by Rhys Hughes
We chatted awhile. He was a magus, down on his luck, forced to take first to the saw and hoops of the stage conjuror and then—when that too had failed—to pluck for a crust. Evidently a blue dwarf of many talents, all of them unformed. He gave his name as Otho Vathek. ‘Though known as the Blue Dwarf, I am really a microscopic giant of cobalt hue,’ he said. I should have laughed at this, but something held me back. The hint of tragedy in his eyes was not all studied.
To reciprocate, I told him about my own life and aspirations. I discussed the weave of my professions, the texture of tweed and ghosts. There was scant kinship between us; we had little in common save empty bellies. Yet I took a liking to the small fool. I described my fiancée, Mina Radcliffe, and confessed I missed her dreadfully. He wanted to know where she was. I informed him she had left town some months since. She was away in Ingolstadt University, in her first year, studying Sociology and Re-animation, a sandwich course—but one made with stale bread and spread with bat’s cheese.
Finally, I asked him directly about his letter. He blushed bright cyan and admitted he was desperate. ‘Otho,’ quoth I, ‘we are all in the same charnel-house. Now kindly elucidate.’ He sighed and proceeded to babble something about a strange book, a grimoire that had recently come into his possession. Unlike other magical handbooks, this one actually worked. I snorted in derision. I knew about grimoires; I owned a dozen. The spells they contained fell into two main categories: charms for attracting members of the opposite sex and charms to force the shades of dead skinflints to reveal their hidden hordes. ‘And yet you are both loveless and poor,’ I pointed out. At this he shuddered.
As I waited for a reply, his eyes suddenly expanded in terror. He had been glancing around my hip with mounting agitation. Now he let loose a squeak, donned his cap with the coin still inside, strung his lute over his shoulder and gave me a look of profound misery before hurrying off into the distance. I turned to find myself confronting a score or so of black clad figures with twisted countenances who rushed past at a brisk pace. They seemed intent on catching up with the dwarf. They did not look like actors, though their chins were extremely long. I watched as Otho and his pursuers disappeared around a corner where the park gave way to a market trading wigs and greasepaint.
I made my way back to my own segment of the city and troubled no more about the matter. Otho was obviously a condwarf; I would forget our meeting. But three days later, as I was crossing Werther Bridge, heavy with statues and held together by eggs and flour rather than mortar, I came upon him. This time he wielded a flute and all his melodies were shriven things, notes sharp as poniards. He ceased playing and danced a few steps. ‘You’ve returned!’ He was jubilant. ‘I apologise for rushing off like that. Urgent business, I’m afraid.’
I waved aside his excuses. ‘Do not be afraid, little man.’ Though he wanted to resume our earlier conversation at the point where it had broken off, I simply wanted answers. ‘Why did you tell me about your grimoire and why do you not use it yourself?’ He shook his head and explained he had given up the black arts; he was determined to make it as a composer for Musicals instead, the reason why he now lived in the Actor’s Quarter. No more invocations and pacts. He touched my arm and solemnly declared he would rather starve.
On the face of it, his tale seemed reasonable enough. Here was a creature who having explored the left hand path had then renounced it, a decision that left him with a grimoire he could not use on principle. Destitute, however, he wished to sell the book. My advert had caught his eye; he had stoked my curiosity by warning me away from the merchandise. Once free of his sorcerous past, he would be able to launch himself body and soul—though mainly soul; there was little of the former—into his chosen profession. All this was normal business practice.
But my suspicions were aroused. I was unconvinced by his demeanour, which remained one of pained expectation. He was a trifle too eager to conduct a transaction. ‘Not your usual grimoire,’ he added, his tongue rolling thickly in his ulcerated mouth. ‘More a key to others, if you know what I mean. A door into a walled garden of delights!’ He noticed my frown and sought to reassure me. ‘All the familiar demons are there. Asmodeus, Moloch, Baalberith. A good price too. No regrets, I assure you. Well what do you say?’ He snatched at my cravat and sought to wind me down to his level. ‘Truth is a mirror!’
This time I noticed them before he did. They were threading their way through the crowds that thronged the bridge, attempting to blend in among the commuters. They did not make directly for us, they were clever enough to approach by a circuitous route. Only their chins betrayed them for what they were (whatever that was!). Reaching into one of my myriad voluminous pockets for a pair of serrated scissors (with which I trim the gowns of velveteen marquises) I severed my cravat and separated Otho from my presence. I did not wish to be associated with him in the eyes of the eccentric fellows. He toppled backwards and landed squarely on his haunches. ‘Friends of yours?’ I inquired mildly.
He saw the figures and bounded to his feet. He was cornered and had to make a quick decision. With the hesitation of a single heartbeat, he clambered over the iron railings of the bridge and jumped into the muddy waters of the river. I rushed to the side and gazed down at the murky wound of his immersion. Then the waters healed the scar, but no body resurfaced. When I turned, the lantern-jawed brood had vanished. All that remained was Otho’s tarnished flute. I puffed out my cheeks and continued on my way, strangers commenting most favourably on my original style of neck-wear. From such unhappy accidents are new fashions born. But the snipped cravat did not catch on.
This time I could not so easily dismiss the encounter from my mind. Otho Vathek was in some mighty uncommon trouble, to be sure. There were absurdly-chinned elements out to settle his account in full, or at the very least to reduce the heat of his life to a simmer. I was reluctant to involve myself further but I could feel the nets of his fate closing in around me also. ‘Buttons and haberdashery!’ I cursed. ‘But I will get to the hem of this!’ I worked myself into a state of determination. I began to foam at the mouth. I like to take a theme by the scruff of the colon and give it a real exosmotic twist.
To be honest, I was more interested in securing my own future than helping the dwarf. I owed my landlord, Wynkyn de Rackrent, a great deal of money. A grimoire that worked would be a nice little earner: a quick conjuration, an assertion of will over a minor demon and I would be able to pay off all my debts. I assumed the black clad fellows, tenacious in purpose and long in the face, were also desirous of obtaining the book. Why did Otho not sell it to them? I flattered myself he had chosen me alone to benefit from his renunciation of the dark arts. Perhaps I was better dressed than rival buyers. Possibly my scented knees had swung the balance in my favour. I could not fathom it.
At any rate, I guessed I would have to inform him of my intent to purchase the volume before he sold out to another. This meant seeking him out again, rather than waiting for a random encounter. I had picked up his abandoned flute; once across the bridge and into the quieter area of the Old Square, I paused to study the instrument. Although not yet skilled enough to tell anything from a player’s saliva, I recognised the make at once. Only one establishment in the city would dare sell this type: Katzenellenbogen’s on the Rue Discord. I hastened there, arriving to discover the proprietor had shut up shop for lunch. I pounded on the door with my fists until I heard the shuffle of approaching feet and the sound of a bolt being withdrawn. I was admitted with scowls and oaths. The owner was an unctuous wight; he made instruments but could not play a note. ‘Harker Melmoth,’ I said, ‘le style est l’homme.’
He introduced himself as Irving von Landshort, a distant relation of the blind genius who had founded the shop. Business was anything but brisk. ‘What can I do for you?’ he groaned. His breath reeked of garlic soup. I presented him with the flute, waving it under his nose like the baton of an insane conductor. ‘Yes, I know that,’ he said, clipping on tiny pince-nez and studying it f
or a moment. I asked him if he recalled who had bought it. He nodded. ‘A blue dwarf, one of my best customers, though he never pays. I let him have his instruments on credit. Oboes, harps, violins, lutes and flutes. He is always in a hurry.’ He scratched his ear and yawned. His spectacles were cracked.
‘And when did you last see him?’ I inquired. I was tempted to go much further and criticise his crumpled clothes, his poor sense of blend and contrast, but there were more important matters afoot (a foot made of six toes and each an enigma). So I contented myself with fixing him with a morbid stare and hunching my shoulders, as if I were an anarchist who might return with a globular bomb and shatter the whole building if not speedily satisfied. Evidently, however, he had already mistaken me for a member of the Secret Police. While answering my question he took my hand and pressed an ocarina into my palm—a fluty bribe.
‘He came in but ten minutes before you. I closed for lunch as soon as he departed. He never stays for long. He was filthy; little mounds of damp clay fell from his limbs in steaming clumps, like grave-earth from the bones of a corpse.’ He leant forward and tapped his nose. ‘A murder suspect, eh? I thought as much. I knew he’d do it, the tinker. Watch out for the little ones, mother used to say. I gave him a hurdy-gurdy. He promised to pay once he had conducted a deal with a certain sartorial gentleman. A likely story, if you ask me!’
I thanked the proprietor for this news, returned the ocarina and set off once more into the unsatisfactory world. I had the information I wanted and rubbed my hands in anticipation. The dwarf was a busker and whereas lutists are tolerated only in parks, and flautists on bridges, hurdy-gurdy players must needs ply their trade outside theatres. The law is very clear on this point. Thus all I was required to do to find him was cruise the extremities of the city’s dozen playhouses.
This reasoning did not pay immediate dividends. It was some days before I could ascertain the exact location of all the buildings in question. One chilly evening (the cobbled streets glittering with ice) I caught the plaintive honks and wheezes of a hurdy-gurdy coming from the midst of a crowd gathered outside the Theatre de l’Orotund. Pushing my way through, I seized him around his thin shoulders. He seemed pleased to see me; he drew me to one side and grinned like a glib fool. He was still encrusted with slime, and his cap had scooped nothing more than a broken tooth; his situation was worsening. I gazed contemptuously at the well-heeled mob. They were queuing to see Caspar Nefandous’ new comedy. Dilettantes, all of them; parasites who could not tell amontillado from sherry, or orphrey from sarsenet. How I envied them!
‘So you have finally decided to accept my offer?’ His relief was a tangible thing; I asked him at once to state his price. ‘A single silver florin!’ he cried. I showed him my empty pockets and his face fell. I did not have the money on me, but it was just feasible I could raise it. When he learned this, delight reclaimed his features. ‘Remember the book is a key,’ he added. ‘A drop is all it takes. A single drop on the tip of the tongue. Locks will turn, mirrors will spin!’
As we conversed, I kept an eye open for those figures who seemed so intent on disturbing our concourse. Clever I already knew them to be; how clever exactly I was soon to discover. They were concealed in the queue. As the line shuffled forward, the first of the long chinned ones pressed against me. Foetid breath gushed from a twisted maw; fouler even than von Landshort’s garlic exhalations. I said to myself: ‘Harker, this is no natural halitosis. Good sense to flee.’ But I did the proper thing instead; I grasped the fiend around the waist and called to Otho to run. My prey was slippery and strong to boot. He squirmed out of my clutches and knocked me back into the dwarf. As I fell, I hissed into his ear, ‘I’ll meet you at the Café Worm, a week to the day.’ It was the first place that came to mind. He nodded.
Then he was away again, the hurdy-gurdy clattering behind him as he raced into the distance, his pursuers breaking ranks and chasing him wordlessly, in a silence punctuated only by the music of their boots on the cobbles. I wondered what I was letting myself in for. As the whole pack turned down an alleyway, I thought I heard the dwarf cry out: ‘No more good sirs, no more. I have done enough!’
I picked myself up, brushed down my soiled sleeves and returned to my rooms. On the landing, I met my neighbour, Monsieur le Purr, who bowed gracefully and wished me good-evening. This was a predetermined code that meant the landlord had been round earlier. And indeed, in the dirt in front of my door, I spied his nefarious footprint. ‘Harker, fine fellow,’ I muttered under my breath, ‘things shall soon be otherwise. It will be curtains—nay, billowing drapes!—for Wynkyn de Rackrent when I have that grimoire. Coûte que coûte!’
I needed a whole week, of course, to raise the required revenue. In these days of negative inflation, a single silver florin is worth much more than it used to be. That night I could not sleep; I tossed in my crinoline sheets, hypnagogic images competing with more conscious vistas for the territory of my brain. I seemed to see the city spread before me like a napkin, not entirely flat—one corner curled up where the town meets and clings to mountains. A million creases were the implausibly convoluted streets and lanes of the old Quarters. The city has always seemed ready to fold in upon itself; I imagined the napkin snatched by the hand of some metaphysical breakfaster and shaken free of the toast crumbs that symbolised—rather unsubtly—the haphazard dwellings and sundry other buildings of our yeasty metropolis.
No matter! Sleep could wait; there was much work to be done. Early next morning, I made an appointment to see my bank-manager. This was the Alfred Carnacki I have already mentioned. It was he who was responsible for introducing me to the world of the preternatural in the first place. Business had been particularly bad; a customer had defaulted on payment for many sheets of yellow wallpaper I had supplied him with (this was a special request; I applied the same technique I use on waistcoats to the paper, producing a hideous asymmetrical design that resembled nothing so much as lopped heads caught in snares, bulbous eyes). Anyway, I had an overdraft at the bank and Carnacki suggested that I work as a part-time parapsychologist to make ends meet. I foolishly agreed.
His attitude toward me was one of supercilious irony. He received me this time into his office as if he knew not who I was. ‘But Monsieur Melmoth!’ he chortled. ‘How can I possibly promise a stranger a loan? I would soon be bankrupt if I humoured all who came through my doors with a similar request. No, it is impossible.’ I sighed and offered my glass globes, my suits of rusty armour, my skeletons as security. He would not have it. I even suggested my collection of sewing machines and thimbles. He smirked at this and a cunning light came into his eyes. ‘All those items you must stake,’ he said, ‘and also fulfil one obligation.’ When I heard what it was, and assented, he opened a little safe in the back of his office and withdrew the money. The silver florin was cool between my fingers, hard as the buttons of Mina’s suspender-belt.
I left the bank with an ambiguous knot tightening in the pit of my stomach. If the dwarf did not deliver the goods, or if the book was not as efficacious as he claimed, I would lose everything. I would be unable to pay the interest on the florin. Gone would be all my possessions, my umbrella and operating-table. More to the point, I would have to fulfil Carnacki’s hideous obligation. He had made me sign a form saying that if I defaulted, I would create for him the tallest hat in the world. It was his idea of a sardonic joke.
I was in something of a funk as I awaited my final meeting with Otho Vathek. I neglected all my other work. I even declined Monsieur le Purr’s kind offer of a glass of Chablis. A cataphysical tenant, I not so much distrusted him as felt uneasy in his presence. But he was suave; there was no denying his taste and touch, almost as refined as my own. I killed the days by lying on my musty couch, in an attitude of tragic repose, one arm flung over my pale features, my curly locks brushing the carpet. Eventually the assigned day arrived and I made my way down the hill, through the graveyard and along Rubellastrasse to the Bohemian dive known as the Café Worm—an e
arthy place.
Here I exchanged shot silk handkerchiefs for absinthe (the owner is an understanding chap) and sat in the shadows. The café was full of poets, painters and arty folk, some of them talented, most not, with a dress sense that ranged from nonsensical to offensive. But the girls were wonderful enough, high spirited and savage. I watched them with a measure of self pity; Mina had abandoned me. She still wrote me letters, but these were of a formal sort, cold to the touch. She was so afraid of her prose slipping into the purple that she had firmly bound it on the other side of the spectrum: the sunset of ardour. Bound with locks of her own hair, no doubt! I felt impulsive; I called out for the girls to dance for me. Yet it was the men who clambered onto tables in response to my request. My luck was not holding.
As I sipped the green oblivion, I span the coin on the worm-eaten table before me. It had been monstrously tempting to spend it on food, drink, Hessian cloth or some other of life’s essentials. I thought of the things I could yet purchase, were I to leave the café and forget about the dwarf: ripe cheeses, the transient love of a woman, myriad pairs of socks, a telescope. Or I could enter a bookshop and emerge with a proper book. Penny Dreadfuls I had read in my time; Shilling Shockers I had glimpsed. Florin Fantasques were rumoured to be much worse, to venture beyond the borders of the imaginable.
While I debated with myself thus, I felt an insistent tug on my shirt from below. At the same time, the coin struck the side of my absinthe glass with a frosty inhuman tinkle. I shuddered, a feeling of exquisite sadness overwhelmed me. The dwarf was under the table, his finger to his lips. He eased himself up onto the seat opposite mine and heaved the grimoire before me, knocking my glass onto the floor. I gazed at him. He looked even more dishevelled than before, but there was a desperate joy in his eyes. He noticed the florin and licked his lips. ‘Borgen macht sorgen, Mein Herr?’