Ten Sorry Tales

by Mick Jackson

  The following week the rain came, just as Mister Morris predicted. It lashed the windows and drummed on the roof of his unhappy house. He put on a raincoat and found his umbrella and went down to the river to see how high it was getting. The water swept by at quite a lick and came right up to the sandbags. If those soldiers hadn’t put them there, Mister Morris thought, he’d be in his boat, paddling up and down that tunnel he’d spent all year hacking out of the ground.

  It was starting to get dark. He looked at the sodden sandbags by his feet. Here and there the odd trickle of water seeped between them. Now, if only one or two sandbags happened to get knocked out of the way, Mister Morris thought to himself.

  He gave one of them a little kick with his wooden leg, but couldn’t get enough power behind it. He took his umbrella down and tried prodding at the sandbag with that instead. In truth, he wasn’t making much of an impression when he had a funny feeling that he was being watched. He turned and found a man standing not far away, wrapped up in a raincoat. After a couple of moments the man took a step towards Mister Morris.

  ‘Do you need a hand?’ he said.

  As he came a little closer, Mister Morris could see that the man was about the same age as himself, if not a little older. The fellow bent down, picked up one of the sandbags and handed it back to Mister Morris. Mister Morris took it and turned to throw it over his shoulder when another man, of similar vintage, suddenly appeared.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ he said.

  Within a minute there were a dozen of them, all working together. Twelve old men handing the sandbags down a chain, just like the soldiers who’d brought them in a few weeks before.

  The first sign that their endeavours had been successful was when the man next to Mister Morris called out, ‘That should do it,’ and waved for everyone to get out of the way. A couple of sandbags slowly rolled aside under the weight of the water. Then the river seemed to suddenly sense a new course for itself, punched a hole right through the bank of sandbags and sent them tumbling all over the place.

  Mister Morris hurried home just as fast as his leg would carry him. By the time he opened his cellar door there was at least two feet of water flushing straight down his tunnel and his boat was tugging at its leash.

  He grabbed his torch and climbed into his row-boat, which was so eager to be on its way that Mister Morris found it impossible to untie the rope and had to cut it with a knife. Then he was off, racing down the rapids, down his dark, dark tunnel, with hardly time to catch his breath.

  Mister Morris didn’t get the chance to do much rowing. He was too busy trying to keep his boat from being smashed to smithereens. The walls flew by and when he wasn’t guiding the boat between them he was shining his torch over his shoulder, to see how far he had to go.

  It was quite a ride and one that Mister Morris wouldn’t have missed for the world. It was the sort of exhilaration he rarely experienced behind the counter at the hardware shop. But just when he’d begun to thoroughly enjoy himself and to whoop and hear his own whoops echoing back at him, the boat began to slow and he found himself at the end of the tunnel where the water was boiling and raging from all the other water backed-up behind.

  Mister Morris got hold of his oars and started rowing back towards his cellar. He rowed like mad but wasn’t going anywhere. He was held in the grip of the floodwater, as it thrashed and buffeted his boat up against the tunnel wall.

  Then he noticed that the water was still rising. For some reason he’d imagined that it would climb to a depth of a couple of feet, then simply stop. But the boat was being steadily lifted on the water, with Mister Morris inside, furiously rowing, until at last he found himself being pressed right up against the tunnel roof.

  The water kept on coming and began to creep over the side of the boat. The torch went out, the water roared and churned around him and in that terrible watery darkness Mister Morris finally surrendered to his fate.

  ‘It’s not such a bad way to go,’ he thought to himself. ‘Drowning in my own tunnel, in my own home-made rowing boat.’

  The water completely engulfed him. Mister Morris slumped forward.

  ‘This is it,’ he said out loud.

  But at that last moment, when his whole life seemed to swim about him, the stubborn wall gave way and Mister Morris, his boat and the millions of gallons of water behind them were launched into what felt like the very heart of the earth.

  When things eventually settled down and Mister Morris dared to sit up straight he found himself in unfamiliar surroundings. His boat was gently drifting in the middle of a vast underground lagoon. Vast stalagmites and stalactites reached up and down around the water’s edges. And all the walls and the cavernous ceiling had a smooth and eerie sheen to them.

  Mister Morris noticed several other boats drifting here and there in the distance. Each had a hurricane lamp hanging from a pole. One of the boats was slowly being paddled over towards him. When it finally came alongside, Mister Morris recognized the owner. It was the old fellow from the riverbank.

  ‘Glad you could join us,’ he told Mister Morris.

  Mister Morris did his best to regain a little composure. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said at last.

  ‘You’ll be needing a lantern,’ the other fellow told him. ‘To see where you’re going.’

  Mister Morris nodded. ‘I know a shop where I can pick one up,’ he said.

  The other fellow smiled and started to turn his boat around.

  ‘We tend to leave each other alone,’ he said. ‘But if you want a bit of company, just give me a wave.’

  Mister Morris thanked him, then watched as the old fellow rowed off into a quiet stretch of that vast, milky lake.

  ‘I should’ve brought some sandwiches,’ Mister Morris thought to himself.

  For the rest of his days, Mister Morris rowed on the lake on a regular basis. It gave him the chance for a little reflection. He also liked to think that the rowing kept him fit. And as he rowed he remembered his mother and father and the day they rowed on Lake Windermere. And, from time to time, he thought about his old friend Frank, who died in the war all those years ago.

  The lepidoctor

  A coincidence is sometimes just the world’s way of getting your attention – a way of getting you to sit up and take notice once in a while. Some coincidences are so slight as to barely merit a raised eyebrow. Others carry such weight that, when acted upon accordingly, they have the power to change the course of your life.

  The coincidence at the heart of this particular story is of quite considerable magnitude, not least for the boy and the butterflies involved. It has its origins one Saturday morning when Baxter Campbell paid a visit to the Houghton Museum – a place packed full of stuffed bears and birds and Paraguayan nose-flutes and various bits of bone and stone which had, at one time or another, been brought back from every corner of the world.

  Baxter was himself an unusually cultured young fellow. In his bedroom he kept an old harmonium on which he would compose his own maudlin lullabies. On his bedside table sat a leather-bound collection of the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson. On his walls were pinned the paintings of Pieter Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch. All of the above he’d picked up for next to nothing in jumble sales and junk shops. Like his dad, Baxter found anything old or second-hand peculiarly alluring. Old stuff had history to it. Old stuff had character.

  When Baxter was still a baby he accompanied his father to every second-hand shop, street market and auction on his busy itinerary. So, long before he could walk or talk, Baxter was already familiar with the smell of mould and mothballs and the sight of grown men haggling over the sort of old books and clocks and china most people would just throw away.

  These days, Baxter was old enough to go on his own to the same second-hand shops and flea markets his dad had introduced him to. And on Friday nights he and his dad liked nothing better than to sit by the fire and trawl through the small ads in the back of the local paper, circling any item they liked
the sound of, such as ‘Cast iron bedstead. A bit bent. Very heavy’ or ‘Large box of chemistry equipment – eg test tubes, pipettes, etc. Offers please.’

  If there’d been a Mrs Campbell she might have had something to say about the cardboard boxes which lined the hallway and the stacks of books which clogged the stairs. But Baxter’s mother had departed this world the same hour Baxter had entered it. Baxter’s father had raised him on his own and early on the two of them had come to an agreement whereby Baxter’s dad would store all his stopped clocks, Second World War memorabilia and railway paraphernalia in the basement and Baxter would have the use of the attic for his old adding machines and broken wirelesses.

  On Saturday mornings Baxter liked to visit one of the local museums and have a look at some ancient pair of Roman underpants or the shin bone of some Neolithic Man. He liked to eat his lunch at the Turkish café and, in the afternoons, to call in at all the jumble sales he’d picked out of the paper the night before. On this particular Saturday Baxter stood in the Houghton Museum before a glass cabinet containing an old pair of handcuffs. They came from Bristol, apparently, and looked as if they weighed a ton. Baxter wondered what sort of crime you had to commit to find yourself wearing them and whether the same poor sod who’d been shackled by them had been whipped within an inch of his life by the cat-o’-nine-tails from the neighbouring cabinet.

  Baxter walked on, past the polar bear, baring its teeth and raised up on its hind legs, past the row of Balinese slippers and the display of Moroccan board games and only paused when he came face to face with a poster which announced ‘BUTTERFLY: a new exhibit by Milton Spufford’ with a big black arrow pointing into the next room. As we have already established, Baxter Campbell was a cultivated boy and not the least bit intimidated by either Art or Culture. And as he still had plenty of time before his next appointment (a jumble sale up at the Methodist Church at one o’clock) he decided to follow the signs, passed through an archway and came out into a large white room.

  What struck him first were the incredible colours – the colours and the actual size of the thing. Vivid blues, emerald greens and luminous turquoises all shimmered together in the two huge wings of a single vast butterfly which was so big it practically filled the whole of one wall.

  Baxter was impressed, there was no denying it. The creature somehow managed to be both beautiful and monstrous at the same time. It was only as he walked towards it that he saw how that massive butterfly was actually made up of several hundred real butterflies which had been carefully arranged into something like a huge mosaic.

  ‘Oi!’ someone said.

  Baxter jumped. Without realizing it, he’d walked right up to the butterfly and raised his index finger. An overweight security guard, standing about ten feet away, seemed quite prepared to bundle Baxter to the ground if necessary.

  ‘No touching,’ he said.

  Baxter brought his hand down and went back to studying the individual butterflies. He could see the fine fur which covered their tiny bodies – the faint veins which wired their wings. One butterfly’s wings were all chalky blues and whites, as dusty as powder paint. Another’s were so black and glistened so wetly they looked as if they had just been dipped in ink.

  Each was so pristine that Baxter was having trouble believing they weren’t still living - as if they might have been specially trained to hang in formation all day long. It was a nice idea but one which promptly vanished when Baxter noticed the head of a pin in the middle of the butterfly right in front of him, then of every other butterfly, which held them to the wall.

  Baxter was beginning to feel quite ill. He decided to leave the museum. On his way he passed a large photograph of Milton Spufford, the man who’d put together this weird work of art. He was standing on a hillside in baggy shorts, with a butterfly net in one hand and a large glass jar in the other. Underneath the photograph it said: ‘Once caught, the butterfly is dropped into the “killing jar” where the smell of crushed laurel leaves soon lulls the creature into a permanent sleep.’

  Baxter was completely bamboozled. He’d come across plenty of dead animals in his time – tatty fruit bats … over-stuffed walruses … rhinos with paper-thin skin – but they’d all been caught and stuffed at least a hundred years earlier. The idea of someone catching and killing butterflies these days just seemed plain stupid. You’d have thought there were few enough butterflies to begin with, without going round sticking pins in them.

  He left the museum and did his best to forget about those beautiful dead butterflies, but wasn’t particularly successful. And for the rest of the afternoon as he rummaged at his various jumble sales that monstrous butterfly kept looming up in his imagination and threatened to overshadow the whole weekend.

  A couple of weeks later Baxter paid his monthly visit to Monty Eldridge’s Second-Hand Emporium. Monty liked to think of his establishment as more of an antique shop than a junk shop and his prices tended to bear this out, but Baxter knew that he was far more likely to turn up something interesting at Monty’s place than most of the others, even if he was less likely to be able to afford what he found.

  Baxter was right at the back of some dimly lit room, trying to squeeze between a fancy lamp-stand and a table piled high with crockery, and Monty was over by the counter reading his paper when Baxter noticed an old mahogany box, about the same size as a small medicine cabinet. He eased it out from under an encyclopedia. The box was surprisingly heavy, which gave Baxter hope that it might contain something particularly old or unusual. He set it down on a rickety old table, pushed back its little latches and carefully opened the lid.

  A powerful smell of mildew came up from the plush interior as Baxter caught his first glimpse of a gleaming set of silver instruments – tiny knives, needles and pairs of pincers – all laid out on a bed of velvet and each in their own custom-made cavity. Two corked phials were strapped into the box’s lid, along with some sort of eyepiece and a well-thumbed manual. It looked like a set of tools which might have belonged to a dentist or a watchmaker.

  ‘What’s this?’ Baxter called out to Monty.

  Monty looked up, put down his newspaper and strolled over to see what Baxter had found.

  ‘Ah now, those’, he announced with some relish, ‘are a lepidoctor’s surgical implements.’ He picked out a particularly deadly looking blade and studied it. ‘Late Victorian. Very rare. I’ve not had a set of that sort of quality for nigh on thirty years.’

  Baxter picked out a pair of tweezers. They were beautifully constructed but finely fringed with rust. ‘A lepiwhat?’ he said.

  ‘A lepidoctor,’ Monty told him. ‘Bit of a lost art these days. And probably something of a secret society way back then.’

  Baxter replaced the rusty tweezers and brushed his fingers over the other instruments. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but what are they for?’

  Monty shook his head, as if despairing at the depths to which educational standards had fallen. ‘A lepidoctor’, he said, ‘was someone who specialized in carrying out repairs to butterflies.’

  If you had asked Baxter Campbell at that particular moment if he properly appreciated the significance of his discovery and whether he recalled the peculiar exhibition from a fortnight before he may not have been able to tell you. All he knew was that he wanted to own that box of tricks more than he’d ever wanted to own anything. He had fallen in love with its strange array of sinister instruments long before he understood what purpose they served. All the same, Baxter had spent enough time in the company of second-hand dealers to know that it never pays to show your enthusiasm. So he continued to quietly pick over the silver implements. He slipped the magnifying glass out of its leather strap – the sort of eyepiece jewellers use to examine diamonds – and blew the dust off it. He put it up to his eye: it was a perfect fit.

  ‘So, what’s it worth?’ he said, as he leant forward and examined the other tools through it.

  ‘Well, that depends’, said Monty Eldridge slyly, ‘on what someone’s w
illing to pay.’

  It took quite a while to get old Monty to say how much he wanted for the lepidoctor’s instruments and, almost inevitably, it was far more money than Baxter could hope to find. But Monty happened to remember an old gramophone Baxter had bought off him a year or two earlier (whilst explicitly failing to mention the fellow who’d been offering good money to get his hands on one) and it took another five minutes’ hard bargaining before a deal was struck, in which Baxter agreed to trade in his old gramophone and fix the gears and brakes on Monty’s bicycle in return for that box of surgical tools.

  When Baxter finally took the mahogany box home a few days later he whisked it straight up to his room and closed the door behind him. This was, in itself, highly unusual. His father was normally the first person to whom he’d show some new, peculiar find. He placed the box on his bed and knelt down beside it. He opened it up and took out each silver tool in turn. He examined them all through the dusty eyepiece. None appeared to be broken, although he thought the spring on a pair of pincers would probably benefit from being replaced. The two glass jars were empty, or, at least, what little remained in them had set solid, like old varnish. Baxter pulled out the booklet and had a quick flick through it. The binding was split and the pages were worn and grubby, as if the previous owner must have thumbed through it a thousand times.

  He turned to the first page and started reading. In the third paragraph he read:

  There is no reason to suppose that any moth or butterfly should be entirely beyond resuscitation, no matter how many weeks or months they have lain inert, as long as the internal organs are present and correct or may be easily rectified and the wings, antennae, etc. are not too badly decayed.

  Baxter felt his heartbeat quicken – could feel it pumping in his ears. If there had been any lingering doubts as to what he must do, they promptly evaporated. In anyone’s life there are few enough occasions when one is absolutely certain of something: when the facts stand right before you like some solid, unmovable truth. But Baxter knew, as he sat there with the room slowly darkening about him, that this was one such occasion and that his course of action was laid out for him.