Angels of Music

by Kim Newman

  It was about the size of a provincial lecture-hall or meeting-place. The chairs were wooden and unpadded. No one was paying for comfort. Unlike the grand theatres of London and Paris, this playhouse was not illuminated by electric light. The Théâtre des Horreurs was still on the gas. Sculpted saints and angels swarmed around the eaves. A relic of the convent school, the holy company was – after a century of alternating abuse and neglect – broken-winged, noseless, obscenely augmented or crack-faced. The house barely seated 300 patrons, in circle, stalls and curtained boxes.

  Kate took her seat in the middle of the stalls, between an elderly fellow who might be a retired clerk and a healthy family of five – a plump burgher, his round wife and three children who were their parents in miniature. After the warnings and waivers, it surprised her that minors were allowed into the performance.

  The elderly fellow was obviously highly respectable. He was tutting approval over an editorial in La Vie Française, a conservative Catholic publication, which breathed fire on all traitors to France. Treason was defined as saying out loud or in print that Captain Alfred Dreyfus, currently stuck in a shack on Île du Diable, was not guilty of espionage. To Kate, the oddest thing about the affair was that everyone seemed to know Dreyfus was innocent and that another officer named Esterhazy was the actual traitor. Papers like La Vie, published and edited by the powerful Georges Du Roy, still ruled it an insult to France to question even a manifestly wrong-headed decision of a military court. Dreyfus was a Jew, and the line the Anti-Dreyfusards took on the issue was virulently anti-Semitic. A military doctor pledging to a fund established to benefit the family of Captain Henry, who had committed suicide when it came out that he had patriotically forged evidence against Dreyfus, stated a wish that ‘vivisection were practised on Jews rather than harmless rabbits’. Dreyfus, his novelist supporter Émile Zola and caricature rabbis were burned in effigy on street corners by the sorts of patriotic moralists who would denounce the Théâtre des Horreurs as sickening and degrading. The gentleman reader of La Vie Française could evidently summon enthusiasm for both forms of spectacle – unless he had come to lodge a protest against Guignol by throwing acid at the company.

  She looked about, discreetly. Yuki was seated in the back row, presumably so her headdress wouldn’t obstruct anyone’s view of the stage. In England – or, she admitted, Ireland – a Japanese woman in traditional dress would be treated like an escaped wild animal. The French were more tolerant – or less willing to turn away customers. After all, Yuki was plainly not Jewish. Clara had wangled a box. Kate caught the glint of opera-glasses. It was only fair she get the best view: she was the devotee of contes cruels.

  A small orchestra played sepulchral music. Refreshments included measures of wine served in black goblets marked poison and sweetmeats in the forms of skulls, eyeballs and creepy-crawlies. Kate bought a sugar cane shaped like a cobra and licked its candied snout. She was used to keeping an itemised list of out-of-pocket expenses. She trusted the Persian, Erik’s representative above ground, was less of a fussbudget about petty cash than the editors with whom she was used to dealing.

  A lifelong theatregoer, Kate had filed notices on the stuffiest patriotic pageants and the liveliest music-hall turns. She’d been at the opening night of Gilbert and Sullivan’s hit The Mikado – which Yuki professed never to have heard of, though everyone asked her about it – and the closing night of Gilbert’s disastrous ‘serious drama’ Brantinghame Hall. She knew Oscar Wilde, though she’d not yet found the heart to seek him out in his exile here in Paris. She’d laughed at the patter of Dan Leno and the songs of Marie Lloyd, stopped her ears to Caruso’s high notes and Buffalo Bill’s Indian whoops, gasped at the illusions of Maskelyne and fallen asleep during Irving’s Macbeth. She’d seen a train arrive in puffs of steam and the Devil disappear in clouds of smoke at the Salon du Cinématographe. She did not expect to be much impressed by a French spook show.

  The nurses took up a station at one side of the stage, joined by a tall man in a white coat. He had a stethoscope around his neck. Kate wondered if this ‘doctor’ ever had to do more than administer smelling salts or loosen tight collars. The warnings and the medical staff were part of the show, putting the audience on edge before the curtain went up. Not immune, she admitted a certain frisson. The smoke-mist was thinner in the auditorium, but her head was fuzzy. Opiates mixed with the glycol might account for ‘nightmares guaranteed’.

  The music stopped. The house gas-jets hissed out.

  In the darkness… a chuckle. A low, slow, rough laugh. It scraped nerves like a torturer’s scalpel.

  Rushing velvet, as the heavy stage curtains parted. A drum beat began, not in the orchestra pit. With each beat, there was a squelch…

  A series of flashes burned across the stage. Limelights flaring. Sulphur wafted into the stalls.

  The scene was set: a bare room, whitewashed walls, a table, a boarded-up window.

  The beat continued. A drum wasn’t being struck.

  A middle-aged woman lay face-down. A grotesque imp squatted on her back, pounding her head with a fire-poker. With each blow, her head reddened. Spatters of blood arced across the white wall…

  Was this a dummy, or an actress wearing a trick wig?

  The imp put his whole weight into his blows, springing up and down, deliberately splashing that wall. Kate even smelled blood – coppery, sharp, foul.

  The imp flailed. Blood – or whatever red stain was used – rained on patrons in the first two rows. Kate had wondered why so many kept hats and coats on. A few were shocked, but the habitués knew what to expect. They exulted in this shower of gore.

  Murder accomplished, the imp tossed away the now-bent poker.

  The orchestra played a sinister little playroom march. The imp went into a puppet-like caper, as if twitching on invisible strings. He took a bow. Applause.

  Guignol, in all his mad glory. Eyes alive in his stiff mask.

  ‘A disagreement with the concierge has been settled,’ he squawked.

  His harsh fly-buzz voice was produced by the distortion gadget Punch and Judy men called a swazzle. It was rumoured that Guignol, whoever he was behind the mask, had his swazzle surgically installed. When he laughed, it was like Hell clearing its throat.

  Already, before the show had really started, Guignol’s costume was blood-speckled.

  ‘Welcome, pals, to the Théâtre des Horreurs. We’ve much to show you. We are an educational attraction, after all. For the world is wild and cruel. If you are alarmed, upset or terrified by what you see, tell yourself it is fakery and sham. If you are bored or jaded, tell yourself it’s all real. Many have said they would die for a chance to go on the stage – how heartless would we be not to grant such wishes?’

  It was only a mask. If its expression seemed to change, it was down to shadows etched into the face by limelight. But the illusion of life was uncanny.

  Guignol was the theatre’s third mask, rudely pushing between the Tearful Face of Tragedy and the Laughing Face of Comedy.

  The Gloating Face of Horror.

  Erik, who spoke with musical perfection from behind a dark mirror, was also masked. Could this whole affair be down to a squabble between false faces? The monsters of Paris contesting the title of King of the Masquerade?

  Stage-hands carried off the limp, dripping concierge – who bent in the middle like a real woman, rather than a dummy.

  The list of the disappeared contained several women who might have been cast as a concierge. However, it would take a degree of insanity compounded by sheer cheek for a murderer to commit his crimes before paying witnesses. There must be a trick she wasn’t seeing.

  Now, Guignol sat on the edge of the stage and chatted with the front row, advising patrons on how to get stains out, admiring hats and throats and eyes. He slowly turned his head, an unnerving effect inside his mask, and looked up at Clara Watson’s box, blowing her a kiss. He leaped to his feet, did a little graceful pirouette, and flourished a bloody ra
g in an elaborate bow.

  Was the clown on to the Angels? Kate couldn’t see how. He was probably just playing up to whoever had bought the most expensive seats in the house.

  ‘Now, heh heh heh, to the meat of the matter… the red meat.’

  Iron latticework cages lowered from the proscenium, each containing a wretched specimen of humanity. The cages were lined with spikes. Chains rattled, groans sounded, blood dripped.

  Guignol set the scene with, ‘Once upon a time, in the dungeons of Cadiz…’

  Tall figures in black robes and steeple-pointed hoods dragged in a young man, stripped to the waist and glistening, and a fair-haired girl, in a bright white shift…

  By now, Kate understood the Théâtre des Horreurs well enough. Whenever she saw white on stage it would soon be stained red.

  ‘There was a plot, once,’ Guignol continued. ‘A wealthy young orphan, a devoted lover, a cruel uncle who held high office, a false accusation, a fortune for the coffers of the church if a confession could be extracted. Scenes dramatised all this. Lots of chitter-chatter. But we have learned it is wasteful of our energies to go into that. Really, what do you care whether an innocent’s gold coins be diverted to dry sticks of priests? The preamble is stripped away here, for we understand you want to reach this scene, this climax, as soon as possible. And so our piece begins with its climax, and then…’

  The youth and the girl were clamped into cages and hauled aloft. The girl uttered piteous cries. The youth showed manly defiance. A canvas sheet was unrolled beneath the hanging cages.

  Braziers of burning coals were wheeled on stage. A burly, shaven-headed brute in a long apron entered. An eye-patch didn’t completely cover the ridged scarring which took up a third of his face. Shouts of ‘Morpho bravo’ rose from all corners of the house. A popular figure, evidently. Morpho grinned to accept applause. He unrolled an oilskin bundle on the table, proudly displaying an array of sharp, hooked, twisted, tapered implements. Picking up Guignol’s cast-off poker, he straightened it with a twist – exciting more cries of approval – then thrust it into a handy fire.

  ‘Which to torture first?’ Guignol asked the audience. ‘Don Bartolome or Fair Isabella?’

  ‘Maim the whore,’ shouted someone from the circle. ‘Maim all whores!’

  ‘No, open up the lad, the beautiful lad,’ responded a refined female voice – not Clara, but someone of similar tastes. ‘Let us see his beautiful insides.’

  ‘What the hell, do the both of ’em!’

  This audience participation was like a Punch and Judy show, only with adult voices. The caged actors looked uncomfortable and alarmed. No stretch, that. According to the programme, the roles of Isabella and Don Bartolome were taken by performers called Berma and Phroso. Few in the company cared to give their full names.

  Morpho took out his now red-hot poker and applied the tip to the callused foot of one of the background victims, who yelped. Claqueurs mocked him with mimicked, exaggerated howls of sympathy pain.

  No one on stage in the Théâtre des Horreurs could frighten Kate as much as their audience.

  ‘You, Madame,’ said Guignol – tiny bright human eyes fixing on her from deep in his mask – ‘of the brick-red hair and thick shiny spectacles… which is your preference?’

  Kate froze, and said nothing.

  ‘Bartolome, Isabella, the both… neither?’

  She nodded, almost involuntarily.

  ‘A humanitarian, ladies and gentlemen. A rare species in this quarter. Madame… no, mademoiselle… you are too tender-hearted to wish tortures cruel on these innocents, yes? Would you care to offer yourself as substitute? Your own pretty flesh for theirs? We have cages to fit all sizes of songbird. Morpho could make of you a fine canary. You would sing so sweetly at the touch of his hot hot iron and sharp sharp blades. Does that not appeal?’

  Kate blushed. Her face felt as if it were burning already. The elderly gent beside her breathed heavily. He looked sidewise at her as if she were a Sunday joint fresh from the oven. His pale, long-fingered hands twitched in his lap. Kate wished she could change places so as not to be next to him. She looked to the plump family on her other side – Morpho supporters, to the smallest, roundest child – and was perturbed by their serene happiness.

  ‘So, mademoiselle, would you care to join our merry parade?’

  Kate shrank, shaking her head. Morpho frowned exaggeratedly, sticking out his lower lip like a thwarted child.

  ‘I thought not,’ snapped Guignol. ‘There are limits to humanitarianism, even for the best of us.’

  Guignol stood between the hanging lovers, hands out as if he were a living scales.

  ‘Confession is required from Isabella, before she can be burned as a witch and her properties seized by the church,’ he explained. ‘I think the most ingenious means of eliciting such a statement will be… to push in her beloved’s eyes with hot sticks!’

  Morpho jabbed his poker up into Don Bartolome’s cage… twice.

  The stink of sizzling flesh stung Kate’s nose. The young man’s cries set off screams from Isabella and quite a few members of the audience.

  Red, smoking holes were burned in the young man’s face.

  …or seemed to be. It must be a trick.

  Isabella sobbed and collapsed in her cage, then rent her hair and shift in shrill agony. She was too horror-struck to sign a confession – a flaw in the wicked uncle’s plan. Though, as Guignol had said, the audience didn’t really care.

  They were all just here for the horror.

  Morpho considered a medium-size set of tongs, then shook his head and selected the largest pincers. Cheers and hoots rose from his partisans.

  Kate couldn’t look away but didn’t want to watch. She took her glasses off, and the spectacle became a merciful blur… but she could still hear what was happening.

  Putting her glasses back on, her vision came into focus just as a long string of entrails and organs tumbled out of Don Bartolome’s opened belly, then dripped and dribbled and dangled…

  Just sausages in sauce, she told herself. The Théâtre des Horreurs bought pigs’ blood and horses’ offal in bulk from the local slaughterhouses.

  And so it went on. The scene changed, and other ‘plays’ were presented. Simple situations which allowed for atrocities. In a gloss on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether’, Morpho returned as a maniac who takes charge of a madhouse and trephines his own head-doctor. Isabella and Don Bartolome were done with, but Berma and Phroso came back with other names to be violated and abused all over again: as harem captives of a cruel Eastern potentate; passengers sharing a lifeboat with hungry sailors, drawing lots as to who would be eaten when the rations ran out; a brother and sister sewn together by gypsies who needed a new star attraction for their failing freak show. Kate fancied that Berma, though luminous in suffering, was a little bored with it all, but handsome, wild-eyed Phroso was eager for each new indignity. He all but begged for the knife, the flail and the cudgel.

  Early in the evening, Morpho did the heavy lifting, but his energies flagged as Guignol became more animated, more active. The maestro personally wrestled a bear, throttled a baby, killed the King of Poland…

  Saint Denis interrupted the proceedings, his disembodied head preaching against the immoral spectacle. Guignol snatched the head and booted it into the wings, blowing a spectacular, swazzle-assisted raspberry. What was it about Paris and severed heads? From Saint Denis to Dr Guillotine, the city had decapitation on the brain.

  The saint’s headless body blundered comically and was hauled off by a music-hall hook. Since the usual neck-yank was out of the question, the hook had to snag him by the midriff.

  Kate checked her programme. No interval was promised.

  II

  KATE GOT HER fill of horrors. The elderly gent in the next seat kept his eyes on the stage, but – under cover of his folded Vie Française – let his hand wander to her knee. She touched the back of his hand with the poi
nt of her tiny blade, prompting a swift withdrawal. The roué didn’t take rejection in bad humour. He licked a blood trickle – a darker shade than the stuff spilled on stage – from the shallow cut. He was lucky not to have been seated next to Yuki. She’d have cut off his hand and dropped it in his lap.

  The last act was more like conventional drama than the succession of gory spectacles which made up the bulk of the evening’s entertainment. Someone must actually have written it.

  Members of the company posed as statues vives, on display in a waxworks. Guignol acted as guide, recounting crimes which earned respectable-seeming gentlemen and ladies sobriquets like Ripper, Razor, Poison Marie, Black Widow or Werewolf. This scene transformed as the figure of murderer and corpse-molester Bertrand Caillet came to life and crept into a graveyard to clutch the throat of a lingering mourner.

  In a change of pace, Caillet was played by Phroso, given the chance to slaughter instead of being slaughtered. Memory of the actor’s earlier sufferings lingered, making his monster pathetic if not sympathetic. The date was 1871. The arrest and trial of the madman was black farce, carried on during the fall of the Paris Commune. So many committees and sub-committees were in session, debating the aims and achievements of the Commune and its increasingly desperate defence, that no official courtroom could be found. Caillet’s case was heard in a disused horse-butcher’s shop. Witnesses, lawyers, policemen and victims’ relatives were called or dragged to the barricades as the Army of Versailles retook the city. Offstage fusillades rattled those giving testimony. Caillet’s confession was interrupted as pitched battle spilled into the makeshift courtroom, leaving the shop floor splashed with human blood. The skirmish done, Caillet resumed a stuttering account of his crimes and compulsions.

  Guignol cavorted and chortled through la Semaine Sanglante, the bloodiest week in the bloody history of Paris. Caillet’s homicidal mania was a trifle amongst greater, more cynical horrors. Most of his ‘victims’ were dead when he got to them. He strangled two or three, but found the results unsatisfactory. Fresh-killed was too dry for his tastes. To prick his amatory interest, a corpse had to have the sheen of rot. Meanwhile, one hundred hostages, including priests and nuns, were executed on the orders of the Committee of Public Safety. In reprisal, the victorious army murdered thirty thousand – the innocent, the guilty, the uninvolved, anyone who was passing.