Flesh Wounds

by Christopher Fowler

  Rain blanketed the city, sheathing the rooftops in a grey shower curtain of mist. It flooded the gutters, coursed over pavements, breached the drains and ruined Peter’s chances of making a decent impression with his new shoes. Filming was about to commence in another old warehouse. This particularly run-down specimen was tucked behind the tube station in Tufnell Park, hidden by a row of shops that were either covered in For Sale signs or were already derelict and seemed to be spouting water from a thousand broken pipes.

  Peter looked for the telltale glare of the spotlights, but found none. Studio lighting was always turned off between takes because of the intense heat it generated. Besides, the set was supposed to be low lit, so he doubted that anything could be seen from the road. He found the producers waiting on the second floor with a small crew (below British union requirements, certainly) and a simple set of rubble and straw, in the centre of which was a single wooden chair. Bound to it with ropes around the torso and legs was a rather unrealistic dummy, intended to represent the young hostage. Luserke came over and greeted Peter warmly.

  ‘I hope the late hour does not upset you, Mr Tipping,’ he said apologetically, ‘but we have been having some trouble with the lights.’

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ Peter looked over at the single cable trailing behind the set. There didn’t seem to be enough lighting here to go wrong. But then, the scene they were about to film was an intense one, and every element had to be exactly right.

  ‘You will be pleased to know that our “Jack” is so far very good,’ the director continued, anxious to please. ‘He finished his part of the scene today. I would have liked him to stay here for your lines, but he is a big star in his country because of a television show, how you say sitcom, and he will not sit with the bag like so.’ He indicated the linen sack gracing the head of the mannequin, whose left leg looked as if it was about to detach itself completely. Wherever the money was being spent on this production, thought Peter, it certainly wasn’t going into the props.

  ‘The dummy doesn’t look very convincing,’ he complained. ‘Couldn’t you make the scene more realistic by getting someone to take its place while we film?’

  ‘I think we will not need to do so. Watch please.’ Luserke gestured to one of the crew and the set lights came on, throwing a dingy blue haze across the chair and its occupant. With the figure half buried in indigo shadow, its imperfections were lost to the darkness. ‘I am more concerned with your close-ups tonight, and your speech, which we will do in one take. I think we will not need to feature our Jack in clear focus. If you would like to take your mark on the set –’

  ‘I haven’t been made up yet.’

  ‘Made up.’ The phrase seemed new to him. Luserke looked over to his producer, who said something in German. ‘Now I see. This was not made clear to you before I think. No make-up for this scene. The light, the blue light, will be on your face.’ Peter looked back at the low glow of the set and hoped it would be bright enough for his facial expressions to register. This was to be an emotionally draining moment. He didn’t want his performance to be lost in the gloom, like it had been with the extras on the hill.

  He made his way past the shattered-looking writer who was sitting with his head in his hands, nodded to Ostendorf, who was whispering into his mobile phone, and found the gaffer-taped cross on the floor of the set. Ostendorf had told him that he needed to learn only two pages of dialogue for this first night’s shoot, which involved the end of his scene with the hostage and the moment of fury in which he kills him. The producer felt that, as he would be addressing a plastic dummy rather than a live actor, it would help to start with the least interactive part of the sequence.

  Peter studied the lolling, strapped-up figure and rolled the handle of the carving knife between his fingers. Although to his eyes the set appeared absurdly unrealistic, he knew that through the camera lens it would take on a strange reality, so that even the luminous turquoise lighting would somehow be appropriate. The lengthy scene was divided into sections, the last part involving a ranted monologue from Peter which culminated in him stepping forward and thrusting the knife into the mannequin’s chest.

  By the fourth rehearsed take of his ‘fury’ speech, the crew were egging him on and applauding. Encouraged by Luserke, who sat forward on a stool beside the camera studying Peter’s every movement with glittering eyes, he grabbed the chair back with one hand and with a despairing scream thrust the knife deep into the gut of the dummy, splintering the plastic shell to bury his fist deep within the kapok and foam interior. The director wanted his inner rage to surface, to slam against the floor and walls until it exploded into unstoppable violence.

  During the final rehearsal Peter caught himself thinking, This is what it’s really about, to be in the centre and in control, to reach inside and draw emotion from the heart, to feel the sheer naked power of performance. He had reached this point by his own efforts, not through some agent looking to cream off a percentage. This was just the start, a glimpse of the future making itself clear to him, a fabled city appearing through a calming sea. Enjoy the moment, he told himself. Make it last.

  They took a short break and the film magazine was loaded for the first take. Peter returned to his mark and stared across at the battered dummy strapped to its chair, chunks of torn rubber clinging to its cream plastic chest.

  ‘Peter, could you come here a moment please?’ Luserke called him over to query an inflection at the end of the monologue, tapping the speech with a nicotine-stained finger.

  ‘I can handle it that way if you like,’ he conceded, ‘but it’s a long speech, and by the time I get to the end my voice has risen so high it’s hard to control.’ Peter promised to try his best, but he knew that he’d do it his way. The matter was out of his control. He could only give his talent full rein and shape the power as it grew within him.

  ‘Your mark, please. Quiet everybody.’ The crew quickly returned to their places.

  Peter reached his spot and looked up. Rain still blurred across the skylight. The knife handle was warm in his hands. The lights dimmed even lower than in the rehearsals, and the room fell silent, so that the only sounds came from the rain above and the breath catching in his chest. He could see nothing beyond the shadow of the dummy and the straw-lined edge of the set.

  Slowly, carefully, he began the speech.

  The anger flowed from him as he accused the captive young man of having all the things he could never have, of squandering his inherited power, of wasting a life that paid lip service to truth and decency while perpetuating an immoral, divisive society. He felt the bile rise within him, felt real hatred for this golden boy who knew nothing of the real world, who had never tasted the hard lives of working men and women, and forward he ran with the knife at his waist, thrusting it out into the bound ribcage of his captive in an explosion of bare rage.

  The first spray of warm liquid jetted into his face, blinding him as the next boiled hotly over his fist, which still clutched the knife. He tried to pull his hand free from the dummy’s chest but it was trapped, caught between the flesh and bone of the hostage’s ribcage. There were no lights at all now, only the scuffling of feet and the slamming of a distant door. As he fell to his knees he knew he had cut into a real, living body with the foot-long blade and that even now the roped-up figure was sinking fast within the coils of death, leather-soled shoes drumming madly on the floorboards until the chair toppled onto its side and the form bound to it lay still and silent, but for the steady decanting of its blood.

  The crawl across the room in darkness seemed to last a lifetime. When he finally found a light switch he was frightened to turn it on. Two bare bulbs served to illuminate his blindness. He looked down at his shirt, his hands, his trousers, at the gouts of blood, as if someone had emptied the stuff over him in a bucket. The camera, if that was what it had been, had gone. There was nothing left in the room except the ‘set’, a pile of bricks and straw, a pair of gel-covered standard lamps set on the fl
oor in either corner, a wooden chair and the cooling corpse of a young man, bound at the hands and feet, and taped at the mouth.

  It took him a moment to realise that the room wasn’t quite empty. Something else was over everything. His fingerprints – on the body, the chair back, the floor, the walls, the knife.

  And even as his confusion lifted to be replaced with mounting fury, he wanted to know not why but how. How had they come to choose him, of all people? Because even now he could not see the blindness in himself.

  And then what hurt most of all, what really cut into his heart and burrowed into the little soul he had, to lie there stinging and burning in a wormcast of purest agony, was the disappearance of the audience who had witnessed his greatest performance, and the knowledge that his moment of triumph had not been captured.

  It was a pain he had only just begun to nurse when the police broke in the door.

  Tales Of Britannica Castle: II. Leperdandy’s Revenge

  * * *

  This began as a separate Britannica story, but preceding events had clouded the characters’ minds; it would have been unfair of me not to provide some kind of resolution. Exotic grotesquerie becomes hard to sustain without collapsing into caricature, and I’m not sure I’ll do any more. Peake fans will find parallels once again.

  ‘YOU MUST EAT something,’ coaxed Dwindoline, raising the steaming ladle of bone broth to her half-daughter’s parched lips. Ginansia coughed and knocked it aside, spattering an Arthurian arras with ruby droplets and shreds of gristle. She dropped back onto the bed, sinking into the dull-gold pillows.

  ‘How can I eat, knowing what I now know?’ she asked. ‘My bile rises. I shall never eat again. The shame of it, to think we are descended from common cannibals!’

  Dwindoline knotted her dimpled hands in her lap and sighed. ‘So many generations ago,’ she whispered, her breath clouding in the chill bedchamber, ‘and born of desperate necessity. How could we help but follow their tradition when it was all we ever knew?’

  ‘Decency should have told you to desist. I despise the entire Bayne dynasty.’

  ‘Then you must despise yourself, my dear,’ said Dwindoline gently, ‘for you were fattened on the braised flesh of traitors, just as we all were.’

  Ginansia’s opal eyes turned to her. ‘Did you never think it was wrong?’

  ‘I thought it the way of the world.’ Dwindoline tugged at a stray brown thread poking from her dirndl. ‘When we are children, we assume that everyone else is like us. When we discover the truth, we have to adapt.’

  ‘Then I shall adapt as well.’ She reached down beside the bed and pulled out a raffia parcel of carrots and radishes that Leperdandy had thoughtfully delivered. ‘The family has found its first vegetarian.’

  ‘Your father won’t be pleased.’

  ‘My father is dead. Killed in the stupidest of all the stupid wars. My stepfather can be buried alive by the blind gravediggers of St Minch for all I care.’ She bit disconsolately into a carrot. The sound was like snapping wood.

  ‘Scarabold is too angry to countenance your presence at table. He has allowed Carapace to stay on at the castle and is attempting to placate the earl, whose alliance he needs. Your maidenhood ceremony may yet take place.’

  ‘Not while this body has a breath left in it.’ The girl flummocked onto her side, the bedsprings chiming. The wind moaning through the arrow slits of the East Quadrant turrets sounded like a distant mad organist. Dwindoline felt she should deliver a warning.

  ‘The Great Wound will not wait for your agreement in this matter, Ginansia. As I try to placate him, Mater Moribund goads him on.’

  ‘I can fight my own battles.’ Ginansia raised herself on one arm, studying her stepmother with returning affection. ‘Don’t fret. I’ll meet with Scarabold and disarm his argument.’

  ‘That, my doveling, is something warrior kings have failed to do,’ said Dwindoline, sadly stroking her hair. In these grim times, she seemed to be forever comforting her disillusioned offspring. Outside, the wind wailed in sympathy.

  ‘I must see for myself,’ said Ginansia firmly, ‘and you must take me.’

  Leperdandy uncrossed his skinny legs and rose from the marble dais, pacing to the window and staring down through the smeary stained-glass at the weatherbeaten hedgerows lining the moat. His face was as pale as lightning. ‘I once descended deep into the heart of the prison chambers,’ he murmured, ‘and it is not a sight for female eyes – nor any who value their sanity.’

  His ears pricked, and he yanked open his bedroom door before the second knock. Aunt Asphyxia, all velveteen and liverspots, stood with her bony fist still raised.

  ‘Conspiring!’ she cried, the word emerging from her frayed vocal cords as a muzzled scream. ‘Always tucked away, the two of you, whispering and plotting!’

  ‘How could we be, Aunt Asphyxia, with you lurking around to spy on us?’ asked the boy in mock exasperation. ‘Ginansia wants to visit the dungeons. Shall we let her?’

  ‘Germs!’ screamed the old lady. ‘Disease, deformity and diarrhoea! No woman is allowed to take such risks!’

  ‘Did you want something specific?’ asked Leperdandy, looming in the doorway to prevent her entry.

  ‘Tell the girl she must acquiesce!’ Asphyxia suddenly screwed up her eyes and scratched her mottled nose to prevent a sneeze. It gave her a face like a diseased parsnip. ‘She must apologise to Carapace and beg for his carnal attentions!’

  ‘I don’t think there’s going to be much chance of that, Auntie.’ He started to shut the door, but she thrust at him in an angry cloud of mothball musk.

  ‘You have no inkling of the consequences, you useless young fop! We cannot afford to make an enemy of the earl! Loyalties must be forged!’

  ‘Then the Great Wound will have to exercise some diplomacy for once.’ With that, he slammed the door shut.

  Leperdandy raised a slim finger to his lips, halting his half-sister’s laughter. ‘She’ll be hovering outside for ages yet,’ he whispered, ‘and she’s not as harmless as you might think. From her ears, straight to Britannica’s war room.’

  ‘Will you take me down to the prison cells or must I go alone?’ his half-sister asked.

  ‘Fumblegut will never admit you, and you should be glad of that. His tastes are more exotic than the excesses of your imagination. Better by far to begin with Scarabold.’

  ‘Do you really think so, Dando?’ Her headstrong ideas were usually mitigated by Leperdandy’s guidance. ‘Then I should go to him now. Reparation without surrender. I will have my wishes observed.’ She rose from the bed with a creak.

  Leperdandy worried a cuticle and watched as she washed her cheeks in rosewater and donned an evening robe of deepest sapphire. She showed her mother’s determination, even if she lacked the authority to access her desires.

  ‘Gin, if Scarabold consents to a confrontation, you will try to be –’ he searched for a word that would not annoy her, ‘reasonable, won’t you?’

  ‘Reason is as reason does,’ she replied, clasping a gold opera necklace over her breastbone. It was a family heirloom, a pendant chain hung with six flawless cabochon-cut rubies, Scarabold’s favourite. Leperdandy furrowed his alabaster brow. The princess was unversed in the art of discretion, and her stepfather would not take kindly to accusations. He began to regret suggesting a meeting so clearly fraught with dangers …

  The Great Wound had wondered how long it would take his errant stepdaughter to come a-creeping back in abject apology and gave a smile of satisfaction to see her humbly seated on the edge of the battered crimson recamier in the reading room. He strode across to the vast granite fireplace and scratched a match into his overloaded briar, filling the chamber with a smell akin to burning sweet wrappers. Ginansia had woven tiny violets in her hair and laced them through her bodice, appearing an image of innocence in the mistaken hope that it would sway Scarabold to her argument.

  ‘Gad, you’re a headstrong minx and no mistake,’ he complained, �
��but I’m prepared to bygonify your quarrelsome attitude if you are willing to renounce your vestal status and comingle with the earl Carapace.’ He tamped down his pipe bowl with a fat sepia-tipped thumb, clearly expecting no response.

  ‘That is quite out of the question,’ the girl replied hotly. ‘I came to speak of another, far more serious matter.’

  ‘What could be more serious than the perpetuation of our line?’ The Great Wound hissed and sucked at his pipe, peering at her with his good eye through a cloud of cinders as though discoursing through a raked bonfire. ‘If we fail Carapace now he will deny us the alliance that secures our future. Don’t you see, you silly girl, how our fate is entwined with his?’

  ‘You hated him once,’ answered Ginansia. ‘You told me that the iron rule of the Bayne dynasty held the entire valley in its grip.’

  The old king softened as he remembered. ‘The world has changed, my petal-pudding, and we are driven to befriend our former enemies. That is why I ask your help and pray that you can understand our predicament.’

  Ginansia had no wish to hurt her family; her life knew no one else, for the castle had few visitors. She began to appreciate her role in the destiny of the Baynes – and to understand the bargaining power it afforded her.

  ‘I shall attempt to do as you wish, stepfather – on one condition.’

  ‘Condition?’ asked Scarabold suspiciously. ‘We don’t have conditions.’

  ‘I must visit the dungeon chambers wherein you keep our war prisoners. If you deny me this, I would never surrender myself to the Beetle Earl in a thousand years.’

  ‘But why would you wish to enter such a dreadful place?’ demanded her stepfather, genuinely confused.

  ‘To meet the people we eat,’ she replied, trembling with indignation. ‘I wish to see the men we breed like cattle and slaughter to fill our bellies.’