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That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

Page 3

by K. J. Bishop


  The cold was soon joined by a burning smell – this, too, he remembered from before – as if there were a fire nearby, but he could see no sign of smoke or flames. The sounds of Cake Street dwindled away behind him, while the darkness thickened in the streets – so small that they seemed like tunnels in a mountain of brick. In the absence of street lamps, only occasional dull lights in the tenement windows, brown with oil and dust, confirmed the presence of living beings.

  Seaming kept his eyes averted from the windows as, following the directions he had memorised, he crept along by the general faint light of the city, which streaked the cloudy March sky with a gravy of ruddy greys and left enormous enclaves of shadow unprodded.

  He began to fancy that he could hear constant movement – mostly animal scrabblings, but sometimes human footsteps. These never came from ground level, but always from somewhere above or below. He formed an impression of a world of rooftops and sewers, a world more three-dimensional than the ordinary one, where human beings had learned the insect trick of making all surfaces serve as the ground plane. To distract himself, he tried to concentrate on this aesthetically interesting aspect of his surroundings; however, as distractions went, it fell some way short of ideal.

  He wished he had a lamp, or even a candle; but his visitor had warned him that a light carried in the Ravels identified its bearer as a mucker, with no legitimate business being there – as legitimacy was esteemed by the locals – and thus fair game for any bored or idle cut-throat.

  She had been fair and slight, and wore a sequinned mask that covered her whole face. He felt that she must be a gentlewoman who had fallen on hard times, for she was well-spoken, and her dress, though years old in style, was of fine make and fabric.

  She had come to his studio hoping, she said, that he could help her. Showing him a cutting from a recent magazine article on local painters in which he had been featured, she had indicated a heavily underlined paragraph:

  Alfred Seaming’s portraits could be images of saints. He perceives an urgent need for a new idealism. ‘What is the point of merely reproducing the commonplace world, with all its banality and vice? I wish to paint my sitters’ noblest qualities, which, I believe, are the qualities of their true selves.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said hurriedly, ‘quite so.’ While he stood passionately by the words, he was embarrassed by how pompous they looked on paper. The truth of the matter was that he delighted in painting flattering portraits, and knew he had a knack for doing so that amounted to a kind of genius, while remaining modestly unwilling to take an interest in how high or low the flag of that genius might fly on the walls of civilisation when all was reckoned. The academic art establishment had made him into something of a mascot, and encouraged him to make much of his philosophy.

  She inspected his studio thoroughly, the glittering face making a study of each and every painting. At last she said, ‘Yes. You do have a talent for idealisation. But you will also need courage. If you have it, it does not show in your work. So, Mr Seaming, are you braver than you look?’

  He was taken aback by her bluntness, though he couldn’t deny the accuracy of her assessment. He hazarded a guess that the mask might be hiding not only her identity, but a face scarred or deformed. Still, what sort of horror could be under there that he would need more than ordinary bravery to look at it? He felt she was being overly theatrical. Somewhat on his dignity, he replied that while he was obviously not any sort of hero, he was not a craven man.

  ‘Prove that,’ she said, ‘and I will commission you. Whatever your usual fee is, I will pay triple. Danger should offer rewards, after all.’

  Seaming inquired what kind of proof she had in mind: was he to fight a duel? Walk slowly across Tourbillion Parade in the evening rush hour with his eyes shut?

  Nothing so foolish as either, she informed him. He had only to visit her in three nights’ time at a certain address in the Ravels, which she handed him on a plain card. If he would simply arrive there, at an hour after midnight, she would consider that proof of sufficient courage. He must also, she said, bring the tools of his trade.

  He came close to telling her that he was too busy. But his pride balked and his avarice flinched, and even his curiosity, usually a rather passive organ that functioned merely as an adjunct to his imagination, made small murmurs.

  Seaming found himself saying yes, she could expect to see him there.

  Later that day, feeling nervous and depressed, he had told Stroud the particulars of the situation. Stroud, whose father had probably been a count, had reminded him that he was merely a common man and had no obligation to be brave.

  Seaming had argued that even a common man should avoid hypocrisy. Lack of adventurous spirit surely fell among those tedious, petty and banal things he had always professed to despise.

  Stroud shrugged and said that he personally had never bothered to refrain from hypocrisy, but if Seaming wanted to worry like a poor hound and chase himself into uncomfortable corners, it was his business. This goading had galvanised Seaming’s spirit: he would not decline the dare.

  The air was no longer cold, but humid and greasy.

  He had just suffered down a pitch-dark, sludge-bottomed defile between blind walls, where he had had to feel his way to a covered stair. The stair had brought him to a derelict quadrangle, down the middle of which he now hurried, favouring that exposed route over the shadows in the cloisters. Oppressed by the sense that calamity was imminent, it was only the fear of betraying himself as an outsider that kept him from breaking into a run.

  Calamity refrained from occurring. Beyond the quadrangle there was an area, ascending a hill, of more prosperous if not much more pleasant appearance. The modestly wide street into which he stepped was a grand boulevard by comparison with the alleys below the stair, and the increased space brought a dilution of the darkness. He found himself among the ornate facades, as showy as they were cast down by the ravages of neglect and vandalism, of once-desirable addresses. But if the residents were better off than those below, they were no more open about their presence. There were only the same infrequent window lights, all heavily cloaked behind curtains and blinds, and the same dislocated sounds. Amongst the latter he heard an accordion playing, as if at a great distance. The music brought back to him, in a strange intense rush, memories of old gypsy men and their dances on the common in the village where he was born. He felt again his childish fear of the sounds and smells of their camp, his terror of everything about them.

  Seaming caught his imagination before it ran away with him completely. He told himself to at least be rationally afraid, if he was going to be afraid at all.

  According to the directions his visitor had given him, he was nearing his destination. He counted streets until he reached the one he was to turn up, and after climbing the hill for ten minutes he found the house.

  It stood on the corner of a cross street, on the other side of which was a kind of overgrown, heavily wooded park. His nerves gave pitiful thanks that he did not have to go any closer to the pitch-black massif of trees.

  The name ‘Park View’ was spelled out in rusty iron letters on the portico. A sullen glow penetrated the fanlight. Seaming pulled the bell-rope and waited. No one came. He gave the rope another tug. He couldn’t hear the bell ringing. He knocked, feeling that he was being watched from all directions, particularly from the park, which looked more like some wild ancient forest, harbouring primitive evils, than anything remotely civic. He waited again, for as long as he could endure, then knocked with more force, deciding that if no one answered this time it would not be at all dishonourable to leave his calling card and make his way back on the double. This time, however, he heard the sound of someone approaching, followed by the decisive clicks of more than one lock.

  The door opened.

  In the hall, holding a bunch of keys, was a child in a carnival costume.

  No.

  Not a child. It was some kind of old circus grotesque, an ancient stunted woman. Wha
t Seaming had at first taken for a mask was thick, white, dry makeup. Her black hair was piled up in a lacquered dome half as tall as herself. A wide-skirted dress belled from her waist to the floor.

  She bowed stiffly. As she straightened, she said in a voice atonal and distorted, ‘How can I help you?’

  Her mouth had remained shut as she spoke. Seaming stood dumbly, his muscles and thoughts gone slack.

  She bent forward and straightened again. The question repeated itself, in exactly the same mechanical monotone. He realised that she had a false voice box like that of a talking toy.

  Seaming had always had a slight horror of dolls and automata. Even as a child he had associated them with fetches, the undead, the diabolical. Now he felt suddenly terrified that whatever had been done to her might also be done to him. He thought of the other woman’s mask. Perhaps there was a plague here that destroyed bodily tissues. He imagined his face and throat rotting, caves opening in his flesh and filling with dust and spiders.

  She bent and repeated the phrase a third time.

  Embarrassed, Seaming fumbled in a pocket and presented his card. ‘The lady of the house is expecting me,’ he said.

  The dwarf turned her head to the right. Her voice box grated, ‘Come this way.’

  Seaming followed her. He avoided looking at her by studying the hall. It was papered in red flock and lit with weak brass lamps, which together created an ugly, heavy atmosphere, aggravated by a smell of dampness and animals, with a chemical note of furniture polish. She turned left into another passage, which ended at a flight of stairs. She pointed up to the next floor. Seaming found himself imagining a past for her. He could only think of sad and sordid things, and again his thoughts embarrassed him.

  He wanted both to run from her and to say something civil and friendly. He managed to thank her.

  She turned her head to the left. ‘You’re welcome.’

  He thought she smirked a little; then she left him.

  The woman was waiting for him at the top of the stairs. She was wearing another old, out-of-repair gown, this one of dark gold velvet with panels of seed pearls. Her mask glittered like a glimpse of metal in a mine.

  She undid the ribbon securing the mask and removed it.

  Seaming held his breath, steeling himself for whatever aberration or scarring might be revealed.

  When the mask was gone, he forgot to breathe entirely.

  Hers was the very face of loveliness.

  No odalisque, no great lady, no madonna, no serene and enigmatic muse upon any pedestal had a face to compare.

  ‘Welcome, Mr Seaming,’ she said. ‘My name is Beauty.’

  Seaming felt the urge to kneel. Standing, as he was, on the stairs, he managed a sort of half-curtsy.

  ‘I have worshipped you,’ he whispered. ‘I have sought you all my life.’

  ‘You and thousands of others, Mr Seaming,’ she said in a dry tone that he found painful to hear coming from such a face. ‘The mask allows me to live a life of my own; to seek rather than be sought, and to find rather than be found.’ She re-attached the mask. ‘I believe you should be able to look at me from a rational perspective again now.’

  ‘You cannot be mortal,’ Seaming faltered.

  He sensed that she smiled.

  ‘There are few things more mortal than I.’

  Seaming swallowed. ‘Why did you show me?’ His senses and emotions had in no way stopped reeling.

  ‘Because to understand my husband, as you must, you should see what he has seen and feel what he has felt. It is he whom you are to paint.’

  ‘He must be a god, then. No mortal man could look at you and live as a man. He would be a slave.’

  Now she laughed. ‘My husband is very far from being a god, though I have seen pictures of ancient gods whom he somewhat resembles, in his present state. But that is only a coincidence. He is not a man either, however, though he has taken to living more like a man than anything else.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Are your eyes the only sense you use, Mr Seaming? His presence pervades this house. Scent the air.’

  At first he did not know what she meant, but he soon noted how markedly more potent and acrid the animal smell became upstairs. It was an odour of hide, musk and gamey meat. It grew even stiffer as Beauty led him along the corridor.

  Seaming’s reason told him that the conclusion he drew was the only logical one. It gave his system another severe shock. ‘You keep company with a beast,’ he murmured. Then he turned red, as forbidden perverse images flocked into his mind. Women with swans. Women with serpents. Pubescent witches rutting with jaguars and hogs.

  ‘I see you understand,’ she said, as if he had made some completely ordinary comment. ‘The subject of maidens and monsters has a long and varied history. Not all stories end in the popular fashion, with the maiden rescued. Some of them have more elaborate outcomes. Our tale is such a one.’

  With a dry throat Seaming stammered, ‘The old woman downstairs… her injuries… did your husband cause…?’

  ‘He has nothing to do with her condition. But the damaged have a sense by which they seek each other out, Mr Seaming.’ Beauty stopped in front of the door at the corridor’s end. ‘My beast is potentially dangerous, but only if you get too close to him. Otherwise, you may be certain that you will be quite safe.’

  ‘He is chained?’

  ‘He is confined.’ She produced a key and turned it in the lock. ‘You know, I think you may like him.’

  Seaming doubted that, but he kept silent.

  She led him into a dark parlour. By the light from without, Seaming saw old, elegant furniture and paintings in gilded frames. The opulence of the decoration vaguely surprised him, but he had little attention to spare for it, as Beauty unlocked a further door.

  The stink in the next room was part kennel, part sickroom, part abattoir.

  The room felt large, but its corners were smoothed in darkness, leaving its dimensions indistinct. It was given only a dim and unpleasant illumination by a ceiling lamp of emerald-green glass. The slimy colour of the light, and the degraded lustre of the metallic upholsteries, gave the room the ambience of a sideshow tent.

  On a daybed in the green and dark centre of this room lay a gigantic black wolf.

  The beast’s head was four or five times the size of a large dog’s. The skull was angular and long, the fur thick and coarse, the ears tall like a jackal’s. The eyes were as large as billiard balls and as yellow as dandelions.

  For the space of a few moments Seaming was aware of nothing but the animal’s presence. The beast was splendid. He exuded enormous vitality. If his physical impression had none of the elevating effect of the sublime, it nonetheless had the force of some great mountain or cruel storm. He was perhaps, after all, a more equal match for Beauty than any man could have been.

  Seaming might have remained mesmerised, but certain details broke the spell. The wolf did not lie like an animal, but like a man, sitting straight with pillows behind his back and a brocade cover over his legs. A velvet blanket draped the massive shoulders and chest. A portable games table rested on his lap. A heavy paw extended and nudged a turquoise rook forward.

  ‘Check.’

  The voice was deep and damp and it stretched and chewed the word. But it was not unintelligible. Somehow the animal mouth made a human sound. The wolf was only half beast. The shape of the legs under the cover was human. In proportion to the giant torso they were narrow and short.

  Beauty leaned over the board, studied it, and moved a coral bishop.

  The huge eyes widened a little, and the wolf’s face looked eager. Then the black brow furrowed. ‘But I will be able to take that. Promise you are not letting me win?’

  ‘I promise,’ Beauty said.

  The eyes narrowed. ‘Then you are setting a trap. But I cannot see it.’

  Beauty scratched behind his ears. ‘Let’s leave the game for a while. We have a guest. This is Mr Seaming
, the artist who is going to paint your portrait.’

  The wolf’s nose wrinkled. The lips drew back, displaying plentiful rough teeth, and curled up at the corners in an approximation of a smile.

  ‘I can see you are asking the same question I ask myself every day, Mr Seaming. What am I – man?’ – the paw lifted up a pawn, then one of the horse-shaped knights – ‘or beast? We all belong to the animal kingdom, but there is a question of degree, is there not? At least, there is the question of species.’

  ‘You speak like a man,’ Seaming said faintly.

  The wolf howled, to shattering effect on Seaming’s ears, then growled, to the same effect on his already racked nerves: thunder had never rumbled deeper, brute had never so threatened. He felt the fear of being eaten alive. He had to force himself to stand where he was.

  ‘Could a man make such a sound?’ the wolf purred in his throat.

  ‘If a man were in rage or pain enough–’

  ‘Enough, you mean, to lose his faculties and move closer to the nature of a beast?’

  Seaming gathered his own faculties. ‘Your intelligence is a man’s, not a beast’s.’

  The wolf leaned forward and exhaled with might. His breath was putrid. Seaming involuntarily stepped back.

  ‘You smell me, but I smell you far better.’ The wolf snuffled loudly. ‘You ate semolina pudding for breakfast this morning. Last night you ate fish and drank wine so bad that it was almost vinegar. You slept alone in sheets you have not washed for two months. Your cloak is not your own. It was recently worn by a man who suffered from a cancer of the kidneys. You know nothing of a beast’s intelligence, Mr Seaming, any more than you know how limited your own intelligence is.’

  Looking satisfied, the wolf leaned back again. He licked his jowls with the tip of a grey tongue. ‘I was a man once. I wronged a woman. I thought myself ensorcelled by her loveliness, but the only spell was the spell of my own lust. To punish me she enchanted me in truth. She turned me into a beast in body and mind. The one thing I retained of my human nature was my desire for beauty. The woman was not only an accomplished witch, but a great ironist.’

 

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