The Smell of Telescopes

by Hughes, Rhys

  “Well, my work is functional, not fine art,” said the ghoul. “But you’re free to look round. I’m self-trained and you mustn’t expect too much in the way of aesthetic gratification.”

  “Come, these pots betray a certain flair,” cried the visitor. “Lead me through your shop and I will choose something.”

  So he guided her along racks of ceramic utensils, which she studied with a slight wave of her hand, as if to indicate they were not quite suitable. When the conventional rooms were exhausted, they reached the attic. “The work in here is not really for sale,” apologised Omar, “but if you will enter and allow me to snip a strand of your hair...”

  The visitor seemed about to refuse, but the door was swinging open and when she caught a glimpse of the mutated wares she forgot to voice an objection. Stepping forward in joy, she squealed: “Perfect! They are so delightfully strange. And this one is the oddest of the lot! I must have it at any price!” And she moved to the end of the attic and seized the ghoul’s mother, who was sleeping on a stool. At this point, several things happened at once. The ghoul mistook his visitor’s cry for compliance with his request, and he reached across the room with his elongated arms to sever a lock with his shears. But the mother had jumped up in alarm, knocking over and smashing the single lamp. In pitch darkness, Omar felt under his visitor’s veil and detached it with clumsy fingers, whereupon he snipped the lock. While he groped his way to a hook to hang it up, his mother struck a flint in an attempt to relight the lamp; the attempt was unsuccessful, but the long spark which winked in the gloom was enough to illuminate the visitor, who was still bending over the mother. Then darkness came again, more intense for the momentary light: there was a groan, something brushed past the ghoul and clattered out through the shop.

  When Omar’s slitted eyes had adjusted, he saw he was alone in the attic. No: his mother was there as well, but she was changed. Her arms flung up as if to cover her face, her body twisted away as if from some dreadful apparition, she was literally petrified. She had always had a stony expression; now it was real. Omar looked at the ceiling and his hearts raced madly; in place of the lock of hair was a very angry snake, hissing and writhing on its hook.

  Well, he gnashed his filed teeth for many a moon, I can assure you. Without a mother, a ghoul is lost, like a bridge without a river or a pot without a price. Luckily, he dwelt by a mosque and the local muezzin was a sorcerer who made no secret of his skills. Standing on his roof at night, just after the evening call to prayer, Omar hailed the muezzin on his minaret and made a pact. He would sell part of his soul, the human part, to Eblis—the devil—in exchange for the return of his mother. So the muezzin lowered a glass tablet inscribed with arcane symbols on a gold thread and told Omar to place it between his mother’s granite lips, whereupon she would spring to life. As he stumbled through the attic with this talisman, Omar happened to brush the snake, which bit him on the shoulder. He growled in pain and his great hands came together, crushing the glass tablet to powder. The sparkling shards flew up and settled on the warped and twisted pots. With a hideous scraping sound, they came alive—the urns, the pitchers, the cups, the coffins—tumbling awkwardly, snapping their lids, grating against each other, whistling, crowding round the ghoul like dogs round a master, or jackals round a corpse. With his fists and feet, he smashed them to pieces, then he went down and returned with the potter’s wheel, which he rolled among the wounded ceramics, reducing them to fine dust. The one place the magic glass had missed was the mother, who remained as motionless and igneous as before.

  Unable to bear the loss of his soul for naught, Omar left his shop disguised as a minor prince and went searching for his visitor. But he succeeded only in passing into the domain of Hell. By now, his fears had altered. He was more frightened that another sorcerer would manage to reanimate his mother: she would be furious at being kept so long in such a condition and would berate him. Better to be damned, he decided, than to suffer the ill-will of a ghoul’s mother, who would be certain to bend him over her knee and smack...

  At this juncture, Vathek’s acquaintance slapped off his turban to reveal the horns of a ghoul. His forked tongue poked out over his filed teeth. Vathek fell back with a cry of pity and alarm, but recovered soon enough and, tapping his nose, asserted that he knew another mother quite three times as dreadful as that one, but lacked enough horrid words to describe her. Indeed, at that very moment she was trying to dethrone one of the pre-Adamite sultans. More tangibly, in Avanos there is a curious statue standing in the square, waiting for something, a backward glance from an earlier tourist, I do not know; but it is a fact that Gorgons no longer go to Asia Minor for their holidays.

  The Purple Pastor

  Of my trousers and my soul I have little to say. Poor fabric and logical positivism have divested me of the one, and argued me from the other. Am I ranting? Surely, for none of this is true. I’m still attached to both, though I know not where they are. Let me start my tale afresh! I cannot, for my soul, or my trousers, remember how, when or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the Lady Myfanwy. Long ears have elapsed, and my donkey is feeble through much suffering. But this too is a lie! I met her in a decaying town on the River Wye called Monmouth, as you well know. Will the right words forever elude me? I’m in a daze, having eaten my own blueberry pie in the extremity of hunger. A poison now circulates in my blood, for the pie was stale. I’m sick unto death with that horrid filling, and for the wild, yet most homely jam which I’m about to vomit, I neither expect nor solicit a bucket.

  There were three of us, heading south from Shropshire, following an unwound turban which had lately belonged to a yellow imp. Myfanwy and my verger took the lead; I trailed behind with bare legs. Our planet was no longer scalene, but it still wasn’t round, and it was my fault, so I had the responsibility of tucking up the loose corner, which was flapping in space, to make a parcel, a world-pie containing the future. To be blunt, the task seemed beyond my talent, which is modest and clumsy, but lovely Myfanwy had faith. I could not resist her belief, though I shuddered and sweated at the enormity of the scheme. We passed into the Malvern Hills, and here the turban was snagged on crags and chewed by hermits, until we were obliged to navigate by the stars instead, glittering over the snow, ascending all the while, as if we determined to ask Orion for directions in person, or else to borrow his belt.

  I chafed, thighs and tolerance, but protested not, partly because I was too far behind to be heard. The way appeared curiously strenuous. It is rare for Malvern peaks to tax the heel; often they have been hammered to gentle slopes by aeons of weather. The flora was unexpected also: the gorges were filled with Arolla Pine, which is native to the Carpathians. Before I could marvel overmuch at the incongruity, there was a commotion among some boulders, and dark shapes swooped from the shadows. The odour of garlic was extreme, the twang of crossbows untuned, and I surmised we had been ambushed by traditional banditti. By the time I reached Myfanwy and my verger, the skirmish was concluded. An old duelling pistol smoked in her dainty fist. She replaced it in a secret pocket and my admiration was tinged with horror. Such a violent and competent and tasty woman! No sulphur cloud might obscure that fact.

  And such a feminine weapon, with a trigger like a batted eyelash of a mistress! They did not sell flintlocks in the markets of Monmouth, not since the days of Charles Rolls, inventor of the limousine, who required one to power his first prototype, so it was clear she had obtained it on her travels. Pressing her on the point, I learned she had bought it from a squonk in Pennsylvania, the western point of the world. She patted the bulge in her jacket and sighed. “I don’t care to use it much, because it feels like murder.” And when I kicked the leaking bandit at my feet, she added: “Murder of the pistol, I mean.”

  “You postulate that the firearm is animate?”

  She nodded. “The squonk said something to that effect. No matter: I perceive the tethered mounts of our assailants. Let us borrow a horse or three before they return wi
th reinforcements. Listen here, Gruffydd, you lack pants, so take this scrawny ass.”

  “It has flared nostrils. How unfashionable!”

  But I didn’t resist, pulling myself into the saddle and clinging to the greasy mane. The going was barely easier; we staggered up summits so lofty that an aurora borealis flickered in a nephelococcugic vale below, and inched along ledges littered with crossbow bolts. Instead of passing into the lowlands which border the Severn estuary, we entered a range of yet taller peaks with cognac-hued sides. Any pretence that we were traversing the Malverns was now impossible, and indeed it was my verger who claimed these as the Orchat Mountains, best seen in the season of Opora, when an aerial armada of phoenix alight on branches and burn the stalks off ripe fruits, which drop into the laps of itinerants, but he was unable to say exactly where in the calendar of the year this enigmatic season resided, beyond resorting to some drivel that it was generally between the rising of Sirius and the bedtime of Arcturus.

  “Definitely the Orchats,” he avowed, “and those others up ahead are the heights of Kunlun Shan. Beyond them, the Hindu Kush, the Julian Alps and what are probably the Kaatskills.”

  “The Kaatskills?” I objected. “Ridiculous!”

  “By no means. Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember them. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and like to lord it over the surrounding country. A good place for a game of ninepins; a very aged fellow told me.”

  Myfanwy, who had climbed them on her way to Pennsylvania, concurred with this analysis and wondered aloud:

  “It appears that a number of separate ranges have gathered here for a crucial purpose. Do you think they’re holding a parliament of peaks? A literal kind of international summit?”

  My verger poked his tongue like an uneaten host and hissed: “Highly likely. The Himalayas are absent. I dare state these others have come to conspire against them. That famous range is still growing, and must be a focus of resentment for its eroded cousins. Something similar took place in 1883, when a volcano cartel plotted the assassination of Krakatoa. It was soon annihilated in an explosion.”

  “A natural catastrophe!” I cried.

  He smirked. “No, they sent it a letter-bomb.”

  Despite the grotesque implications of accepting this speculation as fact, I could sympathise with any geological formation, whether volcano, mountain or iceberg, which wanted a level playing-field with its rivals. The Himalayas were indeed rising above their station, something never to be said about the Malverns, nor any Welsh peak, including Snowdon, which would shortly glower below its rusty signals, warped rails and tasteless café, forcing lazy passengers to walk down to the top. But perhaps I was muddling two meanings of the same word, a bad habit which I hear can now be kept in check in a Prague sanatorium. I had no funds to go there, and was sick, or sock, of walking to boot.

  As we stumbled from one spectacular range to another, the rumble of distant avalanches forever in our ears, my donkey tripped and cast me to the frozen ground. The ribbon of the unwound turban fluttered around its hooves. We had found our way again. I was jubilant and started to relax, becoming more responsive to my environs. The mountains really were up to some icy intrigue, and I expressed awe at my verger’s erudition. “How do you know so much about arcane topics?”

  “I’m a perfect scholar, Gruffydd. I’ve read the whole of Papus Levi and Valentine Cheese, and most of Montague Winters, Raymond Lullabye and Friedrich Nightshirt. I collect wisdom, but not in my memory. I preserve old truths in balderdash vinegar.”

  “You? Impossible! A pickler?”

  “A pickler,” he replied.

  “I have my doubts.” I said. “A sign.”

  “It’s this,” he answered, producing a jar from beneath the folds of his vestments and uncorking it.

  “You jest,” I exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. “That is naught but a Klein Bottle, with a defective map of the world etched on its surface. But let’s proceed to Monmouth.”

  He snorted softly and turned to Myfanwy. “As for Gruffydd, he can’t tell a jar from a bottle!” There was no genuine spite in his tone, and I forgave his insolence. Perversely, I felt affection for him, even subtle reverence, as if I was the callow verger, and he my mentor. I approached him with a low bow locked in my spine. “We’ve been working together for almost a year, but still your name is unknown to me. Will you reveal it?”

  He waved a tolerant hand. “Why not? The vowels are a joy to project down the chasms. I am Douglas Delves.”

  Extreme bother seemed pickled in the echo.

  To this day, I can’t work out how so many massive mountains were able to cram themselves between Shropshire and Monmouth, without crushing either or both, unless they had lost weight in the slide over the continents to meet at that point. We eventually escaped the drama, reaching the rim of the last range, the Caucasus, merely to plunge down its foothills into a crisis. The noble town of Monmouth had changed beyond recognition: there was no horizon anywhere, and it was futile to look for one sideways. The town was now tiered triple, with Zipangu and Pennsylvania mounted above, great sweeps of world curving away from both, inverted oceans and people waving at us from the dizziness of those atmospheric antipodes. Consider a samosa or triangular napkin, with two sides folded into the middle but supported over it. Humanity and other monsters, plain or fable, were the filling, or if you prefer, the sneeze.

  It was exhilarating to view lands previously familiar only in cheap atlases. Then it occurred to me that by aiming due west or east, I might reach a fold, cross it and be upside-down too, returning in the opposite direction. Myfanwy’s dream of a spherical planet had been implemented in such a way that a traveller was nearer his destination before he started his journey; a good reason for not going anywhere. Typically Welsh, that solution! While I frowned at this, and various imponderables, the vision of beauty herself gripped my arm and indicated we were searching for the tavern in whose cellars I had once lodged: my ovens played a part in her strategy. Accordingly, I urged my donkey to a forward totter, pleased to discharge this duty correctly without trousers or soul. On the outskirts of the tectonic stack, I noted that the upper tiers had been warped back to align them with Monmouth, the base.

  Needless to say, the streets of my youth were shrouded in darkness, for the only access to the sky, and thus sun, moon, stars, came from the unfolded, northern edge, the direction which I considered mine. And what minimal light glowed from the phosphorescent sky-seas was blocked by the overhanging vegetation of the two continents, acting as exotic drapes. I felt that Monmouth had retired to bed and was too prim to show its naked shoulders to men of the cloth and women of the pie. I saw that creatures with the texture of wood were floating down from the middle tier on silk parachutes made from kimonos, or else employing grappling-irons to climb back. These gnoles had inhabited every glade in all lands in the days of Slith, Nuth and the aforementioned Rolls. I didn’t like the crafty looks they offered us as we passed through the foliage curtains into the false cavern that was once Agincourt Square.

  The market was devoid of imps, for gnoles had taken over all wheels of commerce, except the actual waterwheel by Monnow bridge, which didn’t rotate now, having been jammed by the cables which pulled in Zipangu and Pennsylvania. The poles of the stalls supported the first of these lands and they visibly bowed under the weight. Imps are wicked traders, as you have discovered to your cost, but gnoles are worse: they sell items that are no use to anyone. What purpose in buying a kettle with a spout which curls back into its own belly? Might as well order pottery from a ghoul! We ignored the banter and dismounted, groping toward the ‘Green Dragon’, my last place of abode. Dim lamps swung from external brackets, glinting on my verger’s jar. The interior of the pub was illumined by clay pipes, furiously puffed by patrons so they might see their drinks. Ales frothed in the murk like subterranean lagoons.

  We went down into the basement through the hole of a dull, dark and soundless trapdoor. I
lit a flambeau (the leg of a stool) and studied my surroundings. My possessions were in disarray, but none had been stolen, possibly because they’d been deemed valueless. The oven was still in its customary place, and Myfanwy ran her fingers over the knobs of the lucky burner. She pursed her lips and whistled: “So this is the finest furnace in Gwent? And I am the best pie-artist! What a superb combination! We’ll have Owain ap Iorwerth and Tangerine Pan out of your house in a lick!” I was grateful for her zeal, but troubled as to her real motives. Unlikely that affection for me formed any part of them. All the same, I was proud to announce the design of the oven as my own. Inspiration had come while dreaming of home, before returning to find it full of pastors. Long lost pudding times; superior to salad days!

  “But all my recipes failed,” I meekly appended.

  “Because you are a fool,” explained Myfanwy. “Don’t worry: I’m here now. You allude to similarities between oven and house. That’s precisely why I wish to gain entry to your residence. There are two upper chambers in this oven, connected by pipes to a third, lower compartment. Whatever is placed in these top chambers is combined into a pie down here. It’s a system which can mix anything and lock it in a crust. Now, Gruffydd, how many rooms do you have in your house?”

  “Two upstairs and one down, connected by laundry-chutes. Grief! You intend to turn my house into an oven!”

  “That’s what it always potentially was. You weren’t clever to build this machine at all: the house suggested it, and you were just a tool of its urge to have a child. You were a wife to your property, and a mother to this domestic appliance. Well then, let’s employ the house itself for a kiln, and bake Wales into the future at the same time! I’ve calculated an easier way of folding the loose corner of the world over Monmouth. It relies on producing a gargantuan pie.”