chill wind. This town exudes a miasma of undeniable decadence—almost of pure evil—but it is as nothing compared with the unpretty pass he has just negotiated. He shivers as he wonders about that crossroads with the monstrous oak and the gibbets and that dark shape which swooped over him as he descended the path.

  Here, at least, there is the chance of warmth, food, perhaps a little ale. The streets of the town are quiet and tangled as string. Mice race ahead of him, hugging the walls with tiny feet. He passes under the arch of a ponderous leaning clock-tower, and down a twisting lane of indigo cobbles, until he chances upon a tavern.

  Inside the dubious-looking establishment, a skeleton hangs inverted from the ceiling, describing slow circles, a brazier of coals glowing inside its hollow skull. The other sources of illumination are more orthodox: flickering wicks that droop in blue glass bottles behind the bar. The tavern is deserted save for an oleaginous innkeeper who wipes tall glasses with a grimy cloth. The musician makes his way to the bar, unslings his instrument, and feels inside his threadbare pocket for the last of his change. ‘A bed and a drink. . . .’

  ‘At once!’ The innkeeper draws a tankard of foamy ale from a rotting barrel and slams it down on the counter. He takes a sharp little knife from his belt and skims off the head. ‘Welcome to Umber-Scone!’

  ‘Welcome eh? That’s what I need. I have fared none too well in the towns I have lately come from.’ He indicates the swirling skeleton. ‘Is this the usual form of lighting in these parts?’

  ‘Usual enough here. He was one of my best customers—some would say that he still is. He could never bear to leave this place. It was his last request.’ The innkeeper mops his forehead with his cloth and draws a glass for himself. ‘So you are a musician? A wand
ering minstrel?’

  ‘That is correct.’ And the musician fingers his instrument, both lovingly and with resentment. He downs his tankard and orders another. So they drink together and become a little drunk. As always, anticipating only scorn, the musician decides to tell his story:

  ‘My name is Dizzy Craggs. I play jazz. A century and more ago I made a pact with the Devil—I sold my soul to become the greatest jazz player in the world. But I soon grew scared and sought a way out. Now I wander the world in search of the perfect jazz tune. That is the escape clause in the contract. If I ever find it, I am free.’

  ‘What is jazz?’ The innkeeper slides his own fingers over the tarnished brass. He does not seem particularly impressed by the confession. ‘I too once sold my soul to the Devil, as have many in this town. But the Devil demanded a refund. . . .’

  There is no mockery in his voice. Dizzy nods his head and raps his knuckles on the counter, rhythmically; always rhythmically. He blows the froth of his murky drink from his lips. ‘Jazz is a music you will never have heard. While wandering the world, in a garden suspended between dawn and sunrise, I somehow lost my way between reality and dream. I tripped into another dimension, almost entirely analogous to my own, save in some subtle details. Ever so subtle. There is no jazz here. I am unique.’

  They giggle in unison, and drink until Dizzy is worthy of his name and can only yawn and request to be shown to his bed. The innkeeper leads him up a flight of creaking stairs, snapped and twisted in the middle like a broken spine, and opens a warped wooden door into a narrow musty room sparsely furnished with an ancient bed, petrified chest of drawers and wormy chair.

  ‘The worst I have,’ the innkeeper confesses, and then adds: ‘But you don’t want to see my best. My best is far more terrible!’ His greasy hand reaches out to grip the musician’s shoulder in an ambiguous show of affection.

  Dizzy closes the door firmly behind his host, places his instrument on the stained chest of drawers, strips off his soiled jerkin and climbs between the mouldy sheets. Something bites his ankles, he scratches and draws blood. But soon he is asleep. His nightmares are full of sounds; the music of a harp, chuckles and sobs, the clang of three public clocks, each out of time and tune with its fellows. Two strikes each: it is two o’clock and all’s unwell in the voracious fervour of the whirling worlds.

  Finally he awakens and swings his legs over the side of the bed. It is dark; it is still the middle of the night. He can really hear the sweet tones of a harp, very faint and attenuated. He seizes his instrument and throws open the shutters of his window. The sound is clearer now; he steps out onto the sagging balcony and leans over the railings.

  A song has come to him in his dreams. Perhaps this is the perfect tune at last, the one that will release him from his diabolical pact? He raises his instrument to his damp mouth. Far below, across the rooftops, he can see into a garden bathed in moonlight. Two figures are walking hand in hand around a toppled fountain—a young girl with long auburn hair and a curiously hunched man with a mechanical gait.

  Dizzy plays the first note of his song. It is a soft note, the last gasp of an angel; as silent as a lamb thinking, as blue as northern eyes ground in a pestle. It is his intention to take the melody of his dream, contrast it with the song of the harp, and bend them both through a cool harmonic improvisation.

  But before he can continue there is a sudden eruption of black, the balcony shudders and there, before him, hovers a horrible visitation. It glares at him for an instant and then flaps away savagely over the chimneys. Dizzy is dumbfounded; he guesses that it must have been hanging from the underside of the balcony, like a bat. It has the wings of a demon. Down below, the couple in the garden have stopped walking and are looking up towards the creature.

  Shaking, and feeling as if he has come within a fingernail’s breadth of his destiny, Dizzy staggers back into his room. He realises that he must alert the innkeeper. He pulls on his jerkin and winds his way down the stairs to the drinking room where the brazier still glows and the innkeeper still stands, now smoking a clay pipe. ‘A drink and an ear!’ he cries.

  ‘Certainly!’ The innkeeper draws another ale and hands him a full pipe. ‘Unable to sleep, eh? Not surprising for one who has sold his soul to the Devil. . . .’

  Dizzy lights his pipe from one of the lamps behind the bar. ‘I stood out on my balcony and saw—’ As the innkeeper leans forward with an intent look on his face, Dizzy knows that it will be asking too much to force upon him another unlikely tale. Besides, it is none of his business; he will be out of this town come morning. So he continues: ‘—a couple walking in a garden. A girl with long red hair and a hunched man.’

  The innkeeper frowns. ‘You must be mistaken. I know the girl; her name is Coppelia. She is a toymaker, one of our best. But she lives alone. The hunched man sounds like her father, but Dr Coppelius died many years ago in a bizarre accident. . . .’

  ‘Well then, I must indeed be mistaken.’ And seeking a subject mundane enough to kill both the night and the innkeeper’s suspicions, Dizzy reaches down and scratches at his legs. ‘There are fleas in my room. I have been bitten many times.’

  ‘Naturally. Umber-Scone is infested with fleas.’

  ‘And moths?’

  ‘Of course.’ The innkeeper yawns, puffs on his pipe and settles down on a high stool, his eyes hooded by fatigue and the oily flames of the sputtering brazier. He draws a deep breath. ‘The moths eat the fleas . . .’

  iv

  The Hospital of St Scudéry, patron of poor fools, weavers’ concubines and samovars, folds in upon itself between leafy park and foot of urban hill. Now on the edge of town, where lunatic wails do not echo among populated streets, the wave of housing once swept over and around it, receding during the plague years and, with violent undertow, dislodging slates off roof, weakening foundations, but not quite dragging the whole edifice back to the dark centre.

  Six hundred madmen roam the shell of the Great Hall, whose double doors are locked with a key as heavy as an arm. Plaster is peeling off the walls and ceiling; the chains that bind the inmates to brackets have rusted through and broken loose. So the lost souls hold court together, each delusion in opposition to all others. For every one who boldly asserts he has a body of glass, there is another who will claim he is opaque, that the mummer’s antics of a third cannot be perceived through him.

  The upkeep of the place is expensive. Rich couples come and pay to view the lunatics, a shilling a head. It is not quite enough—not now, for they come less frequently. The squalor is distracting.

  Herr Wyeth, who runs the institution, who cleans the rooms and passages, who doctors the patients and clucks his tongue, has no degree. He wanted to be an arborist but quickly discovered he could not stand the sight of sap. He has heard that lunatics are like trees, that their ages can be gauged by sawing them in half and counting the rings. And once he tried but was vaguely disappointed with the results.

  He is the last member of the Hospital staff to remain. As funds run low, his own position grows insecure. One day soon, he will have to follow the example of his colleagues—he will have to walk away from the Hospital forever, abandoning the inmates to their sordid delusions.

  He hears their babblings as he plays solitaire in his office. It is an unusual game, invented by one of his charges. The maxims of the philosopher Lichtenberg are rearranged into new pearls of wisdom according to the random positioning of a handful of brightly coloured glass beads on a stave. The first aphorism thus produced astonished Herr Wyeth with its pithy truth and woody beauty—but since then he has struggled in vain to produce meaningful sentences.

  He attempts to concentrate, but the voices warble through the walls:

  ‘A body of glass! A lens! I am a closed vessel—ha! ha!—The moon will strike me and set my heart aflame! My burning heart will consume my inner air! Will I not suffocate?’

  ‘No, the moon no longer peeps through the roof. Now there is a face. It has eyes like lodes of fool’
s gold.’

  ‘A voice that stings like such gold, sparked into the eyes! Or like a foolish goldsmith, scalded by the molten world! I have been one, in my time. Now can I sing. Oh la!’

  Herr Wyeth sighs and clears the stave before him with a sweep of the hand. He does not recognise the voices; he has little real interest in his patients, but urgent action is called for, before their hysterics upset the others.

  He takes a volume down from his shelf and opens it before him on his desk. It is the latest medical textbook from Geneva. There is a new cure for hysteria: a cage suspended on a centrifuge. The patient is whirled at high speed, the unhealthy humours are pushed to the surface of the body and sweated out. If this does not work, or if the apparatus is unavailable, dunking is recommended.

  ‘It enters through the hole! What does it want?’ The voices continue with mounting frenzy. ‘What does it possess?’

  ‘The desires of a demon!’

  Herr Wyeth takes the key from the cupboard and carries it on his shoulder like an axe. In his other hand he snatches up the lantern. Originally a prison for anarchists, the Hospital is designed like a cochlea, the shape of the inner ear, the spiral passages guaranteed to amplify seditious talk from the Great Hall at the centre to the Governor’s office.

  There is a crash now, as of some heavy object thrown with force from one end of the Hall to the other. Herr Wyeth quickens his step. Dunking it shall be; for both of them.

  ‘Leave me alone! I am not a man! I am not edible! I am an hourglass; my liver is made of sand. I loved life once! Once!’

  ‘A punishment for your crime!’

  Herr Wyeth bawls: ‘Cease! The pair of you shall know pain, like salted heretics, peeled and pickled.’ The image gives him a mordant satisfaction. It is a metaphor taken from his glass-bead game. Shorn of wisdom, but spicy as Sabellian sweat—which is another. ‘Cease now, whoever you are!’

  ‘Tush! It has me by the scruff. Leave me be, fiend! These manners do not suit. Shame, shame!’