The Truth Spinner

by Rhys Hughes

  “Of course,” I said wearily.

  He rubbed the yellow blot on his forehead and continued, “The Clown Museum is where those registered faces are recorded by being painted on eggs. Every accredited clown must have a unique face and those eggs enable the proprietors of the Museum to check that no face duplicates any other. I registered my own face more than two decades ago, immediately after I realised I was a were-clown. In fact it is precisely 7412 days since I presented my painted egg to the Museum and carefully added it to the trays of their collection.”

  My interest was finally aroused. “In that case your career as a clown precedes mine by only twenty four hours, for it is 7411 days since I added my own painted egg to the archives. Perhaps our eggs stand next to each other?”

  He nodded ruefully. “I know for certain they do.”

  “Why so much bitterness about it?”

  He grinned. “Now we get to the crux of my vendetta against you. When you added your own egg to the Museum trays you clumsily knocked it against mine. Your shell remained intact but mine cracked and the yolk poured down my registered expression, eventually drying and forming a thick yellow crust over my visage. You remained unaware of this accident and turned to depart, but a few days later I was contacted by the Museum authorities and asked to report there in person. When I saw my mutilated egg I was mortified.”

  I blinked at this revelation. “Clearly I must apologise to you, but I don’t believe that such a minor mishap warrants so deadly a revenge.”

  “You fail to appreciate its full consequences,” spluttered Guttersnipe Chutney, picking ineffectually at his stain with his fingernails, “because you forget that a registered clown is never allowed to deviate from the design submitted on his particular egg. My own egg now featured a yellow splodge and so I was forced on pain of expulsion to add an identical mark to my real face.”

  “Didn’t you plead mitigating circumstances?”

  “Certainly, but the authorities are strict and deaf to all excuses. I had no choice but to obey them. An ordinary clown would simply have used a paintbrush, but I’m a were-clown and my makeup is biological, not synthetic, so it was necessary to grow the stain.”

  The tinge of sympathy in my voice was genuine. “I see. And thus it can never be removed.”

  He inclined his head. “I am stuck with it for the rest of my life.”

  “And you hate it, I presume?”

  “Very perceptive of you. It makes me look like a jaundiced cretin.”

  I shuffled my feet. “But you are a were-clown and can always change back into a normal human by switching off your moonlight lamp. I doubt the stain will accompany you in your transformation. Allow me to bend down and pick up this stone and I’ll smash the bulb for you…”

  Something appeared in his outstretched hand. “I don’t want to be a man again. My destiny lies with the mightiest clowns of all time, so don’t attempt to damage my lamp or I’ll be forced to discharge this gyrojet pistol at your chest. I’m tempted to kill you anyway, but I’ll take far more pleasure in letting you live as a failure. Goodbye, Mr Bubbler, and please have a safe journey down your imminent pit of despair, recrimination, impotence and misery…”

  He waved me on with the barrel of his weapon and every trace of pity for his plight suddenly vacated my soul. I thought about rushing him and taking the full force of one of his rocket-powered bullets, to end everything there and then rather than walk away into a life of gradual descent into nullity. But I was too cowardly and I merely did as I was bid and shambled away.

  I have never worked as a proper clown since, nor as anything else, and I dissipate my meagre savings on beer, for I have become an alcoholic. That’s why I look so poorly and why I seem crushed by the weight of my misfortunes. I daydream about returning to the Clown Museum with a Molotov cocktail or other incendiary device and bombing that traitorous place. But I probably never will…

  * * * *

  “Has your story finished yet?” yawned the genie.

  “No need to be so obvious about how bored you are,” bristled Castor, “but yes, it has.”

  “Good, because it’s bad form to tell your life story to a supernatural being. Cosmic etiquette and all that. It’s especially rude to reminisce in front of a genie who has been deposited for recycling.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Castor.

  “You’re supposed to use your three wishes and go.”

  “I’ll remember that, but if you don’t mind me asking, what exactly do genies get recycled into?”

  “Spirits, of course,” answered the genie.

  Castor raised his eyebrows. “Ghosts, you mean?”

  “No, like brandy or vodka or rum. Remember the fruit juice odour you detected earlier? That’s our sweat. We’re full of fructose and other sugars and when we die we rapidly ferment into alcohol. Hundreds of us are recycled every week.”

  “That’s astounding,” said Castor.

  The genie watched him licking his greedy lips and quickly changed the subject. “Don’t you want your wishes?”

  “Certainly. It’s high time my luck changed. I could use my wishes to get my own back on Guttersnipe Chutney but I’m sure there are more efficient ways of employing them than that. Three wishes in total, you said?”

  The genie nodded. “That’s the contract.”

  “Anything else I should be aware of before I begin? Any hidden clauses?”

  The genie was impressed. “Few people have the clarity of vision to ask that question, but yes, there’s a clause. Three wishes only and I get to kill you after you’ve had your last wish. Do you agree?”

  Castor snorted. “No, I don’t agree to that!”

  The genie pouted. “But it really is standard procedure. Even if you don’t agree to my terms I’ll still kill you after your last wish. That’s what genies do. I’m compelled to obey you until the last wish, then I’m free to end your life.”

  Castor inhaled deeply. “Very well, I agree, because I can see an easy way out of the trap. My first wish will be for more than three wishes. In fact, I hereby wish for an unlimited number of wishes!”

  “Granted!” cried the genie, and he waved his smoky arms.

  “Has it worked?” demanded Castor.

  The genie bowed low. “Yes, your first wish has been granted. You now have an infinite number of wishes at your disposal. However, I must point out that it was a wasted wish, as I still intend to kill you after your third wish.”

  “That’s unfair!” protested Castor.

  “No, it’s not,” said the genie.

  “Yes it is,” persisted Castor, “because you said you would only kill me after my last wish, and now I have an unlimited number of wishes, so there simply isn’t a last one. Infinity never ends, please remember.”

  “But when you agreed to my terms your third wish was your last…”

  “Bah!” grumbled Castor.

  The genie blithely examined his fingernails. “Next wish?”

  “You’re so mean and vicious,” said Castor, “that my second wish is for you to instantly become sweet and good-natured. That way you won’t want to kill my after my third wish and I’ll be allowed to live and enjoy all the wishes that come after it. That’s what I want.”

  “Granted!” the genie roared, and he waved his arms again.

  “Really?” frowned Castor.

  “Yes indeed. I’ve just done exactly what you asked for, but it was also a wasted wish, I’m sorry to say. You see, I was already sweet and good-natured. I intended to kill you with a smile on my face and that’s what I still intend. No genie is really vicious and it’s not a requirement of any killer that he has to be mean.”

  “Humph!” snorted Castor.

  “Your third and last wish?” prompted the genie.

  Castor clenched his fists. “Very well. When I was young and still struggling to be accepted as a professional clown, I always imagined that if I ever found a genie I would wish for genies to stop existing, to prevent other people fro
m being granted wishes. That’s how much of a misanthrope I was.”

  “I never would have guessed,” said the genie.

  “And that’s my third wish,” continued Castor through gritted teeth. “I want all genies to die immediately. Wherever they are.”

  The genie swallowed and muttered, “Granted!”

  He clearly had no choice in the matter…

  Castor stood in the lonely moonlight and allowed himself to appreciate the fact he was still alive despite having used all three wishes, but he was no better off than when he had first approached the bottle bank and this fact irked him. He had been offered an opportunity to get even with his tormentors but it had slipped through his fingers. What a loser!

  Or was he? He sniffed the air gingerly. Alcohol…

  The genie had died and fermented into a potent brew that darkly stained the ground. Castor fought the urge to get down on his hands and knees and lap the precious juice of oblivion with his tongue. Too bestial. Then he smiled and regarded the other bottles that surrounded him.

  They were full of dead genies, brimming with alcohol, hundreds of bottles sloshing with the fluid of forgetfulness, with a liquid escape!

  Or with fuel for a daring assault on the Clown Museum…

  The simple fact was that rags and matches could be obtained easily enough, and so this bottle bank had become a cache of Molotov cocktails. Castor reached into one of his pockets for his tubes of face paint. He didn’t have a mirror but that didn’t matter. It was time for him to adopt a new face anyway, and with the poaching of the Museum eggs in the coming inferno, how would anyone ever be able to persecute him for a mismatch?

  With a lopsided grin and nostrils filled with the fumes of fermented genies, Hangfire Bubbler loped off into the night…

  The Private Pirates Club

  At this point, the literary agent who sold this book could restrain his impatience no longer and he said, “Although he’s a fictional character that didn’t exist before the author invented him, I met Castor Jenkins once. So it’s time I told a story of my own. Ready?”

  * * * *

  My name is Thornton Excelsior and I’m highly respected in the publishing world. Some people mistakenly conclude that being a literary agent is a sedate business and that the people involved in it must have fairly bland lives. Maybe that’s true for others, but my own life has been adventurous and continues to vibrate with incidents.

  For instance, having recently escaped from pirates, I was invited to join a private club composed entirely of men and women who had achieved the same distinction. I went to my first meeting in an anxious frame of mind, hoping my escape would be superior to those of the other members, but prepared for disappointment. Around a rough wooden table sat a motley collection of individuals, and when I entered the room they began slamming full mugs down on the surface, applauding my arrival with spilled rum. I settled myself on a vacant chair and waited quietly to see what would develop.

  The figure at the head of the table thrust his finger into the puddle that had formed on the uneven plank directly in front of him and watched the concentric ripples with a meditative smile. Lanterns swung from the ceiling on thin chains, turning all eyes into stars, ladling shadows over the lower halves of faces, an effect less mysterious than it ought to be. A brasher man might have introduced himself at this point but I preferred to err on the side of caution, inhaling the fumes deeply through flared nostrils until I could no longer smell them. Then the man with the extended finger made a little speech.

  “Pirates are everywhere! Pirates are a fashion and a myth, a savagery and a custom, a colour and a doom. They are like pieces of cork in a glass of wine, spots on the sun, loose buttons on a shirt. Pirates.

  “They are like notes in a song — a song about pirates.

  “Pirates are like thumbs where toes should be, like needles in a camel’s eye, like the words in a book that has accidentally fallen into a frying pan: can you hear the sizzle? Pirates. Like hairs on an old bar of soap...”

  “With respect,” I interrupted, “they aren’t like that at all.”

  “No?” he demanded with a furious frown.

  “Like none of that,” I confirmed.

  There was a general murmuring and the dimness of the room seemed to lessen as smiles full of rotten teeth were inversely flashed, if I may be permitted a twist of language, for a deeper darkness will lighten a lesser, when both glooms are present. And that is a maxim for you to keep, of dubious value. But the man with the extended finger remained without a smile, his frown disapproving perhaps even of itself, the very opposite of a sign of glee, however ironic, and he asked me slowly to refine my criticism of his comparisons, to prove that pirates were nothing similar to any of his examples.

  “I was captured by a pirate exactly one year ago,” I said, “and the experience had nothing poetic or contrived about it. On the contrary it was a grimy, dismal reality. The man who controlled the ship on which I was a prisoner was none other than Captain Salve, the second worst pirate on the first set of Seven Seas.”

  “Tell us the whole story,” the company roared.

  “Very well,” I continued, filling my mug from a bottle that stood near to a platter of figs, “but talking about it doesn’t help me to assimilate what happened. The therapists are wrong about that. I’m a literary agent and I was travelling to Sumatra to attend a book fair. A hundred leagues nearer than we expected, the coast of Aceh rose up on the horizon and we headed for it in all innocence. But this was a trick: Captain Salve had painted the coast on a giant floating screen and he was hiding behind it in his own heavily armed ship. I still have nightmares about how he burst through, guns blazing, smashing our poor vessel to splinters.

  “I was one of the few survivors and I was plucked in a dazed condition from the water on the end of a grappling hook. I still have a scar on my shoulder. Captain Salve slapped my cheeks until they became too warm to touch and then he asked me directly ‘Why shouldn’t I throw you back?’ and it was fortunate I blurted the following reply ‘Because I’m a literary agent and might one day be in a position to sell a book of your memoirs, if they are written well enough’. After a minute of scratching his head indecisively he decided to formally accept me as part of his crew. And that’s how I saved my life and went to work for the second worst rascal that ever swung a salt encrusted cutlass on a creaking deck.

  “A compulsive thief was Captain Salve, a man born to always take and rarely give!

  “He couldn’t help himself: he was a genuine kleptomaniac. As we were near Sumatra he thought we should pay a visit to the East Pole and test my abilities at distinguishing toxic growths from beneficial. I’m sure all of you present know everything about the East Pole that ever needs to be said. It’s one of the secret poles of our world, striped red and white just as you might expect and rising out of the briny deeps on the exact line of the equator at a longitude of 90°E. Just like the West, Front and Back Poles the East is a place where pirates forget their differences and meet to trade in safety.

  “A sort of vast floating market is what it is.

  “You could obtain almost anything you wanted there, especially if it was something with a piratical association, such as pearls, pistols, barrels of grog, slaves, earrings, pieces of eight, wooden legs, sacks of gunpowder, octants.

  “Also there was plenty of food including cocoa beans, chillies, biscuits, dried beef, crispy seaweed, oysters, yoghurt, cheese and mushrooms. But some of those mushrooms were really toadstools, for that’s the way it happens at the East Pole, nothing malicious but a simple mistake, and Captain Salve wanted to cook a vast risotto for all his men, he had a good side too, it was just very thin and unreflective, like a black stiletto’s edge, and he cared not to poison his crew, so he asked for my advice. Maybe he thought that a literary agent knows everything on every topic. But I obliged and selected the fungi and the risotto was prepared and I was the first to sample it.

  “Captain Salve watched me carefully and spott
ed the fact I didn’t die.

  “I guess I won his trust after that, at least in part, but I didn’t enjoy his newfound respect for long. After the risotto was devoured he did something a bit reckless, something entirely in keeping with his awful reputation...”

  * * * *

  I paused for breath and clearly my pause was too long or wide, because one of the other members of the club, a man with a nose like a piece of ginger, saw an opportunity to fit the beginning of his own anecdote into it, like a foot thrust into the gap left by a door just before it closes. And once that foot is in place it is never surprising to witness the rest of the body following suit, so I poured myself more rum and nibbled at a fig and leaned back to hear the whole of his tale, and he knew more than me about the conventions of the club, for his respiration was shallow and uninterruptible during its telling.

  “You describe his action — whatever it was — as reckless, and that word is highly evocative of the pirate who captured me, not because of his nature or lifestyle but simply because it was his surname. Captain Reckless was a rather careful sort of man, considering his chosen profession, but he was a restless and relentless experimenter. He liked to despatch his victims in new, original ways, or at least with unfeasible extensions to existing methods.

  “I can positively state now that Captain Salve, with or without his risotto, was never the second worst pirate on the first set of Seven Seas. That title belonged to Captain Reckless. Yes, he was undoubtedly the second worst and I intend to prove it!

  “Captain Reckless decided to get rid of me, one of his horribly careful decisions, by making me walk the plank, that old pirate classic. But an ordinary plank would never satisfy his innovative soul or tickle the stomach of the scientific curiosity that lurked in his brainpan like a hairy frog or maybe like a kitten covered in scales. I use the word ‘scientific’ in a loose sense... But I’m digressing!