by Ishbelle Bee
I sat with my new father at the dinner table. My black-eyed Daddy. The clocks ticked round us.
“What is going to happen to me?” I asked him.
Mr Fingers peered over at me. “You will grow up here as my son.”
“Why do you want the grandfather clock?”
“It has something inside of it.”
“What?”
“Something I want.”
“How will you find it?”
“I have my spies. My little blackbirds on the Earth with their beady eyes. Now eat your supper.”
And so I ate. I gobbled down what was on my plate. After dinner, Mr Fingers scratched his belly and yawned. He reminded me of a great crocodile. How bright his eyes looked. Like glistening ebony. Like black magic. Like a serial murderer.
After dinner, Mr Fingers took me by the hand and led me down a long black corridor. On the walls were paintings of human bodies piled upon one another in great heaps. They twisted and writhed like worms in a jar. I was sure they were actually moving.
“You are going to meet the other princes, now. Your brothers.” And he opened the door at the end of the corridor.
We stepped into a great circular chamber where a series of glass coffins stood in a row. Each glass coffin had a little boy inside with eyes as black as midnight. Mr Fingers put his finger to his lips. “Shhhhh, they are sleeping. You are number fourteen. My fourteenth prince and my favourite boy.”
“My brothers,” I whispered. I looked at them in their glass cages. Identical dolls. One of them was softly snoring and I could see, yes, I could see his teeth. Little and very pointy, like tiny blades. They were my brothers and they were something horrible. They had black hair and black eyes. My hair was yellow like my mother’s, my eyes pale. I was not one of them. Mr Fingers put his hand on my shoulder.
“My dear boy. Tomorrow you can play with them. Now run off to bed and get some sleep.”
And I ran. I ran into the tower and into my bedroom. I covered myself in star charts. I wanted to dream of the stars. I wanted to escape through my telescope, but I was in the Land of the Dead and my dreams were those of corpses.
In my dream I was in my old family home again. It was a place of charms and punishments. I was having dinner with my father and mother and Aunt Rosebud. We were eating something strange. We were eating an angel. It was still alive and its wings were beating like a heartbeat. I said, “I cannot eat this.”
My father looked cross. “You must eat what you are told.”
My mother said, “It’s good for you. It will make you a strong boy.”
My Aunt Rosebud added, “You have a weak brain. Angel meat will cure you.”
I tried a piece of angel meat. Chewed it and swallowed. It tasted sweet. It tasted wrong. I spat it out and ran out of the room. My dead family watched me leave and continued eating. I ran out of the house and into the garden. I ran to the fields and to an old well at the bottom of the estate near the woods. I sucked my thumb by the well, and stroked the long grasses, touching the daisies. I peered down the well and saw Mr Fingers waving. “Jump down, little boy. Come with me.”
I didn’t want to eat angel meat. I didn’t want to jump down the well. I had nowhere else to go. I saw the lake and started to run to it. It was big and cool and blue like suicide. I jumped in and sank to the bottom. I was safe there with the mermaids. I was drowning and safe.
When I woke up Mr Fingers was standing over me. He wanted me to meet my brothers. He wanted to tell us a story. We sat round our father like choirboys round a priest and he opened a big black book and began:
Once upon a time there were fourteen princes. And they lived in a magical kingdom deep down in the underworld. Their father was a very powerful magician and he was very proud of his boys.
Prince number 1 liked to carve faces in potatoes to make him laugh.
Prince number 2 liked to set fire to butterflies.
Prince number 3 liked girls with big hairy legs.
Prince number 4 liked to eat pancakes with sugar and butter.
Prince number 5 liked to chase ghosts and catch them in jars.
Prince number 6 liked to cut off heads and hang them from trees.
Prince number 7 liked to cut smiles into people’s faces.
Prince number 8 liked to fall in love with mirrors.
Prince number 9 liked to draw strange symbols on doors.
Prince number 10 liked to tell pretty lies.
Prince number 11 liked to sit in graveyards.
Prince number 12 liked to steal love letters.
Prince number 13 liked to collect teeth.
Prince number 14 liked to stare at the stars.
And they were all so happy with their Daddy in the magical underworld. And they would do anything their Daddy would tell them. Anything.
Because if they ever disobeyed him, their Daddy would gobble them up in a heartbeat.
* * *
And he shut the book. I stared at my identical brothers with their black sharp eyes and wondered if it could get any worse.
A stupid question, really.
Prince Number 13
Number thirteen is supposed to be unlucky. Some people dispute this theory, saying it’s superstitious nonsense. Well let me put everybody straight. Avoid number thirteen. It’s the nastiest number there is.
Princes 1-12 were all alike. Daddy had made them himself with dark matter and his own juices. Sticky little identical creations. Voodoo doll eyes.
Prince Number Thirteen was different. He was like me.
Like me, he had a name. It was Tumbletee. Like me, he also had a hobby. He liked to collect teeth in little bags. Like me, Daddy had kidnapped him from the Earth to raise him in the Underworld. My brothers told me, “We are not allowed to play with him,” and so I asked Daddy why not and he said:
“Because he is the game.”
He slept in the black tower, near Daddy’s chamber. Number Thirteen. One day I climbed the tower to visit him. I wanted to know the thirteenth prince. His bedroom overlooked the river of the dead, a ripple of black fleshy waters, a vinegar stink. Whereas my bedroom was covered in star maps, his room was dripping in blood, pooling like bright bursting flower heads around his feet. I noticed his skin was pitted and scarred and moony white. He was older than me and his eyes, knife-like, would slice through flesh. He had white hair, it was moonlight white. White as fairy dust.
“My name is Loveheart. I am your brother,” I said.
He watched me intently, as through examining a bug. “Tumbletee. I like teeth. Let me see yours,” and he moved closer to me and touched my incisors with his bloodied finger. “We are not like the others,” he said. “You and I are different.” His finger moved over my teeth, lover-like. I think he wanted to pull them out. I stared down at my feet. I was standing in red.
“Why is there so much blood?”
“Daddy says I am a supernova of cruelty. We are all monsters, little brother, but I am the worst of them,” and he removed his finger from my mouth and shook my hand. I gripped his palm. It was icy, alien. Something deep inside me was screaming.
* * *
kill him.
push
him
from the tower.
* * *
He smelt of spermy things. He knows what I am thinking, he knows. “Little brother,” he said, “Little brother, I want so much for you to try and kill me.”
I backed away from him, blood trailing on my feet. Marking my exit.
October 1887
Excavation Site of the Egyptian Princess
Lemon hot. We boiled under the Cairo sun. Goliath brought me to the tomb of the princess, his father’s excavation. The tomb entrance had been uncovered; I stepped closer, touched the walls with my fingers.
It fizzled cool magic.
Hieroglyphics. That is what Goliath calls them. To me they are a magic language. My finger outlined a feather shape, a wriggly snail, a bird. Each one has meaning, each one a word that forms a
spell.
Above the entrance to the tomb in colours of black and gold there was a dazzling painting of a man with the head of a black dog. A jackal prince. I stroked his head. Imagined him on a lead in Hyde Park.
He looked part wicked to me, part of an underworld. I wondered what that would be like; would there be a black river stuffed with souls? Would there be a sphinx asking a riddle I had no answer to? Would they cut out my tongue, write symbols on the walls with it. Make a marking of me; squeeze me into their alphabet?
Goliath lifted me up so I could see the patterns on the ceiling, “Can you see, little one, can you see the magic bugs?”
I could, I could see them crawling over the entrance to her death chamber. Red splodges. Tiny things. A hundred of them; they nibbled the sandstone, eating the structure. They formed spirals, turning in on themselves. Making circles of everything.
He carried me out of the magic space and I sat on his lap and ate honeycakes; licked my fingers and pointed to the top of the pyramids. What are they aiming at? Pinpointing a star?
So much yellow sand – under our feet and miles away. Spread like butter. The heat melts everything, turns me into goo.
The workmen had already found pieces of pottery near the entrance; shards painted green with white vampire fang shapes. The teeth of a crocodile maybe? I played with them in the sand; tried to make a jigsaw puzzle of them. Moved the pieces around. The picture remained unclear.
Men with shovels and carts moved across the sand; under shaded tents they played cards and drank coffee. Their hands were lined deep; cracks in paper. I waved at them; one of them waved back, his mouth a red hole with two wonky teeth.
“One day,” Goliath said, “You will see inside the princess’s tomb. See her sarcophagus. My father says she was a sorceress.”
I squeezed his nose with my hand and laughed. “Did she have a big nose like you?” and I cuddled him. Squeezed him with love.
Together we walked across the sands hand in hand. The land was marked out, divided with excavation digs. The Pyramids of the Kings surrounded us as though we were pieces on a board game. We moved through the squares. Watched our footing.
The Game
Tumbletee & Loveheart
And so I grew up in the Underworld. There was no sense of time down there. The Underworld clocks tick tocked and Daddy gobbled the seconds up. Tumbletee told me Daddy had sent him many times to the Earth to do things for him. He had been to Egypt and seen the tombs of the Pharaohs, and he had walked the streets of Paris and been to gentlemen’s clubs and danced with girls dressed in peacock feathers. Daddy said I was not ready to go to the Upperworld yet, but I was starting to change. My eyes, which were blue – the colour of my mother’s – had become ink squid black. My big brother, Tumbletee, said I was unnaturally beautiful. He liked unnatural things.
Daddy said, “You have the face of an angel, Loveheart. You have a face that will break hearts.”
I don’t understand beauty. I looked at Tumbletee’s face, it had pox scars. Its texture looked like porridge. If I ran my finger over his face and felt its lumps, would I feel ugliness? His face was a weird painting, a landscape of the moon. Craters and pits. I saw the galactic in him, the alien, the deep unknown.
Growing up in the underworld was like sinking into a deep well, black waters. I was losing myself, forgetting my name.
* * *
Loveheart Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart Loveheart
Loveheart Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart
Loveheart
Love love love love love
heart
heart
heart
* * *
At meal times we sat round the dinner table with our Daddy. All fourteen princes. Row upon row of wicked black eyes. We were eating a giant blood pie. Daddy cut the slices, oozing so much red.
“Eat up, my sons,” he said. “My wonderful boys.”
I ate the blood pie, chewed on it. Gobbled it down. I was growing into a big, strong boy. I was eating something I shouldn’t. It was poisoning me. I looked round the table at my brothers and I thought, I am the odd one out. The blood trickled down my throat, deep into my stomach. The more I ate Daddy’s food, the more I was changing, my insides turning to black ooze.
I could hear the tick tock of Daddy’s clocks – their constant noise. It filled my ears, drowned out other sounds. It was making me mad. He was making me mad. My mouth was full of blood, my head full of demented clocks. Year upon year. Year upon year. Layers of a trifle. I was the red jelly at the bottom, see me wobble.
Wobble on the plate
wobble
I remember my seventeenth birthday in the Underworld. Daddy was so proud of me. I was his favourite. Head full of fairies. Demented.
They called me Loveheart.
My big brother Tumbletee was taking me to the Upperworld. We were going to play a game. Wasn’t that nice. I was very fond of games. Tumbletee told me I had an ancestral home and vast estate. Apparently I am the richest man in England, isn’t that marvellous! If I played the game well, Daddy said I could go back to my castle and live in the Upperworld. I was wearing a lovely coat with red lovehearts over it. Daddy gave it to me as a present. I do like hearts, such a curious thing, the heart, and very tasty.
“What game are we going to play, brother?” I asked him.
Tumbletee put on his black top hat with a red sash, his white hair sticking out like silver threads, his voice a lizard hiss. “Follow me and you will find out, little brother.”
August 1887
I returned the same day I was taken. Snow rested on the ground. Mad weather for August. Everything was topsy turvy. Dangling on all the trees around my ancestral home were severed heads hanging from the branches, dripping blood onto the snow.
“Do you like my gift?” Tumbletee licked his lips.
There must have been a hundred heads or more. Mad fruit.
“Yes, yes. We are in the thick of it. Deep like custard,” and my big brother put his arm around me. “Before I leave you, you must do something for Daddy,” and he guided me towards the front door of my white home. A head hung from the doorknocker, its eyeballs wobbling about like jelly. He opened the door with a great silver key. Sitting at the hall table was my mother.
“I dug her up for you,” he joked.
The table was laid with a white lace teacloth and on it a pile of jam sandwiches and a steaming pot of tea. “Isn’t this a warming reunion? Tea with Mother.” And he guided me to a seat next to her. Her skin was green, her eyes clouded over. Mother. I remember you. I am a cracked teapot. The fault lines run deep. I could smell the rottenness of her. Tumbletee poured the tea and passed me the sandwiches. “Tuck in.”
Isn’t this a strange world? I am having tea with the dead. I am made of marmalade. I am smiling and smiling and cracking and breaking within your hands.
Dearie me, I dropped my teacup.
And he left me there. In my ancestral home with my dead mother and my vast gardens of chopped heads.
Madness is only a word.
Loveheart.
VI: July 1888
Detective Sergeant White & the Invitation
It was lying on my desk when I returned from Doctor Cherrytree’s practice: a little white envelope with a loveheart ink splodge. A dangerous little thing.
* * *
Dear Detective Sergeant White,
You have been invited – Yes, you! – to an art exhibition of Elijah Whistle. All your favourite monsters will be attending.
Bring Walnut if you wish.
Mr Loveheart ♥
* * *
“Constable Walnut!” I shouted, and he appeared, poking his head round the door.
“Yes sir?”
“It appears Mr Loveheart has decided to give us a helping hand.”
The Moonstone Opera hou
se, nestled near the Thames, was the venue for the evening art exhibition. It was raining heavily and the streets were oozing with liquid. Purple banners hung, heavy with rain, outside the doors and a soft velvet rope sealed the doorway. It was guarded by an attendant with white gloves, holding a large black umbrella.
“Very posh,” sighed Constable Walnut. “I’ve often considered trying my hand at painting. Bit of an artistic gift running in my family,” and he held up his hands. “Creative hands.”
“I’d keep that to yourself, Walnut, if I were you.”
We approached the attendant.
“Evening gentlemen, may I see your invitations?” He glanced a somewhat suspicious eye over our invite and then reluctantly held the velvet rope aside. The building inside was circular, with a large selection of paintings adorning the walls.
We deposited our coats and stepped into the main exhibition area, in which twenty or so people were gathered. Above the main room was a high balcony overlooking the main exhibition, where an enormous painting of Lady Clarence was hung. She was lying, lizard-like, on a sofa in a vibrant maroon dress. Her expression was odd: it was a mixture of conceit and a strange slyness. And then I realized why, for her hand was resting on a clock. A secret message for all those involved, I thought. Suggesting she has some sort of power over death.
“It’s quite a statement,” a voice like little bells said next to me, and I turned and looked directly at Mr Loveheart. He was dressed in otherworldly green with red hearts bursting like stab wounds all over him. “Of course,” he continued, “these people are all rather stupid. We must not be too hard on them. Their little magic clocks have made them a bit mad.”