Enstone laughed. ‘My fiancée didn’t believe me,’ he said, ‘when I told her I wanted it in my living room. She said it was a horrible thing to want. She said, “Michael, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. And we’ve got to be at the Morrises by nine.” ’
He could not stop himself. ‘What did you say to her?’
‘That’s a bit personal, don’t you think?’
George giggled again—louder, this time—and hated himself for it. ‘Of course, of course, I’m sorry.’
‘I told her we’d be at the Morrises by nine.’
‘I’ll make her beautiful,’ said George. ‘I promise you.’
He watched Enstone vanish through the mist of the evening, and then in the stillness that followed he began to shake.
George gathered the head into his arms and crooned to her, as he always crooned, and told her the story of how she had come to him. He told her how Enstone had been tall and lithe against the bark of the trees; he told her how Enstone had ripped his fingernails into the white, white, white coat; he told her about how the two of them had grappled, and how they had indented their bodies upon the snow, melting their shapes into the earth, and how her heart had beat so loudly that the whole wood had heard it—but she was not to be ashamed, no, because she had lost fairly, and to a great man.
George felt it beneath his fingertips. ‘He killed you with his bare hands,’ he said. He put on his gloves.
He did not give her a name. He did not feel that he had the right. She belonged to Michael Enstone. Only he could name her.
Enstone returned to the shop a month later. He did not shake George’s hand. He did not address him by name. ‘I want to see my wolf,’ he said.
George had dried and tanned the pelt; he had separated the skin from the muscle and dandled the fur against his face when he could not sleep. It smelled, sometimes, of juniper.
‘I kept my promise,’ said George. ‘I’ve made her beautiful for you.’
He had already begun moulding the bones.
‘Let me see. . . .’ Enstone fiddled with fragments of the spine. ‘This is the back, then?’
George nodded.
‘My fiancée says she doesn’t want it in the house. She says she’ll throw it out the window if she has to.’
George made small amiable sounds.
‘Don’t you want to know what I said back?’
He waited; George complied.
‘I told her that I’d keep what I killed. And that she could throw herself out the window. And do you know what happened then?’
George shook his head.
‘She cried at first. But she agreed. I got rid of one of the living-room sofas.’ He fixed his gaze on George. ‘Do you get many like me, here?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Men who bring what they’ve killed.’ Enstone continued rearranging the bones on the table.
‘In the old days—all the time. I mean—before I was born—the old owner, Farringdon, he said he used to get hunters all the time. He did a trade in that. Hunters’ trophies.’
‘And now?’
‘Museums. Theatres. We don’t get many at all.’
‘But all these?’ Enstone motioned at the birds.
Joy waxed across George’s face ‘Mine,’ he said. ‘They belong to me.’
‘You killed them?’ Enstone’s smirk shot through him.
‘No, no, of course not, I didn’t kill them. But dead things find their way here—and I save them.’
Enstone smiled. ‘Tell me,’ he said, so slowly that George could not breathe. ‘How do you save them?’
He would not babble—he would not babble! He would not stutter, or giggle, or foam up upon himself in his loneliness. George spoke as slowly, as carefully as he could.
‘I bring them to life again.’
‘Is that what you think you’re doing?’
‘Y-yes.’
‘If I were a taxidermist,’ said Enstone. ‘I’d stitch the head of a wolf onto the body of a bear, and add a snake’s tail. I’d mismatch the eyes, and add bird’s talons on the feet. They do that, don’t they? For fairgrounds and freak shows?’
‘Not anymore,’ said George. ‘They used to, last century.’
‘And taxidermists are so much more honest now? No more griffins and lost unicorns and things like that?’
‘I try to be. I’m the only one left.’
‘Shame,’ said Enstone. ‘You could do such interesting things to them—if you only wanted to.’ He leaned in—slightly—and George tried his best not to jump. ‘Would you stitch my wolf up like that? If I asked you to?’
George swallowed. ‘If you asked me to,’ he said.
Enstone had mercy on him. ‘You might as well keep on as planned. I’m not in the mood for a change.’
In Enstone’s absence George re-created him. He stroked the wolf between the ears and he pressed his lips against the nose and as his fingers worked he asked her what she knew of him. He imagined that if he only pressed hard enough on her, if he only wished hard enough for her, then she would raise her chin and bare her teeth; her flesh would stitch itself together and then she would tell him how it had been. She would tell him how Enstone had looked, with his dress shirt flecked with snow and the tie around his neck undone and loose-hanging, with the flesh blue and bare with the cold and his unblinking eyes fixed so singularly upon her.
She would tell him how he had loved her. And Enstone must have loved her—and here George burnished the flesh more furiously—he must have loved her, to want her with him, to bring his fiancée to the point of tears, to install her and her white fur and her great, glass eyes which George had polished in his house. He loved her; he had given her a name, which George could not discover, although hair by hair he had searched for it on every petrified goosebump on her skin.
The smell, too, inverted him. He had grown so used to the bleach, to the formaldehyde, to the rotten-egg anaesthetising of the place, that sweet smells had become nauseating to him. The smell of flowers or of food, of anything perishable, smelled to him like decay.
But Enstone’s cologne smelled of juniper, and it was everywhere, and George could not scrub it out.
He would make her beautiful. He would bring her to life and with her burnished glass eyes she would see Enstone at his dressing-table; Enstone at his desk. She would watch him make his fiancée cry, his legs spread out across the armchair; she would watch him turn his eyes to her, and kiss her, and silence any possibility of rebellion.
‘It’s not the first thing I’ve killed,’ said Enstone, when he came again to check on the wolf’s progress. ‘It’s the first wolf, though.’ He considered George. ‘Have you ever stuffed a fox?’
‘Yes!’ George thought of the fox in the window, of the little hat, of the electric candelabra he had placed so precariously in its jaws. ‘Yes—all the time, foxes.’
‘My father taught me how to hunt,’ said Enstone. ‘In the summers. Upstate. I was good at it. But I didn’t like it, much.’ He waited, and then his voice grew high-pitched and nasal. ‘Why not?’ He continued on—and it was only after a moment had passed that George realised Enstone had been imitating him. ‘Because—it’s all over too quickly. You shoot or cut or send the dogs, and then—it’s all over.’
‘But it isn’t over!’ George thought of his ferrets, of his foxes, of the birds and the wings and the friends he whispered to.
Enstone turned to him, letting his gaze cast a mould over George’s face. George could feel him cataloguing each expression; each quiver and tic of the muscles in his cheek, of the way his lips curled over his teeth when he felt afraid.
‘Exactly,’ said Enstone. ‘That’s why I found you.’
Enstone told George stories—idle, tossed-off stories about women and houses by the sea, about trips he had taken and the fiancée who could not tame him and how he liked to keep the heads of the animals he had killed on a wall in his father’s house, how he liked to engrave the date and the specie
s below, of the cities and the lives he had lived in and among. With each story, Enstone made another incision upon him—quick and clean and so expert it could not kill. With each story, the shop smelled more strongly of juniper.
George continued with his work. He moulded the bones and cast them again in wood, wool and wire. He tanned the skin. He fashioned the eyes. At last he mounted the skin.
He could not stand to say goodbye to her.
He pictured it one last time—Enstone as he had been, when he first came into the shop, covered in blood, blood beneath his fingernails, pictured him as he should have been—and as he had always suspected it had been—with Enstone ripping her throat from her body with his bare and bitten hands. Sometimes he even dreamed about it. Sometimes, in his dreams, Enstone did it with his teeth.
‘You’ll be going to the home of a great man,’ said George, and kissed her between the ears. ‘He’ll give you a name.’
He put on his gloves; he cleaned the slab so vigorously that the whole shop smelled of rotten eggs; he looked at his reflection in the glass cases and practiced saying ‘your bill, Mr Enstone,’ and ‘will that be all, Mr Enstone?’ without a stutter or a choke.
Enstone came at half past nine.
‘I want to see it.’
George brought her out, passing his hands over her back, fingering the ears. She was as beautiful, he felt sure, as the day Enstone had killed her. She stared up at them with flint-black eyes and in them George could see his own reflection, and Enstone checking his watch.
‘Oh.’ It was all he said.
‘You don’t like her?’ George did not let himself hiccup.
‘Is that all there is?’
He did not even have the mercy to turn away. George felt himself go pale, pale and red and white again like spoiled meat; he felt Enstone watching it, and so his blushes grew brighter and more horrifyingly red.
‘Meaning?’
‘It’s what I said about hunting, I suppose. Once they’re dead, they’re dead. And the thing is, really, when you think about it. . . . My fiancée’s been nagging me about it for so long, and she’s putting up such a fight . . .’
‘You don’t want her?’
‘I’d pay you, of course. For services rendered.’
‘You mean—’
‘You know what I mean. I don’t want it.’
It was so blithely, so casually spoken, that George wondered, with a dread that calcified his soul, if Enstone had not planned it all beforehand.
‘You keep it,’ Enstone continued. ‘If you care so much.’
He did not look away when George began to weep. Enstone fingered the wolf’s ears; he tapped his fingers on the slab; he played idly with the birds’ bones laid out in one half-opened case.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is embarrassing.’
George could not hold it back. Whinnies and giggles, hiccups and tics, stammering insufficiencies all fumbled their way to and around his tongue; he begged and then he whimpered and then he pleaded; he forced himself to choke it all down and then, with the only breath he could manage, he staked his soul on the thing that mattered most.
‘At least give her a name.’
‘A name?’ He laughed so easily now. ‘For a dead wolf?’
‘For this wolf—please—you can’t go without. . . .’
‘You might as well name a doorknob.’
‘Please!’ George could no longer hide his shame. His tears dribbled with the effluvia of his nose; sweat pooled underneath his gloves. ‘You’ve got to!’
‘Really. . . .’
He had gone too far; he knew it the moment he felt the bones of Enstone’s wrist press against the film of his gloves. And then he could not breathe.
‘Every single time. . . .’ Enstone’s voice was cold; it was slow. It did not rage against the borders of its throat; it did not escape his control. His heart did not beat so clumsily in his chest that the whole world heard it. George listened, and could not hear it beat at all.
Enstone pulled his wrist away and wrote out a cheque on the slab. ‘Every single time.’
He left it there when he went.
The birds spread their wings over him. The ferrets raised their heads to him. The wolf stared up at him. They could no longer console him.
He went to each one in turn—he ran to them and tore the gloves off his hands and pressed his bare skin to their feathers and their fur, to the scales of the fish, to their teeth, so violently that his fingertips bled. He called them by their old names, told them the stories he had told them once, pressed their beaks and muzzles to his breast and shouted inwardly that he could not be lonely, that he was not lonely, that his friends were with him and that the world did not exist outside the boundaries of his shop, that nothing mattered because in the end all of life laid down its head at his shop, that he belonged with them here, and that one day Enstone too would find himself laid out on a slab, with a scalpel prying apart his bones.
George could not bring himself to believe it.
He pressed his face to the stomach of the wolf and prayed for life.
He whispered words, felt and unknown, into her mouth; he made promises that overboiled his blood. He told her that he would give up all of himself, give up his name, give up his arms and legs and replace them with claws and stitched muzzles, that he would etherise and invert all of himself, of the giggling, hiccupping, mess of himself, if it only meant that around him he could hear heartbeats, or the flapping of wings. He would let Enstone stitch his head to the body of a wolf; he would let Enstone fix his body to the head of a bear, if it only meant not being alone.
He begged, with the last of himself that he could make sense of, to be changed. He begged not to be alone.
He pressed his cheek against the white, white fur, and then he heard it.
It beat for him.
Then came the rustle of wings.
‘Thank you.’
They came all at once, now, faster and truer, louder and wilder, the whipping and purring, the flapping that deafened him, the roar and the rage and above all things the heartbeats, which were quicker now, and then his heart began to match theirs.
He opened his eyes, and then he saw all he had ever wanted to see.
The birds had flown down from the ceilings; the ferrets had leaped down from their cases; the wolves and the bears and the foxes were pawing the ground, waiting to be set free.
He howled.
Together they went, raging and roving; together over the snow; together through the streets; together faster and faster and together and together until the city lights were invisible behind the fog, and the cars blared out into silence and the snow had no tracks in it.
Here they were alive. Here he was not alone.
Here he was white, like the white, white snow, and here the woods smelled of pine needles and juniper, and here, once, a wolf had been killed, but it did not end there, and she had led him home.
So wild they flew, and wild they galloped, and wild they stared into the darkness for the first sign of the hunt; when he reared up he knew at last what blood smelled like; his she-wolf howled, and so he followed her, and followed them.
With them he took his first mouthful of flesh; with them he sped through the forests of the Hudson River Valley. With them he raged. With them he roared. With them he flew.
THE MAN WHO LOVED FLIES
Andrew Apter
I do not have a specific recollection of the morning I was brought downtown to Lambert’s Department Store. That lumbering, elephantine behemoth with clacking wooden escalators and floor upon floor of dusty glass cases and mannequins where I began my apprenticeship in what was then commonly known as the pin and needle trade is, for me, the whole of my memory, as if I did not so much step into Lambert’s as simply appear there suddenly, as from a deep sleep. You might say I came awake on that day and that everything that could change for a young man changed, instantly. But I believe I have read that love may change a man in that fundamental regard
. Perhaps, in the end, there is nothing surprising about what happened at all.
I will set down the following sequence of indisputable facts, not only for posterity, but in the hope (the very small hope, admittedly) that whoever remembers the son of Thomas Hurley and Lambert’s Department Store will come forward with their own testimony. I know this at least, that Mr Huntingdon Lambert, who died early after founding Lambert’s by all accounts never would have tolerated what I found up there on the fourth floor. He was said to have been a dapper man intolerant of personal filth and with the highest regard for his customers, many of whom he knew personally from church. And among the many dozens of men who came and went for their haberdashery needs, there must be one or two who remembers. A man would remember such a thing, it seems to me, unless he is too frightened to admit it, which is also possible. So the truth could at least in principle be established once and for all and my confession looked upon not as the ravings of a madman, but the setting forth of simple imperturbable facts—what I did was because of the flies, and no other reason.
I, Thomas Hurley, am the man who loved flies.
***
I was born to older parents in one of those small, thriving mid-western cities surrounded by broad flat farmland. Like so many others, the Hurleys had migrated west generations before to find work in the textile and manufacturing mills that were beginning to open up and produce clothing for the burgeoning population on the western coast. It was believed, rightly, that a man in our part of the country had one of two choices: farming or the mills, and the latter at that time was much more lucrative for newcomers. When my father was forty he left the mill to become a tailor at Lambert’s, which had just opened its doors. In this venture he was successful and before long met my mother, who worked as a schoolteacher. I was their sole child. We lived in one of those stolid houses on a tree-lined street right in the city and within walking distance of downtown.
I will admit that when I first saw the flies in Lambert’s I said nothing. The tailors, who were mostly men like my father and glad to have work, made no objection or mention of the flies, even when they crawled on their clothes or hands. Nor did any of the customers, many of whom were farmers and, of course, used to insects of all kinds. The flies, too, seemed quite comfortable—even, you might say, relaxed. At any time of day dozens could be seen on the carpet or tailor’s dummies creeping around with a strange, almost casual license that perhaps only a child like myself might notice. Never before had I seen flies behave in such a way. Before long I became like the rest of them and relinquished any misgivings I might have had.
Strange Tales V Page 22