by Paul Sussman
I tried to catch the culprit, but to no avail, and eventually, beside myself, left a pleading letter on the doorstep begging them to go away, accompanied by a 20-pound bribe. It was a desperate act, and I held out little hope that it would work. Rather to my surprise, however, it has. Or, so far, at least. Early on Thursday morning, that being yesterday, the knocking stopped, and there hasn’t been a peep since. You could hear a pin drop in the castle. Yesterday evening I sneaked down and eased the front door open a few inches and saw that the letter and money had gone. If I’d known they just wanted cash I could have solved the problem days ago. That knocking really has been screwing me up.
I do feel a bit cheapened that I’ve had to buy my peace and quiet. Such things are, I feel, a man’s by right (and a woman’s too). With less than a day left to live, however, I’m not overly bothered about the expenditure. If it gives me the space and security to get my note done then it was a price worth paying. I just hope I haven’t set some sort of precedent. I haven’t got much money left, and need to keep some back to pay Dr Bannen when he comes later this afternoon.
Curiously, the thumping inside my back, around the area of my wings, also seems to have quietened down. It’s still there, thud thud thud, but softer and, more importantly, it seems to have settled down into a regular pattern, like a pulse, or a heartbeat. What I found so distracting about it before was that it would come and go, never giving me the chance to get used to it, to assimilate the sensation. One minute it was there, the next it wasn’t, and then it was again, jerking me in and out of my concentration like a marionette on a string.
Now, however, it has evened out into a consistent, soft, metronomic pounding, and although I’d rather it wasn’t there at all I have at least been able to adjust myself to the rhythm of its hammering. It’s no longer disturbing my work. It has become a part of my bodily process. If it would just stay like this for the next 20 hours or so I’ll be a happy man. Down, wings! Down!
So, I’m feeling happy because the knocking on the front door has stopped, and because the knocking in my back has eased off, and because I’m rather pleased with my description of the whole Prince Gummy episode. Above all, however, I’m happy because I’ve come up with a solution to the vexed question of what to do above my doorframes. And a bloody marvellous solution it is too!
You may remember that on Wednesday night I suddenly decided I didn’t like leaving the space above each doorframe empty. Since then I’ve been racking my brains as to what to do with those frustrating rectangles of hovering whiteness. Amongst other options I’ve considered:
1) Painting them in (there are a couple of tins of black matt down in the basement).
2) Putting a big thick cross through each one, as though they were boxes on some gigantic questionnaire.
3) Drawing pictures in them.
4) Filling them with abstract loops and spirals, like the designs on the pages of an illuminated manuscript.
5) Collecting some bracken and grasses and doing a sort of flower arrangement in them.
Then, however, at about six o’clock last night, as the first stars twinkled coldly through the smudged windows of the upstairs gallery, the answer suddenly burst upon me.
‘Of course!’ I cried. ‘It’s so obvious. I’ll fill the space with names! Each doorway leads to a murder, so above each doorway should be the name of the victim. Like a sort of chapter heading.’
It was indeed the obvious solution, and I felt a trifle foolish not to have thought of it before.
‘Flower arranging indeed!’ I chided myself. ‘You’re a fool, Raphael. Always have been, always will be. A bloody fool!’
I was delighted with my new idea, and got to work immediately, abandoning Gummy-Molars mid-flow and transporting my ladder downstairs to the foyer, where I set it up before the doorway to the first of the ground-floor rooms. I then climbed up and, in large purple letters – good colour, purple; very eye-catching – wrote Mrs Ethel Bunshop above the doorframe, underlining the name and surrounding it with a garland of curlicues and squiggles. I climbed down to admire my handiwork and then, on a whim, remounted and drew a picture of a matchstick figure with its hair on fire in the top-right-hand corner of the panel.
The effect of these minor additions was startling. I had thought the note looked good before, but now, by dint of a single purple-lettered name and a rather childish drawing, it seemed to come alive before my eyes. Where previously it had all appeared rather uniform and two-dimensional, it now leapt right off the walls at me, demanding to be read. It felt richer and more satisfying, just as a seascape is more satisfying when there’s a sail or an island to break the ceaseless, distended monotony of the water.
‘It works!’ I cried excitedly, standing on the far side of the dim foyer and gazing across my work like an artist gazing at a newly painted portrait. ‘By God, it works! Just look how much perspective it’s added. How much depth!’
I stared proudly at my masterpiece for several minutes, moving about the foyer so as to view it from different angles – it looked particularly good from the castle’s south-eastern corner, near the entrance to the kitchen – and then set about filling in the names of all my other victims. Above the next doorway I wrote Mrs Bunshop (cont.) – if you remember, she filled two rooms – accompanying her moniker with another matchstick person, this one engulfed in flames from head to foot. I then moved on to the doorway to the downstairs gallery, over which I wrote Walter X. & Keith Cream (with, respectively, drawings of a hot-air balloon and a pumpkin); then the kitchen (Lord Slaggsby and a cream cake); the cellar (The Albino Twins and two teddy bears); the study (Mr Popplethwaite and a large safe); the bathroom (Luther Dextrus and an alligator) and, finally, the upstairs gallery (Prince Gummy-Molars & Miss Dorothy Wasply, with a catapult and an exploding bath). I haven’t yet decided what to put over the door to my bedroom, but since I won’t get there till late this afternoon there’s no real hurry. I’ve got plenty of time to think about it.
(I should perhaps remark that whilst I filled in the spaces above the outside of each door, I left those above the inside empty. Aside from wishing to save time, I’m also much less concerned about these interior blanks, since you can’t actually see them unless you physically enter the room. Out of sight, as they say, out of mind.)
It took me almost five hours to complete all the doorways in the castle – I’m a slow artist – and I then wasted another 30 minutes wandering around marvelling at my efforts, so that it wasn’t until almost midnight that I finally returned to the note proper. Thereafter things progressed steadily enough, and by 3.30 a.m., the very last 3.30 a.m. of my life, I finally brought Gummy to a close. He occupies the northern half of the upstairs gallery, starting to the right of the door and ending to the left of the windows, and, as with Walter below, I’ve cordoned him off by scraping a deep and rather unsightly groove across the dusty wooden floor. His death unfolds in two colours, red and a sort of algae-coloured light green, and in letters of about average height. Perhaps very slightly smaller than average.
I am currently writing between the two east-facing gallery windows, closer to the right-hand one than to the left, and, aside from the persistent drum-roll in my back, am feeling fit and confident. My eyes in particular appear to be sharper and more focused than they’ve been at any time in my life, as though death were a sort of grindstone, honing the blade of my vision to a perfect edge. Yesterday afternoon I noticed for the first time that one of the eastward islands has a small house on its leeward side. I had no idea people lived out there.
I should now by rights be getting on with my next murder. It’s been a good night, but time is still of the essence. I’m reticent to start, however, until I’ve passed the right-hand gallery window – that way I can fit Miss Wasply precisely into the space between the window and the door. That leaves me about two and a half columns’ worth of wall space to fill. I haven’t got much else to say about the note, or my health, or my splendid door-headings, and so I’ve decided to increase the size of my
writing a little, each letter swelling to the size of a nice fat gooseberry, and tell you about the time as a child when I went on a picnic to Greenwich with Father, Emily and Mrs Eggs.
Mrs Eggs was always taking me and Emily on picnics. We had picnics in Regent’s Park, picnics in Hyde Park, picnics in Richmond Park, picnics in the garden and even picnics upstairs in the nursery when the weather was bad and it was too wet to go outside.
Father, however, never came on these excursions. He was far too busy with his inventing.
‘Please, Father,’ I’d implore. ‘We’ve got fairy cakes and jam sandwiches and lemonade. And Emily’s coming too. It’s going to be the best fun in the world.’
‘Oh, if only I could,’ he’d sigh. ‘If only I could. But my experiments are at a critical stage, don’t you see? I simply can’t leave them. You run along and have a good time and I’ll see you when you come home. Off you go!’
And so we’d troop off to Regent’s Park, or Hyde Park, or Richmond Park, or into the garden, or upstairs to the nursery, with our fairy cakes and jam sandwiches and lemonade, and always without Father.
Until one day, to everyone’s consternation, including, I suspect, his own, he announced that, for once, his experiments weren’t at a critical stage and he was coming too.
‘Your father’s coming on the picnic!’ screamed Mrs Eggs, getting quite hysterical at the thought. ‘It’ll have to be cucumber sandwiches! Only cucumber sandwiches will do. But where am I going to get a cucumber at this short notice! I’m going to have a heart attack!’
Eventually, after much to-do, she managed to track down a cumbumber (that’s what Emily always called them) without suffering a coronary, and, the sandwiches made and packed in a large basket, we all set out on the train to Greenwich, Emily and I peering out of the window, Father smoking his pipe and Mrs Eggs fretting that she hadn’t made enough food, something she always did, despite having invariably packed enough to feed a small army.
It was a fine, warm summer’s day, and in Greenwich we marched up through the park and laid out a blanket on the grass beside the Royal Observatory.
‘Well, this is nice,’ said Father, gazing out across the Thames and puffing on his pipe. ‘I really should do this more often.’
‘You can come whenever you want,’ I said.
‘I’m sure I haven’t made enough,’ moaned Mrs Eggs, fiddling around in the picnic basket, which was so heavy it had taken two of us to lug it up the hill. ‘We’re all going to starve!’
We didn’t, however, and after we’d devoured a mountain of sandwiches and cakes and biscuits and sweets and drunk a lake’s worth of lemonade, Emily and I ran off to play hide-and-seek amongst the trees whilst Mrs Eggs passed out in an exhausted slumber and Father sat reading that month’s issue of the Inventors’ Review. Every now and then I would look back at him, a halo of pipe smoke hovering above his head, a faint smile on his face, just to make sure he was still there and that his presence on our picnic wasn’t simply a daydream. He was still there, however, and I remember feeling happier than I had ever felt before.
‘Race you to that tree over there!’ cried Emily.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Last one’s a sissy. Wait a minute! I haven’t said “Go” yet!’
Later Father joined us for another round of hide-and-seek, and gave us each a piggy-back, and played some I Spy, although we soon got bored of the latter because all the things Father spied were so impossible to guess.
‘No,’ he’d say after we’d spent half an hour trying to work out what the particular something beginning with ‘a’ was, ‘it’s not an apple, or an ant, it’s that amputee sitting down there on the bench. Can you see, children, he’s only got one arm.’
Later still, Mrs Eggs told us a story about a prince who was turned into a toad. Father supplied the toad sound effects and Emily and I rolled about laughing.
We stayed in the park until the sun started to drop westwards beyond the river and then packed up our things and wandered slowly back down the hill. Father bought us all iced-creams, and we stopped for a while to throw sticks in the river. On the train home I started to cry.
‘Why can’t you come on every picnic, Father,’ I snivelled. ‘It’s been such a good day.’
‘From now on, I will,’ he declared, patting my head. ‘Every single one.’
He never did, however. The cumbumber sandwich picnic in Greenwich Park was the only one he ever came on. That’s probably why I remember it so fondly. Why it occupies such a special place in the museum of my memories. Why, even now, over 90 years later, I still break into a huge smile whenever I think about it. Cumbumber sandwiches and lemonade and hide-and-seek – it really was the best fun in the world.
All of which brings me very nicely down to the skirting board directly to the left of the second gallery window. My writing is now back to its normal size (i.e. that of raisins) and I’m still using that algae-coloured light-green pen. It’s almost five o’clock on the morning of Friday, 31st December 1999, the last day of the millennium, the last full day of my life, and Dr Bannen’s coming in ten hours’ time. I know I can kill Ms Wasply by then. I know I can. I just need . . . What the fuck! Someone’s just blown a raspberry through my letterbox! A bloody great loud rippling raspberry! And now – oh no, no, no! – that bloody knocking’s started again! Boom, boom, fucking boom! I AM GOING TO RIP SOMEONE’S FUCKING HAND OFF!
Twenty minutes later. Didn’t catch them, of course, the knocker, the raspberry blower, the shit. They obviously want more cash, but they’re not going to get it. I’ve had enough. Standing on the doorstep, I screamed at the very top of my voice: ‘Fuck off, you cunt! You’re not getting any more money out of me!’ So now they know.
The stress has set my back off again. Thud thud thud. Hammering inside. Knocking outside. It’s a wonder I’m managing to keep my sanity. And I’ve now gone past the second of the two gallery windows. Bollocks!
Come on, Raphael!
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ALTHOUGH IN TERMS of strict chronology Dorothy Wasply was the second person I killed, she was actually my first proper victim in the sense that her death was deliberately planned and executed. The more generous amongst you might even consider her my only proper victim – in no other instance have I murdered with quite the same degree of premeditation as I did in the case of Emily’s dragon-faced governess. Her removal – oh, sweet explosion! – is inextricably bound up with my childhood and early days with Emily, and it is somehow fitting that now at the very end of my life the time has come to transport myself, and you too, almost right the way back to its very beginning.
Time and wall space being pressing – I still have to tell you what happened with Emily the other night – I shan’t waste too much of either with an excessively detailed account of my very earliest years.
I was born not long after midnight in the cold, dark, early hours of 1st January 1900, and was, if the photos are anything to go by, a marvellously healthy baby, with a huge toothless smile and a full head of shimmering blond hair. When he beheld me for the first time, apparently, my father wept.
I stepped off into the world at White Lodge, our crumbling, whitewashed home in Regent’s Park, and it was here, as well as committing my first murder, that I spent the early part of my life.
Mother wasn’t around, of course, and Father spent most of his time secreted in his workshop, emerging only to confront his more voluble creditors and when accidents with chemicals necessitated the evacuation of the room on safety grounds. Aside from that, however, and the fact that people were forever commenting on my unnaturally large blue eyes, my existence was a consummately normal one.
I played with my toy soldiers, built camps in the attic, surveyed the world through a miniature telescope my aunt had bought me and went on long walks in the park with dear old Mrs Eggs, always taking a bag of breadcrumbs with us so we could feed the ducks around the lake. I drank copious amounts of milk, detested semolina (still do) and developed, about the age of three, a ta
ste for woodlice, which I would pluck from beneath stones and eat raw. My knees, I seem to recall, were permanently grazed, and my favourite books were an illustrated volume of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and The Magic Castle, by someone whose name I can’t remember.
At the age of three or thereabouts I started at a small nursery school near our home, where I made a number of friends, including a pasty-faced child called Ginger. For a year Ginger and I were inseparable, until he stole my W. G. Grace cigarette card, whereupon I punched him on the nose and we never spoke again.
Other memories of those early years include a week’s holiday in Margate, where I rode on a donkey and was violently ill after eating five sticks of rock; a severe bout of measles from which it was touch and go whether or not I’d recover; a stern dressing-down from a policeman after I’d fired my catapult at a passing hansom cab, causing the horses to rear; and a Christmas carol concert where a large candle fell out of its holder and set light to baby Jesus in his manger beneath. These and various other minor occurrences aside, however, nothing of any great note happened to me until the afternoon of my sixth birthday, that being 1st January 1906. Then, however, something of very great note happened. I met Emily. And with her my life really begins.
I heard her before I saw her, and saw her before she saw me. It was a cold, clear afternoon, and I was playing in the garden when, from beyond the wall surrounding our house, I heard the most enchanting sound.
‘Go on, Miss Wasply! Throw it high up.’
There followed a considerably less enchanting sound – ‘I will not throw it high up, young lady! Particularly when you address me in that disgraceful tone of voice!’ – before the first voice, more insistent this time, was heard again:
‘You will throw it high up, Miss Wasply! You will, I say.’
Casting aside the toy sword with which I had up to that point been amusing myself, I hurried over to the garden wall and, clambering up an old plum tree – the old plum tree, the one from whose branches Father used to pluck coins – gazed over into the park beyond. Ten yards away, her arms outspread ready to catch, was a young girl with blonde hair and extremely green eyes. She was wearing a thick blue coat and was standing opposite a tall, stern-looking woman who, with her flared nostrils, bulging eyes and enormous chin, bore, a striking resemblance to a dragon.