Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  West was for once at a total loss for words as he stood fixed in the glitter of Himmler’s little, round spectacles. That was for the best, as the Reichsfuhrer astounded us both by declaring, “You haff done vell, Vest! Dis vass not’ingk but a man, if a Chew can be so designated. Christianity vass all a plot, as I knew, a plot to distract us from the true vorship of Votan.”

  “Heil Hitler!” West at last remembered to say.

  “As your reward, I am sending you both to Auschwitz—” here the Reichsfuhrer skipped a beat, perhaps giving the lie to those who have averred that he was totally devoid of humor—“to oversee and guide Dr. Mengele in his endeavors. His experiments haff lately taken a decidedly odd turn, and I feel you are the only man to evaluate them and report to me confidentially.”

  MANY HAPPY RETURNS

  Returning late to my new home, I spied a stranger in the alley.

  “May I help you?”

  He ignored me. He needed no help to trespass.

  The gate to the alley was locked. I entered my front door, grabbed a flashlight and a ring of household keys, and hurried through to the garden.

  Lights from tall buildings around me revealed no lurkers. I unlocked the gate from the garden to the alley. Except for trash cans and litter, it was empty.

  The house next door was a classic Federal house like mine, but divided into apartments. The stranger must belong there. But where had he gone?

  I soon found an answer. A door into the neighboring house was blocked by old packing crates, but a man could squeeze through. The door looked unused, though. The knob was missing.

  I examined the windows. They were above the level of my head, and securely barred. Lights shone in a few of them, and I glimpsed motion. I realized that I wouldn’t have to call the police if I kept prowling like this.

  Hurrying back to my garden, I saw a depression in the wall of my home. It had once been a door, but it was bricked over.

  My home was the sort that Susan would have liked. She had enjoyed entertaining, and she had collected too many antiques for our East Side apartment.

  “Why on earth did you buy a house?” my sister, Janice, had asked. “You should have moved to a smaller place when....”

  “I can afford it.”

  “If you can afford an elephant, should you buy one?”

  “It feels like home.”

  “It feels like a museum.” Her disapproving gaze stopped at the urn on the mantel. “Or a tomb.”

  I was awakened that night by footsteps. They must have come from the house on the other side, which shared a wall with mine, although I had never heard untoward noise from those neighbors.

  The next night I saw a woman in the alley, who vanished as neatly as her male counterpart. I went to the house across the alley and buzzed the super, but he affected to speak no English.

  That night I heard two sets of footsteps and voices, as if the female stranger had moved into my walls, too. The conversation seemed pleasant, but I couldn’t make out a word.

  “You never get out, do you?” Janice scolded. “You’re coming to my place for New Year’s.”

  “No, I had planned....”

  I couldn’t continue. I had planned nothing. Susan’s New Year’s Eve parties had become a tradition. This would be the first year without one.

  “Why don’t we have my party here?” Janice said. “I always go to yours, anyway. You must have the list.”

  Going through the list was a ghoulish exercise. So many names had been crossed off, and still more had to be. Life is like the trenches in the First World War. Instead of five minutes, it takes sixty years or so to lose your friends, but you lose them.

  Frank Capra takes over New York City when it snows at the holidays. The buildings are scaled down by the black sky, bright lights glorify sifting snow. The derelicts are replaced by charming character actors. “Hello, Lion’s Head!” I called. “Hello, General Sheridan!” People smiled at me and I wished them all a happy New Year as I hurried home, somewhat tipsily, with last minute party supplies.

  This would never do: the gate to the alley stood open. Trying to pull it closed with my arms loaded, I slipped on the ice and tumbled painfully down the steps.

  Someone helped, but he guided me deeper into the alley. That bricked-over door was open. Light poured out.

  “Now, wait—”

  “What you need is a drink,” my helper said. By God, it was Roy! Where had he been keeping himself all these years?

  Inside the house I found that just about everybody had gathered. I hadn’t seen Claire since ... since she slashed her wrists. She didn’t look any the worse for it.

  “I think the mice are having a party,” she said, one ear pressed to the wall.

  “Acoustics,” explained Paul, still the professor, although he had choked to death at a restaurant ten years ago. “The party’s really here.”

  That should have been my cue to dash for the real entrance to my home. But I knew beyond all doubt as I walked into the next room that Susan was waiting for me.

  LA FILLE AUX YEUX D’ÉMAIL

  I had bared my torso as the doctor advised, but Surprenant flaunted his customary, quasi-military regalia, suggesting some absurd costume approved by his late master, Bonaparte, whom he would soon join in hell. If this happy event miscarried, and if my ball merely passed through his chest without killing him, he would ever after painfully cough up wads of wool, linen and silk, and perhaps a brass button or two.

  As I raised my pistol—the damned thing shook, beastly chilly morning—I gritted, “Waterloo, you frog-fondling bastard!”

  I was aware that Trelawney winced and Mr. Jagger averted his eyes. However unexceptionable the sentiment, this was not the sort of a thing a gentleman said at such a moment. That fiend merely smiled one of his stiff little smiles and flung back at me, “Countess-fondling bastard, Milord Cuckoo.”

  You can see what an impossible creature this was, lacking even the common decency to address me as “My Lord Earl,” or “Lord Nether Dunwich.” I forgot the Martial skills that were my second nature and yanked the trigger as if it were intimately connected with the pustulant innards of his stinking heart. I consequently missed that organ by a foot: the ball drilled between his eyes.

  “Well played!” Lord Cummerbund cried, even before the body hit the turf with a gratifying thud. Mr. Jagger averted his eyes once again, doubtless reflecting that this was not how duelists comported themselves in the reign of good King George III.

  The dead man’s seconds held their ground, wordless, expressionless, not at all like any Frenchmen I had ever seen, as I strode forward with an offhand deprecation of my shooting. It was Mr. Jagger, the surgeon, who doddered to intercept me, fearing that I would club the fallen man with my pistol-butt. But I only wanted a last look at the poor chap, I assured the old man as I set him firmly aside.

  Incredible, really. The hole was neat and bloodless as the bung of a cask. The Adonis-like head (it cost nothing to give the smocksniff his due, for he was dead, thank God!) showed none of the grotesque distortion that often results from the forcible insertion of a big lead ball into the brain.

  Trelawney and Lord Cummerbund draped my cloak over my shoulders and hurried me from the field, as seconds are supposed to do. I was not at all loath to go. The sight of Surprenant’s blue eyes, clear and placid as the sky toward which they gazed, was bloody unnerving.

  A departing glance, equally unnerving, showed his seconds still standing like statues.

  * * * *

  I flung my reins at the nearest lackey and raced upstairs, bursting into my wife’s chambers and hurling my cloak within a foot of her exquisite, empty head. She lay on a divan in the filmiest of morning gowns, a sylph basking in a transparent mist.

  “Your lover is no more,” I announced.

  “No more than what, Neddy?” She yawned delicately into her fan. I saw that she was reading a triple-decker by that Shelley woman, which irked me more than the absurd name she called me by. I of
ten said that someone should drown that pup, and his novelizing trollop of a wife along with him. Their filthy effusions had undoubtedly undermined Phyllis’s moral character.

  “You whore, he’s dead! I’ll no longer be sickened by the taste of snails and garlic in your kisses.”

  “No worse, surely, than the taste of turnips, gin and scullions’ cunnies in yours, Nether Dunwich. Oh, my! You’re not referring to that French gentleman, are you? I dropped him, as you adjured me to.”

  “And I dropped him again this morning, dropped him deeper than ever plummet sounded.”

  “Killing lovers and quoting poetry before breakfast! You’re becoming nearly interesting. And you look altogether fetching without your shirt, Neddy. Why fine, strapping men wear so much clothing is beyond my understanding. Remove your hose, why don’t you?”

  “It doesn’t—oh, yes, quite.” I kicked off my boots and peeled my nether garment. Although I risk seeming the proper Bedlamite, that hole in Surprenant’s head had provoked a sequence of thought that led directly to the one between Phyllis’s thighs, and I had been pulled from the field of death by an upright lance. I am not alone in my madness. Any man who fought against Boney knows that nothing tops off slaughter like a proper fuck.

  Women, of course, are the same, if not worse. Thrash a clumsy groom, and before you can apologize for your unthinking brutality, some tender-hearted virgin who has just been nattering about the Rights of Man will tear your breeches down and inhale your cock. The flush that rose to my countess’s cheeks and the slackening of her thighs told me that my tale of death had aroused her.

  I dropped to my knees and tore her gown apart. This provoked a flurry of protest, but did not stop her from draping her legs over my shoulders and thrusting her cunt up for tasting.

  God, that hole! The door of life, the door of death, the mouth of the tomb where we lust to bury ourselves from boyhood. Its tastes, it textures, its shapes, its fascinations are boundless. I slipped my hands under her rump to lift her like a brimming bowl of poison, and I drank deep. My thoughts were hectic, distracted. I kept thinking of that hole in my victim’s forehead and wondering—damme, some thoughts are too mad to be put in words!

  But this one was mine again, all mine ... until the next dancing-master or clock-maker came prancing up to sniff it. I bit back a cry that was part triumph and part despair as I scrambled forward to jam my cock to the hilt into the slithery essence of her being.

  “What ... unh ... what ... unh ... what was that about Waterloo, Neddy?”

  God alone knew what I had been saying, but I had a suspicion, and that suspicion enraged me. “Countess, I vow you will forget that absurd name if I hang you by your wrists and give you a taste of a coachman’s whip!”

  “It’s so tiresome, Neddy, that you never keep such—oh, My Lord!—promises. Oh!”

  Having reclaimed her for the moment, I relaxed in her embrace ... until the cuckoo-clock hooted, a reminder of the man I had killed that was so apposite, that it was like a rude French gesture from beyond the grave.

  I went to tear the clock from the wall with the intention of smashing it under my heel, but Phyllis flung herself in my way and snuggled the hateful object against her bare breasts as if I had threatened to brain an especially beloved child.

  She had scarcely batted an eyelash when I told her how I had destroyed the damned clock’s maker.

  * * * *

  The Marquis de Surprenant might have been a dazzling ornament of the last century. In those days, I am told, a gentleman could tinker to his heart’s content with clocks and clockwork peacocks and mechanical Chinamen and chess-playing chimpanzees without being dismissed as an eccentric. No one could deny his cleverness, but cleverness is surely no sign of good breeding.

  I had no knowledge of his predilections when, reverses at the gaming-tables having dictated it, I sold him Noddingdean Manor and its attendant lands. The fields were a wasteland of Biblical desolation, the idle swine who posed as tenants never paid the rents, and the manor itself had been home to the owl and the serpent since Queen Anne’s reign. I was eminently satisfied with the bags of gold that were brought to my door—rather a Gallic flourish, that—in a coach drawn by almost preternaturally matched and well-behaved horses.

  “They move like ballet-dancers,” Lady Nether Dunwich said at the time, but I gave this no thought then.

  I forgot about the fellow for six months or so, and my incuriosity about the antics of Frenchmen was so profound that I would have declined his invitation for a week of shooting and feasting at Noddingdean if Phyllis had not pestered me beyond mortal endurance. There would be no denying her, for the marquis had won her devotion with the gift of that bizarre clock, which kept idiosyncratic time and sounded like no cuckoo I had ever heard. Her attachment to this gift flirted with dementia; I had once surprised her naked in bed, apparently putting the clock to a use that no sane Christian would dream of. But I never inquired too deeply into her eccentricities, for she came from a noble Scotch family who had only stopped painting themselves blue in her grandmother’s day.

  Once past the borders of my former holding, I began to feel uncomfortably like that chap in the Arabian Nights who wakes one morning to find that a magician has erected a palace beside his, one that makes his own look shoddy. The former desert bloomed, the former ruin glittered. I will not deny that envy tinged my further dealings with the marquis.

  “They’re toys!” Phyllis cried, having dashed from the coach to exclaim over the exotic birds that paraded about the lawn. “Come look, Neddy, they’re toys!”

  Such familiarity was impertinent enough in the bedroom, but here, in front of the foreign footmen who had sprung up to receive us, it was intolerable. Not a smirk in the bunch, though, they were admirably impassive, and that mollified my anger. It vanished completely when I joined the countess and realized that she spoke the truth. The peacocks that strutted and preened about the lawn were made of metal, inset with dazzling gemstones. I had to touch them—which no real bird would have permitted—to verify the evidence of my eyes.

  “Rather hard on the teeth, I should imagine,” I said.

  A voice said: “And they would surely play hell with your stomach, my lord.”

  “Who—?” The voice had been a man’s, but I was alone with the countess. And the birds. I studied them suspiciously.

  “Nether Dunwich, it was ... he ... that spoke.”

  I thought she had gone quite mad, for she pointed timidly at a statue that stood beside us, one of those naked Greek Johnnies. I had barely opened my mouth to deliver my diagnosis when it turned its head toward us and said, “It was indeed I, my lord. Your pardon if I startled you.”

  “It’s made of stone,” Phyllis whispered, “Neddy, it really is!”

  I absently swatted her hand from the statue’s bare arse as I gave it a close scrutiny. Its facial expressions were somewhat crude—the bloody thing was smiling now—and I detected a seam where the neck had swiveled toward us. It was no man coated with paint, as I had at first suspected, but a mechanical device like the birds.

  “My master, the marquis, awaits you,” the thing said, staring insolently at Phyllis.

  “Your servant, sir,” I said, feeling like an idiot for saying it, as I propelled the countess firmly away by the elbow.

  “And yours, my lord,” the statue said, turning its head completely to the rear to wink at us. At the same time its hand, formerly raised in a heroic gesture, descended jerkily and moved to its front. The body hid what the hand was doing, but the elbow twitched suggestively as the contrivance continued to stare after my wife.

  “Did you observe the ... change ... in its physique?” she asked.

  “Damme if I didn’t! The man’s a rogue, a bloody, pandering dog.”

  “Neddy, it’s only a statue!”

  “Not that—and stop smiling at it, you slut!—the thing’s master, Marquis Bloody-Be-Damned Surprenant. I mean to tell him that it’s just not on in my county, no, not on at all,
statues with stiff pricks.”

  I told him nothing, however. No sooner had we been shown to our rooms than the countess, inflamed by the lascivious display, tore my clothes off and ravished me repeatedly until I was forced to resort to my tongue, my fingers and, finally, the Persian bedstave the shameless wanton had packed, to meet her insatiable demands. I was rather subdued and not a little sore when we dressed and went to meet the other noble guests and be amused to the point of numbness by further mechanical wonders.

  The countess glittered as only she can do, and the target of her relentless glittering was our host. Even without a receptive audience, I had observed, he was inclined to prattle on at unconscionable length, and Phyllis’s attentions encouraged him to a near-Whiggish excess of chatter. Wherever I wandered in the vast drawing room, no matter how intently I tried to listen to serious talk of the chase or the table from my peers, I was conscious of his accented fluting. Like the more viscous elements of a bucket of slops dumped from a London window, some of his words stuck, but I can recall no coherent theme in his twittering.

  He had been, he said, the prize pupil of a certain Herr Dr. Koppel at Ingelstodt. Another German, a writer named Hoffmann, had slandered this Koppel and Italianized his name in a tale about a mechanical ballet-dancer which had achieved some vogue: my lady seemed to have heard of it, and God knows she’ll read any book if it’s sufficiently lubricious.

  Koppel and his ballerina had come to a bad end, but Surprenant vowed to carry on his work and abide by his faith: that the flesh was a poor vessel for the soul, and that it could be far more properly housed in a perfect machine.

  No such perfection was evident in the machines now on display. To the loud amusement of several guests, the Chinese automaton was attempting to fill glasses from an empty decanter. I watched the chimpanzee, playing chess with Lord Cummerbund. The motions of these machines were awkward, like those of the obscene statue; and I would say mindless, except that the ape appeared to be winning.