by Hughes, Rhys
“This is what I wanted,” he said to the proprietor; “it explains my troubles neatly, though I believe not a word.”
“Always keen to be of assistance, sir,” answered Herr Fluchen, with a click of his heels. “Perhaps you will allow me to giftwrap it for you? You may pay on credit: a single good deed.”
“Admirable! Tie the ribbon tightly, my fine man. I intend to reread it over an early supper. Many, many thanks!”
Before the dilettante could depart, his host pressed a small object into his palm and whispered cryptically: “Please also accept this little cake. It was made by my wife, Anna. Be sure to weigh it carefully before you dine!” Then he tapped his nose meaningfully.
With a curt nod, Humphrey strolled back through the shop, past huge mounds of anachronistic clothing, cutlery, painted jugs, wicker baskets, phonograph records, lamps, battered coins, and up to the front door. He stepped out into a light shower and made his way at a brisk pace back to his house. Herr Fluchen followed him, taking a parallel route along the beach, panting as he climbed the groynes, keeping the dunes between him and his quarry. He managed to beat Mr Humphrey to his manse and found an excellent hiding place in the shrubbery. The dilettante arrived back not a minute later; Herr Fluchen noted he had torn off the wrapping and was writing in the book as he loped down the road.
Muttering to himself, Mr Humphrey entered his dwelling and cast the volume before the clock, much in the manner of a challenge. Herr Fluchen witnessed developments by rushing to the rear of the house and squinting through a window. The dilettante’s lips were moving: he was conducting a conversation with the clock. An amateur ventriloquist, the proprietor of the antique shop was able to work out the words.
“So, you are in there!” Humphrey was bawling. “And you have in your possession the power to make me happy. I want all you can offer: tell me how to release you! Show me the secret lock!”
It was obvious to Herr Fluchen, if not yet to the reader, that this somewhat poor hero of ours, Mr Humphrey, had abandoned his scepticism of things supernatural for unabashed belief. The legend of Mortice d’Arthur as revealed by Pastor Rowlands is as follows: the clock-maker, a student of chronometry, wanted to cheat mortality by merging himself with one of his creations. He invented a new kind of clock, with an escapement fixed directly to his mind, so that when his thoughts, as electrical impulses, jumped between his scheming lobes, they were converted into a mechanical energy, which could then, with the aid of gears, be reversed. The ageing process should be defeated: by thinking backwards, and reactivating dead brain-cells, Mortice would grow young again.
Setting to work, the craftsman made a grandfather which encased him like a coffin. With his body forming the clock-workings, he was required to turn the minute hand with his finger. For each hour he moved forward, he gained a corresponding hour of youth. He kept good time: visitors to his workshop set their watches by him. He planned to spend twenty years inside the timepiece, which would take him back to an age when women, in suitable lighting, might find him not unattractive. On no account was he to be disturbed during the process; nobody was permitted to probe inside the instrument. He arranged matters so that the door of the machine was fitted with a secret lock, which could only be opened from outside by an assistant employed to watch over him.
Predictably enough, this assistant—whom Mr Humphrey suspected was Pastor Rowlands himself—grew bored with his task. He decided on a more profitable form of work: the looting of d’Arthur’s workshop for valuable items and the distribution of the objects in pawnshops. Anxious to avoid reprisals for this, the assistant made doubly sure Mortice was unable to escape his confinement: he levered off the alarm bells on the top of the device. These had been set to go off two decades hence, when it was time for the clock-maker to cease turning the minute hand. Without their aid, he would never know the correct moment to stop.
Realising he had been betrayed, but helpless to do much about it, a seething Mortice d’Arthur kept doggedly at his task. The assistant never did return, and the decades ticked by excruciatingly slowly. Eventually, just before the turn of the century, bailiffs forced entry into his home and seized his few remaining possessions: he had not paid the rent for a conventional lifetime. His goods, including the clock, were distributed throughout Europe. The bailiffs treated the grandfather so roughly that the pendulum inside—also a part of the clock-maker’s anatomy, we shall refrain from saying which—broke free of its bearings. Unregulated, the timepiece now took its essential rhythms from the silent curses muttered by the creature smouldering in its stomach.
One day, Mortice vowed, he would be free again: he would reward his liberator extensively. The exact nature of this intended munificence was not stated, save in somewhat ambiguous terms. There was an abrupt ending to Pastor Rowland’s speculations on the issue.
This was the tale read by Mr Humphrey in the book of poems. And the moral? Doubtless that it is foolish to hoodwink time. The dilettante did not disagree with this diagnosis, but desired the promised rewards. Thus he was determined to be the one who liberated Mortice d’Arthur. Once the secret lock was found, his life would improve.
Humphrey struggled with the clock for the best part of the day. The lock was hidden very cunningly; at any rate, it evaded his fingers. With reluctance, he took a break for dinner. As he ate, he thought the device gave another chuckle and repeated its earlier plea: “Let me out, sir!” A sudden sob seemed to rack the frame. “Let me out!” The dilettante turned to it and cried that he did not know how.
He was on the point of leaving the table when he recalled that Herr Fluchen had given him a cake. Removing it from his pocket, he studied it carefully. It was very delicate—an aerated strudel. Why had the trader insisted he weigh it before popping it into his mouth? He shrugged and carried it over to a pair of scales which rested on top of a pipe-organ in a far corner of the room. The scales were presently comparing scores by Bach and Handel. As the sheets of sacred music rocked back and forth, a whine issued from the measuring instrument. Though a secular soul, the dilettante listened to the occasional mass.
Sweeping the scores aside and adjusting a set of counterweights, Mr Humphrey was astonished to discern that, in metric terms, the cake had a weight no greater than a single gram. “Herr Fluchen’s spouse, Anna, must be a wondrous cook,” he mused. And then inspiration struck. “Heavens! It is a clue! The chap knows how to open the timepiece. He gave me a pastry solution. Anna and a gram! Anagram!”
With this insight, the dilettante rushed back to the clock. Now the words on the tarnished face seemed to glow with an inner light. Studying them more closely, he realised that some of the letters could be used to spell a different sentence. ‘Mortice d’Arthur, Chaud-Mellé’ might now be seen as concealing a more direct exhortation: ‘Let me out’! This was the sort of trick to be expected of foreigners.
Pressing the letters in this order, Humphrey was gratified, after a moment’s pause, to hear a click. Reaching down to open the suddenly ajar door, he happened to catch sight of Herr Fluchen at the window. Desirous of keeping the promised reward all to himself, but aware that the trader had given him the method of opening the grandfather, he dithered; he let his arms drop and grimaced. This was possibly the last facial expression he made to be witnessed by a fellow human being.
The antique dealer does not like to talk about what he saw. Had the dilettante looked more closely at the book he bought, he would have seen that mice had been at this too. Well, not mice exactly, but a rodent not a jot less voracious—I mean Herr Fluchen himself, who had cut out some pages which rightly concluded the story. These pages told how Mortice in his prison soon grew very bitter. His initial promise, to reward whoever set him free, underwent a transformation: he vowed instead to submit his liberator to the same treatment he had suffered. Hardly fair on the poor innocent who released him, but like all long-term captives, his judgment had been adversely affected. This phenomenon, which is a form of revenge by proxy, is termed Bottled Djinn Syndrome.<
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What I have been able to get out of the proprietor—which is quite a lot, as he is me—is tinged with awe and horror. The clock flew open: the thing which had occupied it for three centuries snatched Mr Humphrey in its bony arms and bundled him inside. Whether he arranged our hero in a particular way, attaching his limbs to internal gears and levers, I do not know. It is certain, however, that as soon as the desiccated monster slammed shut the door, the clock began working again. It all happened so quickly that Herr Fluchen was unable to take in all the details. He fled back to his shop in Abell, fixing himself a glass of antique absinthe. A few loose ends need to be tied up, and we shall do this while the trader is busy drinking himself into a stupor.
Although he planned everything from the beginning, he was not fully prepared for the sight of the being which leapt out of the clock. He had expected Mortice d’Arthur to resemble the woodcut on one of the pages he had removed from his book. In fact, the clock-maker was altered in a way which suggested he had been subject to more than simple ageing. This can be confirmed by remembering that Mortice, during his imprisonment in the timepiece, was actually ageing backwards.
It appears he grew younger and younger, waiting for his treacherous assistant to return. Eventually, he regressed beyond his own birth into a prior life. The process was repeated a number of times: we may surmise that the monster which assaulted Humphrey was a character who originally lived three centuries before d’Arthur. Research reveals that Chaud-Mellé was enduring an especially nasty plague at that time. This might account for the suppurating boils and lesions...
When Mortice d’Arthur’s possessions were looted by bailiffs, it was Herr Fluchen’s ancestors, also in the curio business, who benefited. The clock, the one item they did not manage to sell, was handed through the generations to the present antique shop owner, who, aware of the legend, gave it to the previous inhabitant of Mr Humphrey’s house. This occupant was enamoured of antiques but did not, as the proprietor hoped, care to open the grandfather. For his own nefarious reasons, Herr Fluchen needed d’Arthur released, but not by his own hand.
Arriving on the scene, Humphrey presented a perfect opportunity for the unscrupulous trader. Herr Fluchen was also an antiques-licker, but a clandestine one: he instantly recognised a kindred spirit. Learning that the dilettante was about to buy the recently vacated house, he forced an entry and doctored the clock. He drilled a hole into the dial and packed an ounce of caesium into the space. Then, to disguise the flavour of the alkaline element, he varnished the grandfather with a tincture made from iron pipes, splashed puddles, soot, roots, bicycle gears, cheese, apples and various other ingredients. He knew that, one day, Mr Humphrey would lick the timepiece: this would detonate the caesium, which explodes when in contact with moisture, and the mechanism would break. The dilettante would then contact the jeweller in Quinn who, unable to repair it, would draw attention to the words on the faceplate. Herr Fluchen gambled that these names would lead Humphrey to his store.
I have told you the rest. The plan worked perfectly. After watching the remarkable emergence of the clock’s prisoner, the proprietor needed absinthe not simply to provide a blanket over fear but as a celebratory adjunct. To be fair, he also raised a glass in the dilettante’s memory. We will preempt sentimental eulogy by stating that a fool once inherited a grandfather; and the grandfather returned the gesture. Mr Humphrey and his clock’s inheritance are one and the same thing.
The tale does not end here, though it is nearly finished. The thing which leapt out of the clock was ravenous after such long confinement. I imagine it roamed the house searching for food. It probably swallowed my wife’s cake in a single bite—but I am certain it was impressed by such a delicate savour. Later, when it had eaten its fill, it settled down to stealing the dilettante’s identity. Dressed in his spare clothes, it had little difficulty in passing itself off as him. The sideburns took three weeks to grow, the stomach another to bloat. Because Humphrey was a rare visitor to the villages, few noticed the difference. To my delight, this new dilettante had a genuine interest in antiques—possibly because to it they were examples of contemporary design.
One morning, the impostor was passing my store. My wife was baking cakes at the time: the fumes were vented onto the street. The temptation was too great for the creature: it stepped over my threshold. Without a moment’s delay, I snatched my hat and coat and rushed past it, through the door. I did not look back. I felt sorry for Anna, naturally enough, but one does not get the chance to cheat the devil twice every century. To put the record straight, I have to say that it was not a Gainsborough but a Turner. Rumours are often poor on detail.
Yes, reader, the monster was my thousandth customer. Compelled to take my place, it is furious at being caught a second time. My sympathy is limited: I moved into the Gothic manse and searched for the document vital to my happiness. I quickly found it. Humphrey had penned his Will on the flyleaf of the Ingolstadt Legends. True to his word, it named me as sole inheritor of his property. This is what I meant when I quoted the price of the volume as a “good deed.” The best deeds are those which concern houses. Now sit down and permit me to pour you a glass of wine. Perhaps I can offer a pinch of Regency snuff?
Well if you are reluctant to partake, that is your loss. But allow me to demonstrate the elegant way of inhaling tobacco-dust. Left nostril first; then the right. Observe the angle of the sneeze. Note its power! Pardon me, I did not realise you were wearing a wig. I assumed readers had their own hair. Now there is a knocking on my window! Who can it be? Excuse me for a moment; I will be right back. There is a peculiar fellow outside: he is peering through the glass. A practical joker, I suspect. He is wearing a mitre and carrying a crook...
AFTERWORD
The above text was found scratched in sand on a beach between the hamlets of Abell and Quinn. Anyone who doubts the content need only contact the local jeweller, who will confirm the main points. The manse, however, may no longer be visited. According to legend, it was a cursed abode condemned to stand until a certain number of owners had lived in it: when that number was reached, it would vanish, taking the very last dweller with it. It is true that sightings have been made of a spectral Gothic structure, housing a bishop-like figure, in various parts of the world, but these cannot be confirmed. The site of the manse is presently occupied by a holiday cottage with a rose garden. All enquiries must be directed to the landlord, Pastor Rowlands.
There Was A Ghoul Dwelt By A Mosque
This is the story about ungodly deeds which Vathek, the mad caliph in Beckford’s novel, was hearing from one of the new arrivals in Hell, when his mother flew in on the back of an afrit to chide him for not enjoying the pleasures on offer. The tale was never finished; Vathek’s acquaintance was damned soon after. Now, what would it have been? Beckford knew, no doubt, but I am not bold enough to say that I do. I will offer a new story: one you will think has been made from scraps of other fables. Everybody should sew a patchwork coat from the materials he likes best. This is mine:
There was a ghoul dwelt by a mosque. His name was Omar and he was a potter with a shop built from broken vases. His doorway looked out on the Kizilirmak, the longest river in Asia Minor, and from his roof he could lean over and touch the mosque with his elongated arms. His wheel and oven had belonged to a human craftsman who died without heirs and was buried with his tools, but (this was in Haroun al Raschid’s day) ghouls were allowed to keep any items they dug up. The creature filed his teeth to stubs to reassure his neighbours—but never mind what they thought of him; he was skilled enough at his trade to make a living from the travellers who passed through Avanos. He rarely overcharged for his products and this frightened people most of all.
Omar lacked humanity in other ways: he kept an attic full of hair clipped from the heads of his female visitors. There were women pilgrims and merchants even then and they were politely requested to give up a lock or two for his archive. The monster labelled them and secured them to the ceiling on hooks, w
here they exuded a musty odour and shivered in the shifting air currents. Omar liked to imagine that his attic was a cave beneath a garden—a garden of vegetable girls whose roots were pushing through into his subterranean kingdom. This unusual custom has persisted through the centuries; next time you are in Avanos, ask for the house of Master Galip and you will see what I mean. His modern collection is also illuminated by a single lamp.
The ghoul had a mother no less grotesque in her habits. She helped him to collect the red clay from the river-bank, bringing him a fresh supply each morning. Instead of cutting the clay into blocks, she would roll it in her hands and present it to him like a freshly-exhumed intestine. Then he would divide it with a pair of shears and they would gather around the wheel with excited giggles, as if they were grilling sausages instead of preparing to throw another plate or saucer.
The attic was also the place where the ghoul kept all of his rejects, the warped and flawed work. Heavy urns, twisted over like slaves; cups with no handles, or too many; pitchers with clamped mouths or leaking sides; shapeless mounds as tall as men which should have been coffins but were unusable, save for lepers; pipes with stems which curled back into the bowl; teapots without spouts, or spouts which poured tea into the lap of the drinker. All these, Omar packed into his attic, loathe to discard them. With the hair above and the failures below, the room became a sort of museum of imperfection—the former lacking complete substance; the latter lacking complete form.
One day, a cowled traveller called at the shop. Veiled from head to foot, she betrayed her femininity by her poise and sibilant voice. She had come far and was taking her first holiday in many years. Her sisters were keen on stone figures for their garden and she had promised to take some back as gifts. But sculptors were rare in Asia Minor; the prophet had forbidden such art; and so, to make the best of a bad thing, she had decided to purchase pottery as a substitute. She wondered if she might view Omar’s most decorative examples.
