by Hughes, Rhys
The next time, they agreed to meet outside, by the main entrance. This should have been easier, but it turned out there was no such thing, or if there was, it was no larger or different from hundreds of other portals which graced, or disgraced, the length of the edifice. She stood in her best coat, utterly alone, like a woman at the edge of the world, her back to the concrete, with myriad windows above and to both sides. She waited. The ruined city, mostly levelled, stained rather than filled her gaze. Separated by enormous distances, sodium lamps on tall posts turned nothing of significance an unnatural yellow. From unknown regions, a faint sound of machinery saturated the damp landscape. Industry at play.
She returned to her room and sent him a desperate message. There was no answer, but later he signalled to her that he had waited at the designated spot, but had selected a different side of the building. Then he seemed to change his mind. Now he explained he had felt too ill to attempt the adventure. Viviana frowned. The mistakes in his behaviour, the discrepancies here and there, made her uneasy. A suspicion started to grow in her mind. He wanted to flirt but always pulled back before the point of commitment. He was afraid of something. First she thought it was his own emotions. Gradually she deduced it might have a less vague outline. It would be able to loom more alarmingly than an extreme change of heart. A scruple with a shadow.
They always announced themselves to each other with that same call. Are you there? On many occasions, his messages broke off in the middle of a sentence. She had assumed this was an undesirable property of the plumbing under certain conditions: a faucet might have been opened elsewhere, drawing his words with the water away from her, diverting his passion. Now she wondered if the true cause of the interruptions had a more anatomical explanation. Even when he did communicate with her for long periods without a pause, there was a furtive slackness in his rhythms that she had not noticed before. He was not striking his radiator with vigour as she did, but tapping it gently, almost with a muffled instrument, with desire that was in fetters. His adoration for her followed the rules of a forbidden game.
On the shortest night of the year, she was awakened by a metallic voice. She stumbled to the window and peered out. Loudspeakers on trucks roared up at the apartment block, huge chunks of fragmented sound reverberating from the cheap concrete and feeding back into the amplifiers, so that a wail rose in volume and made the landscape scream, which was a perfect substitute for the panic in the voice of the announcer. The building was being evacuated. Lines of people were already streaming from the numerous exits. Viviana dressed hurriedly and left her room. She had no idea which way to run, but soon chanced on a staircase which spiralled down. At the bottom she found a door that gave out onto the chaotic scene. She joined the mass exodus, tripping in her slippers. The residents stopped when they reached the location of their former homes. Then they turned and watched.
From snatches of gossip, Viviana worked out the reason for this extraordinary operation. The apartment block had apparently been raised directly over a caldera, a subterranean volcano. The seismologists at the university had calculated it was due to erupt. Most of the occupants had left their lights on, to ease their escape from the cells, and the whole edifice blazed like some ancient computer at the limit of its ability, horribly magnified. There was stasis and drowned stars. The crowd lingered until the cold weakened and the first pale light of dawn, blocked by the enormous domestic silhouette, changed the odour of the air. Viviana sniffed. Then all the windows snapped to grey. The generators in the basement had stopped working. The caldera had burst inside the building. First the lowest level of rooms filled with lava, the molten rock glowing and swirling behind the reinforced windows in too many variations of a drunken wink. Then the second level began to fill and the grey returned to red.
Relentlessly, one at a time, every cell in the block received the flickering liquid. The room which was last to be filled, through some trick of corridors and conduits, belonged to Viviana, though it was not the highest. When it was the only grey square left in the matrix of fire, the sun rose behind the building. The mirrors were still intact and her pane anticipated its own fate with a more ethereal red. The single ray that shot out pierced her directly in the forehead. She felt its dim warmth and an ironic smile altered her face. Then it died, for the lava had taken over. The caldera was exhausted. The molten rock cooled and hardened, and the walls of the structure, weakened by the pressure and heat, crumbled away. A replica of the apartment block was left in its place, slightly smaller but solid throughout, with all the furniture and fittings, the plumbing and its romantic possibilities, vaporised and trapped like love in gestures, embedded and mingled indistinguishably.
Viviana realised she was holding something heavy. It was the spanner. She must have instinctively snatched it up when she fled her room. She looked around. There were many people of every description. Families, couples and solitary individuals. She wandered among them. Her route was random, but she had a purpose. Somewhere amid all this humanity was her man, her untouched lover, the same person who had done so much to kill her loneliness and lift her hopes out of the truth of her situation. She would find him now. However long it took, she would meet him at last. Although she had no idea what he looked like, she knew exactly how to recognise him. She had their greeting call. Are you there? She had that, and he had a head. Ignoring the single men, concentrating on those who were with wives and girlfriends, she meticulously began to call for him.
(2001)
Pity the Pendulum
Sick, were you? Thought your agony was long? Nothing that happened to you was truly comparable to our ordeal. Certainly, they gave you a tour of the torture chamber, insisting politely but very firmly that you try out every device. Primitive machines on the whole, with few moving parts. No sense of time down there, in the flickering glare of the braziers; and too much pain to count the seconds. Completely unlike the dungeon where they cast you later. Cold reason under the blade of the pendulum and your life became a clock, simply because you were fortunate enough to avoid falling into the pit on your first foray into the darkness. Between these two extremes there was the sentence of death, the catching of your swooning body and its conveyance into the square room of iron and slimy stone. The idea of this was for you to awake and perish when you went wandering.
But you cheated them. And so did we. For us all it was mere chance, an accident, that we tripped before reaching the edge of the pit and so discovered its existence. Sprawling at length, chins on stone but lips and noses and brows resting on nothing, bathed in the chill updraught and odour of rotting fungus. That is how it was. And how it annoyed them! They prefer their victims to be stupidly unlucky, to confirm an inferiority in matters of mind; for these priests do not believe faith to be a quality of the heart. No! For them it is a symptom of pragmatism and the purse. Prisoners who demonstrate too much intelligence, whether abstract or purely instinctive, are thorns in their white lips or scorch marks on their pristine robes. But in truth their own brains are desiccated things, mummified in those ridiculous cloth pyramids that serve as hoods.
Luck is not a sign of cleverness, but taking advantage of it most surely is. That is how you insulted them. To defy the Inquisition is a small matter: it is expected of foreigners and heretics. To offend their sense of control is a major incident, a guarantee of causing those inhuman parasites sleepless nights. The ghouls reckon that true retribution for our imagined crimes should be divine; and when it cannot, which is the general case, then accidental and absurd; and if not that, then symbolic. But that is a poor third and they resent being forced to employ it. Thus the pendulum is kept locked away most of the year; if not quite forgotten then never mentioned, or alluded to only by hints at secret meetings, a clicking tongue or a wagging finger. Much more agreeable to talk about cosmic justice, dooms both causal and casual!
So we all went through the same procedure. I know you are still too disturbed to wonder exactly who we are. Let me simply state that we have witnessed mo
re of subterranean Toledo than yourself. A diversity of characters, our little group, with men from many countries and professions. All are special heretics, deemed beyond even the remedy of cleansing fire. They burn their enemies at the stake as an act of mercy. Since they are destined for Hell, it is kinder to introduce them gently to the torment of flame, rather than suffering them to plunge straight from comfort to agony. But for us they have no pity at all: death by moral horror is worse than extinction by physical pain, however prolonged. Thus runs the dark theory of our Inquisitors. We have the pit and no audience, save the devils that stage our dooms. There are peepholes in many locations on the walls and ceiling of the dungeon. When all are in use a prisoner may feel no less bounded by eyes than bricks and iron; and the sensation is more grotesque.
Toledo is an ancient town, as you may appreciate too well, and its layout resembles a web shredded and re-knotted by a wild wind. The craggy surroundings hold it back from expanding far beyond its original limits. Before the Inquisition was established here, it was a model of cosmopolitan tolerance, but when they came they expelled the Jews and Arabs. All but one. An unknown architect, possibly of Moorish descent, was commissioned to construct this hidden world, a honeycomb of cells, chambers and passages deep below the streets. And so the Inquisition funded a model Hell in the direction of the real one. They caused their old machines to be carried down here and designed others still more horrible, inspired by the cloying shadows and rejection of surface values; but they did not know all the secrets of the architect. For every tunnel he was forced to build, he added a second for his own amusement; and for every dungeon, a way out, sometimes leading to a worse fate, for he was as warped as his masters. Then it was finished and so was he.
For the actual labour, the madmen of Toledo were rounded up and given tools. At the end, they were sworn to secrecy and scattered over the land. The architect was cast into the lowest dungeon and used to test its singular properties. First he was allowed to stumble around in the dark, but he knew about the pit and kept away. So they entered and drugged him and he awoke under the pendulum. The rats ate his bindings and he escaped. As with the rest of us, he was then pushed toward the hole by the contracting walls. The plates of iron are held in place by long bolts that pass right through the masonry. Here, on the other side, they are fitted with braziers, and when these are loaded with burning coals the heat is conducted along the bolt to the interior of the dungeon. Thus the hellish manner in which the plates, and the awful figures carved upon them, glow and hiss.
The walls are moved inward by means of a giant clockwork device. It is a slow process, not merely because cruelty delivers itself over long heartbeats, but due to the gross weight of the moving parts. The desire in the breast of the victim is always the same: to embrace the searing iron and scald himself senseless with the steam of his own boiling blood; and to continue that blackening clutch until the skin peels away and the fat bubbles out and the nerves and sinews ignite, snapping and curling like threads of cotton dangled over a candle. Still more: to press tight against the glowing metal until the skeleton itself is stripped free of flesh and must fall apart, waiting to be swept into the pit by the relentless walls. Anything other than to plunge into the hole alive!
But this voluntary death is never managed, for the reflexes always pull the body away from the heat; and the heretic will dance back, until there is no ground left, and on the edge he will totter and over the side he will sprawl into the phosphorescent pit, its cold circumference brushing his face with the stalks of monstrous fungi, the rats on their tiny ledges turning their backs on his grimace. The contempt of vermin is supposed to be the introduction to a new set of terrors, considerably worse but unknown, for even the Inquisition dares not speculate beyond this point. For them, there is water at the bottom, but whether deep or shallow, ancient beyond stagnation or replenished by underground currents from rivers or distant seas, remains a mystery; and rumours that broken spars from lost ships sometimes surface there, with the bubbles of drowning sailors, are discounted as the events of dreams.
Thus was the fate of the architect after he cheated the pendulum. Pity this poor device! For it is among the Inquisition’s most symbolic dooms and yet it continues to fail to deliver the fatal stroke. How those ghouls must grind their teeth behind their hoods when they are forced to draw it back up and set the walls in motion! The braziers must be fired: coals must be conveyed from a bunker and stains on their white robes are inevitable. And the winding of the enormous spring! How tedious and annoying! No wonder they resort to this measure only at the final extremity, the ultimate stubbornness of an ungrateful heretic. And the architect had created all this himself: perhaps to mock them with the effort required to complete the procedure. Or else to mock, and save, himself. White lips? No, his were black and not at all thin. He shared a love of deviousness with his tormentors; but he felt neutral about devils. He had doubts about their existence and these grew as he was numbered among their brood. But now he was plummeting into his own abominable trap.
He tumbled through the nets of the tangled mushrooms, snapping stalks and sending clouds of spores into the air to swirl pointlessly. He acknowledged the rats and the manner in which they snubbed him; but he also passed something else, an item unknown to the Inquisitors, a large mirror fixed to one of the walls of the pit at an angle. In the light from above, which was only the unhealthy glow of the overheated walls, it resembled a pool of frozen blood, suspended in the act of spinning, a coin of death. He turned his head and briefly beheld another perfect circle, the entrance of a tunnel, also tinted red as if with insubstantial gore, but dimmer along its length, and though he understood the meaning of both mirror and tunnel they still astonished him, for the breaking of his mind under torture had made him forget his hopes and doubt his own cunning.
The plunging of his form continued, but his fall was broken by a real net and he bounced and settled, dazed and childlike, closing his eyes against the spores which drifted down and coated his damp forehead. It was peaceful here but safer to move. He swung himself over and jumped to the floor, jangling the bells that hung from the circumference of the net. Then he stooped under an arch into an adjacent chamber. This was his sanctuary. A chair and desk stood in one corner. A candelabra and a tinderbox was on this desk; and next to them a slim book bound in brass clasps upon which rested an inkwell and quill. Drawing a heavy velvet curtain over the arch, he groped his way to the chair. Here he caught his breath before daring to ignite the candles, which gave off a glow less ubiquitous but more universal, in simplicity and human warmth, than the burning dungeon walls.
He had anticipated his betrayal and his preparations for escape were elaborate, but it was essential to curb his impatience until the time was right. It was best to remain in this sanctuary for several hours, for the immediate aftermath of a plummet into the pit was the one time the hooded tormentors cared to examine its interior in any detail. Already the walls were being drawn back. The grating of the huge winding mechanism came to him through the ponderous walls like the decelerated laughter of some unimaginable chthonic beast entombed in the stone. Then he heard a faint spitting. The coals that provided heat to the metal plates and sculpted figures that adorned them were being extinguished with pails of water. Sooty, smoky work! When the dungeon was back to its original dimensions and the walls cooled to darkness, a trapdoor in the ceiling opened and a lantern was lowered on a cord.
Without flinching, his judges inspected the empty dungeon and noted the remains of the pitcher of water and wooden frame positioned directly beneath the pendulum, both crushed to charred dust. But still not wholly satisfied, they caused the lantern to descend further, toward the mouth of the pit, but not so far that any of its lateral beams were blocked, for a bright pit in a gloomy dungeon was too perverse a notion even for their depraved minds. In fact, when the lantern was still several feet above the circular chasm, they held it steady and took turns to peer into the forbidden depths. This rare treat lasted no mor
e than a minute, for even the most fevered of religious imaginations can find little extra heresy in slimy walls and rippling water and the matted backs of diseased rats. They are secular abominations. Time to reel the lantern in and abandon the dungeon to forgetfulness, an easy task to accomplish, for it is a nullity rather than an object, an absence in the bowels of Toledo, and only when its sides are clamped together, the carved figures grinding in private embraces, perhaps seeking to melt and fuse together, may it be said to have true substance.
But the architect remained in his sanctuary, for it was possible the lantern would be lowered again by an Inquisitor more suspicious than his fellows. There is always one. Only when the excitement following the execution had started to become the smooth blandness of a seldom-shared anecdote might it be safe for the prisoner to attempt his escape. Until then he took up the quill, dipped it in the ink and opened the book of blank pages. For the eyes of those who came after, he told his story, explaining how he designed this dungeon for his masters and then became its first victim, but not before secretly adding a way out. He wrote with careful strokes; and by the time he had finished, the long candles had burned to half their length. He blew them out, pulled back the curtain and fumbled his way across the base of the pit. The net was above him. He passed under it, avoiding the bells. On the far side, there was a shallow groove in the wall of the pit, wide and deep enough to accommodate his starved body. Reaching out, he grasped the first iron rung.
Taking a deep breath to steady his trembling arms and legs, he began climbing, slowly and painfully but with a rising joy, passing the net and feeling the thick cord of its edge rubbing against his back, setting the bells swaying but too gently to make them chime. Every fifth or sixth rung he paused for a rest. Then he reached the level of the mirror and eased himself into the mouth of the tunnel, crawling faster and faster toward freedom. If an Inquisitor now chanced to open the trapdoor and lower a lantern, he would be convinced the architect was not just a heretic but a sorcerer, for it would appear the man was crawling vertically down the inside of the pit, head first but not quite like a fly, for it was his elbows and knees which adhered impossibly to the stone. This shocking vision would persist until the architect reached the end of the tunnel and passed through the surface of the water and vanished without a bubble. But the Inquisitors were all in bed and saw nothing and their nightmares were insignificant.