Worming the Harpy and Other Bitter Pills

by Rhys Hughes

  Returning to the basement, I took hold of a flask of concentrated nitric acid, that precious liquid used in the distillation of toadstool wine, and I removed the glass stopper. I determined to hurl the contents of this flask into the face of the American as punishment for his desecration of my Great Work. By deflowering my Hermaphrodite, while it was still an imperfect model, he had destroyed the valency that held the etheric particles together. Massive waves of electromagnetic energy surged through the house. My beautiful creation was disintegrating at an exponential rate. I set my face in a snarl and bounded back up the stairs, three steps at a time, clutching the flask. But on the eighteenth step, I tripped and fell, breaking the flask under my body. Acid splashed my worthless face and torso. My melting mouth screamed.

  The Further Cuticles of Kierkegaard

  In great agony, I crawled the remainder of the stairs to where the American sat on the edge of his chair, eyes half-closed in portentous bliss. There was now no trace left of my Androgyne save for a dense cloud of sulphurous steam that rolled through the room. My charred skin was falling from my body in huge chunks and Mark, when he finally opened his eyes, did not recognise me. My face had run into itself like a chocolate statue in the desert sun. My club-foot had been reduced to normal size; my hair was falling out and my eyes were purple holes of ooze. I homed in on the American with bat-like squeaks.

  ‘So what have you got to say for yourself?’ I demanded, tapping my new foot impatiently. Enlightenment streaked in rays across his visage. He understood. My voice, at least, had not changed too much. ‘Sorry?’ he ventured, and I howled. ‘That is not enough. Not by a long chalk!’ I pouted. Something would have to be done. ‘You have ruined the toil of many weeks. You will have to atone for your sins. It will be unpleasant.’ Hastily, he buttoned his trousers. ‘Downstairs,’ I explained patiently, as if to a child, ‘I have a mind-transference machine. It was one of my earliest inventions. It has never been used. I think that we should use it now. I think that we should exchange your healthy strong body for my disintegrating one.’

  His nod of empathy became a vigorous shake of refusal. ‘I think not,’ he said simply. His lips curled in a sardonic leer. But I was not to be thwarted so easily. ‘Either you help me or I’ll have to torture you to death,’ I replied. My tone was gentle, caressing, musical. I moved a step closer, clicking my tongue to determine his range more accurately. ‘It’s amazing what you can do with a few leaking batteries, a rusty razorblade and a bowl of vinegar.’ I tried to smile, but my teeth fell out. The acid had corroded them into strange shapeless stumps. I scooped them up and put them in my pocket. Mark blanched. ‘Look, I’ll help you,’ he croaked, ‘but not in that way. Listen.’ And bending closer, his words, and his greasy spittle, tickled my perforated eardrum. . . .

  The Vindaloo Bottoms

  Mark’s idea was to stalk the streets, seize some innocent passer-by and drag them helpless down to my cellar where our bodies could be exchanged and then abused, or abused and then exchanged, depending on our particular desires at that moment in space-time. So we left the house and skulked, hugging shadows, kissing foliage and walls, touching up darker places, goosing alleyways, until we found a suitable place to wait for a suitable innocent. Soon a lone pedestrian did pass, and we dragged him into the shadows where I throttled him into a state of unconsciousness with an old fishnet stocking I keep in my pocket for a variety of absurd and sentimental reasons.

  Between us we dragged, carried and tickled our hapless victim back to the house. In the cold air, the frost of our nostril breath solidified into ram’s horns. Down in the cellar it was very damp. I strapped the victim into one seat of my mind-transference machine and took my place in the other. The circuits were closed, the current surged. Our bodies rippled. Our orgasms were intense and simultaneous, long and blue-green, grim and rather glib. It was over. I could see again. I stood up in my new body and carried my old over to the still roaring furnace, the hideous thing dripping congealed blood all the way. I hurled it in and listened to the satisfying snap, crackle and pop of bones.

  Slipping on the aforementioned blood, I skated across to the sink and gazed into the cracked mirror. Here I gasped in extreme horror. I had just made the greatest mistake of my life. Fate had played the cruellest of tricks. The appalling realisation troubled my soul as much as the mirror itself troubled the depths of the Möbius-shaped basement. I covered my face and began to weep tears of oil. The concept was truly unbearable. I was now a walking timepiece!

  The Onions of Ontology

  A little research via the local radio station confirmed that Wilson, my old mechanical companion, had indeed returned to the city some hours earlier. He was due to play a benefit concert in the city centre that same evening. Since wandering away from my loving embrace, he had embarked on a successful career as a musician. Unwittingly, I had sandbagged and adopted the body of the stiffest biped ever to have been conceived in the entire history of human endeavour. I was inconsolable. But there was worse to come. I discovered that the mind-transference machine had blown vital circuits in operation and could not now be repaired. Thus there was no turning back. This meant that morally I was obliged to go ahead with the concert. I would have to ghost for the figure whose own ghost was a photocopy of the length of paper-tape unwinding in my chest at that very moment.

  Together, racked by the needles of despair, the olives of anxiety, Mark and I made our way carefully towards the newly-built outdoor amphitheatre where the concert was to be held. On the way, we paused to pull the legs off an overgrown spider and to play a comical sort of game with a stray cat. With the strips of fur torn from its back and head, I made a hasty false moustache and beard. These enabled me to cross the entire city on foot without being recognised.

  When we reached the stadium, I approached the doorman and tugged off my disguise. Yet he still insisted on blocking my path. I told him my name, but it only seemed to make matters worse. ‘You bloody tin virgin!’ he hissed. I realised that he saw me merely as the latest link in a chain whose grimy end reached back into a past of scrubbed bachelors and seasonal releases. Evidently I was hated as well as loved. So I had to rely on my travelling kit of blades, wires, shards of broken glass and an oblong sheet of sandpaper to gain admittance. With astonishing skill, and without soiling my hands, I managed to turn his cadaver completely inside-out. . . .

  This seemed to have the desired effect and we pushed forwards unhindered. Soon I found myself waiting backstage while the stadium filled up. Peeping out into the crowd, I saw that there were other crusty celebrities present, modern stars of what used to be known, in the late twentieth century, as ‘popular’ music. There was Billy Tempest and the Skidmarks, The Inbreed Three, The Placebo Effect (‘Hey this music is really terrible, but it works for me!’ ‘Yes, that must be The Placebo Effect’) and the highly respected Dominic Dorian, who played modal music on Tuesdays only. The high note of expectancy turned into a loud hush. The first act was Wellington Smythe. When he went on stage and started singing, a justifiably outraged audience quickly dragged him down into their midst and forced an enormous aubergine up his nethermosts. When he struggled free, climbed back onto the stage and resumed his song, he sounded no different. Mark shook his head in disgust. ‘They should have used a cabbage,’ he said.

  The Undivided Amoebae

  Suddenly it was my turn. I girded my loins and walked out in front of my fans. ‘I’m a virgin,’ I squeaked. The crowd roared. ‘I’m a virgin,’ I squeaked again. The crowd roared. There seemed to be only one thing left to say to complete the introductions. I drew in my breath and steadied myself for the effort. ‘I’m a virgin,’ I squeaked. The crowd roared.

  Why is There Only One Monopolies Commission?

  I launched into my first number, gyrating my hips and reflecting camera flashes from my tasteless pearly trousers. I was quite pleased with my interpretation of the song, one of my most famed compositions, but the crowd were considerably less enthusiastic. So I attempted to
slow the pace a little with an ironic blues. I sang: ‘Woke up this morning / my colour vision was confused / Yeah babe, oh yeah / I’ve got those colour blind greens.’ But still the audience were not satisfied. They began to mutter under their breath. I knew that root vegetables were on their collective minds. The situation was becoming more than a little desperate. Fortunately, I had planned for such an eventuality.

  I held up an instrument they had never seen before. As I rotated it under the glare of the arc-lamps, a dignified gasp went up among the ranks of critical young things. It was, of course, the Cheating-Box, strung with nylon wires, as sweet a lute as anything Orpheus dreamt up. A single pluck and I had them in my grasp. Impossible cuboids sound impossible chords. The music span out at them, like bats, like gnats, like flying cats and drew them in, a web of my own devising. Slowly, I forced them to their knees with the stupendous beauty, wrung tears of remorse from their smooth blue eyes, educated them, kissed their adolescent bodies. What joy! What pain, despair, bliss and misery! This was so utterly unique to them that they were lost for words, thoughts, gestures. Finally they had felt something. A sense of wonder?

  The applause I received for this was absolutely gigantic, so large indeed that I resolved somehow to experience the flesh of the entire audience, in one way or another, preferably another, before the two hands of the ebony clock at the end of the stadium joined palms in supplication to mystic midnight. I bowed and bowed and idly fingered my superbly boring genitals, licking the dirt off the stage and picking black wax out of my inner ear. When the lighting failed, someone poured a litre of high octane over Billy Tempest, persuaded one of the Inbreed Three to ignite it by rubbing his drumsticks together and forced Dominic Dorian to reflect the glow with his diamond rings. Wellington Smythe simply stood near with an inane paedophiliac grin. The utter bastard.

  Geiger Counter Revolutionary

  I was exhausted. The concert was over. I had performed eighty songs, twenty-seven in protracted encores, and spilled my oily seed perhaps one thousand and seventeen times. My best leg of three had committed adultery with my left hand, so as a punishment I had plugged both into the mains and frazzled them for good. Yet still I was excited; I needed to return home, lock myself into my inverted bedroom and seek the comforts of a flying helmet and a stick of celery. My lusts are stubborn bargees on a curry-sauce river: they pole their gondolas upstream, against variety’s spicy currents.

  So I hastened through the rear-exit, drawing my opera cloak about my shoulders. Mark followed me; my outstanding performance had turned him into an albino with moody crimson eyes. He talked incessantly about a vague doom and the forces of chaos, but I dismissed his prattlings with a casual wave. We clattered down the cobbled streets, through the Staré Mesto, over the statue-infested Charles Bridge and into the deeps of Malá Strana; I pretended to be a horse. I neighed and kept an eye out for grass, apples, a mare. The bulk of the castle above us crushed our lies.

  Eventually, Mark resumed his talk of destiny and the Cosmic Balance. I was so infuriated by his pathetic affectations that I suddenly took hold of him and hurled him in front of an oncoming tram. The impact threw him against a wall, smashing his skull like a free-range egg. I walked up to him and attempted to communicate by sign-language, body odour, Esperanto, but he merely drooled. The accident had left him little more than a cabbage. As I pondered this latest development, I caught a movement from the corner of my eye. None other than Wellington Smythe was approaching. I looked down at Mark’s twitching body and remembered his words of wisdom concerning cabbages. I laughed.

  My Cheesy Armpits

  I left both the American and the extremely ugly Wellington Smythe in a bloody mess at the bottom of the steps that led up to the Hrad. It had been difficult to fit all of Mark’s solid frame into the constricted rectum of the asinine singer, but I had somehow managed it. I wiped my hands free of shreds of intestinal wall and green mucus. With a lightened step, I continued my homeward journey. As I crossed a railway-bridge, a bright light dazzled the evening. An alien spacecraft hissed overhead. I arched an eyebrow. Uncle Miasma had been successful after all. The craft was heading for our mansion.

  ‘Who would have thought it?’ I chuckled. I knew that the occupants of this interplanetary, most extraordinary craft were in for a surprise. Uncle Miasma had only one reason for attempting contact: he was a connoisseur of unnatural foods. He would be delighted. At the very least it would mean a change from moths on toast. I explored my face with my bachelor-boy fingers. There was much work to do. I could not possibly carry on looking like this. I would have to prise various bits of my anatomy off and replace them with more tasteful plastic or metal curios. A brass nose with flute-holes, for example, would be a vast improvement.

  Also I would experiment a little with the structure of the house. Perhaps I would devise a system whereby any room could be converted into any other via the fifth dimension. Things were looking up. However, as I waited on the bridge, a train chuffed into view. I saw at once that it was Thomas, my old bicycle, and waved. But he merely stuck two fingers up at me and let loose an enormous fart, the stink of it lingering like gritty smoke in the ideal but darkling sky.

  A Carpet Seldom Found

  The street of shopkeepers lay between the bazaar and some nameless mosque with lantern minarets where dusty men came in an endless procession to wash their feet and sit away the sunset. Lawrence was growing stronger daily; three weeks had been more than enough for his body to adapt to the unknown smells, tastes, words and gestures that had so confused him at first. Now he could wander with genuine curiosity among the stalls and kiosks, his hand on his heart, his tongue ready to grapple with the guttural, yet surprisingly harmonious, sounds of a language as unique as a thumbprint on a polished globe.

  Here, in Central Anatolia, far removed from the Greco-Roman attractions of the coast and their subsequent tour groups, he felt he had entered another plane of perception. Konya was a large, rotting hub of a city; there was no denying it. But at the same time it lured him into its depths with a subtle self-assurance, cast at his anticipations much as a fisher in autumnal Istanbul casts at the bluefish of the Bosphorus. And so he was entwined, entangled and hauled spluttering from the shallows of his own culture into the soul kitchens of another. He walked on and high above his fears and delights, on the shimmering air of evening, rode the boat of his invisible fisher: the fluted dome of the Mevlâna Müzesi, tomb of whirling Celâleddin Rumi, bright as dervish eyes, sea-green in a region where no sea glitters.

  Lawrence, like many before and many who would come after, was searching for a carpet—that ubiquitous symbol of faded Ottoman glory. From the covered bazaar of old Istanbul (still Konstantinoúpoli to him, who had Greek blood and whose first experience of Turkish hawkers had been in Sámos) down along the Aegean coast and east to Antalya, he had inspected many examples of the art: kilims, embroidered silk squares hung from whitewashed walls or draped out on dirty floors, cicims, pile-less rugs of all descriptions, soft or stiff, old and new, pale and garish, carpet after carpet after carpet. Yet he had not found what he wanted. He had shared many tiny glasses of black tea, bargained long into jasmine-scented nights, smoked the nargile and perspired in the hamam. But all that he had seen so far had lacked feeling, that spark of emotion or inspiration which brought the colours into a real kind of life and made the patterns dance like abstract puppets before his critical gaze.

  Here in Konya he expected, at last, to be satisfied. Few tourists spent any length of time in this area—merely passing through on their way to the stony pleasures of Cappadocia. Lawrence could understand why; the dust and fumes and conservative nature of the people was as unsettling as the cave dwellings of Göreme and rock churches of Zelve were secure. Yet prices were considerably lower in this Sufic capital; possibly the dealers would be more honest as well and more responsive to the genuine interest he would show. Down the street of shopkeepers he sauntered, the roar of traffic like a noxious river sweeping him further into the d
arker corners of the twisting thoroughfare.

  Before long, he found himself investigating a narrow alley that led off the main street and lurched between houses that seemed as old as Selçuk dreams. At the very end of the alley stood a squat carpet shop, a single lamp doing nothing at all to illuminate the already gloomy exterior. Rugs completely obscured the front of the shop, hiding all windows, and the doorway of the establishment was covered by a tattered silk curtain, through which Lawrence could glimpse only a faint spiral of blue smoke and hear what sounded like a distant clashing of looms and the cracking of infinitely old knuckles; a sound as eerie and yet human as the ney, the plaintive dervish reed flute which calls always for its homeland in the Hatay.

  Chewing a thumbnail in some vague anxiety, Lawrence brushed the curtain aside with his weathered hand and took a cautious step into the shop. The predominant colour was a rich blue; cool and dreamy in this bleached city, dark blues that shifted before his vision and melted away whenever he tried to pin them down with an outright stare. ‘Anyone at home?’ he said, more to himself than to any hidden occupant. The smoke that curled upwards without dissipating (like string; a miniature Indian rope trick) found its source in the end of a meerschaum pipe shaped like the head of a grand Ottoman. But the pipe protruded from a shapeless bundle of cloth and there seemed to be no owner at the end of it, lest he were an amorphous sort of creature; the very froth that would eventually solidify into the clay that held his apple-tinged tobacco.