by David Haynes
Foulkes slid his hand into the machine and carefully withdrew the disc. The silk of her gown grazed his hand and sent a thrill down his spine. He examined the artist’s work again. It was exemplary but as he gazed at it he realised there was an important addition to make.
“Will you accompany me to the bedroom, Iris?”
*
Iris’s funeral had been a lavish and beautiful affair but it had provided little comfort to him. The mutes, the carriage and the flowers had all been arranged by Daniel, and the mourners who came told him what a glorious send-off it had been. He recalled little of the day except for the leaden skies and the sound of the crows cawing from the top of the threadbare trees. He did not even remember the moment Iris was lowered into the ground. Why should he? Why should he dwell on the moments which were so wretchedly damaging?
When Daniel presented him with a golden locket several days later, he had simply stared at it.
“You must open it, father.”
Foulkes had obeyed and been horrified with what was inside.
“It is mother’s hair. Is it not glorious?”
Foulkes closed the locket and placed it inside the cabinet beside the bed. He had never opened it again.
*
He opened the cabinet and removed the locket. It must have cost poor Daniel a small fortune for the craftsmanship was as delicate as it was charming, yet what lay inside was neither. He opened it quickly before he had chance to reconsider his next step. Her hair had been lustrous and full of life but the locks before him lacked any vitality. Nevertheless, once they were back where they belonged, Iris would bring them to life.
Again he worked patiently and with great care. There was barely enough hair to adorn each of the artist’s pictures but eventually he managed it and held the disc up to his eyes. Night had fallen and he had not bothered to light a candle.
“You look wonderful,” he whispered.
He had no idea if the Zoopraxiscope would work again, but as he slid the disc back inside he realised it had become more than just a machine to him. The Zoopraxiscope had become life for both of them.
He switched it on and held his breath. The familiar hum filled the space and all at once Iris appeared on the wall. He smiled and touched the machine. “Thank you.”
She danced again and Foulkes found himself gently rocking in time with her graceful movements. He had been right about her hair, for although it was not in the fashionable style she liked to wear, it flowed beautifully from her head and was full of life. Foulkes laughed and clapped.
“I am sorry it is perhaps not to your taste my dear, but it is how I loved to see it.”
He fell back against the chair and listened to the ghostly orchestra accompany his dead wife. It was bliss.
The clock struck midnight and he could feel his head begin to sag. If he were to placate Daniel and eat breakfast with him, he would have to go to bed. Would he ever grow tired of watching Iris dance? He very much doubted it.
He unplugged the machine and fell into bed where, fully clothed, he fell asleep immediately.
*
“Iris?” he called out. “Iris? Will you dance with me again?”
She turned and smiled. Her hair hung loosely and fell across her bosom. It sent a thrill through his body.
“Will you?”
The orchestra started up as she walked toward him. Oh, how cruel this dream was. So close she appeared yet a whole life stood between them. He reached for her, knowing he would not feel her warm flesh beneath his fingers; knowing she would vanish into the ether before she reached him.
Yet closer still she came. Close enough to hear her footsteps on the wooden boards.
“Will you dance with me again?” he whispered.
Her hand fell across his and the feel of her flesh brought tears to his eyes. She was here and they were once again together in the hall of the Vienna Opera House.
She kissed his cheek and whispered softly, “I will, my husband.”
*
Daniel Foulkes looked down at his father and wept.
“He died peacefully in his sleep, Daniel. None of us could wish for a better end.”
Theobold’s words fell upon him as if it were meaningless trivia for he had heard them before, when his mother died.
“I saw him only yesterday and we were to have breakfast together.” As he spoke, he knew his words were as meaningless as the doctor’s. He crouched and kissed his father’s cold forehead.
“You are together again,” he whispered and left the room.
Although he could bear to look upon his father no longer, he could not stand to leave the house just yet. There were simply too many memories to close the door on. The parties, the celebrations and the arguments floated around the parlour like ghosts. The room was not as it had been then, of course. Now it was dominated by his father’s creation. He had spent so much time working on it but how much time had he spent enjoying it? Daniel would never know.
He turned it on absently and through his tear-blurred vision watched his mother float in her usual grace across the wall. She looked so life-like and as beautiful as ever. Her crimson gown floated behind her like a sail and her chestnut hair fell about her shoulders in lustrous waves.
“I never knew you could dance, father.”
Beside her on the wall, he moved in perfect harmony with Daniel’s mother. Their bodies were entwined like the young lovers they were. Daniel watched them for a moment and smiled. They looked so happy together. They had always looked so happy together.
The End
The Speaking Tube
“You are not long for this world and when death arrives it will not be the angels who carry you to the next place, but Lucifer himself!” John Barker growled.
He waited for the scream and replaced the brass cone. He had detested the speaking tube when his father first installed it, yet now he marvelled at how much entertainment it could deliver, especially for a mind such as his.
He raced up the stairs and pushed open his father’s bedroom door. “What is it, father? I heard a scream and I came as fast as I could.”
Robert Barker lay bed-ridden and bloated in the gloomy room. “My son, I have spoken to the spirits again and... and they...” He trailed off.
“The spirits, father?”
His father snapped his head around quickly. “Yes the spirits, you fool.” He reached for the end of the speaking tube. “Through this! I do not know the name of this devilish instrument but its sole purpose appears to be to taunt me.”
John stepped closer and inhaled the unclean odour surrounding his father. He took the speaking tube and put it to his ear. “I can hear nothing.”
“Of course you can’t, you must wait for the whistle to alert you.”
“Do you not remember why you installed it?”
“I did not install it, boy. I believe Lucifer is at work here. You must remove it at once.” He snatched it away from John and tried to hurl it out of the room. It fell to the floor beside the bed as the tube reached its limit.
“Well, what did they say to you?”
The two men eyed each other for a moment before the older man looked away. “Never mind. Have you brought me my tea?”
“No, I came as soon as I heard your...”
His father waved his hand dismissively. “Then you better get back to the kitchen and prepare it.”
“Yes, father.” John looked down on the man who had grown from portly to obese in the passing of a month. The blankets formed a dome over his substantial belly and swelled up then down with the passing of each grunting breath. He hated him. No, that was not quite correct, he despised him.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
He said nothing and hooked the tube back into its cradle. His father’s brain had started betraying him several years ago and although it had never been mentioned at the time, it was evident he was suffering from what some of the more progressive doctors called dementia. Now, of course, it did not need ment
ioning for it was obvious for all to see. Not that anyone came to visit the mean old rogue for he had no friends, but John could see the deterioration happening almost daily. He skipped down the stairs and smiled. The breakdown in his father’s brain only made his own plans more enjoyable.
He prepared the sandwiches and put them on a plate. He disliked catering to his father’s every whim but had he not spent most of his waking hours in the kitchen, the idea of tormenting the man would never have materialised. He looked across at the speaking tube. It snaked from the kitchen into the room above, his father’s room, where it delivered the messages. At first they had been simple exchanges and, on his father’s part, demands, but on one occasion his father had grown confused and believed he was speaking to his own father.
“Is that you, father?” he had asked.
John kept silent for he had no idea how to reply.
“Father, speak to me please.”
And so John thinly disguised his voice and answered. “I am here, Robert.”
“I am so sorry. You must be dreadfully disappointed with me. I have achieved nothing.” He could hear the supplication in his father’s voice.
“I am,” he replied.
Then came a dreadful wailing down the tube and for a moment he felt a terrible stab of guilt. He opened his mouth to speak; to console his father and to make him understand. But the feeling of guilt was quickly supplanted by a sensation of joy and pleasure. He remained silent until the wailing had ended.
“You have disappointed me and you have disappointed your mother.” He had never met either of his grandparents but it seemed appropriate to add the grandmother to the occasion.
A fresh bout of sobbing had erupted and continued for some time until they grew faint and eventually stopped altogether. Oh, what a wonderful invention this was!
John sprinkled some arsenic onto the ham sandwich and started back up the stairs. He intended to kill the man either by heart failure or poison but one way or another he would be dead soon, of that he was sure. He pushed the sandwich onto the bed beside the glutton and turned away.
“And where is my wine?”
John turned and opened his mouth to speak but was cut short.
“Be careful, son. My mind may be failing but my strength is not. I could leap out of this bed and knock you down as easily as I always did.”
John closed his mouth. Bed-ridden or not, the man remained formidable. He turned and walked away. He should have doubled the dose of poison and be done with it once and for all, yet deep down he enjoyed the drawn-out affair this death had become. How would he feel when it was all over? Would there be sadness and grief? Or would there be a great and overwhelming sense of relief? It was difficult to say but one thing was set in stone and that was the wealth he would inherit. No longer would he merely survive in this dreary hovel. No, he would sell it immediately and purchase a house in one of the more fashionable districts. He would go to the finest tailors and buy an elegant suit. Then he would seduce the prettiest girls and ruin them for every other man. He almost skipped back down the stairs with these thoughts in his mind.
He would play no more of the speaking tube voices tonight for it was clear his father was feeling as compos mentis as he was mean spirited. Besides it worked best in the early morning when the man was just waking up and his mind had not yet shaken off whatever fiendish nightmares had been stalking his slumber.
After delivering the wine, John sat in the kitchen and read the newspaper by candlelight. It was full of scandal and intrigue and very little real news, but he was not interested in the affairs of the day. He scanned the paper each evening for news of a ghastly murder or an explicit description of a bloated corpse found floating in the River Thames. Every day there seemed to be an article about a husband slaying his wife or a prostitute being found with her throat slit open. It was as horrific as it was fascinating. He was sure he could write the pieces in more lurid detail than the journalists did, after all that was what the people wanted.
He followed the story of Mary Ann Cotton of Durham with interest. She murdered four husbands by poisoning them with arsenic and would undoubtedly have murdered more had she not been caught. When she was sentenced, she was a very wealthy woman. In truth the inspiration for poisoning his father came from Mary, albeit on a much slower scale. He was simply having too much fun with the speaking tube to rush matters. The poison was more of an insurance policy in case the old boy managed to resist the voices.
He picked up the tube and blew the whistle. The sound echoed faintly in the room above.
“Who is it?” his father’s voice asked.
He always asked that question these days and it made John smile. “Me, of course. Who else should it be?”
“What do you want?” he replied curtly.
“I shall be retiring shortly so I shall come and stoke the fire. Is there anything else you require?”
“Nothing.”
John heard the cone land back in its cradle. “Goodnight, father.”
The house possessed two bedrooms. The one which his mother and father had shared when she was still alive and a much smaller second. The smaller one belonged to John. A single bed, the same one he had slept in as a child, was pushed up against the cold wall. The grey woollen blankets were stretched tightly across the bed and in a perfectly straight line He had made the bed the same way since being punished by the housemaster at boarding school for disregarding the bed-making instructions. It was a habit he now found impossible to break.
John dressed himself in his pyjamas and climbed under the cold blankets. Unlike his father’s room, his room did not possess a fire and remained cold all year round. He shivered against the cold sheet covering the mattress. If he woke in the night, and the mood took him, he might creep downstairs to the kitchen and call his father. He had not managed it thus far but it was something he intended to do. It would frighten the old bugger to death. John closed his eyes and fell quickly asleep.
He woke with a start and sat up immediately. For a moment he could not place the source of the noise. Has it been a dream or had it been a reality and inside the house? He sat motionless and waited for a repeat. The newspapers told stories of people awaking in the night to find thieves rifling through their belongings. Was this what was happening? He could scarcely breathe for fear they might hear him and assault him, or worse. He shivered against the cold. His curtains were threadbare but beyond them, the world remained cast in darkness. What time was it? He could hardly light a candle to see his pocket watch for that would surely alert the thieves to his presence.
Perhaps they would enter his father’s room instead? He shuffled his feet off the bed. No-one was rifling through that room, at least not before he had chance to locate the bundle of bank notes his father surely kept hidden in there. That was his inheritance and his alone.
He sat still. There it was again, the sound of laughter. He edged off the bed and walked slowly to the door. It was only a matter of three steps but each one sounded as if it was being made by a herd of cattle. He winced as his bare feet touched the cold floorboards. A rug was another luxury to which he was not entitled. It had been a long time since the house had heard the sound of laughter but this was not the sound of happy amusement. It had a thin and almost strained sound.
He touched the door handle and felt the cold brass send a shock through his skin. When he had a house of his own, he would have a fire in every room and he would employ a servant to keep them alight all night long. The door creaked open but it was no less light on the landing. He peered around the door and the bass drumbeat of his heart echoed through his skull.
He waited a moment before stepping across the threshold. The laughter had stopped and the house was silent again. He had obviously had a nightmare and had not quite shaken its dark and ragged threads from his mind. Through the gloom he could see his father’s bedroom door; it remained closed. There was no point in going any further with this nonsense, there were no...
He looke
d down the stairs. Now he was awake there was nothing to stop him from making a little night call to his father. He smiled in the darkness and forgot about the cold wooden stairs beneath his feet.
The kitchen was dark but he knew his way to the speaking tube without breaking stride. He picked it up immediately and blew the whistle. He heard it echo in the bedroom above and blew it again and again. He had not had chance to rehearse anything but that scarcely mattered for once he heard the panic in his father’s voice that would inspire him.
“Hello?” a shaky voice drifted along the tube.
