by Hughes, Rhys
I saw that I was approaching the castle of our nearest neighbour. No lights shone on the battlements: the place appeared to be deserted. An open window gaped wider before me. With a howl of dismay I shot through it into a vast chamber. Spheres rotated around a central furnace. I landed with the birth of many bruises on a planet larger than the Earth. Several moons rose on its horizon. I recognised the furnace: a representation of the star Alpha Centauri. There are planetary systems everywhere in the universe, or so I now believe. Indeed they are almost as common and unremarkable as unlucky men.
(2006)
The Mirror in the Looking Glass
Mad inventors are plentiful in this world of ours but only one sits on a genuine throne and rules his own city like an ancient king. Frabjal Troose of Moonville has many dubious talents, including the ability to flap his ears; they squeak. But his cybernetics expertise is considerable and his contributions to the design and manufacture of artificial nervous systems are almost unparalleled. Only his perversity prevents him from becoming the saviour of the human race.
Perhaps I am overstating the case, but his monumental achievements are singularly unhelpful to his own subjects and the citizens of every other realm. What amuses Frabjal Troose is to install human intelligence in inanimate objects. With the aid of extremely small but excessively clever devices, part electronic and part mechanical, he can bestow the gift of consciousness with all its attendant emotions on chairs, crockery, table lamps, shoes, clocks, flutes.
He can and he does. Frequently.
His other hobby is to worship the moon…
One morning Frabjal Troose awoke with the urge to give thoughts and feelings to a mirror. He foresaw all manner of comic and tragic potential in the reality of a self-aware looking glass. To make the joke even more piquant he decided to equip his victim with prosthetic legs and allow it to roam freely around the city. He left his enormous bed and went to the bathroom and there he saw an appropriate mirror hanging on the wall above the moon-shaped sink.
The operation took several days. Frabjal Troose is a perfectionist and he wanted the circuits and cogs to be tastefully integrated into the frame of the mirror. In the end the workings ran over the surface of the wooden frame like complex ornamentation. By this time, the mirror could already think for itself and was slowly coming to terms with its sudden awareness and the need to develop an identity. It was no longer a mere object but a precious sentient being.
It even had a name. Guildo Glimmer.
Guildo learned to walk within his first hour. Wandering the palace of Frabjal Troose, little more than a large house stuffed with components for new gadgets, he came into contact with the occasional servant. At each encounter the same thing happened: the servant bent down and made a face at Guildo. Sometimes the servant picked him up and held him at arm’s length while plucking a nose hair or squeezing a pimple. What did this mean? Guildo was bewildered.
He continued his explorations and discovered that the front door of the palace was open and unguarded. Through it he hurried, into the lunar themed spaces of the city. Moon buggies rolled past on the roads and the public squares were craters filled with people dressed in silver and yellow clothes. I know that Frabjal Troose once issued an edict forbidding any grins that were not perfect crescents. He also forbade any cakes that were not perfect croissants.
Guildo proceeded down the street. He desperately needed time for reflection, but citizens just would not leave him in peace and they treated him in precisely the same way as the palace servants had, making blatant faces at him, grimacing and yawning and even frowning in disgust. Guildo began to experience the state of mind known as ‘paranoia’. What was wrong with his appearance? What was it about him that provoked such reactions in strangers?
He must be ugly, a horrible freak, a grotesque mutant: there was no other explanation. He was overwhelmed with a desire to view his own face, to confront his visage, to learn the foul truth for himself. But he could think of no way to accomplish this. Are you stupid, Guildo Glimmer? he asked himself. There must be a method of seeing one’s own face, but what? Because he was so new to the conventions of society, he always spoke his thoughts aloud.
“I know a reliable way,” declared a passerby.
This passerby was a droll fellow, a practical joker. He told Guildo that when men and women wanted to look at their own faces they made use of a ‘reflection’. What was one of those? Well, reflections existed in a variety of natural settings, in quiet lakes and slow rivers and the lids of clean saucepans, but only in the depths of mirrors did they realise their full potential. That is where the highest quality reflections dwelled, untroubled by ripples or cooking stains.
“You must look into a mirror!” he announced.
Guildo was astonished but grateful and he decided to follow this advice. The passerby chuckled and passed on. He was later arrested for not chuckling in the shape of a crescent, but that is another story. No, it is this story! No matter, I will ignore it in favour of what happened to poor Guildo. His little metallic legs carried him to the market, a bustling place where anything one desired might be bought, provided one’s desires were modest or at least plausible.
Guildo’s were. He approached a stall selling mirrors.
The man who owned the stall was talking to another customer and so Guildo was free to hop onto a table and examine the mirrors on display. He chose a circular mirror that was nearly the same circumference as his own head and he stepped in front of it. What he saw was totally unexpected and utterly profound. He saw an immensely long tunnel, a tunnel that stretched perhaps as far as the moon or infinity.
It must be pointed out once again that Guildo Glimmer was a living mirror. A mirror is simply unable to view its own reflection. The moment a mirror gazes into another mirror, its image will be endlessly bounced back and forth between the two reflecting surfaces. Hence the illusion of a tunnel. This is a law of geometry and a rule of physics, but Guildo knew nothing of such disciplines. His education had not covered the sciences.
As far as he was concerned, the illusory tunnel was an accurate representation of his form. This meant that he really was a tunnel! Now he understood why people kept frowning at him and why he was so dissatisfied. It was because he was not fulfilling his correct role. He was a tunnel and ought to do what tunnels do, act like tunnels act, think what tunnels think. He rushed out of the market to embrace his true destiny.
Later that afternoon, the splinters of a smashed mirror were picked up from the tracks of the main railway line leading into Moonville. When pieced together they could be identified as the remains of Guildo Glimmer. There was no way of resurrecting him. Frabjal Troose came to pay his hypocritical respects but he quickly lost interest and returned to his palace in a land-boat powered by moonbeams. By this time the sun had gone down and the moon was up.
People said that Guildo committed suicide, that he was too full of despair to continue his existence. Why else would he stand in the path of a moving train? But as I watched the billowing sails of the receding land-boat, I realised that I knew better. Guildo was simply serving a mistaken function. Tunnels are there for trains to pass through, after all. I was the driver of that train: in fact I am the train itself, an earlier example of the unnatural quest to give intelligence to inanimate objects.
(2007)
Oh Ho!
Because people like ghost stories, and refuse to stop telling them, ghosts exist. Because people want ghosts to be malevolent, that is how they are.
But Sidney Fudge believed that rage, frustration and pain were the main ingredients necessary to turn a normal human being into an evil phantom after death. In this he was mistaken.
Such emotions, indeed emotions of any kind, can only be experienced and authentically expressed by a corporeal body, never by a disembodied spirit, for the reason that lack of a nervous system renders impossible the biological changes vital for the generation, development and cessation of a feeling. Hatred and a thirst for revenge do not mer
ely increase heart rate and raise blood pressure but are intimately connected with those physical processes in a positive feedback loop.
With no blood pressure to raise, no glands to secrete hormones, no lungs to quicken breath, no pulse to throb to bursting in the veins, ghosts must be curiously emotionless beings. This is not the same as saying they are serene, gentle or forgiving. No.
The dead feel a cold, distant, purely cerebral, almost indifferent anger, for no other kind is available to them.
In time Sidney Fudge discovered this fact for himself.
He was a sickly child, the sort of boy who is easy prey for bullies and seems to attract them almost against their will. Despite his eagerness to capitulate immediately to any aggression, to submit to every humiliation, the aforementioned bullies were unable to resist beating him savagely as a regular fixture of school life.
Black eyes and bloody noses became Sidney’s trademark. In addition he had the rare talent of encouraging casual bystanders, who otherwise might have interfered with the punishment he received, to unconsciously adopt a policy of neutrality. Even mature adults watched his ordeals with blank faces, unaffected, bored.
Sometimes the adults quietly assisted the bullying. When a group of pupils resolved to push Sidney down the disused school well, the elderly janitor loaned his chisels and a crowbar to the conspirators to help them break the seal on the hole, to no avail as it happened, for the ancient well refused to open just for that antic.
It never occurred to Sidney to fight back, nor even to protect the most vulnerable parts of his anatomy in a manner wholly instinctive in other boys, nor would resistance have availed him, for already he had caught the attention of Pincher Gottlieb, the worst bully in his town and possibly the entire district. Mental torment was now added to physical, for Pincher was a specialist and fanatic and regarded bullying not only as a dignified artform but also as a sacred duty.
Sidney became the quivering shrine at which Pincher worshipped the Gods of Bullying, perfecting his techniques until he attained a level close to sainthood in the terms of his personal religion. Destined for greatness, at least in the estimation of his tutors, Pincher was openly admired for his extreme ferocity and inventiveness.
On one memorable occasion he cornered Sidney in the lavatory and managed to improve the notorious but generally overrated Water Torture by the simple but ingenious expedient of de-purifying the medium of its operating principle. Screams!
On another occasion he stripped Sidney, jabbed his pink flabby body full of rosebush thorns, then set fire to them one at a time with astounding dexterity until they were all ablaze and Sidney was persuaded to dance in an unconvincing fashion. Shrieks!
A third incident to be mentioned in passing was the forcing of Sidney to climb a ladder to the roof of the school, leaving him stranded when the ladder was removed. Not so innovative a prank, one might suppose, but Pincher had paid careful attention to the weather forecast. Furthermore he had clad Sidney in pots and pans and the violent clattering of this homely armour when the hailstorm broke so disturbed the afternoon lessons that Sidney was brutally and excessively whipped by the teachers when they managed to get him down. Wails!
And so it went on, day after day. For years.
The only evasive action that Sidney ever implemented was a sequence of pathetic attempts to avoid Pincher by taking complicated routes home. Instead of leaving school by the main gate, or even one of the side exits, he would climb the boundary wall and drop into the garden of a private house, making his way over several other walls and through a series of adjacent gardens until he found himself climbing the last crumbling wall and dropping down in the woods.
He attempted this ruse half a dozen times.
In the woods he felt marginally safer, but he always took to his heels immediately, weaving between the rotting trunks of ancient trees, putting as much distance between himself and school as possible, his unfit body straining with exertion to such a degree that it might even be argued that he bullied himself as he ran.
Deeper into the misty realm of rumoured bears and wolves he lurched, never heading in the direction of home, where an alcoholic mother and syphilitic father and crippled siblings rarely noticed his existence anyway, but always in random patterns, not caring where he ended up provided it was where Pincher Gottlieb was not.
But Pincher always appeared at the last instant, with a look of hideous delight on his face, popping up from behind a rock or bush when Sidney Fudge finally had to stop running, his lungs burning, legs trembling, heart exploding, and the bully always pointed a casual index finger and uttered the same exclamation, “Oh ho!”
Those two words became the essence of vocalised evil for Sidney, the victory shout of the personification of misery. How Pincher managed to work out where his victim would run to, when even Sidney did not know that, and how he was able to arrive first at the destination, were mysteries only compounding the horror.
“Oh ho! What do we have here then?”
When Sidney was in the embrace of his nemesis anything unpleasant might happen, and usually it did. The woods provided fertile ground for all kinds of potentially fatal pranks. Pincher once fed Sidney a banquet of toadstools and Sidney was left to crawl with excruciating cramps to the nearest hospital, where his stomach was thoroughly pumped and he was berated for his ignorance of fungi.
Also must not be forgotten the day when a tramp discovered a body hanging from a branch on a noose. He climbed the tree, severed the rope with his knife and lowered the corpse to the ground, then plundered its pockets for loose change. The corpse gasped, for it was still alive, so the tramp ran off and alerted the police, who came with medics to revive and retrieve Sidney. His recovery was marred by a universal lack of pity for his ordeal and when he returned to school he was treated to a lecture on the immorality of suicide by the headmaster, who publicly flogged him in the refractory to emphasise his point.
The next morning Pincher Gottlieb chased Sidney into the cloakroom and dangled him by his collar from one of the hooks generally reserved for coats. “Oh ho!” he boomed.
Sidney hung there for six hours and was later caned by all the teachers whose classes he missed. It would be unfair to give the impression that his pleas for assistance were utterly ignored. At one point an anonymous member of staff emerged from his office to investigate the disturbance and subsequently stuffed his handkerchief into Sidney’s mouth to stifle the sounds before returning to work.
Waking life was an unremitting hell for the boy.
But not even the deeps of sleep were a refuge, because all his dreams were nightmares and involved Pincher springing up from unexpected and impossible hiding places to bellow “Oh ho!” before commencing some grotesque outrage on his person. If Sidney screamed or even whimpered in his sleep his alcoholic mother would be sure to enter his room and beat him mercilessly until he awoke.
Sidney developed an obsession that his mother somehow was Pincher, that if he reached out and tore off her rubber mask, the horrid face of the bully would loom there instead.
He even imagined the utterance she would make:
“Oh ho! Fruit of my loins are you now? Is that what you are? My own son, runt of the litter. Oh ho!”
And one night, unable to sleep, Sidney thought he could hear Pincher’s voice coming from downstairs. Slipping out of bed, he listened with his ear to the floor but the words that rumbled below were incomprehensible, so he crept gently down the stairs. The lights were out but the voice still muttered and Sidney gained the bottom step. Then he lost his nerve and turned to go back up but missed his footing and sprawled awkwardly with a sprained ankle. The lights came on. Pincher and his mother stood there together and his theory was disproved.
“Oh ho! Have a drink on the house, dear chap!”
An empty gin bottle rebounded off his skull and he lost consciousness. His scalp remained hairless and discoloured at the point of impact for the rest of his life, but this incident was only the opening of a new ch
apter in the annals of his suffering.
Pincher called round every day for almost a year. He had convinced Sidney’s parents that he was Sidney’s best friend and he often told them lies about their son calculated to induce cyclones of rage in their strange minds. The slander about what experiments Sidney had been conducting with his own disabled sisters had momentous consequences for the boy and his development. Details are scarce but garden shears and a talent for singing soprano were factors.
The missing anatomical segments were kept by Pincher in a little cloth bag which he frequently opened for Sidney’s appalled inspection with the ejaculation “Oh ho!” until they went too ripe and had to be discarded. The use of the word ‘ejaculation’ in the preceding sentence is correct but rather tasteless in context. Ah well.
To add stinging insult to hideous injury, Sidney’s parents allowed the bully to ‘borrow’ every treasured possession Sidney ever owned. The few items that had given the boy some small measure of comfort, his toys and books and photographs, vanished forever. Sidney was left with nothing at all save the deepest despair.
“Oh ho! Set them all on fire, I did!”
The passing years became a decade and Sidney left school and ended up working in a factory. Unlike many bullied children he did not manage to escape his tormentor by entering the world of adult work, for Pincher applied for a job at the same factory and secured a position as a manager directly above Sidney. He would materialise behind Sidney and scream at the top of his voice, “Oh ho!”
So entertaining did his colleagues find Sidney’s reaction to this mantra that they adopted it for themselves and utilised it as a reliable method of decreasing the ambient monotony of their environment. Scarcely an hour passed without an “Oh ho!” triggering a series of convulsions in Sidney’s undeveloped frame. But Pincher was too conscientious a bully to delegate tyranny to underlings and never ceased to involve himself personally in Sidney’s systematic degradation.
