The Final Testimony of Raphael Ignatius Phoenix

by Paul Sussman

  I prodded his buttock a little harder, and his hand swished downwards angrily.

  ‘. . . Rome has ever known. And although he’s a slave . . .’

  Another prod, another swish.

  ‘. . . he nonetheless becomes a symbol of freedom for the poor and downtrodden.’

  And then, I just did it. I hadn’t planned it. I hadn’t thought about it. It was completely unpremeditated. All the anger and frustration of the last couple of years simply came rushing to the surface. I bent my knees, I took a deep breath, and with every ounce of strength I had I jammed the trident upwards into Luther’s crotch. The force of the blow lifted his diminutive frame up into the air and threw it forwards on to the microphones, which let out a squeal of static in protest. I heard him cry, ‘Some fucker bit me!’ and then there was a loud splitting sound as the flimsy rail at the front of the podium gave way, pitching the screaming midget face forwards into the alligator pond beneath. There was a gasp from the crowd, a loud splash, and a swishing of alligator tails.

  ‘Help me!’ wailed Luther. ‘For Christ’s sake, somebody help me!’

  Casting the trident aside, I pressed my eye to a crack in the front wall of the podium. The ’gator enclosure was directly in front of me, with a bedraggled Luther crouching on the far side of the pond, up to his waist in water. Alligators were creeping up on him from all directions, their massive jaws chomping lasciviously.

  ‘Please,’ squealed the beleaguered dwarf. ‘Get me out of here. Someone get me out of here.’

  No one moved, however. Ninety reporters and 500 extras stood rooted to the spot as the ’gators closed in. Luther stared at the reptiles in horror and then, with a desperate lunge, pulled himself out of the pond and made a rush for the side of the enclosure. The ’gators were too quick, however. They charged at him and, to a chorus of spine-tingling screams from their victim, literally tore him to pieces. Fragments of check cloth flew about like confetti, and the water of the pond turned a sickly shade of red. One burly male reporter fainted as a severed foot flew through the air and landed on his lap.

  ‘Oh my God,’ whimpered one woman. ‘They’re eating Luther Dextrus.’

  Even as the alligators snapped at the tattered remains of my diminutive employer I had but one thought in my head, and that was to get out of my costume, out of the movies, out of America and back to England (four thoughts, actually).

  ‘Home,’ I sighed to myself. ‘That’s where I want to be. Back in good old England. I’ve been away too long.’

  Whilst a pair of studio hands tried to fish bits of Luther out of the ’gator enclosure, therefore, and the assembled crowd argued as to just how he’d fallen into the enclosure in the first place – ‘Tripped on microphone cables,’ suggested one man. ‘No, no, he got stung by a wasp or something,’ said another – I slipped quietly back to my changing room, where I unbuckled my helmet and changed into my normal clothes. Half an hour later, The Pill on my finger and The Photo in my pocket, I was in a taxi heading to Union Station; an hour later I was on the Santa Fe Chief roaring eastwards; and three days later was settling into a second-class cabin on board the Scythia, bound for Liverpool, one way. What happened to my house, my car, my bank account and my studio contract I have no idea, for such had been my hurry to get away that I left my American affairs quite unsettled. For all I know they might all still be waiting for me. At the time I didn’t really care. I was just glad to be going home.

  ‘To Luther!’ I said, raising a glass of champagne to my lips as we slipped away from the Manhattan dockside. ‘May his digestion be long and peaceful.’

  It was an eight-day journey back to Britain, and I spent the first three of them fast asleep in my cabin. It was, I believe, the first proper rest I had had for four years. Thereafter, free, thank God, of the seasickness that had marred my outward journey, I ventured forth about the ship, eating in the restaurant, promenading around the deck, drinking a lot of whisky and indulging in the odd game of quoits with fellow travellers.

  It was during one such game, on the penultimate afternoon of our voyage, that something quite extraordinary happened. I was supposed to be playing doubles with a Mr and Mrs Flumstein, an elderly couple from Wisconsin, but my partner had failed to appear and I was therefore casting around for someone else to make up the foursome. Sitting on a deckchair at the far end of the deck was a woman with extremely shiny red shoes, her face hidden behind a magazine. I walked over and inquired whether she might like to play.

  ‘Love to,’ she replied, lowering the paper. It was Emily.

  ‘Emily! My God! How long have you been on board?’

  ‘Since we left America, of course. I didn’t just drop out of the sky.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t seen you. Where have you been hiding?’

  ‘I haven’t been hiding. We must have simply missed each other.’

  ‘It’s a miracle, Emily! A miracle. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.’

  ‘I thought we were going to play quoits.’

  ‘Quoits!’ I cried. ‘Bugger quoits!’

  I turned to the elderly couple from Wisconsin.

  ‘Bugger quoits!’

  ‘Don’t be so rude, Raphael,’ she sniggered, slapping my hand. ‘Anyway, I want to play. Come on.’

  She stood up and skipped across to our opponents, explaining, with an innocent smile, that I had in fact said, ‘Rubber quoits,’ these being the type we were used to playing with in England, as opposed to the rope ones on board the Scythia. The Flumsteins apparently found all this perfectly reasonable, and we duly spent the next hour launching our hoops up and down the deck as the ship pitched and rolled its way back across the Atlantic.

  ‘What happened to you on the Aquitania?’ I asked, bending my knees and spinning my quoit towards the peg, which I missed by a foot. ‘When we last met you said you were going to be on it.’

  ‘I was on it,’ she replied. ‘You weren’t, though. I looked all over.’

  ‘So did I, and you definitely weren’t there.’

  ‘Yes I was! I had a lovely cabin. They put fresh flowers in it every day. It was a fun crossing, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, it damned well wasn’t. I was seasick all the way. Oh bad luck, Mrs Flumstein! Very close!’

  ‘Poor Raphael!’

  ‘I would never have gone on the damned thing if you hadn’t said you were going to be on it. But I couldn’t find you anywhere. You’re never where you say you’re going to be when you say you’re going to be there. It’s damned annoying. Go on, it’s your go.’

  My partner leaned back, her blonde hair whipping in the breeze, and launched her hoop, which landed square on its target.

  ‘Good shot,’ I mumbled grudgingly.

  ‘This is fun!’ cried Emily.

  ‘Your turn, Mr Flumstein. So what have you been doing for the last . . . how long is it?’

  ‘Twelve years?’

  ‘Twelve years! Christ, time flies. It’s hard to keep up with ourselves. Take as long as you need, Mr Flumstein. No hurry. So come on. What have you been doing?’

  ‘Oh, not much really,’ she sighed. ‘Mother died.’

  ‘I’m very sorry. My father too.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He liked you, you know.’

  ‘I liked him. He was a very interesting man.’

  ‘I suppose he was. I never really thought about it. That’s the way of these things. You only really fully appreciate people when they’re dead. Life clouds your judgement. Very near, Mr Flumstein! Very near indeed!’

  And so we played our quoits, and having resoundingly beaten the Flumsteins – mainly because Mrs Flumstein kept throwing her hoops overboard by accident – retired to the bar, where, more than a decade after I said I would, I finally got to drink my pink gin.

  ‘Better late than never,’ I sighed. ‘Cheers!’

  ‘Cheers!’ said Emily. ‘Isn’t this exciting?’

  We spent the rest of the day together, wandering arm in arm around the promenade dec
k, playing table tennis (Emily giving me a thorough drubbing – her serve was quite unplayable) and even eating at the captain’s table, to which Emily secured an invitation by flashing one of her most winning smiles at the ship’s purser. After dinner we danced until the early hours and then, when the band were too tired to play any more, went outside and gazed up at the starry sky.

  ‘Aren’t the stars pretty?’ sighed Emily.

  ‘They are. It’s been a wonderful night. I wish it would go on for ever.’

  She slipped her arm through mine.

  ‘What time do we dock in Liverpool?’ she asked.

  ‘Early, I think. About eight in the morning.’

  ‘And what are you going to do once you’re back in England?’

  ‘No idea, really. Go back to London, I suppose.’

  ‘Raphael, you’re absolutely hopeless. I’ve never known anyone so disorganized. You really should take charge of your life.’

  I must have looked rather crestfallen, for she squeezed my hand and kissed my cheek.

  ‘I’ll tell you what. I’m going to have packing to do in the morning, and it’s going to be an almighty crush getting off the boat, but why don’t we meet on the dock front? Then we can have breakfast together and, in the meantime, I’ll make a plan.’

  ‘Thanks, Emily,’ I said, putting my arm around her and hugging her to me. ‘I couldn’t get on without you.’

  As it turned out, however, I had to; because, as I’ve already described, we missed each other on the docks at Liverpool and Emily disappeared for another nine years. What her plan was I never discovered. Instead I found myself coerced into the world of high-street banking, where I might have had a bright future had I not taken it upon myself to kill my employer. How many bright futures have I scuppered by murdering people? Then again, how many bright futures have I opened up by doing exactly the same thing?

  I have about a foot of wall space left in this room and will fill it with an account of an extraordinary coincidence. You may remember, some six rooms back, whilst describing the ignition of Mrs Bunshop in her room at Nannybrook House, I mentioned her television set was on. Moreover, I also mentioned it was showing an old black-and-white silent film. At the time, however, I didn’t give the name of the film, even though I recognized it immediately. I shall now rectify that omission. It was called America, and was produced by one Luther J. Dextrus. My murders, it seems, call to each other across the years, like dogs barking in a wilderness.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE NOTE’S STARTING to look like a herbaceous border. What began as a dignified procession of mournful black letters now looks like something out of the Chelsea Flower Show. Luther dies in a splurge of garish oranges and pinks, the grotesqueness of his murder undermined by the prettiness of the colours in which it’s described. I feel a little guilty that his decease should unfold in such cheerful, heart-warming hues – it seems somehow disrespectful – but at this stage there’s not much I can do about it. And it doesn’t actually look that bad, in a sort of child’s drawing-book kind of way.

  It’s now about seven o’clock on Thursday morning, and I’m back out on the first-floor landing, about three quarters of the way between the bathroom door and that of the upstairs gallery. My writing is still pink, and although I’ve been up all night I’m not feeling too tired, which is lucky because I haven’t got time to sleep even if I wanted to.

  It’s been hard work writing about Luther Dextrus, and I’ve had one hell of a job trying to keep him in the bathroom. He might have been the smallest of my victims, but his story just went on and on. Things weren’t helped by the fact that I’d already used some of the bathroom’s wall space to describe the extraordinary events of yesterday, whilst much of what space was left was rendered unusable by the presence of a large iron bathtub, a sink, a lavatory, a copper immersion heater and, a most anomalous addition to the castle’s otherwise spartan utilities, a bidet.

  The upshot of all of this was that even after reducing my writing to the size of lentils and pushing it into nooks and corners that I might otherwise have ignored – i.e. right behind the loo and underneath the sink – the story still filled the entire room and, like champagne bursting from a bottle, fizzed out all over the wall of the landing. I was a little disappointed about this, particularly after fitting Mr Popplethwaite so perfectly into his room, but not overly so. I do think I’ve been getting just a touch too literal about my one murder per room scheme. So long as the bulk of the murder fits, that’s the main thing.

  I didn’t get going on Luther until past two o’clock yesterday afternoon, and have, aside from one extended cigarette break in the dome, been at the task solidly ever since. That’s 17 hours, just a few short of the number it took me to describe the albino twins down in the cellar. The note, after a brief spurt in the study, appears to be slowing down again.

  There’s no obvious practical reason for this. The bathroom walls, after all, are neither bumpy nor damp like those of the cellar, nor did I have to waste time moving bric-a-brac around as I did downstairs. I was obliged to keep my writing small, of course, and that always slows things down a bit, whilst in places, such as behind the immersion heater and down the side of the bidet, the whole thing got very fiddly. Taken as a whole, however, the bathroom offers no more challenging a literary environment than the downstairs kitchen, and yet I wrote my way around that in under 13 hours. So why the big delay?

  Two factors, mainly. The first was my back. The strange tingling sensation that I’ve been experiencing for the last few days has now intensified to the point where it’s become a serious distraction. Initially it felt like ants scurrying around beneath my skin. Then it became amplified to one of scampering rodents. Since yesterday afternoon it’s felt as though there was a little goblin in there, several little goblins in fact, all hammering on the inside of my back, as though knocking on a door demanding to be let out. If I close my eyes and concentrate I can even imagine their voices:

  ‘Hey, you! Open up! Let us out! It’s dark in here. We can’t breathe!’

  It’s not actually causing me any pain. Quite the contrary; it’s a vaguely pleasant sensation, like being given an extremely vigorous massage, save that the massaging’s being done from the inside out. It has, however, been wreaking havoc with my concentration, particularly since, rather than being a constant irritation, it comes and goes at random. One moment I’ll be writing away calm as you like, and the next Crash! Bang! Wallop! there it is again.

  It could just be a muscle spasm, or a nervous tic, or a hangover from the fall I had last Saturday. What I suspect, however, is that it’s something to do with my wings. Ironic, really. Ninety-nine years I’ve been waiting for them to unfold, and now that it feels like they’re doing just that I don’t want them to. Not if they’re going to cause me this much grief I don’t. Crash! Bang! Wallop! I wish I’d never been born with the damned things.

  That’s one reason the killing of Luther has taken so long. The other, which in a sense mirrors the disturbance in my back, has been the knocking on the front door. This has now reached epidemic proportions, to the extent that I’ve stopped even bothering trying to keep count of the number of times it’s happened. All yesterday afternoon it went on, and yesterday evening, and through the night – boom, boom, boom, the whole building trembling under the onslaught, distracting me from my work, shredding my concentration, flaying me. The force of the blows has left deep indentations in my front door, and chipped all the paint away beneath the knocker so the bare wood is now showing. If I wasn’t going to die so soon I’d contact the police about it. I feel like I’m besieged in my own home.

  I’ve tried to catch the culprit, but they’re proving frustratingly elusive. Several times now I’ve positioned myself in the downstairs foyer directly behind the front door and then thrown it open as soon as the knocking starts, but there never seems to be anyone there. On one occasion late yesterday evening I did see what looked like a small figure disappearing into the bracken, but
I’m yet to come close to laying my hands on them. If I did I’d rip them to pieces.

  There hasn’t been any knocking for a couple of hours now, but I’m still on tenterhooks. It’s too much to hope that it’s stopped for good. I’ve considered sneaking out and hiding in the bracken myself, lying in wait for my tormentor and then ambushing them as soon as they approach the front door, but I somehow don’t think it would work. They’re too sly to fall for something like that. Instead I’ve left a letter on the doorstep pleading with them to leave me alone, and included with it a crisp 20-pound note which I’ve told them they can keep if only they’ll go away and stop torturing me. So far it seems to have worked but, like I say, I’m not hopeful. I think someone’s out to destroy me.

  I need to make the most of the silence, however, even if it is only temporary, and push on with my work. Dawn’s breaking, and through the window of the gallery a grey-green stain is spreading slowly across the eastern horizon. I’ve brought the note round the landing wall and am now writing down the left-hand side of the gallery door, across whose threshold I shall soon be passing. Other than a brief glass of wine and perhaps a quick stretch on the roof, I’ve no time for a break. I’m still behind, and every minute is precious.

  I must, however, just make one final point before I move on, and that concerns doorways. Or, more precisely, the space above doorways. To date, I have been leaving this area empty, a rectangular oasis of whiteness amidst the lettering all around. The bathroom doorway, for instance, as you look at it from the landing, has a wall of writing to the left of it, and a wall of writing to the right, but nothing whatsoever directly above.

  There’s a practical reason for this. If I were to write above each doorway as well as to either side of it, then it would be by no means clear that the note actually passes through the doorway. It would seem to continue along a single plain. By leaving a space it becomes evident that the column to the doorway’s left, written before the note passes through, has nothing to do with the column to its right, written after it emerges again. Potential confusion is thus avoided.