Gibbous House

by Ewan Lawrie

‘You may speak normally now,’ she said.

  I refrained from remarking that it was hardly possible with the ’kerchiefs clamped to our faces, and asked, ‘Why does he come here?’

  ‘You will see, and perhaps hear, too.’

  The camphor did little to help the streaming of our eyes, and so there was some doubt about the former.

  The tenebrous gloom offered only vague shapes against an indistinct background. It was impossible to gauge the dimensions of the room we were in. The noise of the felines ensured that we could safely bellow Methodist hymns without fear of discovery. Ellen stepped confidently into the darkness, and I followed closely, pulling her towards me. She half returned my embrace before hissing, ‘Have a care, Moffat. We do not have much time.’ She softened her voice, adding, ‘Though we may well – later.’

  We reached a wall after some paces that I wished I had had the presence of mind to count. Every step was marked by the rub of one or another cat against my legs. Miss Pardoner’s sharp look indicated that I had been unsuccessful in stifling an unmanly scream when one particularly large specimen alighted on my left shoulder. Ellen seized the beast’s tail and threw it, squalling, to our rear.

  She felt along the wall until, presumably, she found the handle of a door. We passed through it into a room illuminated by a single candlestick. It seemed as though a thousand diamonds lay on a seething carpet of cats, as the single flame was reflected in every eye.

  Miss Pardoner began to wade through the living sea, which parted somewhat less willingly than the Sea of Reeds had parted for Moses. Once again I fastened myself close behind her, but this time she offered no rebuke, and I was most grateful for it. In the slightly better light I calculated that the room was of a size of the dining room in the opposite wing. But I quickly realised that since nothing at all was symmetrical about the whole edifice, this observation would be of no use in determining my present location.

  At the end of the room stood the candlestick, propped on a small table. Beside it, cats stood upon other cats’ shoulders like some feline circus act, obscuring the doorway. Miss Pardoner seized the candlestick and waved it at the pyramid of cats and they dispersed, hissing.

  Through the door the first thing I noticed was the absence of any cats at all. The second was the presence of hundreds upon hundreds of mirrors of every shape and size, covering every surface and standing in rows, facing each other like those in the Palace of Versailles.

  It would have been foolish to hazard a guess at the number of candles illuminating this huge room; it might only have been a single taper, since the mirrors were not so precisely regimented as I had originally thought. Whatever the number of flickering lights, there were enough reflected images to drive a man mad if he looked too long into any one of them.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a rapid movement. Miss Pardoner gave me a disparaging look as I let out a gasp, and pointed a long finger toward her own image in the nearest glass to my left. This finger she then put to her lips, whilst cupping a hand to her ear.

  There was a rise and fall of an indistinct voice. On occasion a word was recognisable, if the voice reached the volume of a shout. We stood still; the woman raised her eyebrows at me when the name ‘Moffat’ became audible, followed by the noise of expectoration. She put her mouth to my ear and whispered, ‘We will walk this aisle, mark you well the mirrors. Look at your image.’

  She strode off and demonstrated by her confident gait yet another unladylike – and exciting – quality. After a few seconds spent admiring her long limbs’ motion beneath her skirts, I did as I was bid.

  At first I noted nothing untoward. Suddenly one mirror seemed strange. I stopped, unable to fathom what disturbed me about the image. I caught the reflection of my own eye; it had a reddish tint in the white, like a gin-soaked drunkard’s or a minor demon’s. This particular mirror had been silvered with some strange substance that gave the reflected image a crimson hue. The effect was quite pleasing withal. Nevertheless, I paid close attention to the reflections, as the woman had instructed me. At first, it seemed it was all a matter of colour; in one such I appeared the very model of an Ancient Briton in modern dress, so woad-like was the colour of my skin.

  The ranting voice had become a little louder in the interim, such that it was now possible to discern German, Magyar and the occasional Latin tag.

  Miss Pardoner had stopped at an intersection of mirror rows, her arms folded. It wanted only the tapping of a foot to render the picture more ridiculous, to my mind. She jerked her head to indicate that we should turn left. As we did so her fingers pointed at the mirrors, reminding me to pay attention to them.

  Shade and colour played no part in these mirrors’ peculiarities. The first to my right had some fault in the glass itself and appeared to throw a second silhouette in my reflection, as though an imperfect copy of myself stood slightly behind me and a half-step to one side. Doubtless the professor could have explained this apparent implausibility according to some sophisticated corruption of Descartes’ Law. I found it merely peculiar. He could not have explained the appearance of three simulacra of myself in the smooth and faultless surface of the next looking glass. There seemed no reason for this triplication of my image, but move we all four did, in harmony of motion, as though in some stately dance.

  Miss Pardoner gave her own gasp at this moment. I turned to look at her reflection on the other flank. The image was unmistakably hers. However, the pleasing if unorthodox arrangement of her features and figure had been subtly distorted as to make of her as hideously ugly a creature as had ever been seen outwith establishments of low entertainment. My own reflection appeared perfectly usual alongside this harpy.

  There were but few mirrors remaining to the end of this particular aisle, and though I did not peer too closely at the reflections, any glimpse of a reflected image was sufficient to provoke a certain nausea. Miss Pardoner stopped squarely in front of the last mirror on the right, obscuring any view of a reflection. Once more her dumb show enjoined me to remain silent and listen.

  The ranting, bellowing madman was revealed to be the professor, though his words were barely comprehensible. There seemed a little more English in the content than before. Of a sudden, the woman stepped away from the mirror. Once again my composure was not what it might have been.

  It seemed I had been transformed into a homuncular version of myself, great of chest and uncommon short of leg. Some further peculiarity of the glass had rendered my teeth as hideous as those of the professor.

  Miss Pardoner spoke without deference to volume. ‘Do you see?’

  ‘What? Another distorting mirror?’

  ‘Have you been listening at all?’ She started forward and I felt she but barely refrained from an assault on my person.

  ‘To the rantings of an imbecile dwarf? Or is he perhaps quite drunk?’

  The dwarf’s voice shrieked ‘Rudolf!’ And something that might have been either imprecation or curse, but was, to my ear, Latin.

  ‘He is arguing, you dolt!’

  ‘With himself?’ In light of her disregard for any necessity for silence, I laughed.

  The tirade in the next aisle went on. Miss Pardoner took my hand and led us to the end of the next aisle. The dwarf was no more than two or three mirrors down, standing fully erect before one of them, oblivious to all but the reflection. We passed the end of the aisle and positioned ourselves that we might see the dwarf and his reflection.

  The mirror’s properties were the antithesis of those that had ensured my display as a dwarf, for there was a tall and handsome fellow reflected in the mirror before the professor. Yet another trick ensured that any movement was not faithfully reflected in the looking-glass. The little man’s voice rose and rose; spittle covered the larger version of himself from the sternum to the groin. He looked up at the fellow in the glass and bellowed ‘Rudolf!’ before falling in a dead faint.

  ‘Now do you see?’

  ‘Should we revive him?’ I asked, l
ooking down at the crumpled form on the floor.

  ‘He will be quite comfortable for an hour or two,’ Miss Pardoner replied.

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  The professor confirmed his continuing rude health by letting out – at one and the same time – a stertor worthy of a consumptive elephant and an expulsion of flatus that might have done for the trumpeting of the same species.

  We began making our way out of the maze of mirrors. My companion’s brow was quite furrowed – in concentration, I supposed. I busied myself in admiration of the sway of her skirts.

  At the door to the cat-carpeted room, she turned, addressing me in the manner of a governess displeased with her pupil.

  ‘Well, do you see your part in this?’ She seemed on the brink of rage.

  ‘A small man arguing with himself in the mirror?’ I al-most laughed.

  She kicked out at the nearest of the mirrors. It fell backward and the glass crazed but remained in the frame.

  ‘But you heard him, you heard him address the mirror as Rudolf?’

  A shrug seemed the most expedient course.

  ‘Rudolf Jedermann, his brother?’ she insisted.

  ‘Was it so? The man was ranting, I thought.’

  ‘You saw the distortion in the mirror, did you not?’

  ‘Of course.’ I put a hand on her arm. She shook it off.

  ‘I know his brother.’ She coloured somewhat at this revelation. She went on. ‘He comes down here to rail at his brother.’

  ‘What nonsense, Ellen.’ I moved sharply back, fearing she might prefer to kick me rather than risk more bad luck. ‘His brother is in Vienna, he told me so himself.’

  ‘You fool! The professor is drunk and he knows well that it is his own reflection – but I tell you it looks like his brother.’

  It did indeed; the exact image of his brother, the man who had engineered my release into society as Alasdair Moffat. The man who had visited me in the asylum in the presence of the Medical Superintendent. That very man, so much on my mind of late, also bore an uncommon resemblance to someone else in this room, although in a way that emphasised an entirely different set of features. Still, there could be no mistaking Ellen for anything but the elder man’s daughter. I wondered which of them knew – and resolved to keep my counsel regarding my own knowledge of it.

  The young woman turned away and opened the door to the kingdom of the cats. We made our way back to our respective chambers without recourse to conversation. I lay abed but did not sleep with any conviction, noting the passing of periods of stupor by the occasional leap of the moon across the sky.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Eleven in the morning of the following day found me in the grounds, behind the crumbling stables and other ramshackle buildings. The need for a constitutional perambulation had been occasioned by a breakfast of a bonier relation of the kipper and the kidneys of some large, but not necessarily domesticated, animal. Less felicitously, this hour found me also in the company of Jedediah Maccabi.

  The quality of the fellow’s conversation had been painfully brought home to me in the past by his fascination with the avian phenomena peculiar to Northumbria. At this particular time, however, he was boring me with the history of the Border Reivers and his own belief that one Robert Moffat had been murdered by the ancestors of the current Earl of Annandale, John Hope Johnstone, whose father had been the Honourable Member of Parliament for Dumfriesshire. On his asking me if I were in any way at all related to the last leader of Clan Moffat, I scarce managed to refrain from smiting him about the ear and bade him accompany me in silence until we made some distance from any outbuilding.

  This part of the estate was as yet unknown to me. It seemed scarcely worthy of exploration – before us stood wooded lands as impenetrable as the dark forests of Bavaria. The feeling of claustrophobia that the routine and environment of Gibbous House had engendered in me did not deter me from proposing that Maccabi and I venture into that sylvan mass. He followed without great protest. Pigeons filled the gloom with their sinister two-note symphony; I caught the toe of my boot on a hidden root three or four times in as many yards. Maccabi followed with the sure-footedness of the countryman. It had been an impulse to enter the wood, one I regretted as yet another root bowled me headlong into a patch of thistles. Maccabi helped me up silently. He took the lead; I followed.

  His choice of path was more felicitous than mine and both of us remained upright until he led me into a clearing lit by the late spring sun. The glade was filled with wild flowers, the colours as beautiful as a painting.

  ‘Wait,’ said Maccabi, and he held up a hand.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  From the dark spaces between the oaks on the other side of the glade, a swarm of butterflies entered; they hovered over a large patch of what appeared to be lilies, though it was early in the year for such blooms. I decided to risk Maccabi’s enthusiasm for natural history.

  ‘Are they lilies?’

  ‘I believe they are, Mr Moffat, though they should not be.’

  ‘What are you talking about, man?’ I felt heat rise in my face.

  ‘Do you know what they symbolise?’ he asked.

  ‘I doubt I care.’ My eye was caught by the butterfly swarm, suddenly joined by yet another horde, all the colours swirl-ing, darting.

  ‘You should,’ he said. ‘Some say they represent resurrection.’

  By this time there must have been several hundred butterflies. For the briefest instant every one stopped the beating of its wings. The swarm assumed a columnar shape and I imagined I saw the outline of a man within it. Just as suddenly the shape dissolved and the butterflies flew away. The petals of the lilies appeared to have wilted and fallen under the weight of the insect swarm.

  ‘Others say that the lily represents death,’ said Maccabi.

  To the left of the depleted flowers were two gnarled stumps, the smooth tops showing that the trees themselves had been felled long ago. I sat on one and motioned to Maccabi to sit. It was quite surprising that the man was not married, he cut so handsome a figure. He had no need to acknowledge his origins and could quite easily have swept any daughter of the new nobility off her feet and into an unsuitable marriage. I could not imagine why he had not. He seemed quite preoccupied and I took great pleasure in interrupting his reverie.

  ‘Jedediah, are you the professor’s man? Or were you Coble’s?’

  He looked at me closely, as if to find some subterfuge writ large upon my face.

  ‘I am, sir, my own man,’ came his cool reply.

  ‘I think, Jedediah, that you are my man. If not . . .’ I stopped, putting a hand on his knee.

  He shifted uncomfortably, my hand slid from his breeches. He cleared his throat.

  ‘That is not among my sins, Mr Moffat,’ he said.

  ‘I am pleased to hear that there are others, Jedediah. But I will know, nonetheless, are you my man now?’

  He bit his lip. ‘I am not your lackey. The professor is nothing to me, however.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’ I clapped him in manly fashion on the back. ‘But you are a Jew?’

  He jerked, as I had tight hold of the hair at the back of his neck. He squeezed the words through the pain as I twisted my grip. ‘Not by birthright. I have my mother’s colour. My position is... complicated.’

  This last emerged accompanied by the gasp he gave as I released his blond locks.

  ‘Birthright? There is so much importance attached to such an insignificant matter. Esau was right, don’t you agree, Jedediah, it has no more value than lentil soup?’

  He did not answer, indulging in a twice-vain effort at a smoothing of his hair.

  ‘In the spirit of our new-found understanding, tell me, Jedediah mine, what plots am I caught up in?’

  The look of incredulity he gave me enraged me sufficiently to seize his hair once again and demonstrate that he was indeed mine.

  *

  Afterward, when he had finished vomiting, he ex
plained my situation. The professor, he said, intended to murder me and reanimate my corpse by means of a huge electrical charge that would be generated with the help of the vast furnaces below ground. It was of some satisfaction to me that Miss Pardoner had been sincere with me. Maccabi further claimed that Cadwallader, the reporter, the policeman and countless others had been nothing more than preliminary experiments, proofs that what the professor intended was possible. I remarked that thus far such proofs had self-evidently been elusive. I could have smitten him mightily when he said, ‘Perhaps not.’

  The taxidermy was surely, as the professor himself had earlier said, no more than a hobby, his very own violon d’Ingres. Maccabi did mention the professor’s concern that his brother Rudolf would arrive to ruin his schemes. He concluded his account by informing me that I could expect my own resurrection within a very few days. I confess I felt a little nauseous myself at that point.

  As we made our way back through the dense woodland, I braced Maccabi once again. ‘So, how do you come to be here, Jedediah?’

  ‘In the same way as so much of what you have seen here.’ He did not amplify further, until I lifted my hand.

  ‘I was collected by Septimus Coble,’ he said bitterly, and he gave me a look that informed me that no kind of physical assault would draw more from him. Nonetheless, his earlier claim to be his own man was clearly bravado of the most empty kind.

  At the least, Maccabi had confirmed the half of what the putative Miss Pardoner had intimated. It exercised my mind greatly that I could see no way to turn this situation to my advantage, short of disposing of the entire household and making off with such portable effects as would raise the most capital in London.

  Chapter Forty-six

  On arrival at the library, the sight of the professor deep in conversation with Miss Pardoner, at altogether too close quarters, greeted us. She took a step backward from the gnome on noting our arrival. It seemed to me that Miss Pardoner had been instructed by someone or other to maintain some control over the professor. I wondered if it might be the senior Jedermann – and to what lengths he expected the woman to go. Perhaps she stopped short of inappropriate relations, but the dwarf held his hands over his lower abdomen as he turned to greet us.