by Rhys Hughes
I had reached a region of sand dunes, wild and remote. The sea and a lake lapped their own shores, one a summary of the other, except that the shore soaked by the sea contained the lake and that by the lake did not. It held me instead, and another, for I stood watching a fellow and his lips murdering a trumpet, which he aimed over the little waves, but not without reverberations back at me. His feet didn’t quite dip in the green waters, but the foam flew up, blown off by the power of his lungs and swirled down onto his shoulders.
Listening to his piece, it was as if a mallet struck me behind the eyes, then flattened my nose and hit the chin, making me feel as diflas as pechod, which is to say dejected.
Frowning, I mumbled: “What’s a hammer without an arm? What’s an arm without a shoulder? What’s a shoulder when it’s not given cold, allowing the legs to walk away on their own?”
“Speaking to me, are you now?” demanded the man, abruptly lowering his trumpet, as if caught loving it.
“No, to myself!” I answered. “Rhetorical questions, from the hamlet of Rhetor, I assume, which sounds like it may be in Powys, but isn’t. Now turn around and let me judge you, for a back without a face is worse than a deathbed with extra rattles.”
“Is that a saying?” he jerked. “An ancient proverb?”
“In adequate time, it will be,” I lied.
He glanced over his shoulder and I saw he was not wholly ugly. All men are unpleasing in the features compared with harps, but this fellow was simply male hideous, not fishmonkey monster standard. For that I was grateful. Don’t care for demonic things around myself. Hate shapes which shouldn’t live flitting near. He wasn’t one of those, not blatantly, but his music was too much pure grue. That’s not so bad as grisly form, and my suspicions were only stirred, like tea, rather than aroused, like my manjuice wand at rosy crack of dawn.
I sat and removed my shoes. I wriggled my toes.
“You bear an injury of peregrination,” said he.
“Blisters always heal with rest. Which reminds me: time to work my wrist, not my heels. I play music too.”
“Better than me, you suppose? Don’t be modest.”
“Ah no, I’m an eternal beginner. I use only tin strings on my harp, which are useless against the avatars of hell and evil, but that doesn’t matter because I avoid them as often as possible anyway. Sometimes I run faster away than the sprightliest jig.”
“An unconventional melodic metal. I am intrigued. We share at least one oddity. My trumpet was forged from aluminium. It is light and strong and toxic after long exposure, and shiny as the polished neck of Sproon or the rim of the mirror pie of Hiss.”
“You a pagan? A pagan! It cannot be!”
“Aye, my gods are Gaap and Honk and Glib and Drigg and Chyme. They were old even before years were invented.”
“Seedy Crom is my patron. Different pantheon, alas!”
“Two coincidences would be too coincidental.”
I bowed, not so low. “Tin Dylan.”
“And my name, aptly enough, is Aluminium Dewi. I am now an exile. The problem with my home town is that to your face, the people are all behind you, but behind your back they’re at your throat. I was compelled to depart. My roaming begins here.”
I blinked in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Porthcawl. In the distance, see. Between that big mansion and the small lighthouse. That sequence of bays. It was Hugo Bloat who arranged my expulsion. May Boppo blast him!”
“Easy on the dismal names of power!” I cautioned.
“All the same,” he returned, “may he do so. Twice now, because you have unwittingly halved the curse.”
I sighed and said: “Relate me your history and I shall reluctantly listen. It may exhaust your mouth to the point where you can no longer blow a note on your horn, and then I shall be able to depart from you at my leisure, not needing to hurry on and inevitably slip like a knot in a tie and hang still within earshot.”
“That I shall, for a tale shared is a shoulder to cry on squared. I was born there, a tiny man in a small town, until I grew up and property developers moved in. The strange thing is that I didn’t notice Porthcawl increasing in size because its horizons stretched at exactly the rate of my own. As I got older, I was always just tall enough to see the edge of town in every direction. I assumed everything was the same. The truth is that building projects spoiled it.”
“This is a narrative of shady business?”
He snorted and waved his trumpet in agitation. “Don’t be daft, mun. I don’t fret about that sort of thing. They can concrete the whole world for all I care. No, that’s not it.”
I plucked a harp string in relief and it sighed for me. “Pleased to hear that, for I’m suspicious of nature.”
But I didn’t relate him the reasons why, most of them consisting of toadstool forests, monsters in other woods, shadows and bandits behind a boulder on the way, odd rustlings in ditches and stone circles from ages ago, put there for lost ceremonies, better not to ask. The wilds pimpled my flesh up, pressed my spirits down.
Loneliness and gloom indoors can be horrid too. The eeriness on the far side of furniture is a real force, admit it. But the murkiest corner of that far side is beyond indoors altogether, through the wall, outside the very house, back out in that wilderness. Wandering hills at night is the same as being lost far behind countless wardrobes and their cobwebs, and stuck there, even if you know where you’re going. Dead in the centre of that eeriness, no help. Wherever you are, you’re behind a wardrobe in some part of the globe, open or shut.
And probably above a coffin, on the other side of the world. Unless your antipodes happen to be right in the sea. The opposite side of Wales is water, so I am safe. Don’t know about you. Maybe a graveyard directly below your feet now, thousands of miles down, true enough, but there all the same, and the decaying bodies inside with their backs turned to you, except for a few here and there, with rictus grins leering and smirking, having twisted around in the frantic struggles of those buried alive and woken, all tangled in rotted shrouds.
“Why are you sweating?” cried Aluminium Dewi.
“So I am! Must be the digression.”
“Hugo Bloat almost owns Porthcawl,” he said, “what with his immense wealth and skewed eye. A bland dab apart from that look is he, until you know him proper. Can’t honestly say if he inherited his money or made it up as he went along. He lives in that mansion now. It’s named Sker House and legends are associated with it. A young maid in olden times was shut in the attic by her father because she loved a poor man. And she wrote a love letter by opening a vein and dripping the blood on a piece of paper and she threw it out a window and died before she got a reply. No postal service back then, and no stamps.”
“Is the new owner ever visited by ghosts?”
“Not at first, Dylan! He did nothing to annoy her loose soul. But a time came when Mr Bloat wanted to start a new collection and he resolved to make phantoms its theme. That’s all he cares about, hoarding stuff in categories. He travels all places to buy new items. He keeps more than a hundred doors in there, rooms full of doors! And bottles and globes from countries with peculiar names. And gramophones all playing together, but different tunes, and what’s worse, sometimes they sound right, as if the concept of cacophony can be redeemed. That frightens me. Anyway, he came to the conclusion that spirits were collectible too and so he sought how to conjure them up and trap them.”
I gazed over the lake to the house in the distance and the town way beyond that. “Rather him than me.”
Aluminium Dewi smiled and his eyes sparkled like kidneystones which turn out to be sapphires, and he said: “Mr Bloat is persuasive and often gets what he desires through sheer force of wallet. He owns the funfair, for instance, and the authorities wanted to close it down for reasons of safety, but he bribed them away, and so it remains, with its rotting old rollercoaster and ghastly booths.”
I whistled long and low, the way I can’t make melody on
my harp. “A funfair, you say? That’s nice. Not too many of those in Wales. Just now, I’ve come from Lladloh, that’s near Lampeter, and must have walked forty miles, almost as the simurgh flies, through a typical part of the realm, passing the settlements of Talley, Llandeilo, Pontardawe, Skewen, Baglan and Margam, and not once did I spy such a remarkable thing as a funfair. And now I’m here, wherever it is.”
“On the shores of Kenfig Pool,” he returned.
“Rings a faint bell, that name.”
He chuckled. “And so it might. Once there was a town here also, but it was buried by the shifting dunes. That’s the fable. But some say that a part of old Kenfig lies beneath the lake and that on stormy nights the bell in the spire of the submerged church still tolls the hours. Haven’t heard it myself, but the Pool is also rumoured to have no bottom, so the sound must be getting fainter and fainter as the town continues to sink. For that reason, I am no sceptic.”
“Nor me. I’m septic instead. My feet, from tramping.”
“Is that so? Well then, all there you are!”
“That I am!” I stood up and clicked my heels at this compliment and then added: “Ouch!” And sat again.
“But a disappointment’s in store for you, Dylan. A twll of a place, that funfair and no mistake. Make a detour. It ought to be deserted year round, but Mr Bloat is smart. You know how travelling fairs always cause trouble when they roll into a town? The roaming carnival sort are deemed quite as bad as the gossipy neighbours of Cthulhu’s Myngu. The collector eases the fears of the citizens of Porthcawl by arranging for these folk to set up in the old tents and to take over the running of the defective rides. When one band of itinerants departs, another takes its place. And so the funfair’s always occupied.”
“A vile balance between the temporary and the permanent,” I avowed, but I was still eager to visit it.
“My story is connected with this situation. Shall I explain how? It concerns the time that a knife thrower was resident in one of the stalls and Mr Bloat went to see his act. Turns out that this performer hoped to stand out from his rivals, so he came up with a gimmick. He had a pretty assistant and he stood her in front of a large sheet of corrugated iron. Most knife throwers just use wood panels. Anyway, the sound of the blade against the metal was more dramatic than the dull thud of steel on pine, but there was a danger that it would blunt his knives, perhaps even snap a blade. And he couldn’t afford that, so he devised a solution. Any idea what a damascene sword is, Dylan?”
I nodded. “Heard tell of them. A method for tempering a blade so it becomes much stronger than usual.”
Aluminium Dewi licked his lips. “That’s right! But can you also say how the process worked? A scimitar would be poked into blazing charcoals until it was red and then it would be quenched in the body of a captive. As the glowing steel slid into his muscles, it would collect deposits of carbon. Best way to toughen them!”
“This knife thrower was a murderer, was he?”
“No. He dipped his hot knives in vats of alcoholic beverage. He had a faint notion they too contained carbon and maybe other substances even better. He tried beer, wine and sherry.”
“I hope no amontillado was wasted?”
Aluminium Dewi raised an eyebrow. “That’s different from sherry, to all but fools. I know what you’re going to ask next. Did it work? It did indeed, but that’s not the point of this anecdote. Mr Bloat was given to collecting musical instruments at that time. He wondered if treating his violins and guitars and oboes in the same way might improve their sound. He heated them up but they caught fire.”
“Because they were made of wood?” I wondered.
He rubbed his brow in thought. “It must have been. Anyway, after a long period of trial and error, he realised that some instruments could be tempered in this fashion and that their tone really would be sharper and worth much more at auction, if the time ever came when he needed to sell his collection. He hired the knife thrower to do all this for him. By the way, the name of the fellow was Dippy Lavengro, though born like that or not I can’t say. He owned a forge and bellows, probably stolen, and signed a secret pact with the brewers who worked on the edge of the funfair, for the rovers made their own beverages. Mr Bloat had figured that all his metal instruments could be dunked before the time came for Dippy and his fellows to move on.”
“Good at calculating, was he? A cunning one with numbers and other pinches of data? Like Seedy Crom.”
“Sorry, that god is still unknown to me.”
“Very modern, is he! Keeps updating himself and can turn his claw to anything. Once he was purely wrongable, but now there’s a rightable version. In two minds about that.”
“Sounds like a nightmare shwni bob ochr.”
“Aye, well on with your narrative,” I muttered ruefully, for I had no thrill at blasphemy. He nodded.
“A few days before the fair was due to leave, to make room for the next set of itinerants, Mr Bloat brought to Dippy his final instrument. It was a trumpet without valves. One of those long types, straight with a flared end. Dippy took it and rested it against a wall for an instant while he talked terms for its dipping with one of the brewers. But when he turned around, it had vanished. Somebody had stolen it. A visitor to the fair, doubtless. Maybe he had taken it as his prize for some arcane kiosk game in mistake. Dippy thought he saw it in the arms of a man who was entering the Tunnel of Love on a little boat. He waited at the exit but nobody emerged. Then he reckoned his eyes were playing tricks. What was he going to do? He had to secure a replacement before the collector came back. But where from? Where?”
“Why didn’t he just flee?” I asked innocently.
“Hugo Bloat is famous for his grudges, the way he bears them, plus the funds he is willing to waste in treating them as he sees fit, which is to say getting revenge. A hired assassin or poisoned monkey or maybe something even worse would be on Dippy Lavengro’s trail, on my oath! If it cost Mr Bloat a cool million, he wouldn’t care, just so long as this insult to his local omnipotence was repaid several times over. Recall you where he lives. Sker House. Pronounce that name, Dylan. Remember also how his personality is so obsessive. He gathers doors! To lift the biggest ones into his rooms, he had to take the real doors off their hinges. I guess he added those to his collection.”
I was persuaded of the point. I said: “Go on.”
“Dippy thought there was nothing for it but to forge a new trumpet. He had no idea what sort of metal might best serve, nor where to get it, short of melting down one of the funfair fittings, such as a rail from a rollercoaster. That night he couldn’t sleep. He wandered among the tents and watched the stars. There was a streak of light! A meteorite scorched down and smashed a hole in the roof of the Ghost Train. Into that horrid ride crept he, with but a candle.”
“He found an object from the firmament?”
“That he did! It was smoking and hissing, having demolished a pair of ceramic zombies inside. A solid sphere of aluminium, it was. When it cooled, he picked it up. He reasoned this was a gift from heaven and it seemed obvious that he ought to make the trumpet from it. So he took it back to his forge and hammered it flat, and rolled it up, and created a musical instrument unlike any other. He did his best, but it refused to sound a note. He blew and blew to no avail. He puffed until he was pink and worn but still it was silent.”
“Serves his right!” I declared pompously.
“All the same, he dunked it. In brandy. Just to see what next might happen. And then, Dylan, it did work!”
To comfort myself a little, I strummed a chord on my harp. A lonely sound out on those dunes, but not scary, for the story had a monopoly on that quality. I crooned aloud too:
Brandy, brandy, I’ve come to distil you,
Be you legitimate or be you bootleg,
And if you’ll only let me dip my horn,
I’ll sip you true til the dregs of morn.
You should have seen Aluminium Dewi wince. He cried: “By Drigg, you sure enough
can’t sing or play it.”
“My possible best is my worst,” I replied. “And Mr Bloat won’t like it neither. Sounds like he’s a fellow asking for a doom. What way can he get anything he wants in his town?”
“Money! Don’t you listen? I told you!”
I inclined my head. “Sorry for that, I am! Tired with my journey if the facts be known, which is why I come over daft. But continue with the tale and pay no mind to this bard.”
Instead of apologising for his show of temper, he took my advice as if I meant it and said: “That block of aluminium had magical properties, but they were too sober to make a song and dance of themselves. Peaceful as catatonics after burial they would have stayed inside that meteorite, if they hadn’t been dipped in alcohol. Just potential chaos, I mean, and not the kinetic kind. They got drunk, loosened up. Lost all inhibitions, you might say, like some kinds of lady.”
I didn’t know the type he meant, and I was feared of learning, so I shouted: “Magic plays the trumpet?”
“Not quite, Dylan. No, that was Dippy’s fault and doing. He knew so little about designing musical instruments that he forged the trumpet in reverse. If you blew, nothing occurred, but if you sucked. Ah! Then many notes came out, ugly crochets and all. That’s how it is played. I wasn’t puffing the foam of this lake up onto my shoulders, I was sucking it. No wonder the tunes are so dreadful, almost as bad as your own! But there’s no paranormal angle to that. The magic in the metal does something else. It draws in every ghost from the immediate area. As far as a note can be heard, whatever that radius is, it summons them! Sucks them in, it does! What think you of that, mun? And the ghosts slip through the horn, enter the player’s body and possess him.”