by Rhys Hughes
There were two doctors he knew vaguely, deadly rivals but experts in all manner of medical techniques. He would ask them individually to help and he felt better once his resolution had been made. Returning the ladder to the shed, he squelched slowly home.
The following morning, he paid his first visit to Dr Vaughan, who was happy to listen to his problem; the medical savant expressed confidence that he could devise an effective antidote to the afterimage. It would take a day and cost a few thousand pounds.
“And that’s a real bargain, believe me!” he declared, before adding in a low tone, “The main thing is that you asked me and not that idiotic quack, Dr Frazer, who would be sure to cheat you and leave you in a worse mess than you are already in. Pah! I spit on that cretin! Whatever you do, don’t go anywhere near the poxy charlatan.”
The Reverend sighed and felt duty bound to confess that he intended a visit to Dr Frazer immediately after this consultation was over. He wanted to give the task to both doctors simultaneously to increase the chance of success, for competition was likely to make both strive harder; the bishop would expect no less. Yet he was sorry.
“Humph!” groaned Dr Vaughan. “I have no intention of swallowing a feeble apology appended to such an insult, and I regard your procedure in this matter to be cynical and unworthy, and yet I can’t turn down a chance to humiliate my rival. So yes, I do accept your commission! I will nullify the afterimage completely while that fool gropes and clatters in the murk of his incompetence. Just wait and see!”
Wincing slightly at the triumphant use of the last word in that speech, the Reverend thanked Dr Vaughan and left his consultation room with a lump in his throat. Already he had some bad premonitions. He found Dr Frazer to be in an equally waspish mood.
“You mean to tell me that you went to visit that pompous fake before coming here! Well, I am mortally offended by that news. Doubtless he filled your head with lies and slanders about me. In your favour is the fact you evidently didn’t believe them, for now you are here; and your strange little problem does give me the opportunity to degrade that buffoon. In other words, I accept your commission!!
The Reverend went away, satisfied and appalled in equal measure. He planned to avoid his church for the day. But as it happened, that decision wasn’t his to make. As we’ll soon learn…
Dr Vaughan refused to treat any more patients until he had solved this odd case. He said to himself, “I imagine that Dr Frazer will utilise modern scientific methods to wipe away the afterimage; but I have something that is far more potent. True monkey magic!”
And he took a little key and opened a secret cabinet concealed behind a portrait of himself and he reached inside and withdrew a papaya. It was mummified and odourless but a magnificent example of the tropical fruit nonetheless. He held it up to a dusty green sunbeam that slanted through his tinted window and smiled thinly.
“The sacred papaya of Spanko the monkey god!”
He had acquired it while travelling through the land of Gabon when he was an intrepid medical student, many decades previously. It could grant a single wish and he had been saving it for a special occasion. The special occasion had arrived at last! He caressed the fruit lovingly. He had found it in the temple of a ruined city in the jungle. Sweeping all his papers and equipment off his desk with a vigorous forearm, he gently placed the fruit at the centre of the expanse of teak.
In the meantime, Dr Frazer was also refusing to examine new patients. He said slyly to himself, “I imagine that Dr Vaughan will utilise modern scientific methods to wipe away the afterimage; but I have something that is far more potent. True monkey magic!”
And he took a little key and opened a secret cabinet concealed behind a portrait of himself and he reached inside and withdrew a papaya. It was mummified and odourless but a magnificent example of the tropical fruit nonetheless. He held it up to a dusty purple sunbeam that slanted through his tinted window and smiled thinly.
“The divine papaya of Basha the monkey god!”
He had acquired it while travelling through the land of Congo when he was an intrepid medical student, many decades previously. It could grant a single wish and he had been saving it for a special occasion. The special occasion had arrived at last! He caressed the fruit lovingly. He had found it in the chamber of a lost pyramid in the jungle. Sweeping his papers and equipment off his desk with a violent forearm, he softly placed the fruit at the centre of the expanse of mahogany.
The old name for papaya is pawpaw, by the way. I’m sure you already knew that. So let’s just state the play:
Two monkey gods, two pawpaws, two wishes…
Anyone who is familiar with the primate deities of Africa will want to protest at this point and cry, “But isn’t Zumboo the only god of monkeys? Didn’t he conquer all others and ferry them in a banana canoe to the land of unreason where they disintegrated?”
The answer to that is no, it’s just a myth. There are still many monkey gods. Thomp is another, for example. True, Zumboo’s the most powerful, but so what? The point is that Spanko and Basha both exist and are equals in terms of magical force. Which explains the following. Both the wishes acted simultaneously, you see, and amplified each other. Exactly like the same unwise wish on the magic shoes.
The wish uttered by Dr Vaughan and Dr Frazer was as follows: “Let it henceforth be impossible for the spolcyc to see the Reverend Richards. In the pungent name of all simian fruit…”
When praying to monkey gods, one must always say ‘apemen’ instead of ‘amen’. It’s a crucial point. Neither doctor neglected this formality; thus the wishes were granted, or rather one wish was granted twice. And never again did the monster see the Reverend.
Unfortunately, nor did anyone else see him from that moment, at least not in his customary form. Had only one doctor made the wish, doubtless the afterimage would have been cleansed from the spolcyc’s multitude of eyes; but a double wish produces a far stronger effect. And so it happened that the Reverend ended up in the one place in the universe where a beast made of eyes could never glimpse him.
Yes, he vanished into the creature! More accurately, he was absorbed by the spolcyc so that he became its body, with all the eyes studded over him, looking outward. Even if he stared into a mirror he wouldn’t be able to see himself, because the eyes covered him completely. However hard he searched, he would never find the image of himself ever again. That’s how the reinforced wish was fulfilled!
He came down from the roof eventually, after the bishop arrived with a catapult and peppered him with sand grains. He was chased through the streets of Porthcawl until he shook off his pursuers. Some witnesses later said they saw the spolcyc submerge itself in the sea; but I happen to know for a fact that’s not true. A creature made of eyes simply isn’t safe where there are swordfish to cause punctures.
In fact there are very few locations where it might feel at home, where it is unlikely to be harassed by angry citizens of sundry rank; there’s only one logical course of action and that’s to adopt a disguise. The Reverend who was also a monster did just that. Somehow he acquired clothes and a mask and continued to inhabit Porthcawl without risk of being wiped dry, which is the doom a spolcyc fears most.
* * * *
Castor finished the story and drained his glass to the dregs. Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris squirmed on their chairs. The awkward silence lasted another five minutes and then the friends cleared their throats, twiddled a few thumbs and finally broke the news.
“Your tale is very wrong in terms of veracity; and you are perhaps not the smartest teller of it,” sniffed Paddy.
Castor slowly raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“It is easily disproved,” Paddy said.
Harris added, “We know for certain that Reverend Richards remained in human form, in his own form, and that eyes and disguises have nothing to do with his subsequent life. The facts are mundane. The bishop felt that he wasn’t the right man for the job and thus expelled him from the
church. Thoroughly defrocked, he looked for another career and found one as the barman of a pub, of this pub in truth.”
And he jerked a thumb at the figure in question, who stood behind the bar with his elbows splayed on the counter. Castor looked and nodded as he observed the peculiar stiffness of the barman, his badly proportioned frame and fixed features. Certainly it was the Reverend Richards there in the shadows, waiting to pour the beer.
“Yes, of course,” said Castor with a small smile.
Then he reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and drew out a tiny violin and an equally small bow; and he began playing a sad song, just as modest in dimensions as the instrument itself but profoundly deep, almost bottomless, in emotional impact. Not to weep at this wrenching melody was impossible, despite the numerous mistakes in the playing. Paddy and Harris both shed tears, and Castor too.
As for the barman, he started shaking all over, and his clothes abruptly became wet, but his face remained dry. Then his inflexible fingers undid buttons, untied knots and unhooked hooks; and in a paroxysm of vigorous melancholy he burst out of himself like a dragonfly escaping its chrysalis. But with more eyes. Many more eyes.
For an instant he stood there like an optical fountain, shining and salty and unbelievable; he had more pupils than an underfunded school teacher and each iris was a different colour, which is the detail that most intrigued Paddy and Harris; and then he took fright and shambled down some back passage where customers can’t follow.
“There’s no more cunning disguise than to dress as yourself,” declared Castor with a sagacious sigh. He returned the miniature violin to his inner pocket and blinked at his friends. Paddy and Harris glanced at each other, shook their heads, and one of them said:
“The moment he was rumbled, he squelched.”
“Yes,” answered Castor, holding his empty glass to the light, “and now you have driven away the rain with your shoes, we must seize any chance to collect every drop of available liquid.”
“You don’t intend to drink his tears, do you?”
Castor shrugged. “Not straight. But I might start brewing my own beer at home. Call him back, will you? Just rattle your money on the counter if that doesn’t work. And get me a pint of ale while you’re at it. No, make it two. This weather is unseasonably dry.”
Home Suit Home
It began in the village of Lladloh. Empty houses vanished overnight and nobody knew how or why, and when the owners returned in the morning there was nowhere for them to live, but whether the cause was natural or criminal none of them dared to guess. Only if a building was occupied at all times did it remain in place, so people stopped going out, a safeguard that precipitated a minor famine.
The mayor made a token attempt to tackle the problem by encouraging his citizens to fill rooms with mannequins or the cardboard silhouettes of real people, but it didn’t work. Whatever evil force was taking the houses wasn’t so easily fooled. I believe that Phil the Liver was the mayor at that time, but I might be mistaken. The politics of that cursed village are truly intricate and fretful to say the least.
Not for long did Lladloh remain the only affected settlement. Rapidly the phenomenon spread to other parts of Wales, to north, south, east and west, not forgetting Monmouth, where the market imps did a brisk trade selling voluminous tents to the homeless; nor even Swansea, whose hairy inhabitants dwell in burrows and so were mostly unaffected. No domicile in the stunted nation was exempt.
Even the offshore islands suffered. The lighthouse of Caldey vanished one keeperless night. And finally the epidemic reached the isolated town of Porthcawl, where the collective will vowed to get to the bottom of the mystery, or at least halfway down it.
“The collective will shan’t be denied!” cried Collective Will, his name a perfect coincidence in the context of his utterance. Determined to put a stop to the property thefts, he called a meeting of the most eminent local citizens. During this meeting, while the attendees were absent from their homes, their abodes disappeared.
“An inevitable consequence,” declared Billy Belay.
“Indeed so,” agreed Collective Will at the next meeting, the following day. The eminent citizens had moved into a large seafront hotel where at least one person was permanently on the premises, usually the manager or a badly paid staff member, but it was decided to convene for the talks in a nearby pub, before it too vanished.
“What is a likely way forward?” asked Paddy Deluxe.
Collective Will sighed and rubbed his chin. “Our combined funds are meagre and should be reserved for the purchase of beer and chips, for are we not Welsh? No professional detectives are affordable, nor any amateur sleuths available, so Karl Mondaugen must be given the task. Surely you know to whom I refer? The mad inventor originally from Munich. He has devised all kinds of novel wonders.”
“Hardly a time for reading!” objected Billy Belay.
“By ‘novel’ I meant original or unique,” explained Collective Will with the faintest grimace. “There are no inventors quite like Mondaugen. Even his eccentric façade is a prototype.”
Frothing Harris confirmed this. “And once he made a soap trombone. I saw the result with my own eyes and the eyes of others. The lather of the low notes was especially scouring.”
“Impressive,” nodded Paddy Deluxe, “but will he agree to work for us for nothing? And if he does, how can we know what his true motives are? How may we even be confident that his motives haven’t been patented! It might cost us more in the long run.”
“But gentlemen, what other choice do we have!”
“Who said that?” cried Paddy.
“I did. Yes, I’m one of your eminent citizens and therefore an attendee at this series of meetings. Already I have an idea for a contraption to trap the force or being that is committing these thefts. In my laboratory I’ll be able to fabricate this contraption in a few weeks. Unluckily my laboratory was part of my house, and my house was stolen yesterday, and so first I’ll have to invent a new laboratory.”
Most of those present merely gawped at Karl Mondaugen, who sat on a black sofa that was possibly a giant pumpernickel, his long green boots swinging over the side like gherkins so mutated they resembled footwear and his lederhosen glistening. But Collective Will collected enough of his wits for the following exchange:
“Why not invent one then?”
Mondaugen pouted. “I’ll need a laboratory to do so.”
“Can’t you pretend this pub is one?”
“Only with great difficulty.”
“Don’t you have any great difficulty on you? I suppose you’ll have to invent that in a laboratory too?”
“Actually no. I invented some earlier and put it in my pocket. Let me reach in… Here it is, a pure gram of great difficulty, enough to permit the pretence you desire. Now I raise it to my nostrils and snort it like so. My head spins, my pupils dilate.”
“Are we your pupils?” wondered Billy Belay.
Mondaugen made a dismissive gesture. “I can’t abide students, so you are merely neutral observers.”
“We look forward to seeing your laboratory when it’s ready,” declared Collective Will, “and even more forward to seeing what inventions come out of it, especially if they remedy the plague of the disappearing houses. You can rely on our support.”
“My laboratory is already finished!” cried Mondaugen. “It is this pub, as you suggested it ought to be, so technically you are trespassing, but I’m a gentle soul and won’t prosecute. As for my aforementioned contraption, I’ll notify you when it’s done.”
“We can’t afford to pay you, remember.”
“The ecstasy of creation is remuneration enough! I am an amateur and therefore spit on money, not in the metaphorical sense but with a patented spitting machine that can eject thin streams of saliva with sufficient force to punch a hole of perfect smoothness right through a noteworthy stack of the largest denomination coins.”
“The committee is very pleased to hear that,” sa
id Collective Will, but the spare change in his pockets jangled despondently, so he called an end to the meeting and the eminent citizens slowly finished their pints of beer and wandered back to the hotel.
Karl Mondaugen watched them leave.
And then he threw himself into his work, not stirring from the pub for three weeks, living on peanuts and pear cider and constantly utilising the implausible and impossible tools he carried everywhere in jacket pockets often rumoured to be bigger on the inside than the outside, pockets oddly created with the aid of those tools.
But he didn’t shun the more conventional implements of his trade and could be located in his corner banging with a hammer and joining wires with a soldering iron at most hours of the day and night, to the annoyance of the landlord and his customers. But no complaints were lodged against Mondaugen, for it was rightly feared he might design and deploy a horrid and innovative retaliation on anyone or anything that dared interrupt him. He had been known to do that before.
Finally he sent a message to the seafront hotel that his contraption was complete. He requested that the committee of eminent citizens meet him not in the pub, but on the esplanade in front of the Grand Pavilion. When they arrived and gathered around him, he displayed a box no larger than a brick and pointed proudly at it.
“What exactly is this?” asked Collective Will.
“A robotic cottage,” answered Mondaugen, “that has limited reasoning powers and can walk on retractable legs. If we leave it unattended in this spot, the force that is making vacant abodes vanish won’t be able to resist the bait and will steal it like other empty houses, but my cottage has been programmed to return to this precise location and will hasten back to it. A magnetic compass and pedometer are embedded in its brain, which can be consulted to pinpoint the coordinates of the hideout of any abductor. Then a raiding party can be sent out…”
Collective Will cleared his throat and said, “Ah, a cottage. Yes, I can discern the windows and door.”