The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

by Brian Stableford

  Sevanter looked down at the portrait that he held in his hand. “I remember that you liked her,” he said, quietly.

  “Liked her!” said Funeste, stifling a cry of pain and showing for the first time the torment that he must have kept hidden for many long years. “I loved her, with all my heart—and she loved me! But you were a magistrate and I was your clerk. There was little gold in your family coffers, but you were a man of importance, especially in town like Teirbrun. There was not a shred of silver in my purse, and I could never be anything more in Teirbrun than your faithful shadow. She loved me, but she would not marry for love. Her father would never have permitted it, of course, but that question never arose. Had it only been a matter of his prohibition, I could have reconciled myself to the inevitability—but it was not. She would not even entertain the thought. She would rather have a man without a heart, whose fine clothes and full pockets made up for the emptiness that was inside him. If you had loved her as I loved her, I would have thought you blameless, and would gladly have forgiven her, but you did not. You never saw beyond the matter of mere business that you completed with her father. I could not forgive you what you are, and what you made of her.”

  “But men of my sort cannot marry for love!” said the Great Judge, with the air of one stating the obvious. “Love is a last resort when it comes to reasons for marriage. It is reason that sets human beings above the beasts, and we must live by that reason and not as slaves to silly passion. The poor sometimes marry for love, because they cannot marry for gain, but they would not do it if they had the choice.”

  “Your daughter married for love,” Jean Funeste pointed out.

  “And suffered the consequences,” Monsieur Sevanter retorted. “My father was displeased with me, as you know, for marrying Blanche—he considered her station too far beneath me—but you argued very cogently on my behalf, as I recall, regarding the economic wisdom of the alliance.”

  “I did,” Jean Funeste agreed. “And every word was true, as regards the economic wisdom of the alliance. Had your father once raised the objection, though, that you did not love her, or that she did not love you, I would have confessed myself beaten and admitted that he was correct in his opposition. He did not. His arguments were as blind to the reality of human emotion and human worth as yours.”

  “You’re a fool, Jean,” said the magistrate, sadly. “I always suspected you of reading poetry when we should have been studying our law books.”

  “I had time to do that,” Jean Funeste told him, “because I was more intelligent than you, and more efficient in my studies.”

  “Hardly more efficient,” Monsieur Sevanter retorted, “since you wasted the time you gained with such trash. You’d have done better to study religious tracts, or mathematics—or astrology, since you obviously could not tolerate too much truth.”

  “I am more tolerant of the truth than you imagine,” Jean Funeste replied, “although I have certainly taken care in spinning a complex web of deception these last few weeks. I was afraid, at first, that you might correlate the Phantom’s crimes with my absence from your presence, but you never even noticed my absences, any more than you ever really noticed my presence. I was never anything more than an item of the furniture of your life, which you never really noticed—just as she was.”

  Monsieur Sevanter looked at the portrait again. “Why did you steal her gifts to my children?” he asked.

  “Because they should have been gifts to my children. It should have been my children that she bore, and not yours. You have no right to these things I have taken—you have no right to your own family, though I know you would not care a jot if they were taken away, and so I have not sought to hurt them, or your father either. I loved her. All her love-tokens are rightly mine, and all the things that she loved herself.”

  “Oh Jean,” said the magistrate, with a sigh, “you are a great fool. I truly was your friend, and you ought to have tried harder to be mine. Instead, you have become a famous robber and a faithless betrayer. How shall we ever find a punishment to fit such crimes?”

  “We are not here to pass judgment on me,” said Jean Funeste. “I have been occupied in passing sentence on you. In the eyes of the people of Teirbrun you, not I, are the famous robber. My denunciation was carried to every covert and corner of the town, and because it came from your trusted friend, it was believed! Most of the imperishable valuables that I stolen from the houses of my victims have already been unearthed in your father’s garden—which is, to be strictly accurate, my father’s garden, although no one in Teirbrun will think about that. Your confession, dictated to me in your final hour of life, and signed by your own hand, will also be offered in evidence—I have it in my pocket now, with your name already forged. All of this will be believed, even if you deny it until you are blue in the face, for the mayor and the Town Council—following the sage advice of Furalor and Odo—are already intent on committing you to the lunatic asylum in Is. You are perfectly free to tell the truth, but no one will ever believe you, because my lies have already taken root, and are invulnerable.”

  “They would not be invulnerable if you were dead,” said Monsieur Sevanter. “You are wearing the Phantom’s costume, and doubtless carrying the Phantom’s dagger. By the time that you were found, with a bullet in your chest, the only signed confession in your pocket would be your own. I can write, you know, even though I have spent a lifetime allowing you to do it for me.”

  “Alas,” said Jean Funeste, in a sympathetic tone, “I believe that you are wrong. I have done my work better than you can imagine. Even if I were found dead, wearing the Phantom’s cloak, with a forged confession in its inner pocket, the mayor and Paul Mansard would still be inclined to suspect you, and would surely send you to the asylum in order to be on the safe side. Your only hope of avoiding that fate is to throw yourself on my mercy—for I have promised both of them that I can restore you to your old self, if I am given a free hand. The punishment must fit the crime, you see—I hope that you might condescend to accept my kindness as well as my revenge. I have foreseen every possible eventuality, you see.”

  “Not quite,” said Monsieur Sevanter. “I have not the slightest intention of obliging you by endorsing your lie. Even if shooting you dead did not give me an opportunity to save myself and my reputation—as it surely will—I would certainly derive a good deal of satisfaction from it.” And so saying, he fired his weapon, utterly determined this time that the smoke and the recoil would not affect his aim.

  The pistol blew up in his hand. The force of the explosion sent fragments of twisted metal into his eyes, cheeks and forehead. More than one tiny sliver penetrated to a deeper level, killing him on the instant.

  Jean Funeste had raised his arms to shield himself from the explosion, but he quickly lowered them again.

  “Every possible eventuality,” he repeated, already beginning to shed the outermost layer of his clothing with swift efficiency. “You should have remembered that it was I who gave you the pistol, adjusted its firing mechanism, and loaded it. You have no idea how many guns I had to steal before I found two identical pieces of which I could be perfectly certain—and to find them in a pork-butcher’s, of all places! But I have no time to waste, for the servants will be hammering on the door very shortly.” He had another set of clothes on beneath the phantom’s cloak, which he moved under the bed with the toe of his shoe. He fell silent as soon as the hammering on the door began, thinking it best not to speak his thoughts aloud from then on.

  The clerk unlocked the door, and threw up his hands in feigned despair. “Alas,” he cried, in a broken voice “the poor man was so deluded and deranged that he thought his phantom had come back to haunt him again. But look! It is only a portrait of his dear late wife.” So saying, he picked up the little picture, bloodstained now, which had fallen on the floor.

  When the servants had all looked at it, and nodded their heads in wise appreciation of its significance, in the context of an incurable madness, Jean Fune
ste put it in his own pocket, and took it away with him.

  VIII.

  Monsieur Sevanter’s clerk was entirely correct in his estimation that the people of Teirbrun would believe everything he told them, and he now had very abundant apparent proofs with which to dispel any residual doubt that any one of them might have harbored He pretended to be so stricken by grief that he never served again as a clerk to the court of Teirbrun, but retired to live in solitude in the depths of the forest of Leonais, alone with his memories and his secrets.

  Alphonse Sevanter, who was famous while he lived as the Great Judge, became more famous still after his death, albeit rather briefly, as the Phantom Who Haunted Himself. It was said of him by many of his former acquaintances that he had reserved the most fiendish of all his ingenious punishments for himself.

  Whether Jean Funeste was damned to Hell for the sins he had committed in devising, as he saw it, a penalty uniquely fitted to his enemy’s trespasses, no one can possibly know. All that is certain is that he died only a few years after, but that, immediately before he died, he made a full confession of the whole affair—not to any priestly confessor but to a wandering story-teller like myself, whom he first forced to swear that the tale should never, under any circumstances, be told within the walls of Teirbrun.

  The inevitable result of that injunction, of course, was that everyone within those walls had heard the whole of it within a fortnight—and the most wretched members of the poorest classes were, for once, united with the most pretentious members of the highest in thinking it the finest tale to which their ancient town had ever given birth.

  CUSTER’S LAST STAND

  Custer rolled out of bed feeling like one of Dada’s furry teacups. He blinked, and directed a hostile glare at the thin stream of sunlight that crept through the crack between the curtains.

  Perhaps they’ve gone, he thought, breaking last night’s firm resolution within seconds of opening his eyes. He had resolved that he wouldn’t even think about them until he was dressed and suitably fortified by a Weetabix with marmalade and a strong cup of coffee. As things turned out, though, he staggered into the bathroom thinking about them every step of the way.

  Why me? he appealed to the mirror. What have I done to deserve this kind of treatment.

  He left the curtains closed while he ate breakfast. It was getting to the point that he was afraid to touch a curtain. The ones in the bedroom stayed closed permanently. He made the coffee last, not too proud to seize any legitimate excuse to delay going to the window and confronting the morning. The coffee helped build up his courage, largely because of the healthy slug of Irish whiskey he used instead of milk. It was early in the day, by his standards: hardly half past eleven.

  When the last dregs of the coffee were gone, the comfortable uncertainty had to end. He had to find out. He strode to the window and hurled back the curtains with a single convulsive jerk. A mighty flourish, as he might himself have described it.

  They were still there.

  There were eight this morning, all but one armed with placards. They were not marching—not even bothering to obstruct the pavement. There was no point. Since the demonstration had begun nobody had attempted to use that particular stretch of pavement. Everyone crossed the road to avoid them. Four of them were sitting on the garden wall with their backs to Custer. One leaned against the gatepost, staring moodily at the road. Two were propped up by his car, which was parked in the drive with its hind end projecting beyond the gateposts. The eighth one—the ringleader—was walking slowly up and down between the invisible boundary lines that could have been constructed by imaginatively extending the twin garden hedges.

  When Custer drew back the curtains and stood looking at them, with mixed fear and fury, they turned round one by one to stare at him. They twirled the handles of the placards so that each legend was facing him. As he read them—one or two for the first time, because some had been renewed overnight—all the anger and frustration bubbled up inside him. He licked his lips.

  Little Dorothy Gretton, who had been savagely raped in Subscription to Sin, carried a placard that read CLEAN UP CUSTER—mild and trite, like the character herself. She was looking pale and harassed, and Custer remembered that, after carefully engineering and orchestrating her rape, he had described a “shadow in her eyes that haunted her face for the rest of her days.” The thought of the word “haunted” made him wince.

  Strangely enough, the man sitting next to little Dorothy on the wall was Valentine Wrinch, who had perpetrated the evil deed. He still had some nasty scars on his face, which had been inflicted when, in the course of the climactic chase scene, he had run full tilt into a barbed wire fence. Custer seemed to remember that he had deftly plucked out one of Wrinch’s eyes with that fence, but the stare that transfixed him now was definitely two-eyed. The cursed ghosts couldn’t even be consistent. Wrinch’s placard read: CUSTER’S CRUELTY INTOLERABLE.

  Hector Nettleship, who had turned out after 147 suspense-filled pages to be The Groping Ghoul (and had spent the next twenty pages relating in grotesque detail to Fay Hartshorn the experiences in nursery school that were responsible for his taking the wrong path in life) carried the message: CUSTER’S BOOKS ARE FILTH.

  Rita Costello from the classic Kiss of Corruption—which was still his all-time best-seller—had WE DEMAND FAIR PLAY. Moira Thilly, the lovesick moron who had been one of his authentic masterpieces of negative characterization in Fury in the Fog, had a suitably simple-minded scrawl, which simply said: CUSTER UNFAIR TO CHARACTERS.

  Lucia Cartwright, arguably the prettiest and most likeable character he had ever created—for his adolescent, rather over-sentimental drama Harlot’s Hearse—was the showpiece of the group. Harlot’s Hearse had been his first book and had been a dismal failure until later books, achieving best-seller status, had led to its reprinting. Lucia had suffered with a kind of dignity that Custer would not have permitted in his more mature work. She had no stab-wounds, acid-burns or even dark shadows in her eyes to mar her glossy perfection. Her banner said IMAGINARY PEOPLE HAVE FEELINGS TOO.

  The last placard, carried by Josh Black—the strong-arm man who had proved so fearsomely successful in Beauty and the Brute—read: WE DEMAND A REWRITE.

  The man who carried no message for Custer and the world was the only one who wore a smile as he looked his creator in the eye. He had no right to do that, because, in all the 252 pages of Accursed Humanity!—Custer’s attempt to write a commentary on the human condition that would stand alongside the greatest literary works of all time—Jonathan Shaw had never smiled once.

  Custer gave Shaw the filthiest look imaginable—one that would have defied even his powers of description—and turned on his heel.

  I’ll get you for this, Shaw, he subvocalised. Just wait until I write the bloody sequel!

  * * * * * * *

  The ghosts were fairly real—which is to say, they were more real than they would have been if Custer alone could see them, but less real than they would have been if people could touch them as well. They were, in technical language, visible but not tangible. This had become comically apparent when a policeman, in response to Custer’s complaint that there was a gang of cut-throats loitering with intent outside his house, had tried to move them on. The long arm of the law had gone straight through the demonstrators. Even the placards were only visual images.

  Unfortunately for Custer, the ghosts could be heard as well as seen. They held press conferences. Within a matter of hours after the picketing had first started the whole world was informed of his predicament. The papers had at first refused to print anything substantial, because it sounded so ridiculous, but after Jonathan Shaw appeared on Nationwide, and a famous skeptic was called upon to pass his hands through Shaw’s body in front of several million viewers, they relented in no uncertain terms. Gigantic headlines had announced the news: BEST-SELLER’S CHARACTERS OUT ON STRIKE. A group of building workers occupying a site in Cricklewood in protest against the fact that s
everal of them had accidentally been issued Wellingtons with two left feet had gone back to work. They felt that they couldn’t realistically compete for the sympathy of the public—and they were right.

  For a week after the strike began, sightseers flocked to watch the various demonstrations. They gathered outside Custer’s house for the big show, but soon discovered that there were pickets outside the offices of his publisher and his agent and the home of the only man who had ever given him a good review. There were also pickets outside every branch of W. H. Smith’s up and down the country, and by the busiest railway stations as well. Being intangible, they couldn’t actually stop people buying Custer’s books, but they could certainly make such transactions damnably embarrassing. The first major victory won by the pickets was that of persuading various bookshop managers to take Custer’s manifold works off display, so that they became available only on request.

  Custer had thought, optimistically, that the blaze of publicity would result in unprecedented sales, and for a while it did, but as the strike dragged on, popular interest in the ghosts overtook interest in the books from whose pages they had come. Endless sympathetic interviews with the characters, and a multitude of harrowing pictures showing how Custer had cruelly mutilated them in the course of the violent climaxes for which he was so celebrated, gradually turned public opinion against Custer. By the time the strike was a month old some of his most devoted fans would not have been seen dead with one of his books in their hands.

  One old lady in Heckmondwyke, a small town in Yorkshire, publicly burned her extensive collection of first editions, including an autographed copy of Blood and Guts. Second-hand dealers suddenly found Custer to be a drug on the market, and Oxfam shops refused to accept copies as gifts. The worst aspect of the tragedy was, however, purely personal. Since the strike began, Custer had found himself unable to write a single line of the florid prose that had made him famous. The characters didn’t even wait until he began putting them on paper. They just got right up out of his head and walked out to join the strikers, at which point the pickets on duty outside the house would cheer madly.