by Hughes, Rhys
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 Silver Necks
There was a vampire called Unthank who suffered from a raging thirst. His doctor suspected diabetes but the patient refused to take a test. Unthank drank from all the necks in the village, valley and province, but he was still unsatisfied. It seemed he might deplete the land of victims, so his doctor took him aside and told him:
“This can’t go on. You’re giving the undead a bad name. The elders are talking about locking you up in a pyramid made from garlic. Luckily there’s a solution. You must travel to Heaven, where you can sup as much as you please from the inhabitants without making them anaemic. They are immortal and have bottomless veins.”
Unthank thought this a splendid idea and asked for directions. The doctor clucked his tongue and cried:
“If I knew how to get there I wouldn’t be working here! You should look for a crossroads guarded by a burnished knight. For a modest fee he will allow you to choose one of the paths. But beware: three lead to a hideous doom. Only the fourth, which looks the same as the others, will take you to Heaven. The knight won’t tell you which is which, though he sometimes drops hints like anvils.”
Unthank, despite his name, was grateful and he wrapped himself in a sunblock shroud. He wondered what hideous dooms lurked at the ends of the three roads. But thirst overcame his anxieties and he flew off into the woods. He flapped for a long time until he came to a river. A canoe was moored to the bank and a knight in rusty armour sat at one end. Unthank controlled his appetite and asked:
“Excuse me, do you know the way to Heaven?”
“No, but I’ll take you to someone who does. A burnished knight who guards a crossroads. It’ll cost you, though.”
Unthank paid him and sat in the canoe. The fellow paddled them with a sword wider than a jump. After a day they reached an estuary and in the middle of the estuary a large island. They disembarked on a wooden jetty and walked inland. Eventually they reached the intersection of four roads and the guide said: “Here we are.”
Unthank squinted. “I can’t see a burnished knight.”
“One moment.” The fellow took a wire brush from a hinged compartment in his knee and scrubbed himself all over. Finally he gleamed like a full moon. He gave the vampire an apologetic look. “Chivalry doesn’t pay much, so I earn a bit on the side.”
“Can you tell me which path leads to Heaven?”
“I’m not permitted. If I try, I’ll be turned inside out: it’s an old curse. However, I’m certain you’ll pick the best road. When pilgrims come here the odds are against them, but in your case I feel confident. Follow your instincts and you’ll do fine.”
Unthank peered at the four paths: they were identical. He stroked a fang. “Allow me to go away and consider it. First thing tomorrow morning I’ll be back to make my choice.”
And so saying, he strolled off and hid among some bushes. When the sun went down, he cast off his shroud and flew into the sky. From above he was able to see where the roads went. Three led to hidden trapdoors, visible as vague outlines: the fourth led to a walled garden with a roof of crystal. Unthank glimpsed beings that wore halos and carried harps. He listened but there was no music.
The next day he approached the knight and said: “I’ve made my choice and now I’m off to sample paradise.”
“You must pay me first. If you refuse, my magic sword will slice you into nearly four-thousand pieces.”
Unthank grumbled, but he handed over the coins and walked toward the western path. The knight cried out in alarm:
“What a terribly stony road!”
Unthank winked. “The way to divinity always is...”
“Wouldn’t you rather choose a more comfortable path? The others have all been resurfaced. Look at the gorgeous camber on the northern road! So tasteful and elegant. Consider also the gutters of the beautiful southern road! In absolutely perfect condition.”
“They look just the same to me.”
“A remarkable coincidence, I agree. We must discuss this matter over a pint of ale. There is a tavern halfway along the eastern road. Allow me to escort you there, arm in wing.”
Unthank shook his head. It was obvious the knight was trying to make him change his mind. Did he earn a commission on the number of travellers who fell down the trapdoors? It seemed likely. These crude antics enraged the vampire and he briefly considered leaping on the cheat. But without a tin opener he was at a disadvantage.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll persist with my choice. I’ll send you a postcard written on a cloud...”
The knight shrugged and a sigh escaped the holes bored in his helmet like steam from a golem’s kettle. Unthank ignored him and hurried as fast as his bowed legs could manage. The road ran straight to a locked door in the side of the walled garden. He rang the bell and waited. At long last, a voice answered. Unthank was astounded to recognise the icy tones of his doctor. “How did you get here?”
“I took a short cut. Some enraged villagers caught me after you left and drove a stake through my heart. It’s your fault. The vampires and the humans got on well until you started drinking them dry. If I was you, I’d turn right around and go home.”
“Don’t be silly. It was you who advised me to come here in the first place. Open up and show me in!”
The doctor mumbled to himself and turned a key. Unthank stepped over the threshold into brightness. Everything sparkled painfully: he shielded his slitted eyes and struggled to focus his surroundings. Nothing matched what he had seen from above. The garden was made of metal: platinum, gold and copper. Osmium flowers exuded tetroxides and birds in aluminium trees clicked relays and preened magnetic feathers. Zinc fish darted in mercury pools with propellers instead of fins.
Even the halos of the blessed souls were electric. Unthank lifted a hand to touch the sparks looping from the doctor’s antennae and was knocked to the ground. When he rose, he tried to open the door. The doctor shook his head. “It won’t allow you to depart. It only works one way, like a diode. We’re stuck here. Ever since God took a course in electronic engineering, rectification has supplanted redemption.”
“I don’t understand! Last night I saw harps.”
“Bare wires,” the doctor rasped. “Most of us undress before going to bed. We’re immortal now, but the only way to live forever is to be reborn as a machine. You won’t find sustenance here: our blood is molten silver. If only you’d taken a diabetes test!”
Unthank shed a gothic tear. It was plain as a grave that Heaven to a vampire was sheer Hell. “The knight tried to warn me off this path. But I thought he was aiming to mislead me.”
“He’s the one who made us. As I said, he drops hints like anvils. On these anvils he hammers out our bodies. When the Age of Chivalry finished he grew very lonely. He sees robots as kindred casings, advanced versions of the traditional knight. But he’s a likeable enough fellow. I prescribe iron tablets for his metal fatigue.”
“Where do the other three roads lead to?”
“Hades, Tartarus and Limbo. They would have been perfect for you. As a matter of fact, I believe the Devil is advertising for vampires to help his demons hassle the damned. You’ve got no one to blame but yourself. If I were you, I’d attempt to bite my way through the roof. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of million years.”
“Fangs for the advice...”
And so we lea
ve Unthank. When he escapes, the first thing he intends to do is take revenge on the knight. This is just as impractical as it is unfair: the knight is blameless. He is also quite empty, a suit of armour full of air. He knows this is a poor fable and has resigned to work for a richer tale. Well, would you do the job for his pay? When travellers pick the road to Heaven, he gains nothing. And when they choose one that leads to the Hells, he earns a pittance.
The Tell-Tale Nose
Atchoo! — runny — very, very dreadfully runny it had been and is; but why will you say that it is sore? The cold had numbed my nose — not pained — not tormented it. Above all was the sense of smell diminished. I sniffed nothing in the pantry or in the oven. I quivered no nostril at the laundry basket. No wonder the young man nearly caught me unawares, despite the condition of his socks! He has told you his version of the affair — it is time to hearken to mine.
I knew he wanted to kill me, on account of my eye. It bothered him, my blue iris, the eye of a vulture. Though myopic, it noted his anxiety, his increasing panic, observed all his little preparations with a cool, albeit hazy, detachment. He shuddered when I turned it upon him, as if the orb was a supernatural window into some forbidden realm: the tinted, bulging pane of a beaked god’s bathroom.
He had never been so kind as the week before the murder. He cooked my meals, brushed the pale locks of hair that crawled on my shoulders, wound the ebony clock in the hallway, secured the house against robbers by nailing the shutters. He even dressed up in my late wife’s underwear and plucked a mandolin, as she had done, so many years before. He cared nothing for my gold, but expressed an interest in a box of wicks I kept on the mantelpiece — spare wicks for a dark lantern I used for fishing the fetid lagoons that ringed the city.
I gave him the box and busied myself in the construction of a giant puppet from a spare nightgown and candle-wax. I stuffed its false torso with my previous week’s catch and fashioned a crystal eye to fit in the single central socket of its lopsided skull. This bauble was covered by a leather eyelid, on a spring, and the entire mannequin was operated by cords. Then I arranged the puppet between the sheets of my bed, crawled under the frame and waited. It also had a heart: the mechanism of the ebony clock, fully wound and secreted in a suitable cavity.
For seven nights I lingered in my cramped confines, on the frozen bare boards, while the young man looked into my room, taking an hour to open the door and thrust his head through the gap, but each time he did so, I lost my nerve and felt unable to pull the cords which would cause the mannequin to sit up and open its eye. My arm was paralysed as if by a mystic stiffness. I think it was the dark lantern! Yes, it was this! Its hinges creaked, ever so quietly, and this almost imperceptible sound filled me with anguish, as do all the quietest noises in the world — cell division in lambs, an execution with a guillotine made from cheese, an illicit affair between a barometer and a balloonist.
Naturally, spending a whole week out of bed impaired my resistance to germs and I developed this horrid cold. The sixth and seventh nights passed in unbearable suspense, my mouth set in a rictus grin as I tried to prevent myself sneezing. I welcomed each morning, for at the first note of birdsong the young man would withdraw his head and allow me the freedom to slither out of my confinement and give vent to the meteorological pressures within me. Listen to my nose as it expels the emerald typhoon! Does it not sound like a second voice?
On the eighth night I succumbed. A sinusoidal wave of phlegm rushed along my sinuses. In desperation, I covered my nostrils with my generous tongue; a useless precaution. Might as well attempt to cap a geyser with a mouldy rug! The detonation echoed off the underside of the bed like a carbine shot. “Atchoo’s there?” my nose cried, and with the spasm which racked my body, my arm jerked involuntarily, tugging the cords which crossed the floor, climbed the wall, ran back along the ceiling, tripped over a pulley and speared down to hook the mannequin.
The puppet abruptly sat erect, and the young man kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour, he remained thus, and I guessed the single eye had sprung open, but that it was too dark to glimmer, and presently I heard a groan, a slight noise which may have been the wind in the chimney, a mouse crossing the floor or a cricket which has made a single chirp, but it was clear the young man would interpret it to be an expression of mortal terror from his intended victim.
When he had waited a long time, very patiently, he resolved to open a crevice in the lantern. I imputed this not from a change in the level of illumination in the room, for I knew he would contrive to permit only a single ray, the slenderest possible, to flee the apparatus — one incapable of diffusing from its rigid path — but by an extremely subtle odour from the oily wick, as well as the unbearably quiet grinding of those glacial hinges.
I then heard an intake of breath — an intake sharper than a peeled bell. The ray had connected with the puppet’s vulture eye. How could it miss? The blue crystal I had selected was immense; it dominated a full half of the face. And the leather eyelid quivered on its spring. Yes, it must have been like this! With the clockwork heart pounding within the wax breast! Pounding like a plum ready to burst in an excess of anguish! The young man would not tolerate this; he would be compelled to silence it.
With a loud yell, he threw open the lantern fully and leapt across the room and onto the puppet. In an instant he dragged it to the floor and toppled the heavy bed over it. Now I was exposed and aghast at the possibility of discovery, but the young man was so intent upon finishing his grisly task that he paid no note to anything outside the diameter of that azure eye. I fled, unseen, scuttling along the boards and out of the door. Now it was necessary to hide away. But where?
I have already alluded to my evisceration of the hallway clock. So too have I related how the young man was wont to wind it every day of that fateful week. Too deluded was he to realise he was winding nothing which might be construed as a precision instrument. No, no! I had replaced the mechanism with an orange! Thus there was quite enough room to conceal my body within its sable depths, and accordingly I slipped inside and closed the door.
Here my knees knocked and my teeth ached, with trepidation, no doubt; but my occupation of a timepiece did not suggest to my mind the gradual yet unstoppable progress of decay and death. For there was no pendulum or escapement to count the twists on my mortal coil. Betwixt chronometer and orange there are few points of similarity — only the pips are the same. I gained courage as I listened to the young man pulling up the planks in my chamber. The rasp of a saw, the sloshing of a tub, confirmed his wise precautions.
He was dismembering the puppet, carefully so as to collect every drop of blood. And blood there would be in plenty; for the figure’s hollow limbs were filled with fish from the fetid lagoons, or what I assumed to be fish, and I rubbed my hands in glee, believing that my revenge on the young man was nearly complete. He was never a real son to me. He had turned up at the house uninvited on my wedding night and refused to leave. Somehow my wife and I came to regard him as a piece of furniture. We regularly adopted chairs and tables. Why not a man?
By the time he completed his labours — about four o’clock, though I could not be sure, for an orange does not strike the hours, though a puppet’s heart under floorboards does — there came a knocking at the street door. He descended with a light step, confident he had nothing to fear. There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play had been aroused. At this, I chuckled softly to myself. The neighbour in question has hearing almost as sensitive as my own; it is a trait common to the inhabitants of our street.
The young man led them about the house. He bade them search — search well. He was more confident of escaping detection than a chameleon in a hall of mirrors. And so was I, for the ebony clock, with its warped and twisted frame, did not seem a feasible hiding place for any object, but luckily my own bent limbs and mutated body sl
otted exactly into its bone breaking curves. As I expected, in his mania to be of assistance, he even carried chairs into my bedroom and insisted the officers rest from their fatigues there, directly above the grave of the puppet. Satisfied, the officers chatted together, all very amiable, of trifles, and other confections.
Now I knew that the clock would be ticking beneath the young man’s feet and that he would gradually find this fact unbearable. He had lived too long in the neighbourhood not to have developed acute hearing. I listened to him arguing with the officers — trifles were inferior to profiteroles! — in a high key and with violent gesticulations, and I knew I would soon be rid of the fool. He gasped for breath, paced the floor with heavy strides, foamed, raved, swore! He swung his chair and grated it upon the boards — custard slices were the lowest class of cake! — but then betrayed himself with a scream.
“Villains!” he shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed! — tear up the planks! — here, here! — it is the beating of his hideous heart!” Immediately there was the sound of stressed wood, popping nails, a triple gasp of amazement, a creak of knees bending. I ground my molars in repressed delight. This was the culmination of my plan! The police officers were certain to judge the young man insane when they reached down to retrieve mere hunks of wax, cogs and fish scales dusting a great glass eye! Confessing to the murder of a puppet! They would have no choice but to arrest him and carry him off to a madhouse.
Such was my hope. But all too soon was it to prove forlorn. For one of the officers announced hoarsely: “Yes, it is a heart! And here are the kidneys! And there the lights, folded around the tongue!” And he called for a handkerchief to wrap up these items as evidence for the prosecution. I was much too stupefied by these revelations to account them a jest. Then, as I uncreased my deformed brow in an inverse frown more conducive to profound thought than the standard kind, an abominable fear came upon me, a feeling that my past was catching up with me, like a skeleton on a unicycle — unsteadily, clankingly, ludicrously, bone shakingly.
