by Rhys Hughes
The mysterious drone has grown louder. He switches off the harmonium, which gives a frustrated grunt, and steps out of the shelter. The drone has resolved itself into a little boat with an outboard motor.
Muttering, his hands clasped behind his back, he watches as the sprightly craft skims the wavelets. A single powerful searchlight sweeps the water as the boat approaches. Bats flit, like inappropriate metaphors, around the wake of the vessel. The light strikes the sloping side of the roof, hovers unsteadily and then slides upwards to the top, capturing him in a blinding halo.
‘Visitors!’ Angrily, he waves his swordstick, grasps the scabbard in one hand and unsheathes it, thrusting the blade through the intrusive beam. ‘Have you come to mock? Will you not leave me alone?’
‘Ho there!’ The boat pulls alongside an attic skylight and the engine dies. The light fades to an after-image. A slim, tall figure stands up and gazes at him, hands on hips.
‘If you come to mock, then depart!’ The surge caused by the boat enters the attic through the open skylight and a huge spray of green foam explodes from a chimney. He whirls away and glides back to his harmonium. Bach’s Toccata and fugue in D Minor is almost de rigueur at this point, but he finds that he has no will left. His fingers refuse to uncurl.
Halfway there, he pauses and turns back. The stranger has moored his boat to a suitable embellishment and is standing on the roof. ‘Why have you come to the opera house? Why do you wish to disturb my peace?’
The figure moves forward. He seems very gentle. His smile is a golden thing, full of honesty and compassion. ‘You have been here a long time, alone.’
‘I am, as you are doubtless aware, not suited for public life.’ He taps the mask strapped to his face. ‘They called me the Phantom, they mocked my misery, they turned my grief into a story.’ Here he shudders and a single tear springs from the eyehole of his mask, hanging on the shiny steel like a dewdrop. ‘They even made my life into a musical! Can you believe it? Hideous, hideous!’
‘I meant, on the roof? You have been a long time on the roof?’
‘Nearly a year.’ The Phantom inclines his great head and sighs melodiously. ‘One evening, I felt an urge to see the stars. I climbed up from my secret chamber in the basement and came out onto the slates. It was warm and I fell asleep in the open. Unprecedented! When I awoke, the next morning, the sea was lapping the slates and all Paris was under water. With obvious exceptions!’ He indicates, with a flourish, the phallus of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. ‘Only the thrusting remains. . . .’
‘Yes. The poles melted, you see. Well actually, they just fell apart. A scientist, by accident, happened to discover that ice is fundamentally impossible. Our ignorance alone was keeping it real. The deluge had been expected for some time, but no-one guessed it would happen so quickly. The major cities of the world have all disappeared; the majority of the population of the planet all drowned. Overnight.’
‘But why are you here?’ A terrible thought strikes the Phantom. ‘You are not from Social Services, are you?’
‘I have come to recruit you to my scheme.’
The Phantom laughs a shrill, bitter laugh. ‘You do mock me! You could not possibly be interested in me. I am ugly, malformed, a devil! I am the Phantom of the Opera!’
‘Yes, I know. Tell me about your life, and I will tell you about mine.’
The Phantom frowns beneath his mask. He scratches his false nose, and resheathes his blade. ‘I know what it means to be despised and feared. I know what it means to be cheated of everything that is worthwhile. I know what it means to have not a single friend in a bustling city, to eke out the existence of a worm or woodlouse in the forgotten chambers of a damp old building. I know.’
The stranger grins and reaches out a hand. ‘I understand, for I too was despised and feared. I too have been cheated. I too know what it means to have not a single friend. But I eked out the existence of a worm or woodlouse not in a basement but in a belfry. Once, you see, I was even more ugly than you. . . .’
‘More ugly?’ The Phantom is aghast. But then his lips curl in a cynical leer beneath his mask and he shakes his head. ‘No, you lie.’
The stranger becomes desperate. ‘Let me explain! I too fell asleep, next to my beloved bells, and awoke to find the city flooded. For many days I too stared out across the water, afraid, until an empty boat happened to drift past and lodge itself against my tower. It was in good condition and the fuel tank was full. It is the same boat that you see down there. Well, I wandered over the submerged ruins of Europe for many months until I chanced to arrive in Prague.’
‘So?’
‘In Prague, in Hradcany, in the Mihulka tower, I met one not unlike us. You have heard tell of John Dee? He was a fine magus patronised by Emperor Rudolph II. He was commissioned to turn base metals into gold, the old alchemist’s quest. He failed, and the Emperor imprisoned him in the tower. But alchemy is not about gold, it is about the evolution of the spirit. Dee discovered the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher’s Stone. His first act was to make himself immortal. He has been there ever since. I was his first visitor. His second act was to turn me from a misshapen grub into the butterfly you now see. And he can do the same for you!’
The Phantom scratches his chin. ‘I do not understand.’ He attempts to blow his nose with a flamboyant gesture and a silk handkerchief. ‘I have suffered so many disappointments, so many. . . .’
‘No longer. It is not the meek who shall inherit the Earth, but the dispossessed monsters of the imagination, called forth to amuse a fickle public and then discarded. The modulus that will change our negative aspects to positive ones, our defects to virtues, awaits us! It is a fine irony, is it not? The only ones to survive the flood are those who live in high places, who have been shut away in towers or attics. All over the world, and for all time, writers have placed their most gruesome creations above the rest of the populace. Do you know who else I found in Prague?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘None other than the Golem. He had lain, in little pieces, in the loft of the Old-New Synagogue, ever since Rabbi Löw removed the mystic shem from his mouth. I took the fragments back to Dr Dee and he fitted them together. The Golem is no longer a shambling clay hulk. He is now a fine figure of a man.’
‘Cara semplicità, quanto mi piaci!’
‘Indeed. Dr Dee and I have formulated a plan. We will seek out all those like us; all the demons and ghouls who have escaped drowning by virtue of elevation. And we will band together. A new age shall begin on Earth! Yes, we shall band together! Count Dracula, high on the battlements of his Carpathian castle; Elizabeth Báthori, the Blood Countess, safe in her walled-up room in Cachtice Manor; Maldoror clinging to his golden tower like a leech. The list is endless. Dr Dee shall transform us into gods. We shall rule over the few remaining humans, just as they ruled over us in their fictions.’
With a sudden, impulsive laugh, the Phantom tears the mask away from his warped face. The tempered steel clatters across the slates. ‘I will come with you! But first, tell me who you are!’
The stranger peers into the appalling visage of his host, but he does not waver. His smile is as accepting as ever. ‘You do not recognise me? Ha, of course not! Yet you met me once. My name is Quasimodo!’
‘Quasimodo? Incredible!’
‘Oh yes, I was grotesque, especially in a tutu!’ The stranger smiles wistfully, as if recalling the wilder days of youth. ‘But I have been transformed, transmogrified, transmuted. I have risen, a phoenix, from the ashes of my past. My body is utterly perfect. I am radiant. I glow with an inner peace and a nimbus envelops my smooth limbs. My eyes are as pure as gems, my hair smells of elderberries. . . .’
‘I am convinced. Let us delay no longer!’
Quasimodo extends his hand again. This time, the Phantom takes it. He begins to hum a piece from Berlioz. But then, he turns towards his shelter.
‘Before we go, may I take my possessions with me?’
‘On
e only. My boat is small.’
Together, they move across the roof and enter the doorway of the crude shack, constructed entirely from driftwood. The Phantom looks down at his meagre belongings, at the faded photograph of his unrequited love, at his selection of opera-cloaks and walking-sticks. His good eye falls on the harmonium.
‘Does it have its own generator?’ Quasimodo is doubtful.
‘It is powered by clockwork. It is all I could rescue from the flooded orchestra-pit. I dived down with ropes and hauled it to the surface. A dangerous, foolhardy endeavour. But it was a risk I had to take. I cannot live without music.’
With only a little effort, they manhandle it onto the boat. As they sail away, the Phantom plays Tosca and Lucia di Lammermoor, but then, changes key and pounds out an ironic, ragtime version of Lloyd Webber’s travesty. ‘The Phantom of the Opera is here!’ he wails, and laughs.
‘Onwards!’ Quasimodo also laughs. ‘A new world awaits us! A world free of our oppressors, free of readers and writers, ruled only by the former monsters of high places!’
The Phantom stops playing. ‘But I am not a dweller of a high place! I usually live in the basement of the opera house. It was purely by chance that I was on the roof that night. How did you know I was here? How did you know I was still alive?’
Quasimodo continues to chuckle. He stretches his new body under the stars. The astral light is reflected in his beautiful eyes. He nods to himself.
‘I had a hunch.’
The Good News Grimoire
There are no true Satanists. This was the shocking conclusion at which I arrived as I left the Café Worm at midnight. But I glanced over my shoulder just to be sure. Down the Rubellastrasse I groped and held up my hands to part the fogs that seemed to obstruct my progress. My fingers were yellow, a consequence of growing old, perhaps. I said to myself: ‘Harker, this is a rum business for a tailor to be in. Best get out while you can, old fellow, and set a mind to your own affairs.’
I am not a paranormal investigator by choice, nor yet (despite vicious rumours to the contrary) a solicitor or estate agent. I am by day a simple and honest cloth-merchant. I live in rooms, eat mutton broth on Mondays, Gobi Aloo until Friday and grits with sour cider over the weekend. Along with a plush coat, sackcloth breeches, slippers of the same and a rangy greyhound, three-quarters of my entire tailoring revenue is thus consumed.
It was Carnacki who got me into this foul nonsense. Not, I hasten to add, the famous ghost-finder, but that other Carnacki, Alfred. I cursed him long and mightily as I reached the end of Rubellastrasse and continued through lanes as threadbare as a miser’s shroud. Winter had descended like a landlord, hail thumping on the town like a knuckle-rap, lightning cracking the air like a demand for arrears. Oh for time to return to my sartorial researches! I had almost perfected a technique for dyeing nightcaps with blackberries.
I took a short cut through the graveyard. Such places remain the safest retreats after dark. Were any ghosts, devils or banditti to espy my passing, they would mistake me for one of their own. ‘What normal person would roam a graveyard at this hour?’ they would ask themselves. In this manner, I reasoned, I would pass through their midst unharmed. Yet my mind was troubled as I skirted the mortuary church: owls took flight from its eyeless windows, tawny as new coffins. In the dense fog they collided with each other and, spinning in rigid circles, fell at my feet. I pulled free a shoelace and soon had a tasty brace for the pot.
In the oversized pocket of my greatcoat, a musty tome weighed me down. This I had obtained at the Café Worm from an unemployed magus, a stunted fellow desperate for money. More of this later; in the meantime, suffice it to say the book was inordinately heavy. I gasped and wheezed as I plodded onwards. The gentle undulations of the graveyard were bad enough; when I reached the far side and confronted the steep hill that led up to my own house, I knew I would have to shed some ballast to gain the summit. Delving into my other pocket, I reluctantly discarded my calling-cards, several thousand of them at once. They did not flap like albino crows, nor glide like squares of unbuttered cloud. They merely sank in the fog like tiny marble tombstones in a smoky pool, my identity drowned yet again: HARKER MELMOTH, PARAPSYCHOLOGIST & TAILOR.
At last, halfway up the dreaded slope, the stunned owls on the lace woke and began to flap together. So I was assisted the remainder of the distance; in gratitude I let them go and went hungry. Yet there were victuals aplenty for my febrile imagination. I crept into the house (more Woodworker’s Gothic than Carpenter’s) and up the creaking stairs to my own floor. I had a suite of chambers here, all very dusty, very nice, full of glass globes, rusty suits of armour and skeletons, the whole arranged with the niceties of the philosophy of furniture always in mind. More importantly, in the innermost room of the set, I kept my collection of ancient sewing machines, thimbles and yards of black cloth (one for a girl; two for a boy; nine for a winding-sheet) not to mention my operating-table and umbrella, ready for a chance meeting.
Here, I cast off my coat (with much of the relief of a headless nun kicking the habit) and sank into an easy chair. I was frightfully cold as well as weary; I rubbed my hands before the grate, though as no fire was lit it availed me little. I checked my drinks-cabinet to confirm it was truly empty and fell to pondering the bizarre events of the previous fortnight. At the same time, I removed the miniature portrait of Mina from the mantelpiece and lovingly caressed the delicate curve of her chin, the Pre-Raphaelite tresses of her luxuriant hair.
The spooky side of my business, the investigating of things that are perhaps not wise to pursue, becomes necessary only when there is no work for my needle and thread. In the caramel summer, I am usually busy mending green shirts, sewing buttons onto interesting pyjamas and mixing long-forgotten dyes, chiefly Chermisi, once used to stain the robes of Cardinals. I have no truck with the supernatural. It is only when the leaves start turning russet and the wind chatters gates like the jaws of a dreaming cat, that I am compelled to relax my grip on the flywheels of the sewing-machines, remove the pins from my sallow lips and venture out into the cosmic horror of it all. Mon Dieu! (Born in Alsace, I speak my language with a Germanic accent. Mina is Uruguayan.)
By winter, all the work has dried up. I know not why there are no green shirts to mend when the snows lie thick upon the ground; I cannot guess why interesting pyjamas lose no buttons when the water freezes in my pipes and the taps shudder but do not disgorge. And why no Cardinals to be coloured after All Hallows? Whatever the reason, the fact of it is unarguable. And thus I must earn my black bread by other means; I am constrained to take on a case or two.
Generally, I advertise my services in the local paper. This is an efficient method of reaching potential clients. Odd fellows in large Homburgs and pale women in prehensile weeds are forever knocking on my door, trying to solicit my services. Generally these are sad, lonely or simply avaricious people. Less is the number of bones in my body than the times I have heard about the maiden aunt with the buried fortune who promised all to her favourite nephew (or niece) but forgot to mention it in a Will, and also forgot to mention the location of the trove. ‘Can you contact her spirit?’ they want to know. I state my fee as the exact amount of treasure to be revealed.
Sometimes, however, a case of genuine merit comes my way. There was the thin man who liked to seize passers-by and jump into wells with them. I sealed him in a wishing well; to this day he is punished by the coins of children and lovers. Then there was the beautiful Läis, a succubus who drained men of vitality. I suggested she take up amateur dramatics. It had little effect on her dark nature, but her Ibsen is excellent. And we must not forget the case of the phantom hackney-carriage, which would stop to pick up passengers only to vanish while rushing down the highway at speed. I settled its hash by arranging a meeting between it and the phantom hitch-hiker. There were screams.
But I am digressing. Let me return to the matter in hand. After placing one such advertisement in the Chaud-Mellé Chronicle, a rag hotter th
an any by Joplin, and considerably more confrontational, I received a sinister envelope through the letterbox. Tearing it open and devouring the enclosed note—scribbled on the sort of yellowing paper one associates with abandoned schoolrooms—I felt compelled to raise an eyebrow. The author of the epistle (who styled himself ‘The Blue Dwarf’) claimed to have knowledge at his clubbed fingertips which could forever free me from penury and the marrow of toil. He was warning me away from trying to seek him out in an effort to gain his secrets.
I was quietly sceptical, of course; foolish is the man who spends his doubts as freely as his opinions. But I decided I would follow up this threat on a perverse whim. Accordingly, I re-read the note, applied quivering nostril to ink, determined it was of a composition only to be found in the Actor’s Quarter, and immediately set off for the affected slums in question. I walked through streets unknown to me. It was all so strangely still. No breath of wind came to ruffle the superb cut of my jacket, my hair stood undisturbed on my head in frozen waves. ‘Harker,’ I reminded myself, ‘if ever a city held its breath, this is it. Pray do not suffocate on my behalf, urban monstrosity.’
In damp tenements of my destination, I asked desiccated Thespians for information regarding a short fellow of blue cast. They directed me to a little park, strewn with litter and drunks, where I saw him at once. He was standing beside a shattered fountain, playing a lute poorly tuned. His voice was a passable baritone; his fingers idled over the old songs of Dunstable, Ockeghem and Josquin des Pres. But there was an essential spirit lacking in his work. He had collected a single worn coin in his proffered cap. I introduced myself without delay. ‘Harker Melmoth,’ I said, ‘at your service.’ He looked up. Less a blue dwarf than an indigo midget, his smile was cold.
‘You weren’t supposed to come,’ he replied. And yet there was an insincerity in his tone. I made an elaborate bow, the tip of my nose gouging the dirt at his absurdly tiny feet. He screwed up his face and water sprang from his hooded eyes. ‘I admit it!’ he wailed. I had known this all along. To attract my attention, he had sought to discourage me. I use a similar technique when embroidering waistcoats; designs so repellent that no customer can say them nay.
