by Hughes, Rhys
But Chaud-Mellé is a labyrinth of a city. The false Mondaugen had vanished in the tangle. She ran one way, then another, lost count of the corners she turned and soon became lost herself. Several times she glimpsed the puppet at the end of a street, passing behind a row of columns or entering a tiny square with a broken fountain; he seemed to be taunting her. Once she spotted him crossing a narrow bridge above her and she raised the blunderbuss to take aim, but it occurred to her that this might be the man, not the replica, and she hesitated.
The opportunity was thus wasted. She wandered aimlessly until night fell, then she paused for a rest in a quiet alley, sitting with crossed legs on the ground and reviewing her options. For a long time she sat there and finally she decided that having an extra Mondaugen loose in the world was not an utter disaster. She rose to her feet and a chill of horror paralysed her limbs as she realised where she was. It was the bend in the crooked alley next to her workshop! The octopus must certainly have copied her while she lingered there…
She hastened to the hatch, shaking off the sensation of fear as she ran, fully prepared to blast her own double into oblivion. But she was too late: the octopus had already liberated the second Coppelia. So now there was yet another puppet maker at large in the city! And the new Coppelia was able to build another octopus and another trap somewhere else, capturing yet more puppet makers and perhaps the real Coppelia again, and so on, accelerating the duplication process to the point where every human on the planet would own at least one replica.
Overwhelmed with melancholy, Coppelia trudged home under the dim amber and smoky green lanterns of the midnight city. Her husband, the Maréchal Lore de Retz, was sitting on his favourite rattan chair, reading a newspaper, The Chaud-Mellé Chronicle. She poured herself a glass of absinthe and told him everything. He advised her to destroy the octopus as soon as possible and offered to help her in this task. She nodded wearily and they retired to bed. The Maréchal snored so rhythmically that Coppelia began to wonder if he was a clockwork puppet too.
The following morning they set off together for the narrow alley and the workshop, the Maréchal carrying a sledgehammer over one shoulder that he had purchased especially for the occasion. When they reached their destination they opened the hatch and clambered through into gloom and dust. The octopus was silent, unmoving, squatting among its boxes of spare parts like a naughty toolboy; the Maréchal walked around it, found the most vulnerable spot of its exposed mechanical brain and swung the heavy hammer upward with a mighty grimace.
But destiny had other ideas and the blow was never completed. For a new traveller had just reached the bend in the alley and paused there, though not to catch his breath. His name was Wilson the Clockwork Man and he was already a puppet, but a puppet that duplicated no one; he was an original. The name of the inventor that constructed him is not known and it is not beyond the bounds of feasibility that Wilson made himself. Whatever the truth of the matter, he had entered Chaud-Mellé and planned to explore the city.
His artificial eyes immediately detected the lenses and ear on the outer wall of Coppelia’s workshop; he stopped to examine them. The information they gathered was relayed to the octopus inside, which followed its programming and commenced the task of building a replica. But a gross irony was the result. Flesh and blood humans are duplicated with steel and crystal parts; according to the logic of the octopus, a man who is already clockwork must be fabricated from bone, skin and gristle. It was a perfectly sensible assumption.
The metal arms reached out and pulled the Maréchal to pieces. His hammer dropped harmlessly to the floor. Before Coppelia could retrieve it, the octopus also seized her and began work. Wilson had a large frame and his duplication required plenty of raw materials; nonetheless there was some left over, indescribable globules quivering and cooling in little mounds. The finished article was thrust through the hatch in an absurd parody of a birth. And Wilson the Organised Man, who would never be aware of his name, drooled happily as he crawled off into the urban chaos.
(2010)
Afterword
ROMANTI-CYNICISM
“Toad in a trombone!”
I coined that exclamation of surprise more than a decade ago; despite my best efforts, it never caught on. Yet I persist in maintaining it has an elegant resonance and conjures up a nice image, comparable to that of a fox piloting a biplane. Perhaps my brain works in a quite different way to the neural networks of everyone else.
Back in 1995 or 1996, flushed by the appearance of my first book and also by my own blood in my own cheeks, I made the mistake that young, bombastic, daft authors often do: I decided to invent a literary movement. I didn’t attempt this just for the sake of it, but because I wanted to define more clearly the essential effect I was striving for in my fiction. In other words I planned to label myself before anyone else got the chance. As it happened I was far too slow off the mark, for I had already been branded as a writer of humorous dark fantasy!
A reviewer of distinction had read many of my early stories and come to the irreversible conclusion that my work aspired to juxtapose the vision of Thomas Ligotti with that of Woody Allen. This approach was felt to be rather unwise because “horror and comedy always cancel each other out.” But my intention wasn’t that at all. Horror-comedy is one thing, perhaps a worthy thing in its own way, but it’s not my thing. I wasn’t hoping for any kind of contrasting or portmanteau effect; I was striving for a synthesis so complete that no join might be noticed.
To explain this more fully I like to fall back on a dubious analogy. It is fortunate for me that dubious analogies are almost sacred in my proposed literary movement. Ready? Here we go!
It’s possible to describe water as hydrogen-oxygen but this term is less useful than the one already in common parlance. Water is different from both hydrogen and oxygen, and no objective analysis of the properties of hydrogen and those of oxygen before combination can predict what the properties of water may be. There simply is no physical clue in the atoms of either element as to precisely what will happen when they are joined; we only know the result from experience. The properties of water are not predetermined by those of hydrogen and oxygen. The sum is different to, if not greater than, the parts, and has unique abilities. See the works of the philosopher David Hume for more details.
I wondered if what was true for physical elements might not also turn out to be true for genres. I have already admitted that an analogy between elements and genres is dubious, so go easy on me! Now then… If we take a pair of unrelated genres, for instance horror and comedy, and mix them correctly, the outcome shouldn’t be a chessboard of alternating squares or a salad-dressing of incompatible oil and vinegar, but a molecule, a brand new substance with properties of its own that the original elements don’t have. Horror frightens; humour tickles; a perfect blend of these elements should result in a substance that doesn’t scare or amuse, or at least doesn’t merely do these things, but is capable of effects beyond the reach of those two atomic genres. What those effects will be is something that can only be discovered from the procedure itself.
I call this THE MOLECULAR THEORY OF FICTION and it’s central to my aforementioned literary movement. Shame therefore that the name of the movement is a portmanteau word consisting of two elements stuck (rather than blended) together. No matter! I’m still happy with it; and in the past I found it even more pleasing than I do now. Indeed, not long after coining the term ‘romanti-cynical’ I created a manifesto, as daydreaming founders are prone to do, that set out the broad aims of the movement. I kept them less dogmatic than I might have done, for the dogmas of today often turn into the caterwauls of tomorrow, and futuristic mockery is hard to join in when you are still living in the present.
So yes, I wrote a “Romanti-Cynical Manifesto”.
The problem is that I have lost it…
I don’t have a copy anywhere, even though I’ve hunted high, low and in-between for one, in boxes, on discs, under beds and elsewhere. I have attemp
ted to trawl my memory to recover the general sense, but that’s no substitute for the real thing. Might it still exist somewhere? I think I sent copies to various people: Des Lewis, Mark Samuels, the musician David Tibet (who covered the strange Comus song ‘Diana’ with his Current 93 project) and Ray Russell too, of course; but it’s unlikely they preserved them. Why should they? If someone sent me such a manifesto I’d regard it as a useful way of starting a driftwood fire on the beach, although paper aeroplanes are also an attractive option.
But can I remember any of its contents at all?
Well, I’m sure it made the claim that the ‘absurd’ was a truer reflection of our universe than the ‘real’; that the convulsions of laughter are spasms of clandestine despair; that nothing is certain, not even this statement; that the type of fiction I most desperately yearn to write and read is one that simultaneously takes itself very seriously and mocks itself, with one foot in sober existential horror, one in ironic satire, one in progressive science fiction, one in nostalgic utopian fancies, one in magic, one in naivety, one in cunning, one in fable, one in rationality… with the crucial point being that the total number of these feet must always be startlingly greater than feasible. Even a millipede couldn’t manage so many! I also recall ending my manifesto with a singular injunction:
“Link arms with toads!”
Why the devil not? The camaraderie of the image is as pleasing as that of a fox in pilot’s goggles banking a Sopwith Camel into a roll, or that of a stoat in the reinforced suit of a deep-sea diver surfacing from the wreck of an old Spanish treasure galleon. This urge of mine to absurdify animals is scarcely understandable in psychological terms, but as literary symbols they make perfect sense. To me at least.
Is that all? Anything else?
Indeed. As spiritual and aesthetic godparents and icons of romanti-cynicism, I seem to recall citing Lucian, Apuleius, Rabelais, Orlando Furioso, Voltaire’s Candide, Hoffman, The Castle of Otranto, Beckford’s Vathek, Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa, the arabesques of Poe (rather than his grotesques), Anatole France, Max Beerbohm, Saki, Akutagawa, Blaise Cendrars, Flann O’Brien, Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian, the wry fantasies of James Branch Cabell, Italo Calvino and Karel Čapek, the irony-saturated stories of Donald Barthelme, and the work of the more original and outré science-fiction writers of the 1960s, such as Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Brian Aldiss, Tom Disch, John Sladek and Josef Nesvadba. Into this last category I most certainly would have inserted Cordwainer Smith if I had known about him at the time, but not R.A. Lafferty, for even though he is the writer I am most often compared to, I still haven’t read any of his books.
I doubt this helps. And yet…
Onwards, forever onwards! Link Arms with Toads!
Publishing History
The Troubadours of Perception -- Whispers of Wickedness, Autumn 2003
Number 13 and a Half -- Ghosts & Scholars #23
The Taste of the Moon -- Roadworks #6, 1999
Lunarhampton -- The Third Alternative #12, 1997
The Expanding Woman -- previously unpublished
All Shapes Are Cretans -- previously unpublished
The Innumerable Chambers of the Heart -- The Skeleton of Contention (chapbook), 2004
Pity the Pendulum -- previously unpublished
333 and a Third -- previously unpublished
The Candid Slyness of Scurrility Forepaws -- Whispers of Wickedness #11, 2005
Ye Olde Resignation -- previously unpublished
Castle Cesare -- Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens #8
The Mirror in the Looking Glass -- previously unpublished
Oh Ho! -- previously unpublished
Loneliness -- previously unpublished
Hell Toupee -- previously unpublished
Inside the Outline -- previously unpublished
Discrepancy -- previously unpublished
Acknowledgements
This collection is a highly representative showcase of what I do, and what I have been doing for the past sixteen or more years. I would therefore like to thank those important people who made it possible. Firstly, myself. Secondly, various lovers, friends and rivals. Thirdly, you, for buying this book. I am much obliged!
My website is at: http://rhyshughes.blogspot.com
About the author:
Rhys Hughes was born in 1966 in Cardiff but grew up in the seaside town of Porthcawl. He began writing at an early age but his first publications were chess problems and mathematical puzzles for newspapers. He sold his first short story in 1992 and his first book, Worming the Harpy, was published in 1995. Since then he has embarked on a mammoth project of writing exactly 1000 linked ‘items’ of fiction, including novels, to form a gigantic story cycle. Many of these ‘items’ have appeared in journals and anthologies around the world, and his books have been translated into Spanish, French, Greek, Portuguese, Russian and Serbian. His work has attracted attention for its originality of ideas, ingenuity of plotting and rich playfulness of his language.
The author says, “Because I have experimented with so many different genres, styles and moods, not one of my individual books to date really provides a full overview of what I actually do. Link Arms With Toads! is different because it’s a fully representative sampler of my entire body of work and has been designed as a showcase of the new genre I recklessly tried to invent when I was younger. This book is certainly the best entry point to my body of fiction and if you don’t like Toads! you can be confident you won’t like my other books, so it’s also the financially wisest choice for any new reader.”
When not in the process of working, sleeping or scheming, Mr Hughes amuses himself with one of his many hobbies. He enjoys the world in general. He likes to travel around it, listening to its music, eating its food and conversing with its people. He is a keen amateur astronomer and a dismal piano player. He is enthralled with the twin ideas of designing and flying his own airship and setting up an inexpensive but acclaimed vegetarian restaurant inside an extinct volcano. He is resigned to the fact he will probably never convey guests to that restaurant in that airship. Not in his lifetime. Maybe he will do something else equally satisfactory and strange instead.
Other Books by the Same Author (as opposed to similar books by other authors):
* Worming the Harpy
* Eyelidiad
* Rawhead & Bloody Bones
* The Smell of Telescopes
* Stories from a Lost Anthology
* Nowhere Near Milk Wood
* Journeys Beyond Advice
* The Percolated Stars
* A New Universal History of Infamy
* At the Molehills of Madness
* Sereia de Curitiba
* The Crystal Cosmos
* The Less Lonely Planet
* The Postmodern Mariner
* Engelbrecht Again!
* Mister Gum
* Twisthorn Bellow
* The Coandă Effect
Also from Chômu Press:
Looking for something else to read? Want a book that will wake you up, not put you to sleep?
“Remember You’re a One-Ball!”
By Quentin S. Crisp
I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like
By Justin Isis
Revenants
By Daniel Mills
The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children
By Brendan Connell
Nemonymous Night
By D.F. Lewis
For more information about these books and others, please visit: http://chomupress.com/
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