The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension

by Rhys Hughes

  “It’s not really active,” she added.

  Ivan raised an eyebrow. “So the rumours are false?”

  “What do they say about me?”

  “That you make love to jaguars in the forest.”

  Daniela laughed. “Not true, sorry!”

  Ivan seemed mildly disappointed. “I wondered about it. Rita was the one who told me. I wanted to visit you in the morning to smell your skin, but I couldn’t think of a good enough excuse.”

  “You don’t need one,” Daniela replied.

  “There’s no point now. I knew deep down that jaguars weren’t your type. You are too complex. But the others can’t understand why you go walking before dawn alone in the jungle.”

  “For privacy and dew, I suppose.”

  He nodded, wiped her dry with a cloth and nodded at her open legs. With his delicate fingers he replaced the glistening razor in his little bag and stood up. His knees were creased and red from kneeling. She also stood and watched him as he made for the door. He had dozens of clients to visit before noon. He was one of the hardest-working men Daniela had met. His chosen profession had given him expertise in a truly delicate area. He was a scholar of female anatomy, not only its physical wonders and variations, but also its symbolism and aspirations.

  She realised he was the best authority to approach for practical advice about her perversion, the only man with suggestions worth hearing. Waiting for her hair to grow again before unburdening herself was impossible. It had to be done now. She said abruptly, “Wait! I’ll tell you everything. Jealousy turns me on. I wish my husband was cheating on me.”

  He glanced over his shoulder and grinned. “That’s original, but I don’t think it’s too strange. You desire what most other women have to put up with but don’t like. The main problem is your case is that you aren’t married. You don’t even have a boyfriend.”

  “I’m much too impatient for that.”

  Ivan lowered his voice. “I’m not sure how a single woman can be a victim of adultery. Those sorts of paradoxes belong to the philosophers. By luck there’s one who lives in the next street. He’s an inventor actually but he experiments with concepts as well as machines. I used to visit his wife on a professional basis. His name is Doctor Morales. I believe he worked for the space program before it was discontinued.”

  Daniela frowned. “How might he help me?”

  Ivan shrugged. “I don’t know but he’s always eager for a challenge. Maybe he could build an artificial husband for you? Why not ask? He’s retired now and I think he’s bored with life. He’ll probably welcome your dilemma. Go round and see him. At the very least it’ll be something different for us to talk about next time.”

  Feeling slightly absurd, Daniela nodded. Ivan wrote the address on a piece of paper. Unable to help himself, he sketched a full moon below the words. As if in response, Daniela’s sunburst began to itch. It was as if some metaphysical conjunction of these two celestial bodies was swelling the tides within her pelvis. Tides of blood and lust. She resisted the urge to scratch until Ivan had gone. This delay in such a simple and innocent consummation was excruciatingly sweet.

  Doctor Veloso Morales was a man of indeterminate antiquity with golden hair and watery eyes. The smell of warm dust and desiccated fruit filled the room behind him and made his looming shape on the threshold of the house seem like a sentinel at the entrance of a mysterious factory, but he smiled and regarded Daniela with a certain tenderness that had the signs of a transposed nostalgia. Perhaps he was remembering a lost girlfriend or sister from his youth. He stood back and beckoned for her to enter and she passed into a museum of eccentric machines. They covered nearly every surface and the gentle hum of spinning wheels made her wonder if bees or monks were trapped inside his cabinets. A solitary chair was free of technical clutter and she accepted his unspoken invitation to sit there.

  He moved slowly around her but with considerable dignity. Unable to pause or lean anywhere without feeling the jab of a spring, wire or toothed wheel in his back or side, he kept walking. Daniela felt guilty for depriving this old man of rest until she realised he was taking pleasure from making minor adjustments to the positions of objects. Every finished machine was surrounded by the scattered components of those not yet ready. Morales was clearly an inventor who worked on many projects at the same time. As her natural curiosity overcame her formal shyness she developed an unlikely need to know the function of each appliance. Opposite her stood a rack of crystal tubes. The late sunbeams that slanted from a window in a far wall partly illuminated this array and generated a pattern from the irregular alternation of dark and bright tubes in rows and columns, almost a coherent picture, but what it depicted was unfathomable to Daniela. Yet it was not quite abstract. An unfocussed image.

  Now her host passed behind her. She swivelled her head but he was already bending over her other shoulder.

  “You walked here in your slippers.”

  “It isn’t far. Just one block. Anyway, they aren’t mine, I borrowed them. If you were more observant, you might see they don’t quite fit. It seems to me that you don’t know everything.”

  “Indeed. I’m not an oracle.”

  She wondered why she had employed such a bantering tone, but he had taken no offence and was pacing again, so she nodded at the translucent tubes. “What are those for?”

  “It’s a device for making levers for other machines. Most engineers don’t realise that different inventions need specific kinds of lever. Shape and weight and how they are connected underneath are less important than their secret characters. Levers have internal qualities, no matter how solid they are, just like plants. Let me show you.”

  Approaching the array, he extracted one of the tubes. It sighed as it came out. Then he tipped the contents into his hand and passed the object to her. It was very smooth and still warm.

  “Wood. I was expecting metal,” she remarked.

  “Cheaper and easier to grow them. Now roll it between your palms, caress it gently. It’s shy. Probably won’t function too well in a public environment. Not suitable for a vending machine or elevator control. It will be used in some private capacity, to operate a hidden trapdoor in a cellar, perhaps, or maybe even a guillotine.”

  “I wish it the best of luck,” she said.

  “There are a few mature levers on your right side. These have all been weaned and tested but they belong to contraptions that have become redundant or inappropriate. There’s a slim chance they might come out of retirement one day. That’s why I keep them.”

  “You’re a sentimentalist.”

  “An optimist too. And dreamer. All the ludicrous things that everybody is or should be. That’s my curse.”

  “I heard you were involved with outer space?”

  “Yes. A lunar project but it was aborted on the eve of the big day. The worst disappointment of my career! All that work for nothing. It wasn’t purely an academic exercise but something of potential benefit to the human race. Cheap energy. Naturally we kept it quiet. That was easy because it was going to be a surprise anyway. I don’t mind talking about it to anyone who asks, but nobody does and nobody has, until now. It was cancelled because of a single unavoidable factor.”

  “Lack of funds?” asked Daniela.

  He bared his teeth in a grimace. “Women.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Don’t worry. The female of the species really was responsible for our failure but I don’t resent your kind for what happened. There was no help for it. We overlooked an element that was dependent on gender difference. This element doomed the enterprise.”

  She wanted to laugh in his face, but he had turned his back and was lurching into the cluttered depths of his abode, so she examined the finished levers by her side. A console rested on legs next to her chair and the levers were arranged in a single line. The smallest resembled a little finger, complete with knuckle. The thickest was like the hilt of a heavy sword. Idly she pulled the nearest and the positio
n and shape of the shadows in the room altered. The sparkles that burned on glassy and alloyed surfaces died and re-ignited elsewhere. Then she understood that the solitary window was sliding across the walls and with a delighted gasp she guided it with the lever, moving it over the ceiling to expose the rooms above, also filled to bursting with machines. In the sweet murk where her host had ventured, there was a cry. He had knocked his hip against the edge of a table.

  She pushed the lever to its former position but the changes she had made did not correct themselves.

  “I’m sorry,” she cried out.

  His shrug was so laboured it was almost audible. “No matter. I need an injection of randomness into my life. It took me at least a month to situate that window precisely where I wanted it. I desired the light to penetrate my residence in a particular way, but you have rescued me from the tyranny of perfectionism. For that I thank you.”

  She regarded this as an invitation to try the other levers. There were seven in total. The second caused the house to be filled with music that was unbearably strange, every object throbbing and resonating like an instrument, including her bones and flesh. She was being orchestrated in all her cells. She reversed the lever and moved to the next, the echo in her ears fading slowly. This third lever was stiff and required both hands to shift. Its sole function seemed to be the destruction of the levers adjacent to it, the second and fourth, which vaporised into gas and dispersed slowly in the static air. She moved to the fifth. This appeared to engage hidden gears far below, deep in the ground, but there were no other discernible results. Not yet, at any rate. The sixth lever also had no blatant purpose. The level of light in the room increased by a tiny fraction. That was all.

  Doctor Morales loomed out of the gloom. He had been calling to her but the buzzing in her head from the music had deafened her to his words. Her fingers were closing around the seventh lever. Now he came close enough to be audible. His teeth gleamed.

  “I strongly suggest you don’t touch that one.”

  There was something in his expression that made her withdraw her hand and mumble another apology.

  He winced. “I don’t want too much disruption.”

  She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. She was aware her cheeks were turning red with shame, even though she guessed he wouldn’t care or even notice. It was time for her to reveal the real point of her visit and make her request.

  “Shall I tell you why I came here today? It wasn’t a social call. I want you to create something for me. A private commission. I want you to invent a husband. Can you do that?”

  He pursed his lips. “Not a good idea.”

  “Do you mind if I ask why?”

  “Artificial people are unreliable. I lost faith in them a few years ago. They just can’t cope in society. The ones I designed from scratch found it impossible to make friends. The only remotely successful model started as an organic man and I stealthily replaced him piece by piece until he was fully automated, but even he went wrong when his simplistic brain encountered something which was at variance with the expectations of his limited daily routine. He was a dismal failure.”

  Daniela sighed. “Will you try again?”

  “The effort and expense aren’t worth it. Why not look for a real husband instead? That’s my advice.”

  “I need complete control over his behaviour.”

  “You want a slave? Is it sexual?”

  “He has to have stamina,” she whispered.

  “Now I understand. But there’s no need for an entire man. You only require the relevant segment and I have a number of elegant male members in storage. Every inventor toys with such trifles at some stage of his career. Shall I fetch you a selection for demonstration purposes? They come in a variety of colours and textures.”

  “No, he has to have a different sort of stamina, not physical but moral, or rather amoral. He has to have stamina in deceiving me and to keep doing it without regrets. I get turned on by jealousy, you see, by being jealous, but I have never known fulfilment.”

  He tapped his nose. “It seems a harmless enough desire. It even has a name. Zelophilia. We all have special vagaries. Naked clocks arouse me, possibly why I decided to become an inventor in the first place. I have an idea. What if I design automatic genitals for you? If I model them on your own sexual organs and set them loose among the men of the city, satisfaction will be attained without you and despite you.”

  “I hadn’t considered that option.”

  “While you remain at home, lonely and unloved, your disembodied flower will be flooded with the lust of innumerable lovers, including the husbands of your friends. You will be betrayed by yourself, an unbearable and utterly unique sensation. Surely this will take jealousy to new heights? All those encounters denied to you by yourself! Is this not the ultimate expression of what you crave? The apotheosis of your perversion!”

  She shivered in her chair. “Yes.”

  “Good. That is settled. I need to know your measurements. You can take those yourself. I will fetch a micrometer.”

  He walked away and rummaged endlessly in the shadows. She attempted to calm her excitement by talking again, pretending an interest in his other work, the machines that so littered her surroundings that it might be easier to comment on the aspects of the room which did nothing much, the few traces of bare floor and walls, the dust, the occasional surface of a shelf not yet filled. Finally she referred back to the rack of tubes, the pattern of light now different but still indefinable, the picture just beyond the margin of clarity.

  “How many levers do you plan to grow?”

  “Actually I’m waiting for the one that will turn the abominable thing off. My basement is full of unwanted levers. One day the correct one will emerge. That will be a relief.”

  “Why not smash the tubes? Won’t that stop them?”

  “It might. Or it might do something else. I don’t want to risk the consequences of spilling unset levers over the floor. A puddle of liquid levers might cause all sorts of trouble. One slip of a foot and who can say what might be activated?”

  “Do all your inventions need levers?”

  He returned with the measuring instrument. “No. What I design for you will turn itself on. You will be able to carry the finished item in your pocket and smuggle it into the homes of neighbours and it will be programmed to seek out the nearest male. I might have been reluctant to fabricate such a device earlier but a recent event has led me to the conclusion that it is now perfectly safe to do so.”

  He averted his eyes as she raised her skirt and she grinned. “Do you get many visitors, professor?”

  “Hardly any. Now there will be even fewer. I used to go out fairly often but I’ll have to stop doing that. It will become dangerous. I am gradually turning invisible.”

  “How did that happen?” she asked.

  “The sixth lever. It started a machine that is altering the nature of my skin. I wish you hadn’t pulled it, but it’s too late now, because the process is irreversible. The cells on one side of my body will soon become highly sensitive to light. Each cell on the other side will emit the same level of light in the equivalent place. Whatever is behind me will appear on my front, so if I walk in front of a billboard, the logo will appear on my chest and stomach.”

  “Surely you can just wear clothes?”

  “Unfortunately my skin will become too tender to allow that. I must spend the rest of my life nude and unseen, but I don’t hate you for doing this to me. Women always spoil my projects. It’s not deliberate, I’m used to it, that’s all. It’s a natural hazard. Women!”

  She finished with the micrometer and lowered her skirt. Taking the instrument, the professor studied the readings. He was already absorbed in his work, mumbling to himself, searching for suitable parts among the piles of components. Daniela realised she didn’t care to observe the actual process of construction. She became squeamish at the thought of this reverse dissection, the birth of a second, independent lower mou
th, nor was there any appropriate name for the little shell of implausible heat and greed detached from the muscles of her pelvis, nothing workable or clear enough at any rate, and so she rose and strolled to the front door, calling back that she would return in a week. He said nothing.

  She turned the handle and felt the warm breeze pass her face and enter the house, picking up dust and brown fumes and loose papers on its single circuit of the stuffy room and throwing them out into the early evening, where she ran, footsteps muted in slippers.

  The hypothetical skeleton of the moon must resemble a net, with its latitude and longitude lines exposed like geometrical bones and no flesh between the nodes where parallels and meridians intersect. Streets full of shops are like unrolled versions of that skeleton, an urban grid that is distorted only along its edge. Daniela stopped running when she reached the mercantile heart of the city and eased into an intrigued saunter.

  This grid should have been easy enough to negotiate, for no street could ever lead her astray, all were at right angles to each other, but she was briefly distracted by the pattern of lights in the windows of the upper levels of the buildings which contained the shops. Some were on, some had been turned off, creating randomness and asymmetry in the core of the perfect grid. All rooms directly above shops are enigmatic.

  Rarely do they look occupied. More plausible to conclude that they have been left empty for years, filled with relics that nobody can remember how to recognise. But the fact that lights shine in many of them betrays this conceit. From the hills surrounding the city, over the period of an evening, these patterns of illumination gave the illusion of a vast and ancient mainframe computer clicking its way through an outmoded calculation programmed by technicians long dead. Daniela had seen this.

  One night, purely by chance, it would happen that the arbitrary order of these lights would make a coherent figure. Something simple, maybe a stick man done in chunky squares, like a message broadcast to other stars to explain the dominant lifeform on planet Earth. The larger the grid, the more scope for accurate detail, the more realistic the result, but also a far greater number of meaningless patterns, abstracts that no mind could assemble into a shape with an equivalence in the true world.