by Oliver Smith
Dark Hall Press
Techno-Horror Anthology
Various Authors
2014
Dark Hall Press
A Division of New Street Communications, LLC
Wickford, RI
Copyright 2014 Dark Hall Press
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except for brief quotations for review purposes, no part of this work may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Dark Hall Press, a division New Street Communications, LLC.
Published 2014
Dark Hall Press
darkhallpress.com
A Division of New Street Communications, LLC
Wickford, RI
Contents
The Arkenholz Sonata by Oliver Smith
Implants by Michael Bray
Hyperreal by DJ Tyrer
Modified by Tim Jeffreys
Workman’s Wages by Brett J. Talley
Maxwell’s Creation by Gerry Griffiths
Nine-Tenths of the Law by Josh Strnad
Autonomous Trafficking by Kierce Sevren
Planet Ruination by Patrick Lacey
Descent by Joseph Sale
Appendix
The Arkenholz Sonata
By Oliver Smith
As a connoisseur of these things you will know of the infamous portrait exhibited at a certain gallery on the Rue Emile Richard, hidden behind a curtain on instruction of the Préfet de Police, lest it induce morbid hysteria in those of a sensitive nature. Who could forget? That notorious photograph with the disturbingly magnified eye glowering grey beneath shocking white hair that floated like fine midwinter snow, hair that was entirely weightless, hair that defied the gravity of the age. I believe I am the last person left who saw him perform in what passed at the time for the flesh.
I had been earning my rent with a bunch of hopeless hacks preparing for a performance at the Théâtre de Pompions. I needed a cigarette. I searched my jacket and was disappointed to find only a crushed, empty packet in my pocket. In desperate need I rushed too fast from that room. I left the theatre with little forethought and much haste and consequently found myself caught by a storm on the Rue de Lune. How I cursed myself for leaving my fine black Homberg in the rehearsal studio. It was hanging safe on the arm of a Louis Napoleon music stand while I ventured out for a pack of Gauloises Bleu. I was hatless in the Paris rain. I was a fool.
I walked exposed beneath a sky composed in an ominous key and inharmonious mode. I believe the whole of that cacophonous storm fell upon my unprotected head. I caught my reflection in the window of Madame Morisot’s and saw that my hair, usually so immaculate and full of character, hung limp and spiritless. My body streamed and my suit was sodden. I dripped like a wet dog.
I was driven to take shelter in an obscure doorway beneath a decaying fin de siècle pediment unfashionably ornamented with crumbling stone vines; coiled and serpentine like treble clefs on a staff. There I lit a Gauloises Bleu and added a counterpoint of indigo smoke to that miserable dirge of a night. The rain quickened its tempo and the drops rat-a-tat-tatted fortissimo. The air had become a waterfall and the lightning flashed and thundered. It was clearly unsafe to travel back to the Théâtre de Pompions.
I was without hat or hope. I had but one option; I knocked on the door.
I was joined then on the lonely doorstep by sweet accordion music billowing into the filth of the night, inviting me to enter the establishment.
How could I not?
I quite forgot myself and became allied with the orchestra within; there was a magnificent band of Gitanes, Gauloises, and Camels illuminated by radiant Lalique lamps of coloured glass. I settled into the waft of comfortable blue fumes and soloed on my cigarette among so many virtuosi. Soon an illegal absinthe clouded before me in a slender crystal lily and my Gauloises modulated its smoky loops about peacock-chandeliers; I was as happy as a monkey on a branch among the beautiful antiques from Paris past.
The greenish walls were hung with strange and morbid pictures.
I must state here that I love modern art. I am not even averse to the wild experiments of the Impressionists. There is something rather joyful in the healthy enamel-bright colours. In small doses, I delight in their common scenes of everyday life; in summer days, in poppies, in pretty girls, and in banjo players adrift on the Seine. Marvellous. Speaking as an expert, I can assure you that technically a banjo cannot produce a real note, and were I able I would similarly float all its players away in boats on the stinking sewerage ridden waters of the River Seine.
But to return to the paintings that hung on the green walls of the barroom; I found these paintings a little vile, a little degenerate, and even perhaps a little insane.
These were strange visions painted in the technique of Comerre, Vibert and Bouguereau. I regret to say they did not share those masters’ elevated subjects. There were no pantheons of pink-fleshed nymphs; no mythologies of dryads; not even portraits of fine-bred horsewomen, riding whips in hand, and half-dressed in the English fashion. No, these were not those pure and noble motifs approved by the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
This painter was a master of diseased visions. One of the canvas nightmares drew me closer in terrible fascination. I saw coral reefs in poisoned oceans inhabited by creatures of the dream; a world where bird masked figures poked beaks and breasts from shadowed arbours grown rank with horrid weeds. The title read ‘Loplop, King of the Birds’.
“I think the artist has taken too many absinthes,” I idly observed.
A stylish man among a group of bizarrely dressed bohemians wearing a yellow lupin in his buttonhole waved a glass of the ‘Green Fairy’ at me.
“I am a critic, Monsieur, and I assure you the artist is not an absintheur. I am a doctor as well and as a doctor concur that these pictures are not symptomatic of Delirium Absinthium. I am also something of a poet and the poet goes further than the doctor and the critic, as a poet should, and declares this is cold-sober poetry, this is genius, this is the future of art.”
“I apologise Monsieur, I apologise doctor, I apologise son of the muse; I am just a viola player.”
“Almost a musician! Perhaps you know Monsieur Arkenholz? He is almost a composer.”
“I am embarrassed; I have never heard of him.”
“You have not heard of Arkenholz? The Great Conductor? The Marvel of Montparnasse? The Big Lobster himself?”
“I am afraid not, I must humbly beg your forgiveness, I am ignorance personified.”
“Never mind, we hadn’t heard of him either until the owner of a certain gallery on the Rue Emile Richard asked our comrade Max to collaborate with him.”
He offered me a Gauloises Bleu and said “please call me Andre, my associates are members of the Bureau de Lupines. You have heard of them no doubt?”
They all raised their heads and howled like beasts.
A writer, whom I deduced from the shape of his chin to be a sort of radical Cubist, waved a brochure from a certain famous gallery on the Rue Emile Richard. “Are you familiar with the science of psychoanalysis? It has diagnosed the ills of the age; the prognosis is terminal if untreated, but there is hope. We are the antidote to the sicknesses of standardisation, mechanisation, and uniformity.”
An idiot dressed as a harlequin juggled various items among which were a shrunken head, a vacuum tube and a model lobster. “We are the apostles of the unconscious come to save the century from the tyranny of bour
geois conformism.”
Jeanne d’Arc, who had apparently been resurrected from some romantic history book, arranged a silver fox-fur coat around her shoulders. She smiled with her strawberry lips at me and blew a perfectly pitched puff of Turkish tobacco smoke. “Once I was a martyr to reason, to moderation, to boredom.”
“How sad, how dreadful, a terrible fate” I said.
“I was saved by the science of psychoanalysis. My therapy freed me from my bourgeois repression. It unleashed my inner animal, opened wide the cage, and the wild beasts within tore my oppressive super-ego into a hundred bloody segments.”
“And now?” I asked.
“Now, I drink absinthe naked in the moonlight, smoke opium with a hundred different lovers, and dance all night until I am sick.”
“How beautiful, how free, how delightful. Are these comrade Max’s paintings?”
“They are.”
“Then Maestro Arkenholz, must be very… advanced.”
“He has sworn he will forge a new performance for the age.”
“Beyond…” said Harlequin looking into the unspecified distance.
“Beyond Stravinsky’s wild ‘Rite of Spring’,” said Jeanne d’Arc, clutching her heart and rolling her eyes upwards in search of divine visions among the smoke and chandeliers.
“Beyond Schoenberg’s crazy quartets,” said Andre, tapping his temple.
“Beyond the song of Loplop, King of the Birds!” said the Cubist writer, flapping his arms.
“And has he?”
“We shall see tomorrow night at his and Max’s premier. Why, speak of the wolf and you see his tail…”
Max was greying at the edges and cursing in German.
“I think you had better buy him an absinthe,” said Andre.
“Damn him,” said Max throwing his raincoat across a chair, “Arkenholz and I collided. Spectacularly. I tried to explain the science underlying my work; he said ‘you will never understand if you are dreaming not living, wake up.’ Then he tried to shoot me.”
“He doesn’t like the artwork then?
“No.”
“Oh dear. Do you think he has some sort of father complex?”
“Father, mother, great aunt six times removed, I think he has every complex recorded and many as yet undocumented even in the wildest dreams of Dr. Jung.”
At the mention of Dr. Jung the entire Bureau de Lupines spat on the floor and the Cubist boomed like an angry Cassowary.
“But,” said Max, “what am I going to do about the owner of the gallery on the Rue Emile Richard? He is coming to the performance. If it goes well he has promised me exhibitions in New York, Vienna, and Cardiff!”
“You’d better make it up and fast,” said Andre. “I have heard Arkenholz’s megalomania has been pronounced profound and incurable by Sigmund Freud himself.”
At the mention of Dr. Freud the entire Bureau de Lupines rose to their feet, genuflected, and sang ‘Ave Maria’. The Cubist writer stood on a table and crowed like a cockerel.
“Make it up? Remember,” said Max, “this is the man whom Winifred Wagner publicly described as a monster; unreasonable, selfish, and evil.”
“But Winifred Wagner is known to be extremely bourgeois and morally insane,” said Jeanne d’Arc. “At least Arkenholz is not bourgeois, and his concept of beauty is unique.”
“How can you tell?” asked Harlequin.
“His scandalous expulsion from Bayreuth,” said Jeanne d’Arc.
“Anyone can get themselves expelled from Bayreuth; they just have to breathe around Winifred. She is famously averse to sharing the air. He may have written some sentimental chanson and disappointed everyone.”
Jeanne d’Arc ignored him and whispered “Don’t listen to him. Arkenholz will be wonderful. Confidentially, had he not been so close to the owner of a certain gallery on the Rue Emile Richard, I believe he would have been forcibly confined.”
“He is impossible,” said Max.
“None the less, you must make it up with him,” said Andre. “Your career depends on it.”
Then he ordered another round of absinthes and proposed a toast to the great Arkenholz.
“Long may his madness inspire us.”
I could not remember how I made my way home that night. Just trying to remember trebled the volume of the kettle drum beating behind my eyeballs. Searching my pockets for a clue, I discovered several unusual items, including an advert for a performance of some avant-garde music, a small wax lobster, and a drawing of Loplop, King of the Birds signed by Max. There was also a suspicious looking silver fox-fur hung over the banister.
The suspicion it induced was confirmed when I found Jeanne d’Arc in my bathtub. She was sleeping like an angel and snoring like a saint. When she joined me for breakfast, she ate like the devil. Despite my terrible headache, despite my agony, and with no consideration of my impending death from congestion of the brain, she cruelly insisted that I fulfil a promise I couldn’t remember having made; to take her to Arkenholz’s evening performance.
That evening I could not believe I had returned to the bar of the Bureau de Lupines and after a couple of absinthes could not believe, that having returned, I was leaving again so soon.
I looked out at the deluge and I asked: “Going? Where? Exactly?”
Max’s answer lacked the precision I craved.
“Look! An alleyway,” he said, “let us explore. Have you read Freud? This maze, this puzzle, these winding twisting paths of medieval Paris. Startling, fascinating…”
“…and dark.”
“You must understand the gutters to understand the real Paris,” he said, and offered me a Gauloises Bleu.
We cut down the Rue de Morgue past a single gendarme smoking heavily in a dry doorway. He eyed us suspiciously but seemed reluctant to risk his Camel in the rain.
Jeanne d’Arc held my hand as the Cubist gurgled like a nervous pigeon and distant thunder kettle-drummed beyond the tower of Notre Dame.
Max continued, “This labyrinth where stairs spiral down under the city, to sewers and quarries and catacombs; to the unconscious stone memory. You locked the beasts away. Supressed them. The bones are piled in neat and orderly rows, but those exquisite corpses cannot be contained so easily, even behind iron-forged railings.”
For a moment the rain clouds cleared and I noticed Jeanne d’Arc looked beautifully vulpine dressed in the light of the full moon. She scampered and growled delightfully in her silver fur coat showing a set of very lovely white teeth. Harlequin turned a few somersaults over her like an excited cub, while Max and Andre opened their throats in some sort of animal song, in celebration of her beauty no doubt. The Cubist, however, became more shrunken, wattled and purple with every second he spent illuminated by the moon. He waddled off into the shadows. All that was left of him was a cackling in the darkness and a smell that made Harlequin draw back his lips and salivate. Max restrained him from his prospective meal with a rather hairy hand until the moon rolled away again behind some more rain clouds leaving us in darkness.
Someone struck a match. There was a frightened gobble from the Cubist. There was also a faint smell of sulphur and the flame illuminated the face of the Big Lobster grinning on the wall; an advertisement for Arkenholz’s premier.
“I believe we are somewhere in the 5th arrondissement,“ said Max.
He led us onto a narrow but well lit boulevard. Everywhere were hung soggy posters proclaiming:
Arkenholz! Genius! Tonight!
We trailed along behind Max trying to shelter our precious Gitanes, Gauloises, and Camels from the latest downpour. The theatre leaned on the shoulder of an abandoned boulangerie, set on a street where the buildings all threatened to tumble down. I sheltered beneath a crumbling first empire pediment.
“Come on,” Andre said, “Come on out, the great one awaits.”
At the Theatre I paid my three francs and then reluctantly paid another three for Jeanne d’Arc.
Max disappeared as soon as we wer
e inside. I could hear him practising his magnanimous speech of apology in the service tunnels, his voice fading into the bowels of the theatre.
The auditorium was dark. It was cold. I pulled my coat tighter and tried to draw a little heat from a Gauloises Bleu.
Time ticked on in quavers, crotchets and big soggy semibreves. The rain on the roof was counting out the measures. Anticipation gave way to boredom, which finally surrendered to irritation and ennui.
Max reappeared and whispered something to Andre. Andre turned to me.
“A disaster,” he said. “Arkenholz is missing. He was so offended by Max that he has packed his bags and caught the train home to Sweden.”
“But what can we do? There will be no Vienna, no New York, no Cardiff,” said Max, looking downcast in the light of his cigarette “We need a musician, a genius, a hero.”
“To step into the breach,” said Andre.
“To save our lobster,” said Harlequin.
“To light my fire,” said Jeanne d’Arc.
Their eyes were all on me.
“What do you mean? I can’t conduct, I’m a viola player.”
“Oh they won’t mind, you’re just the right build, no one really needs a conductor, and these musicians need Arkenholz least of all; just wave your arms about and take the applause, the adulation, the cash. We must get you ready though.”
“Go on,” said Jeanne d’Arc, “you’ll be fantastic.”
I squeezed into Arkenholz’s suit. If it had been even half a millimetre tighter, I would have burst every stitch and seam. Harlequin used two wires pulled from a Lalique lamp to charge my hair. It stood on its ends, floated like fine midwinter snow, entirely weightless, defying the gravity of the age.
Max broke open a drawer and rummaged. After discarding a set of false teeth, a dangerous looking revolver and a herring tail in a glass jar, he gave a cry of joy. He approached me in an unpleasantly predatory way and grasped the back of my neck with the ardent finality of a guillotine’s lunette, he held my head steady, as he painfully inserted Arkenholz’s monocle into my eye socket.
