Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

by Richard Calder

  ‘And if it falls?’ I said.

  ‘She’ll lose her power. In England, of course, it is what they do to automata before...’ His face reddened. ‘Forgive. I forget, I forget. Barbarous. Barbarous! I want to help. Believe, please! Now tell: has the young lady been able to work... magic?’

  ‘She’s been getting weaker ever since she was dusted. Except—except she can read minds. She couldn’t do that before.’

  ‘A temporary side effect, I would think. Compensation, like the aural acuteness of the blind.’

  ‘But you can clean her up?’

  ‘The dust is not of a type I have previously encountered.’ He slapped me on the back. ‘But yes, yes, I dare say, I will say. We cannot have the marvellous toy suffer!’ he signed off from his workstation; the hologram vanished. ‘Poof!’ he said. 'Just like we make the little robots in the matrix do.’

  ‘Before you make Poof!’ said Kito, who was lounging across her Nubian slave like a torch singer across a Steinway, ‘I want Mr Ignatz tell me about doll-plague.’

  ‘After,’ I said. ‘There might not be much time.’

  ‘It is true,' said Spalanzani. ‘The dust makes weak, but then comes serious dysfunction. Her body will run only fractal software. And that software is being corrupted.’

  Kito dug her nails into ebony electromuscle. ‘Shut up, toymaker, you want make sex machine for me or you want go back Europe?’ Spalanzani’s mouth curled into a nervous, placatory smile. ‘And you,’ she continued, ‘little English brat addicted to vampire kisses—you do as I say or Miss Primavera go way of all silicon. I must know. I

  must know what start doll-plague. I must have America off my back!’

  The monitor still seemed to glow with a spectral afterimage: snowflakes, green snowflakes, patterns within patterns, geometries enfolding mind and matter, space and time, in a model of reality’s infinite permutations.

  It was the fount of all allure.

  The Seven Stars was an embodiment of that allure. The Daedalean corridors, dizzy stairwells and impossible perspectives imitated the topography of a recombinant mind; a mind that is catastrophic, illusory, false. A celebration of surface and plane, of the paradoxes of line, the Stars might have been the result of an architectural collaboration between Piranesi, Escher and a fairground tycoon who dreamed of combining a crooked house with a hall of mirrors and a maze. It was an underground palace, a bejewelled goblin city, stocked with the abandoned luxuries of London’s beau monde. In its catacombs slept a thousand dead girls.

  ‘Titania built the Stars in six months,’ said Jo, her outsized fox fur dragging across the chequerboard tiles. ‘Before my time, of course. But they say the dolls in those days would wake up each morning to discover another room, a hallway, a stairwell where there had been none before.’

  The passageways were suffused with a sourceless green light. At the beginning of our journey the walls had been plain, but now, as we progressed (I do not know how far; the labyrinth twisted, fell, doubled back, fell again), we passed frescoes mirroring the barrenness of our path, a parallel world, pointless and sterile, which absented us and refused to echo our tread. And then the light, deepening as if diffused by rainforest, filled a long corridor lined with doors, some two-dimensional, painted, some, it seemed, real. (I saw one open, and, fractionally ajar, betray a green eye framed by a slit of darkness.)

  Deepening, darkening; we tumbled down stairwells, the greenness matching our descent exponentially, until that light presented the illusion of obscuring more than it revealed—an unknown face, rearing from the gross illumination, appeared to flicker once, twice, then vanish, to leave only a trace of perfume, electric and sharp. We were in some sub-sub-sub-basement, the crypt of the world, when the walls began to curve, making my eyes itch for resolution. Doors. More doors. One was off its jambs; beyond it, a stark bedroom, empty but for a vanity table and a wrought-iron bed (beneath the bed lay a slipper, its long, slim heel broken and hanging off), a room that called silently, insistently for the overthrow of small pleasures. A hairpin bend, and the passageway, like a green rainbow, ended at a portal of beaten gold: doors that might have guarded Belshazzar’s banqueting hall. That face again, rearing out of the corner of my eye, then vanishing, the words ‘Oh party time!' left in the air along with the memory of that electric scent. Jo the Psychopomp was putting her shoulder to the doors, and they were opening, moaning; other faces, sister faces, leered through the crack, and music, tough-cookie music, was making the air dance like a mist of febrile green midges.

  ‘Primavera, I don't like this. I feel sick. I want, I want to—’

  ‘Shut up, Iggy. You’re not sick. Open your eyes. It’s happening, don't you know? At last. It's real. It's true. It's what I’ve always dreamed of.’

  The ballroom was a dragon's lair of shop-soiled furnishings and moth-eaten tapestries and drapes, chiefly in the nouveau and deco styles popular during the aube du millénaire. A group of revellers—dolls in flea-market masquerade costumes (looted from London’s uptown wrack)—were performing a courtly dance to the unlikely accompaniment of saxophone and blue-note piano. Where was the music coming from? From the air, it

  seemed: a sort of jazz of the spheres.

  Arranged in a five-pointed star, holding each other at arm’s length, the dolls marched clockwise, then, completing a revolution, anti-clockwise, their satin-shod feet shuffling across the boards like superfine sandpaper. Other masked dolls, similarly attired in raggedy ballgowns, leaned against walls or reclined in alcoves, idly fanning themselves with spread lunettes of paper and ivory, overwound, it seemed, with a tensility that at any moment might snap. Beyond the wallflowers, beyond the dancers, was a dais on which sat, enthroned, a girl who seemed little older than Primavera. She was crowned with seven stars, and at her side sat a thin pale-faced man. The girl flicked open a fan and waved to us.

  ‘Come,’ said Jo, ‘Titania has granted you an audience.’ We threaded our way through the revolving pentacle of masquers until we stood before the dais. Jo curtsied. ‘Your majesty, we have two guests. Miss Primavera Bob-inski and ... a boy.’

  The child queen leaned forward in a rustle of flounces, bows and panniers, and addressed us from behind a sequinned mask.

  ‘The boy has a name?’ Her voice was like the flutings of a mechanical bird.

  ‘Ignatz,’ said Primavera, flashing an uncertain smile, ‘your majesty,’ and added, with a vulgar enthusiasm which must have flouted court etiquette, ‘Are you really a Big Sister? An original Cartier doll? I though they were all destroyed. And can you do anything—I mean really anything?’

  Jo coughed apologetically. ‘She’s still metamorphosing, your majesty.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Titania, ‘I understand.’ She rose from her throne and descended the dais, her gown a conspiracy of whispers. Titania was unlike any Lilim I had seen. Her hair, a smouldering charcoal black, and the cat-like eyes

  (Cartier nanoengineers had revived Jeanne Toussaint's panther jewellery designs of the 1930s) were typical of the subspecies; but I had never encountered any doll who so embodied the spirit of artificiality, so qualified as Nature's foe. She stood before us, and her gown, red as a lascivious wound, fell silent. She smiled (her teeth seemed oddly blunt), and raised a taloned hand to Primavera’s cheek. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘you’ll soon lose those mongrel looks. Now come to my study. There’s something I want you to hear. Something all my guests hear before I ask them whether they wish to swear allegiance. And if you do so wish, then I shall tell you the secret. The greatest secret of all...’

  The two girls walked across the dance floor, Titania a little stiffly, I thought, a clumsy schoolgirl slightly ridiculous in the extravagance of her Madame Pompadour gown. ‘You can come too, human boy,’ said Titania, adding to her charge, ‘Boys have their uses, of course.’ A wallflower, one leg hooked over the arm of her chair, called out, ‘Nice dress.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Primavera. ‘It’s Ungaro.’

  A girl (fift
een? sixteen? with mad fairies drowning in the absinthe of her eyes) blocked my path. The upper part of her ensemble—a meat-red corselet woven from ‘Skin II’—resembled the flayed torso of a Sadeian heroine. ‘Dance with me,’ she said. Saliva dribbled from the side of her mouth, onto her chin, and then, her breasts. ‘I don’t know how,’ I said. Piqued, she sidled away. ‘Sexual delinquent,’ said Jo. ‘Crazy automaton! Titania tries to invest her life with meaning, and what does she do? Dance, dance, dance! I tell you that doll’s burning out...’

  The man who had shared the dais with Titania gazed down at the pentacle of masquers as he had done throughout our brief audience with his queen, bored, stupefied, unseeing. ‘Who is he?’ I whispered to Jo.

  ‘That’s Peter. He’s brain dead. Titania’s sucked him dry. You’ll be like that’—she gave no hint of mockery -‘in ten years. If you’re not dead before. Still, plenty of time to make babies. Babies that’ll turn into dolls. And that’s all that matters, mmm?’

  A crowd gathered, a crowd of wax faces stained green by the palace’s hermetically generated light; muslin, silk, taffeta, lace swept past; I felt myself pushed, pinched, tickled; the crowd swelled, then withdrew, giggling; Jo was carried away by its riptide.

  Titania and Primavera were leaving the ballroom; I ran after them, skidding across the polished wooden floor.

  The adjoining hallway (we left by a route different from that by which we had entered) was lined with mirrors and trompe l’oeil, and I found myself lied to by false columns and perspectives. Swaying from wall to wall as if I were in the corridor of an ocean liner buffeted by storm, I soon lost sight of my quarry and wandered lost through rooms and salons silent and identical. I was about to cry for help when a hand took me by the arm and pushed me through a door. I winced, expecting to collide with concrete or glass, but the door gave way to three dimensions.

  Titania and Primavera were sitting by an open fire (the palace was mint-cool; the fire, oppressive), half consumed by vast leather armchairs. Along the panelled walls were books and paintings; a heavy oak table scattered with maps and charts, an astrolabe and a globe, suggested the machinations of a general; a ticker tape chattered in a corner. I was in Titania’s chambre ardente.

  ‘Ah, Peter,’ said Titania, ‘I see you’ve found our guest.’ ‘He’s my boyfriend,’ said Primavera. ‘My first.’

  ‘Peter was my first, weren’t you, Peter? But that was another time, another country. Your first is always special. Nothing ever tastes quite the same.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Primavera, blushing.

  Peter drew up two chairs, his expression as deadpan as it had been in the ballroom.

  I settled myself between the girls. A buffet froid of ice cream, chocolates, cream buns and sherbet was arranged by their side. Primavera helped herself to the chocolates. ‘How old are you, your majesty?’ I said.

  Primavera frowned. ‘Iggy, that’s not—’

  ‘Thirteen,’ said Titania. ‘I’ve been thirteen for twenty-eight years. I was made just after Peter was born. Peter and I’—and a bird-like laugh tripped off her lips—‘well, you might say we’re related.’

  ‘But you’re not human!’ said Primavera. ‘I mean, you were born clockwork. You won’t die, like us.’

  ‘Every dawn,’ said Titania, ‘we die. Isn’t that right, Peter?’ A poker floated into the air and began to stoke the fire; the flames crackled over Titania’s giggles; sweat trickled down my neck. ‘But I haven’t brought you here to speak of death. I want to teach you how to live. I want to teach all dolls how to live.’ Her eyes harried Primavera’s. ‘Your generation has evolved. So much more noxious than the first born. Those Lilim...’ Titania slipped to the floor, crawled over to Peter, and lay her head in his lap. ‘Those Lilim were milksops. Isn’t that right, Peter dear?’ Her hand caressed her consort’s thigh. ‘Look into the fire. Do you see the future? Consumed. Us. The world. Everything. Look: the Neverland, in whose doorways and alleys the recombinant feed on those they have beguiled. Look: the Neverland dies, its denizens reduced to starving packs of girls whose teenage mortality will soon leave London’s cordon sanitaire a dry husk. Look: see those who have escaped, the Lilim who claim other cities, the Lilim who claim the world, instructing their sisters in a religion whose longed-for apocalypse is a world usurped, a world of gilded automata. Look: with no human DNA to pirate, that parasitic race, thirst-crazed, hysterical, dies in an ecstatic liebestod, burning

  on the same pyre as forgotten Man. It is right that it be so. It is our destiny. But look: the past is there too. Tell them of the past, Peter...’

  Peter closed his eyes. His voice was soft as ashes. ‘‘Peter Gunn had reached its climax. I shuddered. Titania was robbing me of my human future. But she gave, too. In her saliva, ten billion microrobots—her software clones - coursed into my blood and lymph like a school of mermaids. Ten billion little Titanias swam through me, passing through my urethra, seminal ducts, and into my seminiferous tubules, where they melded themselves with my reproductive ware, corrupting my chromosomes with blueprints for dead girls. I would carry her with me all my life, my Columbine, my sweet soubrette my Titania, queen of the fay; my children would be her children. I too would be a builder of dolls; like my father, I too would be a great engineer! I would complete his work. I would build a world for the chimera, the vampire, the sphinx; a world of childhood perversity; a world of dolls...’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Titania. ‘Quite so. But from the beginning, Peter. Tell them our tale...’

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Lilim

  It was Nursie who told me of the Lilim. ‘They shall inherit the Earth,’ she said, the night-light silhouetting her profile against the wall, where it joined the shadowplay of my toys. Winding them, she would let the boys cavort about the dresser, so that the beating of tiny drums and cymbals, the clatter of tinplate limbs, has always accompanied, in my mind, the memory of her words. ‘Such pretty automatons. Pantalone, Harlequin, Pierrot... How your father spoils you! But beware of her, Peter.’ And she would pick up thrashing Columbine, image of my inamorata. ‘Beware of dead girls. Their too-red lips. Their hearts of ice.’

  Then stooping, her cheeks hot with shame, she would mutter, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, this really is a man’s job,’ and initiate me into the ways of the Lilim. Like most boys I had, of course, already learned much from the smutty jokes of my schoolmates. But Nursie spoke not to edify; she spoke to warn. ‘The chambermaid,’ said Nursie, concluding her biology lesson. ‘You see too much of her. Unclean, vicious girl! Your father doesn’t understand. Don’t think of her!’ But how could I not think of her, of Titania, my living Columbine? And I asked myself then: Would Nursie tell? (But what was there to tell?) That thin, high-cheekboned profile haunting the wall, those flinty, folk-dark words, that smell of lavender water as she kissed me goodnight: Nursie chastened my dreams.

  Each morning that summer the sun effervesced into my room like a champagne of lemonades. The school holidays were at the meridian, the world mine and Titania’s, and Nursie’s words like last year’s snow. Pulling the curtains, I would look down upon Grosvenor Square, environed by its big pseudo-Georgian buildings. The ruins of the old American mission stood opposite, half hidden by full-leafed elms; the scented air was murmurous with bees. That summer, my flesh stirred; my voice broke; my heart bloomed. I did not know, then, that my childhood was to end surrendered to the altar of the Lilim.

  One morning it began. Titania was in the kitchen. Her uniform, which my father had designed, was inspired by Tenniel’s drawings for Alice: pinafore dress, not in the usual blue, but pink, swirling about the knees; starched apron; candy-striped stockings; and pink satin pumps. (‘And how,’ father would say, greeting her, ‘is life in Wonderland today?’) Cornflakes and a pitcher of milk awaited.

  ‘The land of the Seven Stars—we should go there again. Today, perhaps?’ I asked my pretty friend. ‘There’s lots of work to do-.’

  ‘I don’t think we should, Pete
r,’ she chirruped, her bird-like coloratura (‘My nightingale,’ Father would say) in contrast to the autistic face. I chewed my cornflakes wretchedly.

  ‘You’ve got a licence. You shouldn’t worry about Nursie.’

  ‘Mrs Krepelkova doesn’t like dead girls. You know that. Sometimes... sometimes I get scared.’ Turning to the sink she began to wash the pots and pans, scouring them with a cold agitation. Suddenly she froze, clutching at her stomach.

  ‘Can’t Father fix that for you?’ I had seen these signs before.

  ‘Scared,’ she said. ‘It’s happening. I feel it inside.’

  I stirred my cereal into a soggy mess. My appetite had gone. The morning darkened.

  ‘Father says Nursie’s just a silly, superstitious old woman.’

  ‘The world has become a superstitious place.’

  ‘Please, Titania.’ My wheedling voice cut through her massive self-absorption.

  Tm going shopping later.’ The words bled out luxuriantly. ‘If your father says you can come...’

  It was always the same, that face: expressionless eyes, green and supernuminous, and the mouth, locked in its pout; the blood-drained cheeks; the elfin chin and pointy ears; the cutesy nose of the Disney princess. And the same too (for she had doll blood, and such are dolls) her meekness, so infinitely accommodating.

  Everything, everything was to change.

  My father’s bedroom was a twilight world of pulled drapes, old books and camphor. The books were everywhere: tomes on engineering and art history; vellum-bound editions of ‘Second Decadence’ writers of the 1990s; chapbooks on toymaking from seventeenth-century Nuremberg; and rarities such as Bishop Wilkins’ Mechanical Magick. There were paintings, too: amongst them originals by twentieth-century artists such as Hans Bellmer, Balthus and Leonor Fini. (My favourite picture was by the British artist Barry Burman. It was called Judith and depicted a pubescent girl holding, from a leather-gloved hand, the severed head of Holofernes.) But dominating the room—apart from the great bed that ridiculed my father’s consumptive body—were the automata. They hid in the shadows, their kinetic latency like that of coiled, predatory beasts. Here were masterworks from the Age of Reason: The Writer and The Musician by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, purchased from the bankrupt vaults of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Neufchâtel; singing birds by Jean Frederic Leschot; and a magician, a trapeze artist, monkeys, clowns and acrobats by the Maillardets. From a later era my father had collected a bisque-headed Autoperipatetikos by Enoch Rice Morrison; the elegantly dressed girls of Gaston Decamps; a Gustav Vichy musical automaton doll; and (creature of night!) a Steiner doll, with its mouthful of shark-like teeth - which earned it the nickname ‘The Vampire Doll’ -intact.