The Singular & Extraordinary Tale of Mirror & Goliath: From the Peculiar Adventures of John Lovehart, Esq., Volume 1 (Notebooks of John Loveheart, E)

by Ishbelle Bee

  “Iths a thad dhay. The death of Elilah Whhithlle hath moved uth all. Deeply.” The vicar’s tongue wobbled about his mouth.

  Lady Clarence began to wail.

  “I know how she feels,” I said.

  “Elithhahh whath a phhainther. A phhalennted indivduhal...”

  I could bear it no more and lopped the vicar’s head off with my sword,. It spun into a nearby gravestone, bounced, and then plopped into a hedge.

  I then turned to Obadiah and swooshed the sword across his neck, his head dropping neatly into the open grave.

  Doctor Cherrytree began to make a run for it – he really was a terrible coward – while Inspector Salt stood in my way. “I am arresting you for murder. Put the sword down, Mr Loveheart. You’re obviously having a little turn.”

  “No, inspector, I am not having a little turn. I am, in fact, on a killing spree.” And I chopped his head off too, the blood splattering across myself and Lady Clarence’s face. At least she wasn’t running away – she was made of stronger stuff. She glared at me instead.

  “You stupid little man,” she spat. “You’re not going to kill a woman.”

  “Actually, I’ve killed several women. And all of them nasty pieces of work, just like you, madam.”

  “You’re a devil!” she cried.

  “No, I’m not a devil. Merely a man who is fighting for his soul.” I chopped her head off and she sank to her knees. I was covered in blood. I couldn’t distinguish the hearts from the blood. I turned to look for Doctor Cherrytree.

  But then I heard Bad Daddy speaking.

  “Loveheart.” It was a voice from the deep dark. It was Mr Fingers. He was leaning against a headstone, smiling gently. “My dear boy. Am I interrupting something?”

  “No, does it look like I’m busy?”

  “Thought I’d pay you a visit. I need to send you on a little errand.”

  “Can’t you get your other son to do it?”

  “You were always my favourite.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “I will gobble you up.” His voice was a black hole in space. And the dead stayed quiet in their graves. “Good boy. Now I have your attention, I need you to go to Whitby. I have found the girl. The girl in the grandfather clock. I need you to bring her here to me.”

  July 1888

  The Curious Case of Daphne Withers

  I was the mistake. I was the ending of the clockmaker. The tickety-tock maker. Little did I know as I was growing up that I would end up in a ladies’ watch, with a topaz butterfly gilt in a display cabinet.

  Bit of an odd ending, really.

  I was twelve years old, small for my age and plain-featured. I had a gift for playing the piano, so I was told, and no brothers or sisters. On my father’s birthday I had decided to buy him a pocket watch. A very special one. Recently my parents had hosted a dinner party and one of my father’s friends, a Doctor Cherrytree, attended. He had the most beautiful pocket watch. It was silver and engraved with a serpent with ruby eyes. He told me about the clock making shop where he acquired it – and so I decided to find a wonderful gift for my father.

  I was wearing a plain white dress, white gloves, and a yellow ribbon in my hair. My hair was very long and the colour of sand. It was the same colour as my grandmother’s. The yellow ribbon was a gift from her. It was made of silk and was so soft to touch.

  The day was fine, so I walked through the park, the avenue of trees cool and regimented, planted in straight lines.

  I had sat and painted watercolours here; but they were not very accomplished, so my tutor informed me. The park was a flat, green, open space with borders of yellow and pink flowers – and paths as unbending as arrows. There were ladies in carriages, wearing pink gloves and fixed smiles. A gentleman on a bicycle rode past me and tipped his hat. He had a dark moustache, hairy and strange, and his teeth were yellow and bent, and I could see the pink tip of his tongue sticking through. It felt like some sort of warning. Some sort of sign.

  But I continued down the straight path. It was at times like those I wished I had a brother or sister to take with me, to talk to. I suppose I was quite lonely. I knew I was lucky to live in a nice house with a good family. I was told this regularly by my parents. I wonder, if you are continuously told how lucky you are, something bad eventually happens.

  I was lucky

  I was lucky

  I was lucky

  I

  was

  so

  lucky.

  The gentleman on the bicycle rode past me again. This time he was smiling. He circled me with his bike, playfully. Marking out a circle. Enclosing me. I ignored him; I kept my eyes straight ahead on the path through the park. And then he rode off. The danger was gone.

  I was lucky.

  The path approached the vast flat lake in the centre of the park. I could see a white boat with couples oar-in-hand sail past. The air was calm, the water flickered gently, a few ducks floated past, comfy and quacking. The colours of this park were watery blue and soft greens with a few drops of Turkish delight pink and buttercup yellow, and a great deal of grey. It was a boring watercolour. A bad painting. A line of heavy-laden trees stretched over my head, momentarily putting me into shadow. Cool and dark. For a moment I felt that heavy shadow over my head, as though the features of my face had disappeared. As though I had gone. As though I was already slipping away out of this life, out of this world. And yet I kept walking.

  The darkness made me think about Doctor Cherrytree. He had a face like a shadow, it hides his real intentions. He had clever little dark eyes and a very ugly mouth. Over dinner he was telling my father about his photographs. He takes pictures of souls leaving human bodies. He showed me one of them. It was a picture of an old lady in her armchair. She looked as though she were asleep, a book resting in her lap and over her head a wispy trail of light, which Doctor Cherrytree said was her soul.

  I asked him, “Have you trapped her soul in the photograph?” And I remember, that was the point when he took out his pocket watch and checked the time. It was humming like a soft insect. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and he was very pleased that I liked it. He seemed amused by it. The way he looked at me: he saw a plain, not very interesting girl; he saw something empty in me. And I think that’s why he let me look at his watch. He let me touch the ruby snake eyes. They were warm, like fire beads. And he took a small card out of his pocket with an address on it and said, “Why don’t you get one for your father for his birthday? Here is the address of the shop.”

  That card was in my purse. It had his fingertip prints on it. Maybe he left a trace of his own soul upon it. And, I wondered, when I die will Mr Cherrytree take a photograph of me?

  I walked round the edges of the lake, the path still straight as a line, all clear. I could see the exit; I could see the gates in the distance. Children played on the lawn with a fox-eyed Nanny; a policeman strolled past, eyes ahead, always looking ahead. My feet kept moving, one step after another, as though I were an automaton. I had a wind up clock monkey that walks up and down on the carpet that Daddy got from India. That’s what I felt like, now. I was moving but someone else had control over me. I was turning into dark spaces. Emptying.

  The rest of my journey I forgot, as though it wasn’t important. As though I had been switched off. When I arrived at the clock-maker’s shop I felt like I had woken up, and I looked into the window at the beautiful display. They were like precious jewels glinting, touched with something magical. A dark elixir. I found it hard to take my eyes off them. Right in the centre of the display was a silver toad with its mouth open, and inside a clock ticked gently. It made me feel calm, its soft ticking a creepy crawly sleepiness. I opened the door to the shop, the bell above my head ringing, and I knew suddenly.

  I was already a dead thing

  Albert Chimes was standing in front of me with a strange magnifying eye contraption on his eyes. He was a very old man. His body didn’t seem comfortable within its
skin, as though it were a bad fit. I think he might have been near to a hundred years old. He looked like a wizard in a fairy tale. One that lives in a strange tower in a forest. A dangerous wizard, who had gone mad, maybe? Is London a great forest? Am I in a magical tower? I think I may have walked into a fairy story.

  He took the eye contraption off and smiled politely. “Good morning, young lady. How may I help you?”

  I could hear a cat purring, and a slinky plump black-as-night feline materialized on the shelf, watching me with dazzling emerald eyes.

  “Her name is Cleopatra. Do you like cats?” His smile remained fixed.

  “I have come for a gift for my father. It’s his birthday. And yes, I do like cats. She is very pretty.”

  “What sort of clock would your father like?”

  “A pocket watch.”

  “I have quite a few pocket watches at the moment. Step over here and we’ll have a look in the display cabinet.”

  I crossed to him, where a glass cabinet with a purple velvet lining sat. Inside, a dozen pocket watches were nesting. As comfy as eggs. All of them were made of silver, some with gold threads and jewels. Some had animals carved into them, or symbols: I saw a fox with a diamond tail, a tortoise with a green jewelled shell, one with an eye symbol, another with a row of dancing imps. But in the corner, I saw a watch for my father: it had an engraving of a kingfisher with a key in its mouth. My father had always loved kingfishers.

  “That is the one I want,” and I pointed to it. Albert Chimes was just about to open the case, when he looked at me rather oddly. The way the man on the bike had looked at me.

  Circling me.

  Part Three

  I: Mirror & Her Sisters

  What is my earliest memory? I remember when I was called Myrtle. That was my name. One of three sisters.

  Myrtle Violet Rose.

  We were listening to Grandpa tell us a fairy story. It was about a wolf who lived in the forest and he was very hungry. I remember Violet was frightened; she didn’t like his big teeth and his big yellow eyes.

  Wolves are supposed to love the moon, they are deeply in love with her. She protects them, she gives them power, feeds them with love. Stars tremble about her.

  Grandpa says the wolf can disguise himself. He wears the clothes of humans so they can be tricked and eaten. In this story there is a little girl with a red cloak. She carries a hunting knife in case a wolf tries to eat her. A huntsman watches over her, he has a big axe and he knows the forest and can recognize wolves.

  Is London a great forest? Are there wolves dressed in top hats? Smiling, eating cake and drinking tea?

  My name was Myrtle. I didn’t own anything red. The only red was my hair. My sisters’ hair was brown. My sisters said fairy folk have red hair. Red as a sacrifice. Am I a piece of meat? Will a handsome wolf man want me for dinner?

  Grandpa says the wolf dresses up as the little girl’s grandma and sits in bed waiting for her. Granny’s shawl on his shoulders, her spectacles perched on the end of his wolfish snout. Tucked up in bed. The moon heavy, prehistoric above him. A night light.

  “I don’t want her to get eaten,” said Rose, and covered her ears.

  “If you don’t listen to the story, you won’t learn anything,” Grandpa replied, his yellowish teeth snapping together. What did he want us to learn? Did he want us to carry an axe? What was the lesson?

  The moon is always on the side of wolves. The huntsman guards the forest path. If you have tea with a wolfman in a top hat then you will probably be eaten. Maybe the granny wasn’t tricked. Maybe she let him in. Maybe there is something inside us that wants to be gobbled up. My sisters were scared of the story, they didn’t like wolves. I touched my hair, I could feel the heat, the teasing itch.

  And that was my first memory.

  My name was Myrtle. When I died, I jumped into a mirror. Became a reflection. Part of the moon. The wolves sing to me at night now.

  II: Pomegranate

  The Wife of Mr Fingers

  I was abducted from a field of flowers when I was sixteen years old. There were poppies in the field, as red as fire. Bursting like blood vessels. I remember that he smelt of angels. My Auntie Eva told me that angels smell like fireworks because the atmosphere burns their wings, crackles them like paper under a lighted match. Auntie Eva said never trust angels because they are beautiful. But he wasn’t beautiful. He was small and poisonous with dark spectacles. I wanted him so much to be beautiful.

  On hot summer afternoons I used to visit her. She lived in a rundown cottage near the river, cracks in the walls, white paint flaking like old skin. I would touch those walls with my finger, imagining I was touching a tree and trying and guess its age. Ring on ring. She called herself a happy spinster. She hated men and mirrors. She said both were liars.

  Sometimes she would make a pot of tea and we would sit and feed the birds in her little garden, mostly blackbirds and one very overweight robin who was her favourite. We sat in a lazy dream listening to the slow fat beat of wings and the soft slithering of snails. Sometimes she would read my palm. She had an interest in the occult. Her grandmother Molly had been a fortune-teller in Brighton on the pier. There was a strange old photograph of her in the hallway with a red turban on her head and a dead stuffed snake coiled in her lap. She looked like a fraud. Auntie Eva would polish her picture every spring like an ornament to make sure Grandma Molly could keep a watchful eye over us. I wondered why. There really was nothing much to see.

  The cottage was small and painted with the colour of sunflowers, which had faded over the years into a smoker’s-finger yellow. The furniture was all from philanthropic charities, a broken sofa with a floral print and a ringworm occasional table. Wonky legged chairs and a strange squashy cushion seat with bumblebees embroidered on it, flying in circles. Her strange assortment of relatives adorned the walls in old frames, a photograph of Grandma Molly’s father, Reginald Crump, a taxidermist who was hung for poisoning his wife. Reggie’s portrait was appropriately hung in the outdoor privy. In Aunt Eva’s bedroom, in a beautiful ornate frame decorated with dragonflies coiling like the fingers of a magician, danced around a picture of twin baby boys in a pram. The names underneath read Arthur & Goliath, Cairo 1850. Their father was as rich as a prince and was an explorer and archaeologist and his name was Gawain Honey-Flower, a huge man who had travelled out to Cairo and, as Aunt Eva fondly recalled, met a beautiful Egyptian woman, plump as a pagan goddess. The story changed depending on how much wine Aunt Eva had drunk. Sometimes she was “a witch, who had caught Gawain’s soul in a mirror”, other times “the daughter of a pig farmer, who had a toothy grin like a carved pumpkin on Halloween”. Either way, the fate of their children remained the same on each story telling. A year later the twins were born: Arthur who sucked his fingers and Goliath who gobbled everything up just like a bear cub.

  Goliath was sent to a boys’ school in England whilst Arthur trained with his father as an archaeologist and participated in the excavations of the tombs of the Pharaohs and the deciphering of hieroglyphics. At the age of 22, whilst exploring the Nile with a French aristocrat, he fell in whilst drunk and was eaten by a crocodile. Goliath was Aunt Eva’s favourite relative because he was “physically enormous and hairy”, two attributes which she thought of as wondrous. The remaining less interesting relatives were spotted throughout the house: a sturdy housekeeper, a balding pharmacist, a non-descript postman, a shrivelled florist and finally, lurking rather suspiciously in a mother of pearl frame by the cat flap, an incredibly ugly coffin maker. I wondered where she would end up putting me.

  Aunt Eva was a great collector of knick-knacks and loved roaming round the flea markets, sometimes picking up the most disgusting and unusual items. In her kitchen drawer was a jar with floating glass eyeballs, a pair of birthing stirrups and a quack doctor’s prescription: Dr Tumbleweeds “Magical Remedy” for ailments of the heart, as thick and black as syrup. I opened it once, it stank of toffee apples and something rotting. On h
er bedroom table sat an assortment of coloured glass perfume bottles, aquamarine, ruby red, snail silver, flamenco pink. Little magic jars, each with a strange smell: peaches and cream, mothballs, lavender and butterfly wings, tickling the nostrils. On her hand mirror there was a picture of her and my mother when they were my age, wearing strange dresses and holding hands. I examined the photograph carefully; they were almost identical, it was only the sly look in Aunt Eva’s eye that gave her identity away. My mother never looked sly, always calm, always snow white.

  The river curled round the bottom of Auntie’s garden, lapping like a greedy tongue. It was deep and thick water, full of glittering slime and snake-tail weeds. Her garden was on a slope, descending into the riverbank where great spongy heaps of frogspawn floated, soft and glistening. Occasionally we would see a little boat sail along the river, with a red sail. The man in it was a local, Mr Wishbone. He caught freshwater fish and slept on his boat. I waved to him once but he ignored me. I thought he looked hundreds of years old, like a moth-eaten wizard. Perhaps if you gazed into his eyes, you would turn into nothing. Aunt Eva had told me he’s an old miserable bastard and if he ever moored his boat at the bottom of her garden she would drill a hole in it and watch him sink.

  On one afternoon that she read my palm, she opened a bottle of red wine and, after a few generous glasses, held my hand like a prayer book, studying the lines, the hidden words, the invisible threads of me. And she always said the same thing – “Someone is coming for you; he has ladybirds in his eyes.” – and then she laughed sadly.

  “Is it a handsome prince?” I would say. She looked away from me. I took my hand away like a book that has been read and discarded. The little rituals we went through, they were always the same. As if we were both waiting for something to happen, something that, like lightning, would strike and leave a terrible imprint upon us. While we waited, we played these games.